Recent defenses of shaming as an effective tool for identifying bad practice and provoking social change appear compatible with feminism. I complicate this picture by examining two instances of online feminist shaming that resulted in shame backlashes. Shaming requires the assertion of social and epistemic authority on behalf of a larger community, and is dependent upon an audience that will be receptive to the shaming testimony. In cases where marginally situated knowers attempt to “shame up,” it presents challenges for feminist (...) uses. (shrink)

Most psychological literature on gaslighting focuses on it as a dyadic phenomenon occurring primarily in marriage and family relationships. In my analysis, I will extend recent fruitful philosophical engagement with gaslighting by arguing that gaslighting, particularly gaslighting that occurs in more public spaces like the workplace, relies upon external reinforcement for its success. I will ground this study in an analysis of the film Gaslight, for which the phenomenon is named, and in the course of the analysis will focus on (...) a paradox of this kind of gaslighting: it wreaks significant epistemic and moral damages largely through small, often invisible actions that have power through their accumulation and reinforcement. (shrink)

This book explains how gossip contributes to knowledge. Karen Adkins marshals scholarship and case studies spanning centuries and disciplines to show that although gossip is a constant activity in human history, it has rarely been studied as a source of knowledge. People gossip for many reasons, but most often out of desire to make sense of the world while lacking access to better options for obtaining knowledge. This volume explores how, when our access to knowledge is blocked, gossip (...) becomes a viable path to knowledge attainment, one that involves the asking of questions, the exchange of ideas, and the challenging of preconceived notions. (shrink)

This paper defends the liberal arts as an effective way to acquire habits of thought (creativity, skepticism), as opposed to skills. The ability to think creatively, historically, and skeptically can only be acquired slowly, socially, and with a diverse population. While this defense of the liberal arts (as opposed to a skills-focused defense) well supports some of the hallmarks of American liberal arts education (in person, bricks and mortar, not accelerated), it also has some critical implications for how the liberal (...) arts are taught. (shrink)

Most psychological literature on gaslighting focuses on it as a dyadic phenomenon occurring primarily in marriage and family relationships. In my analysis, I will extend recent fruitful philosophical engagement with gaslighting (Abramson, “Turning up the Lights on Gaslighting” [2014]; McKinnon, “Allies Behaving Badly: Gaslighting as Epistemic Injustice” [2017]; Ruiz, “Spectral Phenomenologies” [2014]) by arguing that gaslighting, particularly gaslighting that occurs in more public spaces like the workplace, relies upon external reinforcement for its success. I will ground this study in an (...) analysis of the film Gaslight, for which the phenomenon is named, and in the course of the analysis will focus on a paradox of this kind of gaslighting: it wreaks significant epistemic and moral damages largely through small, often invisible actions that have power through their accumulation and reinforcement. (shrink)

This dissertation is an attempt to loosen what I see as a chokehold by which two paramount assumptions constrict our epistemic endeavors. These Enlightenment assumptions--that we accept or refute ideas as true based on transparently clear and orderly methods and criteria, and that individuals accept or refute truth claims--are still central in epistemology, despite their many critics . Thinking about gossip as an epistemologically productive concept provides us with the means to critique those assumptions, and further attempts to broaden our (...) notion of an epistemological foundation. ;Gossip at first appears to be an unlikely candidate for such a resurrection, mainly because its treatment by academics has been dismissive; this dismissal is in part due to Enlightenment conceptions about truth and falsehood. Chapter One surveys the social science literature on gossip and rumor, revealing that social scientists begin with such restrictive definitions of what gossip is that their conclusions amount to little more than tautology. Chapter Two shows that humanists have a slightly different approach to gossip, but with roughly similar results. ;The handful of philosophers who deal directly with gossip or rumor almost as a unit accept uncritically a division between "purposive" conversation and "idle" chatter. To do so, I think, perpetuates a limiting epistemic foundation on a linguistic level. In contrast, I argue in Chapter Three that the very existence of something like gossip proves the inadequacy of the foundationalist myth , and that to attempt to understand and use gossip with foundationalist tools is simply a wrong fit. My understanding of gossip is based on this central fact: we undertake the activity of gossip or rumor-spreading because we are trying to make sense out of something--we need to collect knowledge socially. Gossip originates from dissonance; it acts as a counterweight to more official information, and can't be considered apart from official knowledge. We use gossip and rumor, along with more orthodox sources of information, to formulate our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The extent to which gossip and rumor are spread is the extent to which the analysis is shared, and not individualized. Gossip is both a genealogical tool and an speculative tool. (shrink)

This paper argues for the specific pedagogical and philosophical value of toggling between places, as experienced in service or community-based learning. Regular shifting of student perspectives by traveling from a classroom to a community service site alienates students from their assumptions about beliefs, and opens up more diverse perspectives within the classroom.

