The aim of this paper is to show that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been mistakenly interpreted as a theory of gender, because interpreters have failed adequately to understand Beauvoir's aims. Beauvoir is not trying to explain facts, events, or states of affairs, but to reveal, unveil, or uncover (découvrir) meanings. She explicates the meanings of woman, female, and feminine. Instead of a theory, Beauvoir's book presents a phenomenological description of the sexual difference.

While human beings generally act prosocially towards one another — contra a Hobbesian “war of all against all” — this basic social courtesy tends not to be extended to our relations with the more-than-human world. Educational philosophy is largely grounded in a worldview that privileges human-centered conceptions of the self, valuing its own opinions with little regard for the ecological realities undergirding it. This hyper-separation from the ‘society of all beings’ is a foundational cause of our current ecological crises. In (...) this paper, we develop an ecosocial philosophy of education based on the idea of an ecological self. We aspire to consolidate voices from deep ecology and ecofeminism for conceptualizing education in terms of being responsible to and for, a complex web of interdependent relations among human and more-than-human beings. By analyzing the notion of opinions in light of Gilles Deleuze’s critique of the ‘dogmatic image of thought,’ we formulate three aspects of ESPE capable of supporting an ecological as opposed to an egoistic conception of the self: rather than dealing with fixed concepts, ESPE supports adaptable and flexible boundaries between the self and the world; rather than fixating on correct answers, ESPE focuses on real-life problems shifting our concern from the self to the world; and rather than supporting arrogance, EPSE cultivates an epistemic humility grounded in our ecological embeddedness in the world. These approaches seek to enable an education that cultivates a sense of self that is less caught up with arbitrary, egoistic opinions of the self and more attuned to the ecological realities constituting our collective life-worlds. (shrink)

This paper examines two different ways of understanding the concept of bodily integrity and their political implications. In Drucilla Cornell's use of the concept, the body cannot be separated from the mind. Protecting bodily integrity means protecting possibilities of imagining the self as whole. Martha Nussbaum's theorizing is based on a liberal way of conceptualizing subjectivity, in which the mind and the body are separate, and bodily integrity is used to refer to physical inviolability.

Traditionally inscribed at the margins of moral and political theory, it is time, after centuries of ongoing debates originated and grounded in Modernity’s values, to reflect on the status of Feminist Theory. Defined basically as critical theory —apostille of the mainstream theory—, feminist thought can be defined as theory tout court, in so far as the egalitarian discourses are central parts of moral and political thought and feminism is philosophical. This paper addresses the ambivalent relation between feminist theory and moral-political (...) theory with a critical view that upholds an integral vision that incorporates the dimension of care into the male-stream, and takes into account gender differences as well as the division between the public and private spheres. (shrink)