The main objectives of the bibliography are to incorporate women's publications into the main body of philosophical thought, to increase the visibility and use of publications created by women, and to indicate the variety of approaches, concepts, and theories embodied in these works. Women Philosophers brings together women's works, ideas, and theories from all branches of philosophy and compiles them into a comprehensive bibliography. More than 2,800 monographs, series, and volumes written or edited by women are listed. An author index (...) with more than 1,900 names is also included. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new (i.e., previously overlooked) breed of exercitive speech act (the conversational exercitive). I establish that any conversational contribution that invokes a rule of accommodation changes the bounds of conversational permissibility and is therefore an (indirect) exercitive speech act. Such utterances enact permissibility facts without expressing the content of such facts, without the speaker intending to be enacting such facts and without the hearer recognizing that it is so. Because of the peculiar nature ofthe rules (...) of accommodation that generate them, conversational exercitives have importantly different felicity conditions and therefore constitute a new breed ofexercitive speech act. (shrink)

We often say one thing and mean another. This kind of indirection (concerning the content conveyed) is both ubiquitous and widely recognized. Other forms of indirection, however, are less common and less discussed. For example, we can sometimes address one person with the primary intention of being overheard by someone else. And, sometimes speakers say something simply in order to make it possible for someone else to say that they said it. Politicians generating sounds bites for the media (...) are an example of this kind of indirection. In this paper, I will explore—via a series of fictionalized examples—these less discussed forms of indirection and consider how such forms of indirection can be duplicitous and misleading. (shrink)

To the person unfamiliar with the wide variety of street art, the term “street artist” conjures a young man furtively sneaking around a decaying city block at night, spray paint in hand, defacing concrete structures, ears pricked for police sirens. The possibility of the ethical criticism of street art on such a conception seems hardly worth the time. This has to be an easy question. Street art is vandalism; vandalism is causing the intentional damage or destruction of someone else’s (...) property; causing destruction or damage is wrong. The only remaining question is which of two coarse-grained models of ethical criticism we choose. The ethicist model holds that a work of art that exhibits ethically bad properties is a work that is thereby aesthetically flawed. That is, the work is flawed as a work of art just because of its ethical flaws. Bad ethics make art worse than it otherwise would have been, although it may be aesthetically successful otherwise. The autonomist model, by contrast, holds that the ethical properties of a work of art have no bearing at all on its aesthetic success. One might suppose, therefore, that on either model, a criticism of street art would be relatively easy to undertake. In defacing public property, some street art exhibits and endorses ethically bad attitudes. On the ethicist model, such a work is thereby pro tanto aesthetically flawed because in the process of creating such works, they violate ethical norms concerning the use of public spaces; on the autonomous model, any ethical criticism of the aesthetics of street art would need to be set aside entirely in favor of criticism that focused purely on the aesthetic properties of street art. I will argue in this paper that neither the ethicist nor the autonomist model adequately captures the moral landscape of street art. Street art may indeed be criticized productively on aesthetic grounds for the destruction it does to public spaces, but the existing models of ethical criticism overlook the complex ethical landscape of street art that results from its use of public spaces. In the interplay of various forms of street art we can see the emergence of an ethical criticism of art that is accomplished by the material properties of related artwork, and consists in the creation of a dialogue over the proper use of contested public spaces. (shrink)

Philosophers involved in the ‘porn-or-art’ debates standardly assume that pornography is centrally about sexual arousal, while art is about something else. I argue against this assumption and for the view that there is no single thing that pornography (or art) ‘is about’. This suggests that there is no prima facie reason for claiming that some x cannot be both pornography and art. I further go on to develop an understanding of (what I call) ‘porno-art’ - a wholly new kind (...) of thing developing from the extant categories of pornography and art, but still distinct and separate from them. (shrink)

