The Feminist Concept of Self and Modernity

Diogenes 56 (1):117-127 (2009)
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Abstract

The relationship between community and individual is the key issue in contemporary political philosophy and ethics. The concept of self seems very important for individualism, communitarianism and feminism when they respond to relationships, particularly when we have to situate selfhood in the conditions of modernity. Consequently, this paper can be divided into seven parts. First it introduces the debate about the concept of the self between individualism and communitarianism. Second, it discusses the feminist critique of this issue and analyses the feminist concept of self, and then addresses modernity as the condition of women. Next it attempts to analyze how women situate themselves in the conditions of modernity. Then it discusses how Chinese women are reshaping their selfhood under the conditions of modernity, and finally draws some brief conclusions claiming that neither communitarian nor individualist self is adequate in contemporary society. Chinese women, it is argued, are expected to reshape their own selfhood resting on the positive side of Confucian ethics and a feminist concept of self

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Xiao Wei
University of Southern California

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Principles of biomedical ethics.Tom L. Beauchamp - 1979 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by James F. Childress.
A source book in Chinese philosophy.Wing-Tsit Chan - 1963 - Princeton, N.J.,: Princeton University Press. Edited by Wing-Tsit Chan.
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.Michael J. Sandel - 1982 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Liberalism and the limits of justice.Michael Sandel - 2002 - Journal of Philosophy 81 (6):336-343.

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