In Kate Manne’s theory of misogyny, women’s behavior is surveilled (by men and other women) so that they conform to gendered norms of behavior and care, and they are threatened or punished when they refuse to abide by norms. I seek here to extend her argument about surveillance to norms around masculinity, and to demonstrate the ways in which surveillance actually runs throughout the gendered economy of care. I assess the impacts of this surveillance (particularly on men of color, who (...) identify as gay or trans, or who are immigrants or religious minorities), and argue that misogyny and masculinity are inextricably interlinked and mutually reinforcing phenomena, that must be simultaneously demystified for progress towards gender equity. (shrink)

Most psychological literature on gaslighting focuses on it as a dyadic phenomenon occurring primarily in marriage and family relationships. In my analysis, I will extend recent fruitful philosophical engagement with gaslighting by arguing that gaslighting, particularly gaslighting that occurs in more public spaces like the workplace, relies upon external reinforcement for its success. I will ground this study in an analysis of the film Gaslight, for which the phenomenon is named, and in the course of the analysis will focus on (...) a paradox of this kind of gaslighting: it wreaks significant epistemic and moral damages largely through small, often invisible actions that have power through their accumulation and reinforcement. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titles: Introduction Response Functions Information and Singular Causation The Functions of Sensory Representations The Contents of Sensory Representations: The Problem of Error The Contents of Sensory Representation: The Distality Problem.

There is a long-standing debate about whether poetry can make a substantive contribution to philosophy with compelling arguments to show that poetry and philosophy involve distinct modes of thought and aims, albeit with similar concerns. This paper argues that reading lyric poetry can play a substantive role in philosophy by helping the philosopher understand how to forge connections with the perspectives of others. The paper takes the view that poetry is not directly philosophical but can play an important role in (...) developing the philosopher's awareness of how perspective shapes beliefs and thought processes. Following Robert Nozick, David Lewis, and Helen Beebee, it argues for the need to broaden our conception of the aims of philosophy beyond aiming for conclusive proof, at the least where philosophical inquiry is focused on questions of value. It then shows how poetry cultivates an intellectual virtue essential to philosophy aimed at uncovering equilibria and collective understanding. (shrink)

Courts, Litigants, and the Digital Age examines the ramifications of technology for courts, judges, and the administration of justice. It sets out the issues raised by technology, and, particularly, the Internet, so that conventional paradigms can be updated in the judicial context. In particular, the book dwells on issues such as proper judicial use of Internet sources, judicial ethics and social networking, electronic court records and anonymization techniques, control of the courtroom and jurors' use of new technologies, as well as (...) the Internet's impact on judicial appointments and the diversity of the judiciary. The second edition includes discussion of current issues in this rapidly developing area, such as privacy protection, the "right to be forgotten," cyber intimidation, freedom of digital speech, and litigant anonymity. Through examination of relevant practical, legal, and ethical issues, it endeavours to extract lessons from the developing issues surveyed and proposes forward-thinking approaches based on proportionality principles. (shrink)

The presented paper addresses the concept of technoscience and its possible implications for technology assessment. Drawing on the discourse about converging technologies, it formulates the assumption that a general shift within science from epistemic cultures to techno-epistemic cultures lies at the heart of the propagated convergence between nano-, bio-, info- and cogno-sciences and technologies. This shift is adequately captured—so the main thesis—by the technoscience label. The paper elaborates on the shared characteristics of the new technosciences, especially their hybrid character and (...) their non-linear integration of basic research, object construction and technological innovation. Recent calls for new modes of technology governance (e.g. for upstream technology assessment and public participation) are discussed against the background of these technoscience characteristics. It is concluded that an adequate model of emerging technosciences and a detailed understanding of their characteristics is of paramount importance for current practices of technology assessment. (shrink)

Die Philosophie Wilhelm Schapps findet aufgrund seines originären Ansatzes der Geschichtenphilosophie im transdisziplinären Austausch über ein narratives Lebensweltverständnis zunehmend Beachtung. Der vorliegende Band versammelt interdisziplinäre Beiträge, die sich zum ersten Mal nicht nur mit den von Wilhelm Schapp zu seinen Lebzeiten veröffentlichten Schriften, sondern auch mit seinen seit 2016 im Verlag Karl Alber veröffentlichten Nachlassschriften auseinandersetzen.

