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Call for papers: 'Philosophy and the Chemosenses' special issue
We invite paper submissions for a special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences on philosophical questions raised by the chemosenses – i.e. the senses of smell, taste, and flavour. The aim of the special issue is to stimulate and attract new research in all aspects of perception, experience, and cognition in the chemosenses, and to demonstrate how studying the chemosenses contributes to philosophy more broadly. We hope to expand the range of topics covered by philosophers so far, encourage new researchers to focus on the chemosenses, and offer a venue for the current community of olfactory philosophers to enrich ongoing debates.
While progress has been made on many areas of olfactory philosophy over the past twenty years, this research has still not yielded a consensus or uniform approach. On the contrary, as debates become more sophisticated and build on prior work, more fine-grained and varied theoretical options have been proposed and broader questions of methodology and overall approach are emerging. Moreover, there are many areas that philosophers are only starting to explore beyond the philosophy of perception and mind, such as the aesthetic dimension of smell, the ecological import of environmental odours, and olfaction’s general role in our well-being.
We are seeking contributions on both well-established questions (e.g. on the nature of olfactory experience and its objects) as well as areas we think are still under-explored. These areas non-exhaustively include:
- the relation between smell, memory, emotions, and more general cognitive capacities;
- the role smell plays within human social interactions;
- the role of smell in culture, and how it differs across cultures;
- ethical issues in the industrial production and use of odorants;
- moral and ecological concerns with the production, use, and digitization of smells;
- the nature of the chemosenses within animals and perhaps even plants.