This article provides some historical perspectives on parental investment and childbearing. Scholars are debating whether parents always loved and nurtured their children. The historical record provides some support for both sides. Parents who abandoned their children often did so with the hope that someone else would be able to raise them. But others, like the ancient Carthagians, sacrificed their own children to appease the gods. Colonial Americans appear to have been particularly solicitous of the well-being of their children. The (...) paper then traces the changes in the role of women in facilitating the process of childbirth in America. Scholars are cautioned not to idealize the childbirth experiences of women in the past as they experienced considerable pain and fear. (shrink)

My topic may seem a bizarre mixture of epistemology and value theory; and perhaps it is best to acknowledge this oddity at once. I should also, perhaps, confess that such a mixture has always seemed something to aspire to. Any philosopher who has made it seem that feeling strongly about something, valuing it highly, is an inevitable consequence of the nature of human understanding , that from the facts of knowledge or perception one can derive the inescapable facts of emotion (...) or desire, any such philosopher has always deeply appealed to me. I am therefore a confessed perpetrator of the naturalistic fallacy. Indeed I go further, and say that I love the fallacy. So Spinoza, Hume and Sartre all seem to me to be real philosophers, on the grounds that for them this connexion between knowing and wanting seemed inevitable. My aim is to illustrate this kind of connexion by suggesting that the human imagination is such that we ought to value it and respect it more highly than anything else; and that therefore, if it can be educated and improved, it is to this education that we should give priority, if we are concerned with education at all. It may seem on the face of it absurd to say that we ought to value any particular human faculty or capacity. It may be thought that this is not the kind of object or evaluation with which at any rate philosophers should be concerned. But the fact is, of course, that we do value very highly indeed all kinds of capacities that we have, such as sight, and hearing and understanding. And being unashamedly naturalistic, I have no hesitation in saying not only that we do value them, but that we ought to; they are, in every sense, valuable. (shrink)

