At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with vocations to the Christian religious orders of the West in marked decline, an authentic Christian presence in health care is threatened. There are no longer large numbers of women willing to offer their life labors bound in vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, so as to provide a real preferential option for the poor through supporting an authentic Christian mission in health care. At the same time, the frequent earlier death of men (...) leaves a large number of widows, some in need of care and some able to provide care. Drawing on the role of widows sketched in I Timothy 2, one can envision Christian widows entering a life of prayer and service in health care settings. As female monastics, such widows could reintroduce a salient Christian presence in health care. How one ties this response to the message of I Timothy 2 will depend on one’s understanding of the status of Scripture, the significance of tradition, the nature of theological epistemology, the meaning of theology, the nature of the Church, and the ontology of gender. The position taken on these issues will define the character of a Christian bioethics of care. (shrink)

Widows, women, and the bioethics of care must be understood within an authentic Christian ontology of gender. Men are men and women are women, and their being is ontologically marked in difference. There is an ontology of gender with important implications for the role of women in the family and the Church. The Christian Church has traditionally recognized a role for widows, deaconesses, and female monastics, which is not that of the liturgical priesthood, but (...) one with a special relationship to care and therefore with particular implications for health care and a Christian bioethics of care in the twenty-first century. In the shadow of early male mortality, women as wives should turn to support their husbands and as widows to support those in need. Widows, in becoming authentic Christian monastics, can bring into the world an icon of rightly ordered women providing rightly ordered Christian care for those in need. They can enter the moral vacuum created by misunderstandings of the place of women and the service vacuum created by a disappearance of religious nuns in Western health care facilities with a presence that is at one with the Church of the Fathers. (shrink)

Legal institutions worldwide construct theories about gender’s ontology—i.e., theories about what gender is—and use those constructions to govern. In this article, I analyse how the Family Court of Australia constructed ontologies of gender to govern young people’s gender-affirming hormone use. By analysing the ‘reasons for judgment’ published about cases where minors applied for the Court’s authorisation to use hormones, I show that the Court constructed two theories about the ontology of gender concurrently—one essentialist (...) and the other performative—which it leveraged to arbitrate the legitimacy of hormone use. By critically examining the Court’s ontological assertions, I argue that both theories advanced anti-queer directives that tethered the legitimacy of hormone use to its promise to produce normatively gendered subjects. This analysis highlights that legal regimes concerned with controlling gender-affirming practices have much more at stake than access to those practices alone. By governing mechanisms of gender’s production, these regimes do not merely shape how gender can be expressed but also the possible forms of gender itself. (shrink)

Resumen Este trabajo de investigación versará sobre la posibilidad de pensar un diálogo entre la teoría de género y la diferencia sexual, atravesando la necesaria delimitación teórica y conceptual de las categorías en juego, ya sea la de género como la de diferencia sexual, con todas las necesarias conceptualizaciones vinculantes. Se trabajará sobre la tensión que existe entre una postura culturalista como la de género y aquella que es denominada como diferencia sexual, la cual no responde al esquema de la (...) diferencia anatómica, aspecto que necesita de la introducción de una perspectiva psicoanalista lacaniana para abordar tal problemática. La lectura de la posibilidad de diálogo provendrá de la ubicación del cuerpo como un elemento central para el desarrollo de la investigación, ya sea en su vertiente psicoanalítica de cuerpo sexuado orientado a lo real lacaniano, como también en la perspectiva de una somateca como espacio de apertura en oposición a la noción de corpus. Es en esta discusión acerca de la comprensión de lo corporal donde podremos identificar la posibilidad de diálogo, en tanto el cuerpo está atravesado por una inconsistencia: su incompletitud ontológica.This research work focuses on the possibility of thinking of a dialogue between gender theory and sexual difference, going through the necessary theoretical and conceptual delimitation of the categories at stake, be it gender or sexual difference, and all the necessary binding conceptualizations. We work on the tension between a culturalist position like gender and one denominated sexual difference, but not in the sense of anatomical difference. To address this issue, it is necessary to introduce a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. The possibility of dialogue will come from the location of the body as a central element for the development of the research, either in its psychoanalytic approach as sexed body oriented to the Lacanian real, or in the perspective of a Somateca as a space of opening, opposed to the notion of corpus. It is in this discussion about the understanding of the body that we can identify the possibility of dialogue, for the body is crossed by an inconsistency its ontological incompleteness. (shrink)

Feminist Metaphysics is the first collection of articles addressing metaphysical issues from a feminist perspective.

