Elly Vintiadis

One of the characteristic aspects of Daniel Dennett’s thought is his belief in the explanatory power of science. For Dennett, in order to make progress with certain philosophical problems, e.g. questions about the nature of consciousness, philosophers need to engage with the findings of empirical science. In this paper, I will take up the question of the relation between science and philosophy and I will start by giving a general overview of Dennett’s view of this relation while also addressing the question of whether he can properly be said to embrace scientism. In the second part of this paper, I will argue that philosophical thinking is continuous with science and that, though at the level of theoretical frameworks the intension of the words “philosophy” and “science” are the same, there is a distinction that can be made in practice if we look at the extensions of the terms.

The following “Good Practices” document was developed by the Women in Philosophy / Demographics in Philosophy group under the directorship of Nicole Hassoun, with substantial contributions from co-directors, advisory board members, and collaborators from 2018 to 2024. It is the result of extensive feedback and discussion from many sources including: two large panel discussions at Pacific APA meetings in 2018–2019; email queries to a large number of journal editors and department heads from 2019 to 2023; the creators of the British Philosophical Association’s Good Practice Scheme;1 referees and editors at Ethics which published a portion of it in 2022; blog readers at the Blog of the APA, Daily Nous, and The Splintered Mind; several committees of the American Philosophical Association; and numerous informal exchanges with members of the profession. In 2023, a version of it was endorsed by the APA’s Committee on Inclusiveness in the Profession. One thing that has become clear over the course of many discussions is that almost every thoughtful reader will find something to object to in the document—some positions expressed too strongly or not strongly enough, some recommendations overly detailed or insufficiently detailed, some underrepresented groups given too much relative focus or too little relative focus. This document is the compromise result of many hands, and we hope that philosophers who are broadly supportive of diversity and inclusion will find value in it even if those compromises haven’t all landed exactly where they prefer.

One of the characteristic aspects of Daniel Dennett’s thought is his belief in the explanatory power of science. For Dennett, in order to make progress with certain philosophical problems, e.g. questions about the nature of consciousness, philosophers need to engage with the findings of empirical science. In this paper, I will take up the question of the relation between science and philosophy and I will start by giving a general overview of Dennett’s view of this relation while also addressing the question of whether he can properly be said to embrace scientism. In the second part of this paper, I will argue that philosophical thinking is continuous with science and that, though at the level of theoretical frameworks the intension of the words “philosophy” and “science” are the same, there is a distinction that can be made in practice if we look at the extensions of the terms.

This article is an introduction to the special issue on Women in Philosophy: Past, Present and Future. Over the past decade, there has been increased attention given to the underrepresentation of women in academic philosophy, as well as the lack of diversity in philosophy more broadly. While there has been some progress in the demographics of philosophy, as evidenced by recent surveys and empirical studies, women are still significantly outnumbered by men and disparities persist. This special issue aims to address the ongoing problem of inclusion in philosophy by exploring the contribution of women in the field. The contributors have been given freedom to write on topics they consider important, with the hope of stimulating further discussion and generating new ideas for addressing this issue.

The neoliberal reality of the past 40 years has caused changes in the workplace restricting people’s freedom and compromising their well-being, often not allowing them to develop our human abilities in the way they chose to. This paper focuses on a neglected aspect of neoliberalism that contributes to this problem: the orientation of the core values of neoliberalism. My contention is that the value system of neoliberalism is structured on what can be characterized as ‘male’ values and this leads to a fragmentation of the labour experience altering the lived experience of work for the vast majority of people. I argue that to reverse this state of affairs a fundamental shift in our values is required that goes beyond just implementing policies and changing wage relations and important insights for this shift can be found in the capabilities approach and the ethics of care.

In this paper I argue that thinking in terms of process metaphysics and seeing the mind and mental disorders as processual in nature allows for a more complete understanding of mental disorders than is allowed by non-processual frameworks, while it also allows us to incorporate what we currently know about them. In addition, it can address problems in psychiatry that arise when we ask the wrong kinds of questions that naturally arise within a non-processual metaphysical framework. In this paper I address the problems of reductionism, essentialism and dualism.