My topic may seem a bizarre mixture of epistemology and value theory; and perhaps it is best to acknowledge this oddity at once. I should also, perhaps, confess that such a mixture has always seemed something to aspire to. Any philosopher who has made it seem that feeling strongly about something, valuing it highly, is an inevitable consequence of the nature of human understanding, that from the facts of knowledge or perception one can derive the inescapable facts of emotion or (...) desire, any such philosopher has always deeply appealed to me. I am therefore a confessed perpetrator of the naturalistic fallacy. Indeed I go further, and say that I love the fallacy. So Spinoza, Hume and Sartre all seem to me to be real philosophers, on the grounds that for them this connexion between knowing and wanting seemed inevitable. My aim is to illustrate this kind of connexion by suggesting that the human imagination is such that we ought to value it and respect it more highly than anything else; and that therefore, if it can be educated and improved, it is to this education that we should give priority, if we are concerned with education at all. It may seem on the face of it absurd to say that we ought to value any particular human faculty or capacity. It may be thought that this is not the kind of object or evaluation with which at any rate philosophers should be concerned. But the fact is, of course, that we do value very highly indeed all kinds of capacities that we have, such as sight, and hearing and understanding. And being unashamedly naturalistic, I have no hesitation in saying not only that we do value them, but that we ought to; they are, in every sense, valuable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Pantheology of Pandemic: Sex, Race, Nature, and The VirusMary-Jane Rubenstein (bio)I. PunitheologyThe explanations started pouring in even before the virus attained “pandemic” status in March of 2020: we were being punished. According to a vocal subset of Evangelical pastors and ultra-Orthodox rabbis, the death-dealing virus was divine retribution for the sins of (who else?) LGBT-identified people and their allies, who aggressively violated what the pastors and rabbis (...) called “the order of nature.”1 Meanwhile, their left-leaning counterparts argued that the sin in question wasn’t so much sexual as ecological: in the words of one Roman Catholic commentator, the coronavirus was God’s punishment for “our unfettered domination attitude toward nature.”2At the same time, an equally vocal throng of secular environmentalists called the virus nature’s own punishment for our manifold violations against her—in particular, the extractivism, pollution, alleged overpopulation, deforestation, carbon emissions, and industrial slaughterhouses that allowed the zoonotic strain to break out among humans in the first place.3 Depending on whom [End Page 5] you ask, then, the disaster we’ve come to encapsulate as COVID-19 is either godly or natural retribution for our manifold sins against “nature.”Although these sacred and secular punitheologies are not equivalent, they bear striking similarities to one another thanks to the monotheistic heritage of the concept of “nature” itself. As we will see, whether it is invoked by pastors, politicians, activists, or scientists, “nature” in the Western-descended world is presented as singular, nonwhite, and feminine; morally normative; and prone to abuse. Nature is often capitalized, often maternalized, and reliably distinguished either from a disembodied male God, a universalized “humanity,” or both. Nature, in short, carries immense ideological freight. Specifically, it installs and polices the work of what Kelly Brown Douglas calls “theo-ideology”: a “sacred legitimation” for a social order that seeks to present itself as unquestionable.4 And “nature” does this unparalleled ideological work thanks to the freedom it keeps promising from ideology: “your” way of being might be constructed, distorted, historical, subjective, contingent, artificial, cultural, or indeed sinful, but “ours” is natural—which is to say universally, even transcendently, true.Whether it comes from the mouths of angry clerics or righteous ecologists, then, the call to get right with nature is a call to adhere to one or another self-concealing social arrangement—to a set of interests and values whose power derives from its seeming so “natural.” For this reason, many contemporary thinkers recommend abandoning the term altogether. Donna Haraway suggests we try the non-binary and carefully pluralized “naturecultures”; Bruno Latour proposes “critical zones,” and Timothy Morton pivots to ecological practice which, he insists, can only function if we let go of the romantic delusion of “nature.”5Regardless of nature’s conceptual integrity, it is important to attend to the term in order to account for its rhetorical force and ubiquity—for the polyphibious presence of “nature” within the left and right-wings of science, religion, and politics alike. In this article, I will decode some of the recent, theologically [End Page 6] retributive appeals to nature within early, informal, literary responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in the US. In the process, I hope to unearth some of the mythic norms of race and gender that this concept both entrenches and conceals in the American imagination. Finally, I will ask what happens when we start messing with these categories, beginning with the mirroring chasms between humans and nature, and nature and God. How might we start to think pantheologically about this unrelenting pandemic, and why would anybody want to?II. Sins against NatureAs Catherine Keller noticed as early as April 2020, American pundits across the political spectrum immediately attributed COVID-19 to the relentless justice of an angry God.6 It is perhaps America’s favorite theological maneuver: explaining natural and social disasters as the product of divine vengeance. From Jonathan Edwards’s spider to Fred Phelps’s funeral protests, American preachers and political commentators have got a long-standing knack for putting the fear of God into a suffering nation. (Even my home insurance policy washes its hands of... (shrink)

From certain sorts of premise, individuals reliably infer invalid conclusions. Two Experiments investigated a possible cause for these illusory inference: Reasoners fail to think about what is false. In Experiment 1, 24 undergraduates drew illusory and control inferences from premises based on exclusive disjunctions (“or else”). In one block, participants were instructed to falsify the premises of each illusory and control inference before making the inference. In the other block, participants did not receive these instructions. There were more correct (...) answers for illusory disjunctions whose premises had been falsified than there were for illusory disjunctions that had not been falsified. A second Experiment introduced illusory inferences in a real world context that accentuated falsification of premises. Accuracy also improved. Knowledge of how to falsify premises and to consider their implications for true premises transferred to a new problem introduced at the end of the Experiment without the falsification instruction. The participants' ratings of the difficulty of the inferences showed that they did not err simply because illusory inferences are perceived to be more difficult than control problems. The model theory predicts these results because it postulates that the limitations of working memory preclude the representation of false information. (shrink)

