Combining the liberalism of Locke and the "civic humanism" of Republicanism, Mary Wollstonecraft explored the need of women for coed and equal education with men, economic independence whether married or not, and representation as citizens in the halls of government. In doing so, she foreshadowed and surpassed her much better known successor, John Stuart Mill. Ten feminist scholars prominent in the fields of political philosophy, constitutional and international law, rhetoric, literature, and psychology argue here that Wollstonecraft, by reason of the (...) scope and complexity of her thought, belongs in the "canon" of political philosophers along with Rousseau and Burke, her contemporaries, both of whom she strenuously engaged in political debate. These essays explore the many aspects of her thought that resound so tellingly to the modern woman, including her groundbreaking attempt to be completely self-sufficient. The final bibliographical essay outlines the changing interpretations of Wollstonecraft's work over the past two hundred years and evaluates her standing among political theorists today. Contributors are Maria J. Falco, Penny A. Weiss, Virginia Sapiro, Virginia L. Muller, Wendy Gunther-Canada, Carol H. Poston, Miriam Brody, Moira Ferguson, Louise Byer Miller, and Dorothy McBride Stetson. (shrink)

This study examines recent French bioethics laws governing the uses of new reproductive and genetic technologies (NRGTs)—including in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, prenatal diagnostics, sex selection, and cloning—in light of feminist claims to women's rights, especially a woman's right to reproductive freedom. To this end, the study explores two interrelated questions: First, to what extent have French feminists supported NRGT development and treatment? Second, to what extent do French national bioethics debates, laws, and policies reflect feminist reactions to NRGTs? The investigation (...) of these questions is informed by recent theories of state feminism that show how national policy debates are gendered by particular sets of feminist ideas, and how policy choices resulting from these debates turn some of these ideas into law (McBride Stetson and Mazur 1995). Some of the most pressing feminist concerns in this area include women's loss of control over their bodies and fertility, women's exploitation and commercialization of their bodies, and women's health risks from NRGTs. The analysis of pronouncements by French feminist writers, researchers, and policy-makers reveals a multiplicity of feminist stances on NRGTs, showing keenly how feminists contest what constitutes effective feminist public policies to illuminate the fact that these policies are subject to shifting political contestations, rather than the reflection of a fixed set of feminist ideas. While contemporary French feminists grapple with the potential merits and dangers of NRGTS, the study shows that feminists generally seem to support NRGTs, as long as French law protects women's reproductive autonomy. Seen in this light, France's strong sense of the right to procreate through facilitation of access to NRGTs is not a contradiction of France's strong social and legal support for women's reproductive freedom, but rather enables French lawmakers to regulate NRGTs more effectively. (shrink)

This collection of essays is a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. It begins with an overview of philosophy's role and responsibility or "task" and of Schrag's contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag's work has extended and reconfigured. The essays are organized around the four conceptual figures widely considered Schrag's most significant and original philosophical achievements: transversal (...) rationality, the self after post-modernity, the fourth cultural value sphere, and communication praxis. The authors focus on topics ranging from Cartesian rationality to Foucauldian rational relativism; from transcendence in relation to the self to the Schragean self's connections with discourse, action, and community; from religion's disruptive presence in contemporary philosophy to recent developments in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

This contribution raises two questions about Talisse’s strategy of grounding democratic norms in a perfectionist account of epistemic agency: first, whether a perfectionist account of epistemic agency is plausible in itself, and second, whether Talisse is right to posit such a close relationship between communities of inquiry and democratic community? Epistemic perfectionism is rejected in favour of a more pluralist view of epistemic agency which starts from an account of the agent’s particular responsibilities. Next it is argued that communities of (...) inquiry are neither democratic, nor is democratic government a condition of their flourishing. Against the grounding strategy, it is argued that those epistemic responsibilities pertinent to the practice of democratic politics can only be determined once we are in possession of a prior account of our civic responsibilities. (shrink)

It is popularly believed that if A owes B a duty of care in negligence, A will not actually have a legal duty to be careful: A will merely be required to pay damages to B if she suffers loss as a result of A's being careless. We can call this the cynical view of duties of care and those who adopt it, cynics. However, it is possible to take a different view of duties of care in negligence, according to (...) which if A owes B a duty of care of some description, A will actually have a legal duty to be careful. We can call this the idealistic view of duties of care in negligence and those who adopt it, idealists. This article explains the importance of the debate between idealists and cynics over the nature of duties of care in negligence and goes on to argue that the cynical view of duties of care in negligence is, in fact, wrong and that the idealistic view of such duties should be preferred. (shrink)

Toni Morrison suggests that storytelling is a highly effective way of structuring knowledge, and that the harnessing of a clever allegory, the search for well-patterned language is a constant, provocative engagement with the contemporary world. This article considers the ways poetry, imagination, and well-patterned language are utilized in the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, and Leonard Harris. The author notes that there are apparent similarities between Rorty and Harris, but one should also notice that there are significant differences (...) in these two philosophical positions. The author ultimately argues that Harris's move toward poetry and well-patterned language is extremely powerful and needed if people wish to move beyond a well-established set of values and norms. Harris prods us to tell thought-provoking, engaging stories—to intricately tuck knowledge into allegory and well-patterned language—but do it without being an apologist for the prevailing bourgeois liberal democratic tradition. In this manner, the harnessing of metaphor and clever allegory, the creative engagement with poetry and well-patterned language (in philosophy) is a provocative means of engaging the oppression, dispossession, and immiseration of the contemporary world. (shrink)

The issue that I wish to address is, why protest and criticize the increasing hegemony of what has been called the “culture of consumerism”? This “why not?” objection encompasses three distinct sets of questions. First, is not resistance to it akin to playing the role of King Canute by the sea? Second, is not acceptance of it dictated by the current liberal philosophical consensus that acknowledges and endorses an inevitable diversity in different individuals’ conceptions of what is good, and must (...) not this consensus itself be taken as a given by all who are opposed to political and religious totalitarianisms? Third, does not cosmopolitanism, regarded as a value-orientation favorable to the dissolution or at least minimization of national boundaries and the practices of exclusivity associated therewith, make common cause in the present historical conjuncture with this same trend? I will argue for a “No” answer to all of these questions. (shrink)

Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today.

