Fiona Steinkamp - The Facts

I am a Research Fellow in the Psychology Department, University of Edinburgh. My initial project was to work on an overview of the philosophical literature on the will for the Koestler Parapsychology Unit, University of Edinburgh and the Institut fuer Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygenie at Freiburg. However, I have now gained funding from the Fundacao Bial to undertake research into precognition. I will be undertaking a survey of those who have had precognitive experiences, a meta-analysis of forced-choice clairvoyance experiments (to be compared to Honorton and Ferrari's meta-analysis of forced-choice precognition experiments) and I will be undertaking some experimental work on precognition. This latter will be designed in part on the basis of the results that come out of the survey of people's precognitive experiences.

Prior to taking up my position at Edinburgh I undertook research for a PhD in Continental Philosophy at the University of Dundee. I completed this succesfully in 1992. I subsequently worked at Dundee as a tutorial assistant for a couple of years. If you are interested to know more about my philosophical interests and publications, you can see my philosophical interests page.

Alternatively, if you are more interested to know where I lived for the thirteen years prior to coming to Edinburgh, you can look at this information about the city of Dundee and the university.

In 1993-4 I took a Diploma in Logic, Text and Information Technology. This course is held by the English and Philosophy Departments at Dundee and it covers programming skills in Pascal, Turbo Pascal and Prolog. It also tackles the philosophical issues pertaining to AI. If you think you may be interested in taking this course, please e-mail Julia Panell at:-

jmp@phil-engl.dundee.ac.uk

Most people are intrigued by my German surname and many assume that I must have fluent German as a result. However, although my father was indeed born in Germany (Braunschweig), he came to Britain when he was only three. His mother insisted that he spoke German at home until he was 19, but by the time I was born in 1963 (seven years after the younger of my two brothers), his German was a little shakey. Thus, although I have a degree in German and Philosophy (also from the University of Dundee!), my German has been learnt through sweat and toil and not through having had the advantage of being of (half) German parentage.

I'm actually a rather keen linguist and I originally left the suburbs of London in 1982 to come to Dundee to study French and German. I spent a year at the University of Cologne in 1984-5 where I, being my usual dynamic and logical self, took it upon myself to study Italian. Long ago, back in 1981, I also did a year's crash course in Spanish at school, so I guess some of that is still lingering somewhere in the depths of my brain.