This essay is a reflection of the time I have spent working with Cardinal Newman’s archive at the Birmingham Oratory. I have had a chance to stop and carefully read his letters and diaries and to see Newman as a communicator extraordinaire! I suspect that the Cardinal would have had great command of today’s social media and communications technology. His laity could have been a wider and larger audience on a virtual level. Might this be an opportunity for a sociological (...) comparison of the great writers and speakers of an earlier time with those of us in today’s media-rich world? With whom else might Newman have interacted? We may never know with certainty, but it would be fun to imagine. (shrink)

1. Conceptions of the nature of value are of two main types: they are either objective, or realistic, or else subjective, that is, psychological. The immediately following pages are devoted to the critical consideration of the first of these, the realistic conception of value as “an indefinable quality which attaches to things independently of consciousness.” According to this view, things have value as they have form or colour or volume. A rose, for example, has the qualities of redness, of (...) fragrance, and also of beauty; a book has the qualities of rectangularity, of twelve-ounce weight, and also of truth; a negro has the qualities of erectness, of brownness, and also of moral goodness or badness. Beauty, truth, and moral goodness, grouped together as ‘values,’ or ‘worths,’ or ‘goods,’ are from this point of view as indefinable and ‘absolute’ as the primary and secondary qualities: indeed, they are together known as “tertiary qualities.’ In G. E. Moore's words, a value or “ ‘good’ is a simple notion, just as ‘yellow’ is a simple notion”; and “just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to anyone who does not already know it what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is.”. (shrink)

1. Conceptions of the nature of value are of two main types: they are either objective, or realistic, or else subjective, that is, psychological. The immediately following pages are devoted to the critical consideration of the first of these, the realistic conception of value as “an indefinable quality which attaches to things independently of consciousness.” According to this view, things have value as they have form or colour or volume. A rose, for example, has the qualities of redness, of (...) fragrance, and also of beauty; a book has the qualities of rectangularity, of twelve-ounce weight, and also of truth; a negro has the qualities of erectness, of brownness, and also of moral goodness or badness. Beauty, truth, and moral goodness, grouped together as ‘values,’ or ‘worths,’ or ‘goods,’ are from this point of view as indefinable and ‘absolute’ as the primary and secondary qualities: indeed, they are together known as “tertiary qualities.’ In G. E. Moore's words, a value or “ ‘good’ is a simple notion, just as ‘yellow’ is a simple notion”; and “just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to anyone who does not already know it what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is.”. (shrink)

It is in the interest of the totalitarian state that subjects not think for themselves, much less confer about their thinking. Writing under the hostile watch of the Prussian censorship, Immanuel Kant dared to argue the need for open argument, in the university if nowhere else. In this heroic criticism of repression, first published in 1798, he anticipated the crises that endanger the free expression of ideas in the name of national policy. Composed of three sections written at different (...) times, The Conflict of the Faculties dwells on the eternal combat between the "lower" faculty of philosophy, which is answerable only to individual reason, and the faculties of theology, law, and medicine, which get "higher" precedence in the world of affairs and whose teachings and practices are of interest to the government. Kant makes clear, for example, the close alliance between the theological faculty and the government that sanctions its teachings and can resort to force and censorship. All the more vital and precious, then, the faculty of philosophy, which encourages independent thought before action. The first section, "The Conflict of the Philosophy Faculty with the Theology Faculty," is essentially a vindication of the right of the philosophical faculty to freedom of expression. In the other sections the philosopher takes a long and penetrating look at medicine and law, the one preserving the physical "temple" and the other regulating its actions. (shrink)

This work “Escaping Self-Sacrifice: Changing Black Women’s Relationship with Servility” is a deep dive into Lisa Tessman’s Burdened Virtues. Addressing the idea of servility as a burdened virtue that requires self-sacrifice, I strive to reevaluate the traditional role Black women have in their families and within their communities. I argue that the demands of Black women are so excessive that they have lost touch with their self-regarding virtues, causing them to have ethical imbalances within themselves. This work is a part (...) of an ongoing attempt to counter oppressive practices with joy as a form of resistance. I use the idea that simply existing is enough for Black women without the added burden of taking care of everyone else. (shrink)

