Keren Lucy Bester

Keren Lucy Bester is a PhD candidate at the University of Dundee and the 2025–26 Fellow at the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation. She works at the intersection of olfaction, ontology and orientation. Her project, Smelling Metaphysical Lies, challenges the dominance of visual metaphysics and reimagines our relationship to reality via the sense of smell. She proposes that olfaction, the most ancient of the senses, uniquely orients us to living processes and embeds us within a living lineage instead of at the top of an evolutionary hierarchy. She develops a metabolic process theory of olfaction that bridges the phenomenological gap in life–mind continuity and presents olfaction as a model for orientational capacities shared across the living spectrum.