A timely interrogation of the concept of 'expertise' in cultural work, exploring the characteristics of aesthetic expertise in the digital age, and its relation to inequalities in the cultural sector.

During the eighteenth century, elite women participated in the philosophical, scientific, and political controversies that resulted in the overthrow of monarchy, the reconceptualisation of marriage, and the emergence of modern, democratic institutions. In this comprehensive study, Karen Green outlines and discusses the ideas and arguments of these women, exploring the development of their distinctive and contrasting political positions, and their engagement with the works of political thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville and Rousseau. Her exploration ranges across Europe from (...) England through France, Italy, Germany and Russia, and discusses thinkers including Mary Astell, Emilie Du Châtelet, Luise Kulmus-Gottsched and Elisabetta Caminer Turra. This study demonstrates the depth of women's contributions to eighteenth-century political debates, recovering their historical significance and deepening our understanding of this period in intellectual history. It will provide an essential resource for readers in political philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and women's studies. (shrink)

Focusing on narratives with supernatural components, Karen J. Renner argues that the recent proliferation of stories about evil children demonstrates not a declining faith in the innocence of childhood but a desire to preserve its purity. From novels to music videos, photography to video games, the evil child haunts a range of texts and comes in a variety of forms, including changelings, ferals, and monstrous newborns. In this book, Renner illustrates how each subtype offers a different explanation for the (...) problem of the “evil” child and adapts to changing historical circumstances and ideologies. (shrink)

Law and Ethics: For Health Professions explains how to navigate the numerous legal and ethical issues that health care professionals face every day. Topics are based upon real-world scenarios and dilemmas from a variety of health care practitioners. Through the presentation of Learning Outcomes, Key Terms, From the Perspective of..., Ethics Issues, Chapter Reviews, Case Studies, Internet Activities, Court Cases, and Videos, students learn about current legal and ethical problems and situations. In the ninth edition, material has been revised to (...) reflect the current health care environment. As students progress through the text, they will get the opportunity to use critical thinking skills to learn how to resolve real-life situations and theoretical scenarios and to decide how legal and ethical issues are relevant to the health care profession in which they will practice. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore how the prospect of artificial placenta technology (nearing clinical trials in human subjects) should encourage further consideration of the loss experienced by individuals when their pregnancy ends unexpectedly. Discussions of pregnancy loss are intertwined with procreative loss, whereby the gestated entity has died when the pregnancy ends. However, we demonstrate how pregnancy loss can and does exist separate to procreative loss in circumstances where the gestated entity survives the premature ending of the pregnancy. In outlining (...) the value that can be attached to pregnancy beyond fetal-centric narratives, we illustrate how pregnancy loss, separate to procreative loss, can be experienced. This loss has already been recognised among parents who have experienced an unexpected early ending of their pregnancy, resulting in their child being cared for in neonatal intensive care unit. Artificial placentas, however, may exacerbate these feelings and make pregnancy loss (without procreative loss) more visible. We argue that pregnancy is an embodied state in which gestation is facilitated by the body but gestation itself should be recognised as a process—and one that could be separable from pregnancy. In demarcating the two, we explore the different ways in which pregnancy loss can be understood. Our objective in this paper goes beyond contributing to our philosophical understanding of pregnancy towards practical-orientated conclusions regarding the care pathways surrounding the artificial placenta. We make recommendations including the need for counselling and careful consideration of the language used when an artificial placenta is used. (shrink)

This paper is about a category of social conventions that, I will argue, have significant moral implications. The category consists in our conventions about what we notice and choose not to notice about persons, features of persons, and their circumstances. We normally do not think much about what we notice about others, and what they notice about us, but I will argue that we should. Noticing people is a way of engaging with them in social contexts. We can engage in (...) social noticing more or less respectfully, more or less benevolently. Moreover, our standard conventions about noticing often have disparate effects on different groups of people. To be noticed appropriately is to have one's moral and social standing affirmed; conversely, to be denied notice or to be noticed inappropriately is very often to be denigrated or objectified. My aim in this paper is to unpack these moral dimensions of conventions of noticing and discuss their implications for how people engage with each other in certain kinds of social exchanges involving persons with disabilities. In Part I, I explain what I mean by the conventions of noticing and how they operate in social interactions. I show that although we do not always attend to them, these conventions are thoroughly embedded in our everyday social life. In Part II, I argue that these conventions have important moral dimensions and as such, should be governed by moral principles and values. I employ a Kantian framework of duties of love and respect in order to show how moral concerns should shape the way we use conventions of noticing and respond to their use by others. In Part III, I draw out the implications of this picture for social interactions among strangers when one or more of the parties involved has an immediately visible disability. (shrink)