Two major questions have dominated work on the metaphysics of social groups: first, Are there any? And second, What are they? I will begin by arguing that the answer to the ontological question is an easy and obvious ‘yes’. We do better to turn our efforts elsewhere, addressing the question: “What are social groups?” One might worry, however, about this question on grounds that the general term ‘social group’ seems like a term of art—not a well-used concept we can analyze, (...) or can presuppose corresponds to a real kind we can investigate. But while the general notion of ‘social group’ may be a term of art, our terms for clubs and courts, races and genders, are not. It is worth stepping back to ask what function these social group concepts serve. I will argue that individual social group concepts function to give normative structure to our lives together. Paying attention to the role of norms in social groups, I will argue, can enable us to provide a unified understanding of the importance of core social groups, while still respecting the great differences among social groups of different kinds. (shrink)

According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue (...) that the notion of substantivity can be understood in a way that accommodates gender pluralism. First, I claim that gender terms (at least as used in the ontology room) are referentially indeterminate, where referential indeterminacy holds in virtue of the way the world is. Second, I propose a degree-theoretic (or scalar) account of metaphysical substantivity; genders are substantial to the degree that they are determinate. I conclude that gender is relatively, although not absolutely, substantial. (shrink)

Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary (...) collection of people is a social group. In addition, the framework provides resources for developing a broader structuralist view in social ontology. (shrink)

"The notion of Geschlecht - denoting gender, genre, kinship, and more - exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the transnational and transdisciplinary structures of contemporary humanities. What happens in the transference from one language, tradition, or form to another? Combining detailed case studies of "category problems" in literature, philosophy, theatre, media, cinema, and performing arts, with excerpts from canonical texts-by field-defining thinkers such as Derrida, Malabou, Nancy, and Irigaray-the volume presents "the Geschlecht complex" as a fulcrum for any interpretive (...) endeavor, as an invaluable mode of thought for the present and inevitable complexities of theorizing in the 21st century"--. (shrink)

With the active involvement of women in the church and home, there is a need to study God’s design for the relationship between men and women. In reaffirming the divine order of this relationship, discussing the biblical gendered roles has been one of the major contending issues. So emerging ecclesiologies in Africa are beginning to challenge the traditional understanding of male headship in the church. Therefore, the article argues that the ontology of men and women’s relationship provides a better (...) framework for understanding the nature of authority and submission in the church. This article states fairly the biblical foundation for the ontology of male and female relationship in the church from both the complementarian and egalitarian views. Also, this article presents the male and female relationship in contemporary African ecclesiology. Furthermore, the article contends that the application of the biblical foundation for the relationship between men and women provides a strong framework for authority and submission in the church, which reaffirms the male headship. The goal of the article is to use the biblical framework for the ontology of the relationships between men and women to propose a theology of authority and submission in the church without undermining the nature and worth of men and women, who are both created in the image and likeness of God. A qualitative methodology was used for this article, which integrates both primary and secondary sources to delineate the thesis of the study. Contribution: This article contributes to the area of ecclesiology in Africa, which shows that the theology of the church is relevant for engaging cutting-edge issues, such as gender studies, human relations and personhood. It explains the influence and implications of the ontology of gender relationship on authority and submission in the church to affirm human dignity and equality in the church. (shrink)

