Chelsea Bowden earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Kansas (2023) and her M.A. in Classics from the Ohio State University (2011). Her primary areas of research are ancient philosophy and ethics of belief. In ancient philosophy her research focuses on the Stoics and the Pyrrhonean skeptics. She is particularly interested in questions about whether and in what way the philosophical ideas and positions of the Stoics and skeptics are both compatible with contemporary philosophical theories and beneficial for our psychological wellbeing. Her forthcoming (2023) chapter entitled “The Viability of Feminist Stoicism: On the Compatibility of Stoic and Feminist Epistemology” explores to what extent the Stoic’s egalitarian and universalistic epistemic commitments are compatible with central tenets found in feminist epistemological theory (e.g., situated knowledge and the role of emotion in knowledge acquisition). She is currently working on a project defending the Pyrrhonean skeptic’s capacity for moral action by examining the role of preference in the skeptic’s decision-making procedures.
In ethics of belief, her research lies at the crossroads of doxastic responsibility, virtue epistemology, and social epistemology. Her previous projects have examined what distinctly intellectual (rather than epistemic) character traits can be said to make us better or worse persons in our intellectual lives, and how differing social environments, non-ideal circumstances, and forms of injustice impact our role as intellectual agents. Some of her current projects focus on the question of whether we are capable of wronging people with our beliefs and if our unexpressed beliefs are morally evaluable.
Outside of philosophy she obsessively bakes, plays with her dog Bia, and is a Parks and Rec superfan.