Arbeitsschwerpunkte
Die Interessens- und Arbeitsschwerpunkte von Milena Bartholain sind feministische Erkenntnistheorie, Philosophie der Sexualität, die Ethik von Überzeugungen, analytische Erkenntnistheorie und Philosophie des Geistes, insbesondere Internalismus und Externalismus-Debatten und Theorien mentaler Zustände wie Wissen, Überzeugungen und Biases.

Forschungsprojekte
Postdoc im DFG-Projekt "Sexuelle Handlungsfähigkeit und die Ethik der erotischen Erfahrung".

Milena Bartholain's main areas of interest and work include feminist epistemology, the philosophy of sexuality, the ethics of belief, as well as debates at the intersection of epistemology and the philosophy of mind, in particular internalism/externalism in epistemology and philosophy of mind, as well as theories of mental states such as knowledge, beliefs, and biases.

Milena is the postdoc in the DFG-project “Sexual Agency and the Ethics of Erotic Experiences”.

In progress

• Paper on sexual paternalism
• Paper defending a new epistemic definition of the debate between internalists and externalists about mind (draft available on request)
• Paper against compatibilism of externalism and self-knowledge (draft available on request)
• Paper on ‘externalised epistemic internalism’ and inferential thinking

Work

“Externalist Internalism - Essays on Hybrid Theories in the Philosophy of Mind and Epistemology”, dissertation (completed 2023)

Four chapters connected by the theme of hybridity across theories in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. More precisely, the thesis assesses the consistency of ‘hybrid epistemic internalism’, a view that combines externalism about mental states with epistemic internalism.

Throughout the thesis, I work with a non-standard (but more plausible) version of access internalism that focusses on the permissive notion of “easy access” to facts about one’s evidence. I identify two challenges to the consistency of hybrid epistemic internalism: the access problem and the equal justification problem. I show that mental state externalism does have an access problem contra compatibilist strategies that argue either that anti-compatibilist arguments are not sound or not relevant to us. I furthermore argue that hybrid epistemic internalism vindicates a weak variant of the well-known Equal Justification Thesis which says that individuals in the bad case have justification to believe the same things as their internal duplicates in the good case. I show that they have justification to believe propositions that are indiscriminable to them given the evidence that is easily available to them. I also defend a novel epistemic definition of the internalist/externalist debate about mind that identifies the question whether mental states may vary in ways that are perfectly hidden to the individual as the fundamental disagreement between internalists and externalists.

Taken together, these chapters present an argument for a unified epistemic conception of the internalist/externalist debates in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. Externalists and internalists in both debates disagree about whether certain facts about an individual’s mind, facts about some of their mental states or about their justification, may change in ways that are epistemically inaccessible to the individual given the evidence easily available to them. Because the internalist/externalist debates in epistemology and the philosophy of mind are both fundamentally epistemic, hybrid views, while not outright contradictory, run into troubles in their consequences.

Media

Milena also occasionally does radio work for Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Check out one of her latest pieces (in German): https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/romantische-rivalitaeten-und-polyamorie-dlf-kultur-390d1fd4-100.html