This paper addresses the generally neglected topic of Vandana Shiva’s ontology. It is argued that there is a significant ontological component to Shiva’s ecofeminist philosophy and that this ontology underpins her ecological and feminist views. Shiva’s ontology provides a standpoint from which she can critique dichotomous ontologies of domination and oppression, and from which she can identify life-sustaining modes of existence. It is argued that this ontology is implicit in most of her works and is best (...) grasped through the analysis of her critique of Western scientific metaphysics. It is further argued that this implied ontology is a continuation of the Hindu-ecofeminist ontology of Prakriti explicitly set forth in Shiva’s Staying Alive (1989). Both forms of Shiva’s ontology, the explicit and the implicit, will be reconstructed and their points of continuity detailed. (shrink)

The prevalence of dementia is increasing worldwide but there is still no hope of a cure. Huge resources go into biomedical research, whose reductive ‘enactment’ has severe consequences for women, who are predominantly affected by dementia. To challenge such tragic enactment, this article considers ‘multiple ontologies’ of the most common type of dementia – Alzheimer’s disease – in the popular fictional film adaptations Still Alice and A Song for Martin. Using a post-humanist account of feminist visual studies of technoscience, this (...) comparative film analysis reveals how gender supersedes AD oversteering the hierarchical dualisms between health and pathology, human and nonhuman, and biomedical and artistic modes of knowing about Alzheimer’s. The author argues that these films stress the potential of the arts, as a multisensorial post-humanist embodied state of becoming with AD, to challenge hierarchical dualisms and innovatively contribute to dementia care. (shrink)

Gender classifications often are controversial. These controversies typically focus on whether gender classifications align with facts about gender kind membership: Could someone really be nonbinary? Is Chris Mosier really a man? I think this is a bad approach. Consider the possibility of ontological oppression, which arises when social kinds operating in a context unjustly constrain the behaviors, concepts, or affect of certain groups. Gender kinds operating in dominant contexts, I argue, oppress trans and nonbinary persons in (...) this way: they marginalize trans men and women, and exclude nonbinary persons. As a result, facts about membership in dominant gender kinds should not settle gender classification practices. (shrink)

The mainstream approach to the understanding of pain continues to be governed by the biomedical paradigm and the dualistic Cartesian ontology. This Volume brings together essays of scholars of literature, philosophy and history on the many enigmatic shades of pain-experience, mostly from an anti-Cartesian perspective of cultural ontology by scholars of literature, philosophy and history. A section of the essays is devoted to the socio-political dimensions of pain in the Indian context. The book offers a critical perspective on (...) the reductive conceptions of pain and argue that non-substance ontology or cultural ontology supports a more humane and authentic understanding of pain. The general ontological features of the self in pain and culturally imbued dimensions of pain-experience are, thus, brought together in a rare blend in this Volume. The essays dwell on the importance of understanding what cultural, social and political forces outside our control do to our pain-experience. They show why such understanding is necessary, both to humanely deal with pain, and to rectify erroneous approaches to pain-experience. They also explore the thoroughly ambivalent spaces between pain and pleasure, and the cathartic and productive dimensions of pain. The essays in this Volume investigate pain-experiences through the fresh lenses of history, gender, ethics, politics, death, illness, self-loss, torture, shame, dispossession and denial. (shrink)

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”.) needs to be read in the light of traditional Jewish sources. The question is, how does it stand up to modern hypotheses of gender construction? Yentl was originally published in Yiddish and was translated to English in the latter half of the twentieth century. We will see that the context within which to understand the story properly is encoded in the story itself, as Umberto Eco explains in his The Role (...) of the Reader and The Limits of Interpretation. We will see how the concept of a person’s gender, as a construction by social norms, is viewed within mainstream Jewish thought. Some textual issues and contemporary ideas of gender are applied to the story. Finally, the feature film Yentl. 1983. Yentl [film]. Los Angeles: United Artists Films.) is also compared the short story on which it was based as an example of translation and re-interpretation. (shrink)

