Guest Editors: Gloria Andrada and Carolina Flores
This special issue focuses on feminist philosophy of mind and cognitive science. It will offer novel perspectives on long-standing questions such as the mind-body problem, the nature of bias and prejudice, and gender and cognition. It will apply a feminist lens to cutting-edge issues surrounding the mind, gender, and culture, including the intersection of minds and technology, the political psychology of social identities, and 4E cognition and feminist philosophy. It seeks to highlight decolonial, non-Western, and Latinx approaches to mind and cognition. And it will encourage authors to consider the intersections–and connections–of these different topics and traditions, and to engage in methodological reflection about how to do philosophy of mind.
Dominant approaches within philosophy of mind have often sought to understand the mind as universal and insulated from power structures and social dynamics, ignoring central feminist insights and marginalizing feminist work about the mind. For example, while metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of language in the analytic philosophical tradition now have thriving areas focused on social questions, there is little explicit talk of social, or feminist, analytic philosophy of mind, with the exception of a recent groundbreaking collection, edited by Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, which has explicitly addressed this area of research as such. This special issue will build on this to situate existing feminist thinking about the mind and cognitive science as key to a philosophical study of the mind and establish feminist philosophy of mind as a thriving field of inquiry in its own right.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- The nature of bias and prejudice and their cognitive and perceptual implementation;
- The internalization of oppressive social structures;
- The psychology of social norms;
- Culture, gender, and the mind;
- Gender essentialism and its cognitive implementation;
- The nature and psychology of social identities;
- The gendered politics of attention and salience structures;
- Feminist approaches to traditional questions in philosophy of mind, such as the mind-body problem;
- Decolonial and Latinx approaches to philosophy of mind;
- Feminist critiques of cognitive science;
- 4E cognition and feminist philosophy;
- Feminist approaches to the intersection of mind and technology;
- Affectivity and gender;
- Feminist phenomenology.
This special issue invites work from philosophers across traditions, especially philosophers whose work is empirically informed; feminist, queer, decolonial, and critical race theorists; as well as psychologists with a feminist orientation. In doing so, it will seek to foster dialogue and points of connection between feminist work being done in contexts that are too often not in contact.
Submissions must be written in English and prepared for anonymous review. We will accept both traditional article submissions (up to 10,000 words long, excluding footnotes and references) and Musings (4,000 words, excluding footnotes and references). Full guidelines can be found on our website. Importantly, Musings are not merely short research articles; they are often more personal and/or more concerned with current issues than full-fledged academic articles, and they are typically less rooted in particular bodies of literature. However they are approached, Musings should seek to catalyse philosophical reflection on important issues in feminist philosophy. (For examples, please see the recently published Musings on our FirstView pages.) We encourage submissions to be written in a style accessible across relevant disciplines, and with an eye to understanding concrete social and political phenomena.
Deadline for submission: 15th January 2026
Please submit your original manuscript electronically through the Cambridge University Press online submission and review system ScholarOne. Manuscripts need to be prepared for anonymous review. More information may be found in the Manuscript Preparations Guidelines.
For any questions on this special issue, contact the guest editors, Gloria Andrada (gloria.andrada@cchs.csic.es), and Carolina Flores (caro.flores@ucsc.edu).