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 area of research is ancient philosophy, with a focus on the Stoics and the Pyrrhonian skeptics. In particular, she is interested in how their views intersect with contemporary philosophical issues, whether these views are implementable as a way of life, and whether the demands that they place on the philosopher are (or are not) psychologically plausible. Her chapter “The Viability of Feminist Stoicism: On the Compatibility of Stoic and Feminist Epistemology” (2024) 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). Her paper “Inquiry, Value, and Some Peculiarities of the Pyrrhonist’s Psychology” (Synthese, 2024) discusses how, due to certain psychological hallmarks, the Pyrrhonian skeptic can achieve various forms of tranquility while nonetheless being continually compelled to seek after the truth. She is currently working on a project defending the Pyrrhonian skeptic’s capacity for moral action by examining the role of preference in the skeptic’s decision-making procedures.
She has secondary interests in intellectual virtue and ethics of belief, where 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 dogs Bia and Zora, and is a Parks and Rec superfan.