RESUMEN Se analiza la presencia de la noción de "estado de naturaleza" en los teólogos y juristas españoles del siglo XVI, mostrando las diferencias y semejanzas entre cuatro temas que antecedieron a la formación del concepto: el estado de inocencia original, las consecuencias del pecado original en la naturaleza humana, la hipótesis de un pacto legitimador de la autoridad política y la hipótesis teológica de la naturaleza pura. A partir de este análisis, se proponen algunos criterios para delimitar el concepto (...) de estado de naturaleza. ABSTRACT The article analyzes the presence of the notion of "state of nature" in 16th century Spanish theologians and jurists, showing the similarities and differences among four topics that preceded the formation of that concept: the state of original innocence, the consequences of original sin for human nature, the hypothesis regarding a contract that legitimizes political authority, and the theological hypothesis of pure nature. On the basis of this analysis, the paper goes on to propose some criteria to define the state of nature. (shrink)

We are all immersed in a sea of social norms, but they are sometimes tricky to observe with any clarity. They are often invisible to us and emerge only when they are not observed. Social norms are important to understand because they are both limiting of our freedom, such as gendered and racialized norms, and at the same time the very conditions of our agency. Social Goodness presents an original, externalist answer to the question of the source or origin of (...) social role normativity. Rather than grounding social normativity in the attitudes of persons, the book argues for an externalism that roots social role normativity in the social world itself: in its positions, institutions, and larger architecture. The core insight of externalism is that the function or structural feature of an enterprise or activity can bring with it normative demands quite independently of the attitudes of those who engage with it. According to the artisanal model, just as a carpenter, ceramicist, or chef is responsive to and evaluable under a set of artisanal norms or techniques, so too is a mother and or an academic or a President. The source of normativity is this technique or expertise, independent of the preferences, endorsements, or recognitive attitudes of individuals. The artisanal model for social role normativity has resources to explain both the "stickiness" or persistence of social norms and our ability to criticize existing norms and to engage in normative self-creation--to create new normative selves. The artisanal model also has resources to capture and express the social situatedness, locality, and materiality of social roles. The relational ontology of social roles, implicit in the artisanal model, provides a useful frame to consider both hierarchical and oppressive social relations. (shrink)

Discrimination is a social phenomenon which seems to be widespread across different societies and cultures. Examples of discrimination concerning race, class, gender, and sexual orientation are not difficult to find in contemporary western societies. In this article, the author focus on the ontological ground of this phenomenon, with particular attention to its diffuse and institutionalised forms. The author defends a broadly speaking reductionist approach, according to which the various manifestations of discrimination are grounded on the existence of the effects (...) of “discriminatory stances” in social contexts. Discrimination may become part of the institutional sphere, either by way of bottom-up “crystallisation” of discriminatory practices, or by top-down “dilution” of institutional defaults into ordinary interactions. (shrink)

I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, “What is it to be a woman?” Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; (...) gender systems serve to enable male control of female reproductive capacities. This explains the fact that most women are female, but it does not entail that all women are female or that all females are women. To clarify my position, I draw an analogy between the kind woman and the kind parent. While it is difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for being a parent, it is clear that the social institution or practice of parenting has its material ground in the biological facts about human reproduction together with facts about infantile dependency. Saying this does not entail that all and only biological progenitors are parents. (shrink)

Abstract This paper explores gender and mental health with particular reference to the emerging philosophical field of critical realism. This philosophy suggests a shared ontology and epistemology for the natural and social sciences. Until recently, most of the debate surrounding gender and mental health has been guided either implicitly or explicitly within a positivist or constructivist philosophy. With this in mind, key areas of critical realism are explored in relation to gender and mental health, and contrasted (...) with the positions of positivism and constructivism. It is argued that critical realism offers an alternative philosophical framework for the exploration of gender issues within mental health care. (shrink)

