Gertrudis Van de Vijver is Full Professor (Gewoon Hoogleraar) at the department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of Ghent University. She was awarded her PhD in philosophy from this university in 1988, for her dissertation “Doelgerichtheid in cybernetica, connectionisme en cognitivisme. Tussen twee epistemologische opties: naturalisme en constructivisme”. Since receiving her PhD, she was post-doctoral researcher and research director at Ghent University until she became a professor there in 2000. Her research is mainly on the epistemological implications of issues of complexity, self-organization and teleology in the life sciences, in psychology and in the study of cognition. For this, she developed a transcendental approach to the philosophy of biology, centring on the idea of co-constitution. In addition, she does research on other aspects and implications of transcendental philosophy, and on the connections of psychoanalytic theory with epistemology and philosophy of language.