Performance is increasingly important to the poet, which is evidenced by the growing numbers of videos and audio recordings online including YouTube, the National Poetry library, and Poetry Archive. As a result, there are greater opportunities to engage with poets reading their own work and consequently, there is a need to move away from thinking of poetry as primary something that takes shape on the page. Furthermore, by refocusing attention to poetry as an oral artform, in particular to poetry performance, (...) different ways of understanding the value of poetry come to the fore. The live poetry performance, I argue, offers an attempt to reclaim the personal individual expression of language in contemporary society and demands attention by the audience because of the role of voice and body in the performance. Through awareness of ‘uniqueness of voice,’ the performed poem becomes a site of collective meaning making with individual identity intact as a shared endeavour between performer and audience, and necessarily resists appropriation (in the sense that the words experienced cannot be divorced from the performer or the performance space to serve as a proxy for meaning elsewhere). This chapter therefore makes an argument for the need to engage with spoken word and performance poetry in the live performance space. (shrink)

This paper surveys recent work on moral expertise. Much of that work defends an asymmetry thesis according to which the cognitive deference to expertise that characterizes other areas of inquiry is out of place in morality. There are two reasons why you might think asymmetry holds. The problem might lie in the existence of expertise or in deferring to it. We argue that both types of arguments for asymmetry fail. They appear to be stronger than they are because of their (...) focus on moral expertise regarding all-in judgments about rightness. We reject this emphasis on all-in judgment in favor of an account of moral expertise as typically multi-stranded and domain limited. This account of moral expertise is better able to address the problem of how to identify those who have expertise. It also offers a more nuanced picture of the contrast between accepting a moral claim on one's own and accepting it on testimony. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 433-452 [Access article in PDF] When Ideas Matter: The Moral Philosophy of Fontenelle Gregory Matthew Adkins Introduction There has been a recent trend in the historiography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual culture to analyze that culture from a sociological perspective. This perspective, a necessary corrective to a pure history of ideas, takes knowledge as a socially constructed phenomenon and thus (...) subject to sociological analysis. The point of the sociology of knowledge, however, is not to re-hash and bolster old externalist arguments but to do away with the whole debate over whether ideas or social conditions are more important in intellectual history and the history of science. A focus on sociology does not mean that ideas do not matter. This becomes apparent when analyzing the ethics of early modern intellectuals.For example, Anne Goldgar's recent work, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (1995), gives much attention to the sociology of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Republic of Letters--but at the cost of relegating the role of ideas to the sidelines. According to Goldgar, if one wants to understand early modern intellectuals as a community, including their ethics and sense of morality, one should focus on forms of sociability rather than the ideas and philosophies they put forth in their writings. An aristocratic ethic dominated early modern scholarship, she argues, and even took precedence over knowledge claims: "[i]n striving to make its inner workings acceptable to the outside community the Republic of Letters chose, like the aristocracy, to empty its internal relationships of content, choosing instead to concentrate on form.... [A]rguments were often judged on the politeness with which they were presented, rather than on their intrinsic merit." 1 Men of [End Page 433] letters, although often of humble origin, cultivated nobility by emulating aristocratic modes of decorum and noble interests in status and reputation. One way they promoted these ideas was through a literary genre adopted from classical antiquity, the éloge (eulogy), which presented exemplary modes of behavior by praising the lives of the "heroes" of the Republic of Letters. Interestingly, the years on which Goldgar focuses her analysis almost precisely encompass the period of Bernard le Bouyer de Fontenelle's mature intellectual production. Yet Fontenelle (1657-1757), widely hailed during his lifetime as having perfected the art of the éloge, plays no role in her argument.From 1699 to 1740 Fontenelle, as secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie Royale des Sciences, composed some sixty-nine éloges in honor of recently deceased members of the academy and of other notable savants. Even a brief glance at Fontenelle's eulogies reveals an intimate link between philosophy and morality. A more careful examination of them in the context of his life and works shows that this link was logically commensurate with his genuinely held notions of human nature, happiness, reason, and the good. In fact the relationship in the eulogies between notions of nobility and the virtues proper to the savant or philosopher is highly intellectualized. Fontenelle was not as concerned with status and reputation or with self-fashioning as one might think. 2 We can only assimilate his ethics to those of the court aristocracy if we ignore what he actually wrote.Through his eulogies and other writings, Fontenelle's thoughts on philosophy and morality have had a lasting impact on western culture. He presented an image of what would come to characterize the proper, objective, modern scientist and thinker. 3 In order to understand the éloge as an institution in the Republic of Letters (and by extension the early modern intellectual ethic) it is therefore important to examine Fontenelle's moral philosophy more carefully. It is a philosophy expressed in his eulogies but understood clearly only in the context of his life and works. On the ÉlogesAs noted above, one way to contextualize the institution of the éloge is to place it within a Republic of Letters concerned with adopting the manners of the nobility: the éloges... (shrink)