This article analyses the British TV drama Warriors, investigating military masculinities and their cinematic attachments to specific nationhoods. The author’s main argument is that Warriors engages in a negotiation of ontological differences through production of military masculinities, situated within specific time–space coordinates. The story of the war is told using the classical war movie genre, underpinned by a tripartite gendered discourse that links feminization, victimhood and peace, on the one side, with two kinds of military masculinities, on the other side: (...) first, the heroic-moral-military masculinity of the protector and defender and second, the vicious-ethnic-military masculinity of the ‘local’ men. As the drama’s characters stand for the specific symbolic geographies and histories, we see different ontological worlds appearing. Among them Bosnia – represented through viciousness of local masculinities and victimhood of local femininities – becomes a specific, isolated place, the ‘symbolic continent’ of the Balkans, whose singular, violent geography is separated from Europe and the West, through Orientalist and Balkanist discourses. Furthermore, it is a place with a past but no future, wherein moral geographies of peacekeeping military masculinities translate into ontologies of Self and Other. (shrink)

In this paper, I tend to the concept of “immemorial past” and argue that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s turn in The Visible and the Invisible—a turn toward the conceptualization of time as chiasm and an ontology of the invisible—provides a rich resource for theorizing sexual difference. More precisely, I argue that acknowledging the different kind of temporality of life that the immemorial institutes—a temporality that is generative of meaning and signification—invites us to investigate gender’s “immemorial past.” Shifting attention from the (...) sedimentation and presence of gender habits to the fecund lack that grounds such sedimentation allows us to account for the structure that makes gender production, institution, and differing possible in the first place. Such a structure is a “fecund negativity,” a polymorphous field or depth, that points to the inherent instability and multiplicity of gender, to the fact that gender formation can be traced back to a plural and ambiguous ground that comes to expression in cultural-historical-linguistic manifestations.Dans cet article, je m’appuie sur le concept de « passé immémorial » et montre que le tournant merleau-pontien du Visible et l’Invisible – vers la conceptualisation du temps comme chiasme et d’une ontologie de l’invisible – constitue une riche ressource lorsqu’il s’agit de théoriser la différence sexuelle. Plus précisément, je montre que reconnaître les différents genres de temporalité de vie que l’immémorial institue – une temporalité qui est génératrice de sens et de significations – nous invite à examiner le « temps immémorial » du genre. Passer de la sédimentation et de la présence des habitudes de genre au manque fécond qui fonde une telle sédimentation nous permet de rendre compte de la structure qui rend possible la production, l’institution du genre et de différer le possible à la première place. Une telle structure est une « négativité féconde », un champ ou une profondeur polymorphe, qui souligne l’instabilité inhérente et la multiplicité du genre, le fait que la formation du genre peut être retracée jusqu’à un fond pluriel et ambigu qui s’exprime dans des manifestations culturelles, historiques et linguistiques.Nel presente articolo, intendo elaborare il concetto di “passato immemoriale” e mostrare come la svolta di Merleau-Ponty nel Visibile e l’invisibile – una svolta verso una teorizzazione del tempo come chiasma e verso un’ontologia dell’invisibile – costituisca una risorsa particolarmente ricca per pensare la differenza sessuale. In particolare, vorrei sostenere che comprendere i diversi tipi di temporalità della vita che l’immemoriale istituisce – una temporalità generativa di senso e significato – ci porta a considerare il “passato immemoriale” del gender. Spostare l’attenzione dalla sedimentazione e dalla presenza delle abitudini di genere, alla mancanza feconda che sottende una simile sedimentazione, ci permette di prendere in esame la struttura stessa che rende possibile la produzione, istituzione e differenziazione del genere. Una tale struttura corrisponde ad una “negatività feconda”, un campo polimorfo o profondità che fa segno verso l’instabilità e la molteplicità inerenti al gender, ovvero al fatto che la formazione del genere può essere rintracciata in un orizzonte plurale e ambiguo, che si esprime attraverso manifestazioni culturali-storico-linguistiche. (shrink)