Irrational beliefs are often seen as beliefs that are either costly or even pathological and it is assumed that we should eliminate them when possible. In this paper we argue that not only irrational beliefs are a widespread feature of human cognition and agency but also that, depending on context, they can be beneficial to the person holding them, not only psychologically but also epistemically. Given that rationality is highly valued, judgements of rationality have wide-ranging implications for interpersonal relations at an individual and societal level. We suggest that a better understanding of rationality and its role in cognition can lead to a more compassionate treatment of people who express beliefs that are judged as irrational.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a defense of the emergentist view concerning emergent brute facts. To this end, I review and evaluate the three main objections raised against the possibility of emergent brute facts; the simplicity argument, the question of whether the idea of emergent brute facts is a coherent idea and the question of empirical evidence. My contention is that none of these arguments is successful in refuting the possibility or the plausibility of the existence of emergent brute facts. I also argue that, in the end, the question revolves around empirical evidence, and that empirical considerations favour the existence of emergent brute facts.

Today the way philosophical work is presented is very narrowly circumscribed and as a result, this excludes people who do not want to, or cannot effectively, present their work in a particular manner. This canonization of the mode of presentation of philosophical work also serves to maintain the status quo of analytic philosophy as an exclusively academic discipline. In this paper I argue that diversity in how philosophical thinking is presented should be allowed, and even, encouraged. I argue that it is in philosophy’s interest to expand the ways that it is presented, because not doing so not only limits who can participate in philosophy, but it also limits who philosophy attracts and so how far-reaching philosophy can be.

In this essay I identify three characteristics that I think make philosophy the distinctive discipline that it is: its breadth, the fundamentality of the question it raises and its concern with the question of the difference of what appears to be the case from what is the case. I then argue that philosophy is necessary because it is at heart a very practical discipline. I end by arguing that philosophy has to a large extent lost its characteristic breadth and that it should regain it in order to be able to make a difference in the world.

What is philosophy, why does it matter, and how would it be different if women wrote more of it? At a time when the importance of philosophy, and the humanities in general, is being questioned and at a time when the question of gender equality is a huge public question, 22 women in philosophy lay out in this book how they think of philosophy, what they actually do, and how that is applied to actual problems. By bringing together accounts of the personal experiences of women in philosophy, this book provides a new understanding of the ways in which the place of women in philosophy has changed in recent decades while also introducing the reader to the nature and the value of philosophy.

Wittgenstein's writing is notoriously obscure. And his epistemological views are not widely read and, as much as they are, they are not widely accepted. This dissertation is a defense of these views as published under the title of On Certainty. Given the obscurity of his writing and the variety of interpretations it lends itself to, in order to defend his position I spell out what I take Wittgenstein's position to consist in as well as what its aim is, namely a dissolution rather than refutation of the skeptical position. My aim is to bring to the forefront Wittgenstein's views as a real and worthy alternative to widely read responses to skepticism.

A distinctive characteristic of psychiatry is that it is a discipline that deals with both the physical and the mental lives of individuals. Largely because of this characteristic, different models are used for different disorders, however, there is still a remnant tendency towards reductionist views in the field. In this paper I argue that the available empirical evidence from psychiatry gives us reasons to question biological reductionism and that, in its place, we should adopt a pluralistic explanatory model that is more suited to the needs of the discipline and to the needs of the patients it is meant to help. This will allow us to retain psychiatry as an autonomous science that can productively co-exist with neuroscience while also giving patients the kind of attention they need. I further argue that this same evidence supports a view of the mind that is anti-reductive and that allows that causation can be both bottom-up and top-down and that such a view is available in emergentism coupled with an interventionist model of causation.

In this paper Peter Klein's criticism of Wittgenstein in "Certainty: A Refutation of Scepticism" is addressed. Klein claims that, according to Wittgenstein, we attribute knowledge of a proposition p to a person only if that person is not certain of p. I argue that a careful reading of Wittgenstein's On Certainty reveals that there are two kinds of objective certainty that Wittgenstein had in mind; propositional objective certainty and normative objective certainty. Klein fails to distinguish between the two and uses what I call propositional objective certainty to make his point against Wittgenstein. I claim that when Wittgenstein said that knowledge and certainty belong to different categories he was talking of normative objective certainty and, therefore, that Klein's criticism is misplaced and attributes to Wittgenstein a position that is not his.

Though pluralism is given a lot of lip service it is not the status quo in psychiatry. In this paper I argue that following the recent Research Domain Criteria project of the National Institute of Mental Health, we run the danger of promoting a reductionist agenda that current evidence and research suggests is not the right way of tackling mental disorders. I further argue that in order to better address the needs of the patients and maintain the ethical standards required in the psychiatric profession we ought to maintain a pluralistic attitude in psychiatric research as well as practice.