Elly Vintiadis

Deree The American College of Greece
  •  1761
    Emergence
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.
    An entry on the meaning and history of emergence as well as the current debate on emergentism in philosophy and the sciences.
  •  322
    Review of Andrew Steane's "Faithful to science: the role of science in religion" (review)
    Science, Religion and Culture 2 (4): 108-111. 2015.
  •  248
    Review: Beyond an Absence of Faith edited by Jonathan M.S.Pearce and Tristan Vick (review)
    Science, Religion andCulture 1 (2): 122-125. 2014.
  •  63
    Brute Facts (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Brute facts are facts that don't have explanations. They are instrumental in our attempts to give accounts of other facts or phenomena, and so they play a key role in many philosophers' views about the structure of the world. This volume explores neglected questions about the nature of brute facts and their explanatory role.
  •  58
    Why Certainty is Not a Mansion
    Journal of Philosophical Research 31 143-152. 2006.
    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 bet…Read more
  •  52
    Naturalism about the mind is typically associated with some kind of physicalism. This paper argues that this association is a mistake and that, gi-ven the naturalist’s commitment to the primacy of empirical evidence, natural-ists should be open to different commitments. It is further argued that natural-ists about the mind should be emergentists because of the epistemological attitude that is at the core of the emergentist position, properly understood.
  •  43
    A frame of mind from psychiatry
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 18 (4): 523-532. 2015.
    Psychiatry is a discipline that deals with both the physical and the mental lives of individuals and though it is true that, largely because of this characteristic, different models are used for different disorders, 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 mo…Read more
  •  37
    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 b…Read more
  •  33
    Mental disorders as processes: A more suited metaphysics for psychiatry
    Philosophical Psychology 37 (2): 487-504. 2024.
    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 …Read more
  •  20
    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 t…Read more
  •  16
    The Importance of Pluralism in Psychiatry
    In Maria Kanellopoulou-Botti & Fereniki Panagopoulou (eds.), Βιοηθικοί Προβληματισμοί ΙΙ (Bioethical Reflections II), Papazisis. forthcoming.
    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 pro…Read more
  •  8
    The Role of Context in Belief Evaluation: Costs and Benefits of Irrational Beliefs
    In Julien Musolino, Joseph Sommer & Pernille Hemmer (eds.), The Cognitive Science of Belief, Cambridge University Press. 2022.
    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 fo…Read more
  •  6
    Special Issue “Women in Philosophy: Past, Present and Future” (edited book)
    University of Rijeka. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. 2023.
    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 is…Read more
  •  1
    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…Read more
  • This is a short introduction to animal ethics in which I present the major views in the literature concerning animal ethics and then apply these to questions such as zoos, pets and experimenting on animals. I also address the question of our obligations and duties towards animals and their relation to our obligations and duties to the environment.
  • Up Girl: Maculinity, Gender and Reframing Opportunity Beyond Neoliberalism
    In Opportunity after Neoliberalism, Brookings Institution. forthcoming.
  • There is nothing (really) wrong with emergent brute facts
    In Elly Vintiadis & Constantinos Mekios (eds.), Brute Facts, Oxford University Press. pp. 197-212. 2018.
    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 …Read more
  • 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…Read more