Alzheimer’s disease is emerging into public view in unprecedented ways. Foremost among these is the embodied form of elderly men and women appearing in commercial imagery for patient advocacy groups or pharmaceutical advertisements, but scientific imagery also seeps into the visual media cultures that surround us. The recent reconfiguration of Alzheimer’s disease is due to expanding ageing populations, an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry becoming a fast-growing material-semiotic realm that is providing powerful images of both gendered and racialized embodiment. Such a visual, (...) and yet highly material, realm is in need of feminist interventions, engaging with the images and ideas that circulate around ageing, medicine, human and non-human embodiment. From a non-representationalist and posthumanist perspective identified as feminist visual studies of technoscience, the authors seek to further the discussion in the direction of understanding the ‘scattered ontologies’ of Alzheimer’s — in laboratory practice, the realm of medical media and in commercial appeals to coherent individuality and human cognition — as gendered domains of figural reality and performative matter. (shrink)

In this paper, I engage with a recent contextualist account of gender terms proposed by Díaz-León, E. 2016. “Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle.” Hypatia 31 : 245–58. Díaz-León’s main aim is to improve both on previous contextualist and non-contextualist views and solve a certain puzzle for feminists. Central to this task is putting forward a view that allows trans women who did not undergo gender-affirming medical procedures to use the gender terms (...) of their choice to self-identify. My goal is to investigate Díaz-León’s proposal, point out several shortcomings of the view and discuss possible replies on her part. (shrink)

Issues pertaining to sex and gender continue to be some of the most hotly debated topics of our time. While many of the most heated disputes occur at the level of politics and public policy, metaphysics, too, has a crucial role to play in these debates. In this essay, I explore several key metaphysical debates concerning sex and gender through the lenses of two important areas in contemporary metaphysics: the metaphysics of essence and the ontology of the (...) human person. The goal here is not to advocate any particular position on these issues, but to show how the tools of contemporary metaphysics can help to offer a more comprehensive map of the conceptual terrain, indicating where major areas of agreement can be found and where the most important disagreements really lie. (shrink)

The way society is organised means that we all get made into members of various types of people, such as judges, wives, or women. These ‘human social kinds’ may be brought into being by oppressive social arrangements, and people may suffer oppression in virtue of being made into a member of a certain human social kind. This book argues that we should pay attention to the ways in which the very fact of being made into a member of a certain (...) human social kind can be oppressive in and of itself. For example, someone who becomes a wife under circumstances where husbands have unjust powers over their wives has suffered a wrong, even if her husband never in fact exercises these powers. The book argues that social movements against racial and gendered oppression, including efforts to advance trans liberation, must get to grips with this phenomenon, and it supplies the conceptual tools needed to do so. The first tool is an analysis of this general form of wrong, termed ‘ontic injustice’. The second tool is an account of ‘ontic oppression’, a particular kind of ontic injustice in which the wrong amounts to a form of oppression, in the sense of being structural and pervasive. The third tool is a pluralist account of race and gender kinds, according to which there is no single social kind that corresponds to a gender category such as ‘woman’, but, rather, there are various different social kinds, each of which is explanatory for different purposes. (shrink)

A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

An inquiry into the ontology of critical gender consciousness in Africa Philosophy is long overdue. Hitherto discourses on gender problems lost focus because of the tendency to leave out the gaps in culture created by colonial experience, modernity’s assaults and unAfricaness in ontology and essence. It is argued here that the fulcrum for a legitimate feminist doctrine is Theistic Humanism, the philosophy of African philosophy that exposes the epistemological and metaphysical basis of the rightful and ethical (...) place of women in the society. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology (EP) theorizes that contemporary women and men differ psychologically, particularly in mating and sexuality. It is further argued that EP research on gender-specific psychological differences is compatible with feminist perspectives. This paper analyzes if integrating EP scholarship on gender differences into feminist scholarship is possible by investigating EP’s core scientific commitments. I will argue that EP’s theories, hypotheses, and empirical findings that pertain to the study of gender do not align with its core values based (...) on Longino’s feminist theoretical virtues as outlined in the 1996 article “Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Values in Science: Rethinking the Dichotomy.” I employ feminist theoretical virtues as tools for revealing how certain theories, models, and hypotheses rely upon, promote contentious norms, and suppress gender. I will defend the thesis that EP theories, hypotheses, and empirical findings are often empirically inadequate, androcentric, and ontologically too homogeneous. Further, EP employs single-factor control models, has no straightforward practical application, and might even be politically dangerous. These characteristics challenge a successful integration of EP into feminism. (shrink)

