Valerie Bernard, PhD

I completed my doctorate in Philosophy of Mind from the University of Toronto in 2024, with a specialization in perception, imagination and phenomenology. I have taught philosophy at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB and St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, NS.

I have a particular interest in the study of dreaming and the ways in which dreamed experience challenges some of our assumptions about the way perception and imagination work. Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology of the imagination offers a surprisingly modern take on this kind of experience that I argue can enrich the contemporary naive realist account of what is happening when we engage with the imagination.