Jane Heal
Barbara Jane Heal (née Kneale, born 21 October 1946) is a British philosopher, and since 2012, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Biography
Heal is daughter of a pair of notable Oxford philosophers William Calvert Kneale and Martha Kneale (née Hurst). She was educated at Oxford High School for Girls and New Hall, Cambridge, where she read first History before changing to Philosophy (Moral Sciences) after two years. She also took her PhD at Cambridge, working on problems in the philosophy of language. After two years of post-doctoral study in the US, at Princeton and Berkeley, she was appointed to a Lectureship at Newcastle University.

After ten years at Newcastle, she returned to the University of Cambridge as a lecturer in 1986. She was awarded her personal professorship in 1999. In the same year she became the first female President of St John's College, Cambridge serving between 1 October 1999 and 2003.

She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1997. She was also President of the Aristotelian Society from 2001 to 2002.

Heal has written extensively on the philosophy of mind and language. Her work in the philosophy of mind came to be known as 'simulation' or 'co-cognition'- that our understanding of other people is achieved by, so far as we are able, placing ourselves inwardly in their situation and then allowing our thoughts and emotions to run forwards in a kind of imaginative experiment.

Publications 
Fact and Meaning, 1989
Mind, Reason and Imagination, 2003

References

Sources 
 "Heal, Prof. (Barbara) Jane," Who's Who 2012, A & C Black, 2012; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2011; online edn, Nov 2011 accessed 25 Jan 2012

Further reading 
"New Books: Fact and Meaning By Jane Heal" from Philosophy
Snowdon, Paul. "A quietist view of discourse." Times Literary Supplement May 4, 1990: 476. 

1946 births
Living people
Alumni of New Hall, Cambridge
Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge
British women philosophers
20th-century British philosophers
People educated at Oxford High School, England
Presidents of the Aristotelian Society