This article is about the radical unity of natural law, and shows that, according to the thinking of Saint Thomas, the plurality of moral precepts can be adequately understood only in its light. In other words, any precept of natural law is a precept because it participates in the first principle. It follows that a division of the precepts into primary, secondary and tertiary precepts does not correspond to a schematic classification. The distinction of primary, secondary and tertiary precepts of (...) natural law is a relative distinction. (shrink)

Resumen Según autores como Grisez y Finnis, la teoría clásica de la ley natural es inmune a la crítica contenida en el argumento de la ley de Hume, porque aquella teoría no aspira a derivar la ética de la metafísica, ni los enunciados prácticos de enunciados fácticos. La autonomía de la razón práctica, sostienen estos autores, permite una explicación de la teoría de la ley natural que no exige ningún recurso a la metafísica o a cualquier otro conocimiento teórico de (...) la naturaleza. Esta tesis ha sido fuertemente discutida por autores vinculados al neo-tomismo que niegan la validez de la regla lógica expresada en la ley de Hume y, a la vez, afirman que la teoría tomista de la ley natural sólo se sostiene sobre sus fundamentos metafísicos. Esta discusión, sin embargo, es manifestativa de la equivocidad con que unos y otros han recibido la ley de Hume, y de la falta de análisis sobre sus supuestos y sobre el modo en que tales supuestos dialogan con la tradición clásica del iusnaturalismo.According to authors such as Grisez and Finnis, the classical theory of natural law is immune to the criticism contained in Hume’s law argument, because that theory does not pretend to derive ethics from metaphysics, nor practical statements from factual statements. These authors argue that the autonomy of practical reason allows an explanation of the theory of natural law, which does not require any recourse to metaphysics or any other theoretical knowledge of nature. This thesis has been strongly contested by authors linked to neo-Thomism, who deny the validity of the logical rule expressed in Hume’s law and, at the same time, affirm that the Thomistic theory of natural law can only be sustained on its metaphysical foundations. This discussion, however, is indicative of the ambiguity with which they have received Hume’s law, and of the lack of analysis on the assumptions of such law and on the way in which such assumptions dialogue with the classical tradition of natural law. (shrink)

Thinking Woman examines the lives and ideas of women in the history of philosophy who wished to understand and advocate for themselves as women. The books is fitting both for undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy who are interested in the ontology and ethics of gender.

This article examines the treatment of gender and the woman question in the ongoing Latin American decolonial debate. More specifically, it traces how the Zapatistas and other indigenous movements as well as some of the main mestizo male voices in this debate have endeavored to frame these issues and the criticism they have received from María Lugones and other decolonial feminists. It then points to some of the limitations in Lugones's own approach, and in a final stream of discussion, (...) it explores some of the ways in which these limitations might be surpassed within a decolonial framework that follows closely indigenous ontological thought. (shrink)

In this work I reflect, from the concepts of coloniality of power (Quijano 2007a) and coloniality of gender (Lugones 2008), key elements to sentipensar,2 the struggles of Indigenous women on the continent in defense of life in their territories. It is not new for Indigenous women to mobilize together with their peoples to defend the land-territory-life, but in recent years their participation has become more visible to the extent that the threat to the territories also involves fundamental elements for (...) the reproduction of life that previously had not been of interest to capital. In this context my interest is focused on the ways in which the women of the territories create and resist from other ontologies in defense of life.Thinking the reality of our countries from the coloniality of power and the coloniality of gender implies, among other things, taking as a baseline the existence of structures of domination, exploitation, and extermination that have been reproduced over the last five centuries in Abya Yala, and that have led to the imposition of a world classification that denies the existence of other worlds that inhabit these territories, and that have been persecuted, massacred, made invisible, but that exist and re-exist (Albán 2013). (shrink)