Technoscience and technology assessment Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s10202-010-0080-8 Authors Karen Kastenhofer, Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute of Technology Assessment Strohg. 45/5 1030 Wien Austria Doris Allhutter, Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute of Technology Assessment Strohg. 45/5 1030 Wien Austria Journal Poiesis & Praxis: International Journal of Technology Assessment and Ethics of Science Online ISSN 1615-6617 Print ISSN 1615-6609 Journal Volume Volume 7 Journal Issue Volume 7, Numbers 1-2.

The view that narrative artworks can offer insights into our lives, in particular, into the nature of the emotions, has gained increasing popularity in recent years. However, talk of narrative often involves reference to a perspective or point of view, which indicates a more fundamental mechanism at work. In this article, I argue that our understanding of the emotions is incomplete without adequate attention to the perspectival structures in which they are embedded. Drawing on Bennett Helm’s theory of emotion, I (...) argue that the narrative view fails to take into account the influence of perspective on the emotions. In order to address this gap in our understanding of the emotions, I highlight a mode of engagement with literature that prioritizes the perspectival features of a work. Focusing on lyric poetry, I argue that non-narrative artworks are those best placed to highlight this fundamental aspect of our emotional experiences. (shrink)

Seitdem die Menschheit reflektiert, macht sie sich Gedanken darüber, ob Wach- und Traumbewusstsein identisch oder verschieden seien. Während Mystiker unser gesamtes Leben für einen Traum halten, Kinder ihre Phantasien für die Realität nehmen, archaische und traditionelle Völker an die Verwirklichung ihrer Träume und die Wirkungsmächtigkeit ihrer Einbildungen in Heilungsséancen glauben, hält der moderne westliche, rational aufgeklärte und durch die kritische Vernunft entmythologisierte Mensch Träume für Schäume und nur sein wissenschaftlich interpretiertes Weltbild für wahr und real; ein Weltbild, das bei genauerem (...) Zusehen ein reduktionistisches Konstrukt darstellt. Alle Beweise für eine Differenz von Wach- und Traumzustand, seien es solche, die sich auf die Gesetzmäßigkeit der Realität berufen oder auf deren Anschaulichkeit, Leibhaftigkeit oder Affektivität, erweisen sich als unhaltbar. Wach- und Traumbewusstsein sind - wie auch verschiedene kulturspezifische Weltbilder - je verschiedene Ausschnitte eines unverfügbaren sublinguistischen und subrationalen Hintergrundes. Jede Kultur interpretiert diesen in einer für sie typischen Weise und deutet ihn um zur Realität, welche aber letztlich nur konstruktivistisch zu erklären ist. (shrink)

This study has two agendas: to interrogate popular notions of religion by reading it, out of Derrida and Certeau, as a signifier for a situated historical scene; and to show the existential philosophy of Beauvoir as a performance of that scene. In particular, it shows how the structure of relationships she presents in her ethics clearly reproduces the rhythms of the scene of religion. One of the implications of this reproduction is that existential philosophy can only emerge in the context (...) of religion, and is necessarily an iteration of religion. The other implication is that we might reassess how we code the category ‘religion’ in our public and private discourse, with all the disruption that such a different coding might entail. (shrink)

