Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy

Formerly Vice-Principal and Southover Manor Trust Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St Hilda’s College and
Reader in Philosophy of Mind, University of Oxford

Dr Anita Avramides was educated in the United States and Britain. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from Oberlin College, an M. Phil. in Philosophy from University College London, and a D. Phil. from The Queen's and Somerville College. She taught at St Hilda's from 1990 to 2020. From 2014 to 2016 she was Chair of the Philosophy Faculty/Panel and Vice Chair of the Philosophy Faculty.

Dr Avramides has had a long and varied teaching career, teaching a wide range of undergraduate courses including the philosophy of mind, the history of philosophy, epistemology, and moral philosophy. 

Dr Avramides has published work in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Her most recent research has been on the question of our knowledge of other minds. This question lies at the intersection of issues in the philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics, and she has pursued her research accordingly. She has recently been interested in assessing the suggestion that we know other minds through perception. Overall, she is concerned to defend the idea that the 'problem' of other minds is conceptual, rather than epistemological.

Dr Avramides was a participant in the first Nuit de Philosophie, a night of philosophy that takes place at the Institut francais, London. Her paper was entitled, 'Dreamers and Zombies'. Other speaking engagements have included the American Philosophical Association, at which she was an invited critic of Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism; a Confer event entitled, ‘Where are the Boundaries of Self and Other?’; the Stockholm Philosophy Colloquium.

Dr Avramides participated in the 'How The Light Gets In Festival of Ideas', the world's largest Philosophy and Music Festival in Hay on Wye, May 2016, on Knowing Others and Knowing Oneself.

A History of Ideas, 'Descartes on Consciousness', April 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qk1n3

'Philosophy Talks', a public radio programme that is part of Stanford University's Humanities Outreach Initiative

A two-hour broadcast on French national radio, France Culture, on John Locke's Theory of Knowledge http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-les-nouveaux-chemins-de-la-connaiss...

Books

Meaning and Mind: An Examination of a Gricean Account of Language, MIT Bradford Books

Other Minds , Routledge; Problems of Philosophy Series Women of Ideas ( ed.), Duckworth

Articles

“On Seeing that Others have Thoughts and Feelings”, The Journal of Consciousness Studies

"Other Minds, Autism, and Depth in Human Interaction”, Oxford Handbook in Philosophy and Psychiatry

“Knowledge of Other Minds in Davidson’s Philosophy”, Companion to Davidson”, eds. E. Lepore and K. Ludwig

“Skepticism about Knowledge of Other Minds”, The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, ed. S. Bernecker & D . Pritchard

“Other Minds”, Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, eds. B McLaughlin, A. Beckermann and S. Walter

Oxford Online Bibliographies, “Other Minds”

“Grice, Davidson and the Social Aspects of Meaning”, in Paul Grice’s Heritage, ed. G Cosenza (Brepols)

“The Bigger Picture”, Philosophical Books, Vol. 45, No. 2 April 2002; “Thomas Nagel: The View from Nowhere”, in Central Works of Philosophy, ed. J. Shand (Acumen)

“Davidson and the New Skeptical Problem”, in D. Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge, ed. U.M. Zeglen (Routledge)

“Dummett: The Logical Basis of Metaphysics”, a contribution to a special issue of Philosophical Topics (Summer 2014) devoted to discussing The Making of Modern Metaphysics, by A.W. Moore

“Abiding Intentions”, Essays in Honour of Stephen Schiffer, ed. G. Ostertag (MIT); “Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy”, Blackwell Companion to Wittgenstein, eds. J. Hyman and Hans Johann Glock