CFP: Philosophy and Chemosenses - special issue Philosophy and the Mind Sciences

CFP Philosophy and Chemosenses - special issue Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 

edited by Giulia Martina and Benjamin Young 

Deadline for article submission September 1, 2025. 

Call for papers for a special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences on philosophical issues 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 as well as demonstrating how studying the chemosenses contributes to philosophy more broadly. We thus hope to expand the range of topics covered by philosophers so far, encourage new researchers to focus on these topics, as well as to offer a chance for the current community of olfactory philosophers a venue 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 to the study of perception are emerging. Moreover, there are widespread areas of research related to smell 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 odors, and olfaction’s general role in our well-being. Given these areas, as well as numerous other fecund yet unexamined research topics, the special issue will provide a venue for established and new researchers to explore the questions they find important and worth pursuing.

We are seeking contributions on both well-established questions (e.g. on the nature of olfactory experience and its objects) as well as topical areas we think are still under-explored, with the aim of eliciting new research on them as well as inspiring contributors to propose their own, novel topics from the contributors. These non-exhaustively include:

1. the relation between smell, memory, emotions, and more general cognitive capacities;

2. the role smell plays within human social interactions;

3. the role of smell in culture, and how it differs across cultures;

4. ethical issues in the industrial production and use of odorants;

5. moral and ecological concerns with the production, use, and digitization of smells; 

6. the nature of chemosenses within animals and perhaps even plants.

The special issue will showcase how philosophy at large can learn from investigation of the chemosenses, and at the same time encourage new interest and contributions from philosophers who have not worked on these topics so far.

Philosophy and the Mind Sciences is a fully open access journal and all contributions for the special issues will undergo peer-review before being accepted for publication.

For further information please contact Giulia Martina ([email protected]) or Benjamin Young ([email protected])