Biography
- Formerly Southover Manor Trust Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St Hilda’s College and
Reader in Philosophy of Mind, University of Oxford - Visiting Professorships at Chendu University, China; Renmin University, China; Huanzhong University of Science and Technology, China; and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Dr Anita Avramides was educated in the United States and Britain. 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. From 1994-5 she served as Junior Proctor.
Teaching
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. Before her Fellowship at St Hilda’s she taught for several years at The Queen’s College, and also at Oriel, Exeter, and Somerville Colleges in Oxford, as well as at Bedford College, London.
Research
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. Most recently she has been exploring these issues in connection with the work of both Edith Stein and Stanley Cavell. She is also interested in work that can be found in this connection in Indian Buddhist Philosophy.
Public Engagement
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?’.
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.
Most recently she has been responsible for initiating and organizing both the Joyce Mitchell Cook Memorial Lecture Series (initiated in 2019 and to be held annually, to celebrate the achievements of the first Black American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy in the United States and who studied at St Hilda’s College in the mid-1950’s), and the Kathy Willkes Memorial Conference, organized in collaboration with the Inter University Centre in Dubrovnic, Croatia and the Herbert Simon Society in Milan, Italy (initiated in 2022, and to be held annually, to celebrate the life and work of Kathleen Vaughn Wilkes, Fellow in philosophy at St Hilda’s College from 1973 – 2003).
Along with Professor Edward Harcourt and Dr Matthew Parrott, she organizes the International Summer School in Philosophy and Psychiatry, which was launched in 2013 and has continued to he held (barring the pandemic years) every other summer since that time.
She is one of the co-founders and organizers (along with Dr Maike Glitsch and Dr Ann Dowker) of Brain and Mind: From Concrete to Abstract. This is a termly event held at St Hilda’s and open to all members of the University as well as the general public and A-level students from schools in the Oxfordshire area. Each term a topic is chosen to be addressed by a leading academic in the fields of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. Examples of recent topics discussed include, Colour and the Brain, Pain and the Brain, and Synaesthesia and the Brain.
Recent Broadcasts and Podcasts
- Meaning, Mind and Other Minds – a 3-part interview with the philosopher Buki Fatoma in her series Phil-Sci Theo, topics at the intersection of Philosophy, Theology and Science
- A History of Ideas, 'Descartes on Consciousness', April 2015,
- '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
Publications
Books
- Knowing Other Minds, ed in collaboration with Dr Matthew Parrott, Oxford University Press
- 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
- Women of Ideas, Duckworth
Selected Articles
- “Other Minds” entry for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- “Knowing and Acknowledging Others”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 123, Issue 3
- “The Sceptic, The Outsider, and Other Minds, Topoi, Vol. 42
- “Knowing Each Other as Persons”, Special Issue of Inquiry, The Point of View of Shared Agency, G. Satne & J. Roessler (eds.)
- “Disjunctivism and Other Minds”, in Epistemological Disjunctivism, eds. Duncan Pritchard, Casey Doyle and Joseph Milburn, Routledge
- “Perception, Reliability and Other Minds”, in Knowing and Understanding Others, eds. Anita Avramides and Matthew Parrott, Oxford University Press
- “Engaging with Buddhism”, Sophia
- “The Other and the Imagination”, in Imagination, Inter-Subjectivity and Perspective Taking, eds. T. Fuchs, M. Summa and L. Vanzago, Routledge:
- “Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy”, in Blackwell Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans-Johann Glock and John Hyman
- “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
Positions
- Emeritus Fellow in Philosophy
Subjects
- Philosophy