This paper theorizes two dialectic moments in which art is situated. The hypothetical dialectic is based on Hal Foster’s explication of the relationship between the neo-avant-garde and the historical avant-garde which forms the thesis of his text The Return of the Real. This dialect is comprised of an initial moment that delineates the terms of our enunciative and perceptive condition followed by a second that “comprehends,” not completes, the first. I forward Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the stain to characterize this (...) first moment. By looking at the stain, we see the make-up of the whole field of symbolic relations attempting—but ultimately failing—seamlessly to incorporate it. I give Diane Arbus’s use of the stain as a subject as an illustration of this first moment. Further, I posit Žižek’s notion of the act as a method to redialecticize art stuck in this initial moment and made stagnant through cynicism. Acts are moments of absolute freedom, that “[temporarily suspend] the field of ideological meaning” (Enjoy Your Symptom 35). However, I qualify the act in art as a “spectre” of the real: “The Real which returns [as]… an image, a semblance, an ‘effect,’ which, at the same time, [delivers] ‘the thing itself’” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real 18). I use recent collage paintings by Albert Oehlen as illustrations to stage the latter part of my argument. (shrink)

Theoretisch befanden sich die falschen Linien in der Theorie der liberalen Demokratie schon immer an mindestens zwei wichtigen Stellen: im Prozess oder Prozedere und im Resultat. Was das Erste betrifft, so bestand das Problem darin, dass versucht wurde sicherzustellen, dass der „Wille des Volkes“ – oder zumindest der der relevanten Menschen, der wählbaren Wähler – durch anschauliche, praktische Mechanismen zum Ausdruck kommt. Entsprechend dem Konsens der bedeutendsten Theoretiker der liberalen Demokratie in der neueren Vergangenheit gelten als solche Mechanismen die Wahlen (...) für Repräsentativorgane und die nachfolgenden Stimmen der Wahlsieger. Doch auf jedem Schritt stoßen wir auf Instanzen der gewählten Regierungen, die die Mehrheitsansichten desselben Personenkreises, von dem sie ursprünglich gewählt worden waren, preisgeben. Die Theorie der liberalen Demokratie besagt, dass solange angebrachte Verfahren zum Ausdruck des Willens der Mehrheit angewandt werden im Hinblick darauf, wer sie vertreten soll, die Vertreter berechtigt sind, gegen den manifesten Willen des Volkes zu stimmen. Doch dies ist natürlich ein offensichtlicher Widerspruch. Was die Frage der Resultate betrifft, so hat sich die neueste Theorie der liberalen Demokratie eine noch tiefere Grube gegraben, da sie sich vom Begriff des Allgemeinwohls abgewandt hat, zu dem zumindest einige frühere Theoretiker in dieser Tradition standen. Die Theorie der liberalen Demokratie hat sich letztlich selbst jegliche kritische Funktion in Bezug auf die Resultate abgesprochen. Statt dessen ist sie gezwungen, jedes Ergebnis zu ratifizieren, ohne Rücksicht darauf, wie offensichtlich es irreführend oder sogar tragisch sein mag, solange es das Erzeugnis einer akzeptierten autoritativen Bündels von Verfahren und Institutionen ist. Eine neue theoretische Richtung wird sicherlich gegen alle Elemente ankämpfen müssen, die größtenteils im Rawlsschen Ansatz und den Schriften der meisten seiner liberaldemokratischen Mitläufer fehlen: mit Macht, Gewalt, Domination, Ideologie, Entschlüssen, Deutungen, politischem Ausdruck, Revolution, Geschichte, Ökonomie, Biopolitik. Was wir dringend brauchen, sind neue Modelle sozialer und politischer Philosophie! (shrink)

Der Artikel hinterfragt kritisch die Krise in der Gesetzesherrschaft im Kontext der zeitgenössischen US-Politik. Es werden einige Beispiele der US-amerikanischen Innen- und Außenpolitik angeführt, die mit dem sog. ,Demokratiekult’ in Zusammenhang stehen. Der Text beschäftigt sich in seinem ersten Teil mit dem offiziellen Verhältnis der USA zur internationalen Gesetzgebung, des Weiteren mit der Institution des Präsidentenamtes und seiner Macht sowie mit der Rolle des Obersten Gerichtshofes der USA. Im zweiten Teil der Arbeit werden bestimmte philosophische Implikationen der amerikanischen Politik in (...) Bezug auf Fragen der Demokratie und der Gesetzesherrschaft hinterfragt. (shrink)

Stewart Cohen considers a case where his son wants a red table for his room. Cohen and his son go to the furniture store. Cohen’s son is concerned that the table his father is considering purchasing, which appears red, may in fact be white with red lights shining on it. Cohen responds with the following reasoning: The table looks red. The table is red. If the table is red, then it is not white with red lights shining on it. The (...) table is not white with red lights shining on it. If one reasons thus, say one’s engaged in -reasoning. Cohen finds such a response unsatisfactory. It is not a way of coming to know —it is too easy. And structurally similar reasoning delivers the falsity of sceptical hypotheses concerning the external world, testimony, other minds etc. So the unsatisfactoriness threatens to generalise. I consider Martin Davies ’s attempt to diagnose this unsatisfactoriness and find it incomplete. I then attempt to remedy the incompleteness in Davies ’s attempt. (shrink)