Victoria Harrison is Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Macau, China.

Harrison moved to Macau in 2016 from the University of Glasgow, where she had been Reader in Philosophy and Director of the Forum for Philosophy and Religion. Her research interests focus on analytic philosophy of religion and on the problems generated by religious diversity. Harrison is also interested in classical Indian and Chinese philosophies. She earned her PhD at the University of London, where her research focused on the epistemology of religious belief. There she developed an internal realist approach to the rationality of religious convictions. Harrison has continued to expand on this work and has applied it within a range of contexts; most recently she has been exploring its implications for intercultural and interreligious dialogue. She conducts workshops in which the theory she has developed, known as ‘Exemplar Reasoning’, is put into practice.

Harrison’s interests extend to the relationship between philosophy and museums and she is currently working with a group of scholars and museums professionals in the UK, USA and China on a project exploring the philosophical dimensions of the ways in which museums represent objects of interreligious or intercultural significance.

Harrison has served on the executive committee of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion and is currently President (until September 2020) of the European Society for the Philosophy of Religion. In addition, she is on the advisory board of the Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy, located in City University, Hong Kong. 

Harrison was a core member of the recently concluded project Eastern and Western Conceptions of Oneness, Virtue, and Human Happiness.

Harrison’s other recent publications include: the co-edited Philosophy and Museums: New Essays in the Philosophy of Museums (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79; The History of Evil in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2018); and Eastern Philosophy: The Basics, 2nd Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).

Harrison regularly teaches philosophy of religion and related subjects at the University of Macau. She employs the Closer to Truth website frequently as a teaching resource.