Justified trust is rationally permitted trust; wise trust is excellent trust. Excellent (dis)trust is always justified (dis)trust, but the reverse is not true. You can be justified in distrusting someone and yet it be wise for you to trust. Contrary to folk saying, wisdom does not favour distrust ahead of trust. This paper explores what it takes to be wise in entering, maintaining, modifying and exiting trust relations. Wisdom is socially scaffolded, including by distributed networks of distrust that make local (...) trust wise. (shrink)

The French studies scholar Patrick Coleman made the important observation that over the course of the eighteenth century, the social meanings of anger became increasingly democratized. The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an outstanding example of this change. In Man or Citizen, Karen Pagani expands, in original and fascinating ways, the study of anger in Rousseau’s autobiographical, literary, and philosophical works. Pagani is especially interested in how and to what degree anger—and various reconciliatory responses to anger, such as forgiveness—functions (...) as a defining aspect of one’s identity, both as a private individual and as a public citizen. Rousseau himself was, as Pagani puts it, “unabashed” in his own anger and indignation—toward society on one hand (corrupter of our naturally good and authentic selves) and, on the other, toward certain individuals who had somehow wronged him (his famous philosophical disputes with Voltaire and Diderot, for example). In Rousseau’s work, Pagani finds that the extent to which an individual processes, expresses, and eventually resolves or satisfies anger is very much of moral and political concern. She argues that for Rousseau, anger is not only inevitable but also indispensable, and that the incapacity to experience it renders one amoral, while the ability to experience it is a key element of good citizenship. (shrink)

Der Begriff "Narrativität" tritt heute als ein Modewort in Erscheinung, das sogar Einzug ins Feuilleton gehalten hat. Im Kontext der Philosophie des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts kann der Mensch als narratives Wesen bestimmt werden. Erzählung dient hier nicht allein als Inbegriff einer Gesamtheit von Sinnbildungen, sondern vor allem zur Kennzeichnung des wirklich Menschlichen. Das narrative Selbst gibt nicht nur auf die Frage nach dem Menschen eine Antwort, sondern ist auch grundlegend für die Beantwortung der Frage nach dem Tunsollen des Menschen. (...) Und es wird sichtbar, dass die "Form der Erzählung" die Art und Weise des Verstehens der eigenen Handlungen und die der anderen sein kann. Die Klärung der Bedeutung von Narrativität im Spannungsfeld von Ethik und deren lebenspraktischem Bezug steht in systematischer Hinsicht allerdings noch aus. Der vorliegende Band leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Klärung dieses Defizits, indem er Grundlagen, Grundpositionen und Anwendungen einer narrativen Ethik vorstellt. (shrink)

Dummett's output has been prolific and highly influential, but not always as accessible as it deserves to be. This book sets out to rectify this situation.

Heidegger's thought has recently been made more available to English readers by the publication of two books: one a translation of one of Heidegger's works, the other, by Thomas Langan, an American scholar, described as a critical study of Heidegger. Heidegger's philosophy has had little or no influence in England; and this seems a good opportunity for considering whether this neglect is merited, or whether some defence can be offered of Heidegger's curious manipulations of the German and Greek tongues. Since (...) An Introduction to Metaphysics philosophises on a basis of Greek, though it purports to be philosophy, not history of philosophy, most of this article will be concerned with Heidegger's use and abuse of that language. I shall suggest, however, that the same conclusions hold good of Heidegger's use of German. (shrink)

From its inception, philosophy has represented itself as a dialogue, or conversation, among those who are lovers of wisdom. It has also been largely a conversation among men. Diotima, the absent female presence, who teaches Socrates about love and philosophy, consigns the lovers of women to bodily reproduction, and associates men with the polis and invention of law. But the polis is composed of both women and men, and a truly progressive philosophy would be a conversation between them. Since at (...) least the fifteenth century, women in Europe have dreamed of a philosophy that would be a conversation that included them. This chapter looks back at the history of women's attempts to refashion philosophy as a dialogue between the sexes, and their dreams for the progress of the polis. Contemporary academic philosophy largely excludes these attempts from the history of philosophy, and distorts and represses an important aspect of the reality of our philosophic past. This chapter argues that the progress in civilization that has taken place in Europe cannot be disentangled from the contributions already made by women to our shared political assumptions. Progress in moral and political philosophy, if it is possible, will involve retrieving, extending, and deepening that contribution, so that the polis, along with the philosophy that sustains it, becomes fully conscious of itself as the outcome of a negotiation between humans who are embodied and sexually diverse. (shrink)