Rien d'humain n'est étranger au monde, et tout en lui puise dans les ressources de la vie. Une philosophie de la naissance est requise pour le comprendre, le monde se confondant avec une immanence matricielle sans dehors. Toute chose en participe, les vivants et l'homme également, leur différence propre tenant à leur manière de naître : la cosmologie devient le soubassement de l'anthropologie dont la clef est une phénoménologie de la naissance et de l'enfance.00Des phénomènes négligés apparaissent désormais décisifs, comme (...) la tendresse - qui tient lieu d'une condition d'existence -, ainsi que la consolation et le jeu, la fragilité et l'humour, ou encore la grâce et le ravissement. Une esthétique s'élabore depuis le goût de l'enfant pour les couleurs, les formes et les textures, mais aussi depuis sa créativité native. Cette esthétique est inséparable d'une érotique et d'une éthique, et plus largement d'une réflexion sur la civilisation ; enfin, cette philosophie culmine dans une pensée de l'éducation, de la liberté et de la vérité. (shrink)

Jan Patocka (1907-1977) est l'un des philosophes tchèques les plus éminents du XXe siècle pour ses travaux sur la phénoménologie et la philosophie antique traduits pour la plupart en français. Il fut par ailleurs, avec Vaclav Havel, l'un des principaux opposants à la mise au pas de la Tchécoslovaquie par l'Union soviétique, engagement qu'il paiera de sa vie après un long interrogatoire policier. La naissance est généralement peu étudiée par la philosophie. Dans la mesure où la phénoménologie se consacre à (...) l'apparition des phénomènes, ce thème ne pouvait lui rester étranger. La naissance se confond avec notre venue au monde, notre irruption dans la vie : elle est le foyer de l'existence. C'est l'originalité de ce questionnement que met en valeur Frédéric Jacquet, en situant cette oeuvre par rapport aux fondateurs de la phénoménologie, Husserl et Heidegger, et en la confrontant avec Sartre et Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

« C’est du monde que nous naissons ; nous nous séparons en naissant de la cohérence d’ensemble de ses processus, nous devenons quelque chose pour nous-mêmes. » La question de la naissance est cruciale pour la phénoménologie alors même qu’elle n’est jamais au centre de l’interrogation des phénoménologues ; elle apparaît de façon discrète et pourtant structurante au sein de la pensée patočkienne qui...

Cet ouvrage met en évidence la version maldinéenne du retour aux choses mêmes, largement effectué selon une esthétique-artistique. Il est alors possible d'expliciter les notions de transpassibilité et de transpossibilité, coeur théorique de la phénoménologie événementiale édifiée par Maldiney.

This paper explores Calkins’ absolute idealism and its ramifications for libertarian free will. Calkins’ metaphysics is a version of absolute idealism, according to which the absolute is a person who has everything else as either a part or an aspect. Three different arguments for the conclusion that Calkins’ metaphysics is incompatible with libertarian freewill are formulated and critically assessed. Finally, I assess the extent to which these arguments are independent of each other.

L’enjeu de cette analyse de la signification de l’expression sub quadam specie aeternitatis est double: projeter un éclairage nouveau, d’une part sur la nature des rapports entre raison et science intuitive, d’autre part sur l’articulation entre durée et éternité. Que les formules sub specie et sub quadam specie aeternitatis soient équivalentes ou non, il s’agit dans les deux cas de figure, de déterminer les raisons de la présence, puis de la disparition de l’adjectif quadam. Enfin on examine les occurrences de (...) l’expression sub quadam specie aeternitatis et des deux autres variantes pour mieux cerner leur signification et leur portée. (shrink)