This paper develops an alternative for (what feminists call) ‘the sex/gender distinction’. I do so in order to avoid certain problematic implications that the distinction underpins. First, the sex/gender distinction paradigmatically holds that some social conditions determine one’s gender (whether one is a woman or a man), and that some biological conditions determine one’s sex (whether one is female or male). Further, sex and gender come apart. Since gender is socially constructed, this implies that women (...) exist mind-dependently, or due to productive human social activities; thus, it should be possible to do away with them just by altering the social conditions on which gender depends. In addition, some feminists take gender to depend on oppressive social conditions. Changing our social environments, then, would not only unwittingly eradicate women; doing away with women should be feminism’s political goal. I argue that both implications are unacceptable. In response, I argue for a view that has ontological commitments which are more congenial to ordinary thinking, and that doesn’t have the goal of eradicating women. (shrink)

Unraveling all the mysteries of the khipu--the knotted string device used by the Inka to record both statistical data and narrative accounts of myths, histories, and genealogies--will require an understanding of how number values and relations may have been used to encode information on social, familial, and political relationships and structures. This is the problem Gary Urton tackles in his pathfinding study of the origin, meaning, and significance of numbers and the philosophical principles underlying the practice of arithmetic among Quechua-speaking (...) peoples of the Andes. Based on fieldwork in communities around Sucre, in south-central Bolivia, Urton argues that the origin and meaning of numbers were and are conceived of by Quechua-speaking peoples in ways similar to their ideas about, and formulations of, gender, age, and social relations. He also demonstrates that their practice of arithmetic is based on a well-articulated body of philosophical principles and values that reflects a continuous attempt to maintain balance, harmony, and equilibrium in the material, social, and moral spheres of community life. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of gender are typically understood as theories of what it is to be a woman, a man, a nonbinary person, and so on. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There’s good reason to suppose that our best philosophical theory of gender might not directly match up to or give the extensions of ordinary gender categories like ‘woman’.

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex stands out as a master class in the accommodation of conceptual and inferential practices to real, objective gender kinds. Or so I will argue. To establish this framing, we will first need in hand the kind of scientific epistemology that correctly reconciles epistemic progress and error, particularly as pertains to the unruly social sciences. An important goal of the paper is to develop that epistemological framework and unlock its ontological implications for the domain of (...) class='Hi'>gender. As we will see, the real gender kinds that contemporary social scientists successfully identify and track are very much the same kinds to which Beauvoir was coordinating reference in The Second Sex. The correct identification of those kinds endures as a moral and political priority, regardless of one’s other gender-related normative agenda. (shrink)

This paper seeks to bring a time perspective to the discourses of globalization and development. It first connects prominent recent gender-neutral discourses of globalization with highly gendered analyses of development, bringing together institutional—structural analyses with contextual and experiential data. It places alongside each other ‘First World’ perspectives and analyses of the changing conditions of people in the ‘developing’ world who are at the receiving end of globalized markets, and the international politics of aid. To date, neither of these fields (...) of expertise has made explicit the underpinning time politics of globalization. Naturalized as status quo and global norm these temporal relations form the deep structure of globalization and its neo-colonialist agenda. The paper uses feminist epistemology to explicate the taken-for-granted time politics of globalization and time-based ontology to render visible the gender politics of globalization. The combined conceptual force makes connections where few exist at present, maps complex processes and traces naturalized relations. It offers not a new or better theory of… but an approach to globalization that makes transparent hitherto opaque relations of power and it identifies openings for change, resistance and alternative political practice. (shrink)