Louise Antony

Louise Antony is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Before joining the faculty at UMass Amherst in 2006, she taught at several other colleges and universities. She specializes in philosophy of mind, epistemology, feminist theory, and philosophy of language. Besides for her academic work, she has also spoken out about the oppressive climate for women in philosophy; she wrote one of a series of articles in the New York Times' Opinionator column in the fall of 2013, and she founded with Ann Cudd the Mentoring Project for Junior Women in Philosophy in 2011.

Antony received a bachelor's in philosophy from Syracuse University in 1975, after which she went to Harvard University for her doctorate, which she received in 1981. Her first academic position was at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1980-1981. She taught at Boston University from 1981-1983; Bates College from 1983-1986; North Carolina State University from 1986-1993; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill from 1993-2000; and Ohio State University from 2000-2006. She debated Christian apologist William Lane Craig in 2008 on the topic "Is God Necessary for Morality?".

In her work on the philosophy of mind, Antony stakes out a middleground between eliminative materialists like Daniel Dennett who deny the possibility of the existence of the mind, and groups such dualists and neutral monists - those who look for non-physical explanations of the mind. Antony is also a prominent proponent of analytic feminist philosophy, suggesting that earlier feminist philosophers overlooked the extent to which analytic philosophers had rejected the ideas of empiricists and rationalists, and thus misidentified analytic epistemology with empiricism.

Antony has written a number of peer-reviewed papers, book reviews, and essays. She has also edited and introduced three volumes: Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford University Press, 2007), a collection of essays by leading philosophers reflecting on their life without religious faith (3); Chomsky and His Critics, with Norbert Hornstein (Blackwell Publishing Company, 2003);and, with Charlotte Witt, A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, (Westview Press, 1993), which was expanded in 2002 in a second edition.

Other selected essays include: “Natures and Norms,” “Multiple Realization: Keeping it Real,” “Atheism as Perfect Piety For the Love of Reason,” “Everybody Has Got It: A Defense of Non-Reductive Materialism in the Philosophy of Mind,” and “Because I Said So: Toward a Feminist Theory of Authority” with Rebecca Hanrahan.