L'expérience esthétique est la voie de la phénoménologie ; c'est du moins ce qu'établit Dufrenne avec une profondeur inégalée. Cette expérience est décrite de façon novatrice selon une phénoménologie du sentiment, qui est le fil conducteur de cette philosophie. La réduction - devenue dès lors réduction esthétique - conduit à l'essence de la manifestation et se prolonge en une réduction cosmologique : le monde se trouve conquis en sa figure originaire, la Nature, qui est pensée comme source ou matrice universelle. (...) L'esthétique enveloppe en outre une réflexion sur l'imagination, l'image et l'imaginaire, comme sur la beauté, marquant l'une des originalités de la perspective dufrennienne. Les percées ontologiques réalisées débouchent alors sur une cosmo-esthétique qui se prolonge en une cosmopoétique. Il s'agit à la fois de concevoir l'appartenance de l'homme au monde, qui le précède et l'excède, ainsi que la différence subjective, puisqu'il est capable de le percevoir. Cette philosophie définit la Nature comme Infini expressif - esthétique et poétique -, et montre que l'homme est appelé à vivre poétiquement, les exigences éthiques et politiques étant nouées à l'esthétique, où le sens de l'humain s'atteste."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

La naissance est la source vive de notre existence, elle ne fut pourtant jamais mise au centre de la philosophie. Au contraire, il s'agit de montrer que la philosophie doit se constituer comme philosophie de la naissance, articulant phénoménologie, métaphysique et anthropologie. Considérer la naissance ouvre une compréhension neuve de l'épochè -- devenue épochè natale --, la réflexion suivant alors la voie d'une heuristique de la naissance. Cette heuristique archéologique décèle à la fois la Natalité-Infinie du monde et l'événement de (...) la naissance métaphysique de la vie. Il devient alors possible d'élaborer une anthropologie-selon-la-naissance qui décrit l'événement de la naissance d'un homme -- en tant que naissance existentiale, aperturale ou épochale --, ainsi que sa naissance continuée -- sa natalité existentielle. Cette dynamique existentielle est en outre susceptible de dénatalisation comme d'un procès de renatalisation examinés pour eux-mêmes, et cette anthropologie, nourrissant par ailleurs une conception inédite de la mort, enveloppe aussi les prolégomènes d'une esthétique, d'une érotique, d'une éthique et d'une herméneutique de l'existence sans jamais que le sens qui en émane ne résorbe l'étonnement qui l'a fait naître. (shrink)

Deux documents sont analysés dans cet article : la photographie d’une famille française dans laquelle le plus jeune enfant est porté par la « nénène » malgache (1903) et un extrait d’entretien réalisé auprès d’une femme née de deux parents métis en 1931, évoquant les liens avec sa nourrice. Ces deux documents permettent de mettre en lumière les types de sources mobilisables pour écrire une histoire des domestiques à Madagascar aux xixe et xxe siècles mais aussi d’analyser les rapports de (...) domination et d’affection qui ont pu se jouer dans l’intimité du lien entre la « nénène » et les différents membres de la famille, en particulier les enfants et leur mère. L’entretien permet aussi d’éclairer la manière dont le recrutement pouvait s’effectuer, reposant avant tout sur des qualités morales plutôt que sur des compétences reconnues et valorisées. (shrink)

What are the conditions under which one biological object is a part of another biological object? This paper answers this question by developing a general, systematic account of biological parthood. I specify two criteria for biological parthood. Substantial Spatial Inclusionrequires biological parts to be spatially located inside or in the region that the natural boundary of t he biological whole occupies. Compositional Relevance captures the fact that a biological part engages in a biological process that must make a necessary contribution (...) to a condition that is minimally sufficient to one or more of the characteristic behaviors of the biological whole. Instead of emphasizing the diversity of part-whole relations in the biological world, this paper asks what biological part-whole relations have in common and what constrains their existence, in general. After presenting the two criteria for biological parthood I discuss in how far my account can cope with hard cases (e.g., redundant parts) and I reveal the merits and limits of monism. (shrink)