Congratulations to Keren Bester, our FPO Fellow 2025-26! 🎉
Keren Lucy Bester is a PhD candidate at the University of Dundee (UK) working at the intersection of olfaction, ontology and orientation. Her project, titled Smelling Metaphysical Lies, reimagines our relationship to reality via the sense of smell. Keren argues that smell, the most ancient of the senses, uniquely orients us to living processes and transitions of the biological and embeds us within a living lineage rather than at the top of evolutionary hierarchy. She develops a metabolic process theory of olfaction that bridges the phenomenological gap in the life-mind continuity thesis and presents olfaction as a model for orientational capacities that remain fundamentally the same across the whole living spectrum. Keren’s project challenges the dominance of visual metaphysics to develop a comprehensive account of the orientational value of olfaction in our everyday lives, in philosophy, and across other disciplines, including the life sciences and artificial intelligence.
Read more about her here on our website.