Issues surrounding birth and death have been fundamental for Western philosophy as well as for individual existence. The contributors to this volume unravel the gendered aspects of the classical philosophical discourses on death, bringing in discussions about birth, creativity, and the entire chain of human activity. By linking their work to major thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and Arendt, and to major philosophical currents such as ancient philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and social and political philosophy, they challenge (...) prevailing feminist articulations of birth and death. These philosophical reflections add an important sexual dimension to current thinking on identity, temporality, and community. (shrink)

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are for many the defining features of the early twenty-first century. With such a provocation, this essay considers how one might understand the relational philosophies articulated by Indigenous learning scientists, Indigenous technologists and feminine philosophers of education as co-constitutive of an ensemble mediating or regulating an educative philosophy interfacing with ML/AI. In these mediations, differing vocabularies – kin, the one caring, cooperative – are recognized for their ethical commitments, yet challenging epistemic claims (...) in the contexts of ML. Similarly, ML poses some questions to claims made about relational and Indigenous epistemologies, where the latter is perceived as separated from and unaffected by computation specifically or algorithmic societies generally. This essay seeks to gain several vantage points to explore and complicate how diverse relational philosophies can address ML and perhaps reconsider their own critical practices. (shrink)

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the role of the feminine principle in the cosmogonic ideas of the Slavic peoples and the philosophy of the Ancient East, in particular, India and China, to the establishment of common and distinctive features of female personification. The authors conclude that the ancient tribal culture, which was based on the logic of nature, the maintenance of the world in unity and the balance of opposites, was much more favorable to women (...) than monotheistic religions, which affirmed the sinful nature of women. Ideas about the origin and development of the universe occupy a central place in the mythological heritage, in the cosmic processes and powerful forces of nature, the unbreakable harmony of male and female principles can be traced, where male energy consists in the idea of fertilization, and female energy – in birth and creation. In every mythological system, there is a character of the Mother Goddess, who acts as a co-creator of the world and living beings, but with the establishment of the patriarchal system, the mythological paradigm undergoes changes, and the female principle is gradually recognized as secondary, or it was completely leveled in the processes of world creation. The archetype of the Great Mother reflects the functioning of human values and runs through the entire history of philosophy and culture. (shrink)

Margaret Whitford's study provides the ideal introduction to Irigaray's thought, offering a sustained interpretation of her whole corpus, including previously untranslated French texts. Whitford suggests that Irigaray's work should be seen as "philosophy in the feminine," actively opposing the complicity of philosophy with other social practices which exclude or marginalize women.

This article explicates the meaning of the paradox from the perspective of sexual difference, as articulated by Simone de Beauvoir. I claim that the self, the other, and their becoming are sexed in Beauvoir’s early literary writing before the question of sexual difference is posed in The Second Sex (1949). In particular, Beauvoir’s description of Françoise’s subjective becoming in the novel She Came to Stay (1943) anticipates her later systematic description of ‘the woman in love’. In addition, I argue that (...) the different existential types appearing at the end of The Second Sex (the narcissist, the woman in love, the mystic, and the independent woman) are variations of a specific feminine, historically changing paradox of subjectivity. According to this paradox, women, in a different mode than men, must become what they ontologically “are”: beings of change and self-transcendence that have to realise the human condition in their concrete, singular lives. My interpretation draws on Kierkegaardian philosophy of existence, phenomenology, and early psychoanalysis. (shrink)

In ____Womanizing Nietzsche,__ Kelly Oliver uses an analysis of the position of woman in Nietzsche's texts to open onto the larger question of philosophy's relation to the feminine and the maternal. Offering readings from Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Freud and Lacan, Oliver builds an innovative foundation for an ontology of intersubjective relationships that suggests a new approach to ethics.

In the post-feminist age the fact that 'woman' finds herself deprived of her 'essence' only confirms, paradoxically, a very ancient state of affairs: 'woman' has never been able to define herself in any other way than in terms of the violence done to her. Violence alone confers her being - whether it is domestic and social violence or theoretical violence. The critique of 'essentialism' (i.e. there is no specifically feminine essence) proposed by both gender theory and deconstruction is just one (...) more twist in the ontological negation of the feminine. (shrink)

While the central ideal of Roman philosophy exemplified by Lucretius, Cicero and Seneca appears to be the masculine values of self-sufficiency and domination, this book argues, through close attention to metaphor and figures, that the Romans also recognized, as constitutive parts of human experience, what for them were feminine concepts such as embodiment, vulnerability and dependency. Expressed especially in the personification of grammatically feminine nouns such as Nature and Philosophy 'herself', the Roman's recognition of this private 'feminine' part (...) of himself presents a contrast with his acknowledged, public self and challenges the common philosophical narrative of the emergence of subjectivity and individuality with modernity. To meet this challenge, Alex Dressler offers both theoretical exposition and case studies, developing robust typologies of personification and personhood that will be useable for a variety of subjects beyond classics, including rhetoric, comparative literature, gender studies, political theory and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Rethinks the soul in plant-like terms rather than animal, drawing from nineteenth-century philosophy of nature.

Examining Levinas's critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas's thought. The author suggests that though Levinas's conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger's philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is (...) excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas's philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics. (shrink)

Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism, it is important to understand how he himself first developed and deployed the concepts of acceleration, the feminine, and the inhuman, which others would go on to appropriate for their own purposes. This article will trace the four feminine figures throughout Land's philosophical trajectory, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned lesbian; (...) the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx. Having elucidated the importance of these figures for Land's thought, this article will conclude by drawing upon the younger Land's feminist resources to immanently critique the disappearance of women from his more recent neoreactionary philosophy in favor of concessions to patriarchal traditionalists. (shrink)

The dreaming body -- The philosophical Jung -- Locating identities : individual and collective matters -- Projection : the mirror image -- Divine reversal -- Mimesis revisited : Demeter and Persephone -- Jung, Irigaray, and essentialism : a new look at an old problem -- Speaking of the collective unconscious.

"Although the feminist debate on the ethics of care has demonstrated that philosophical concepts are gender-laden, the relation of care to justice and autonomy is not self- explanatory. Moreover, given its Western context, the normative relevance of the care debate to non-Western feminisms remains problematic. This book addresses this debate and investigates the extent to which notions of justice and autonomy can be reformulated without Eurocentrism from the perspective of care. In this endeavour, this book maps the shifts in feminist (...) approaches to care from the colonial to the post-colonial periods, taking both inter- disciplinarity and inter- sectionality into account. The book also argues that the feminist debate on care has contributed towards making philosophy's boundaries with culture and social science more porous."--Rabat de la jaquette. (shrink)

Analyzes Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics from a feminist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic perspective, showing that Aristotelian teleology relies on the disparagement of chance and the feminine simultaneously and finding resources therein for contemporary feminist thought.

Examining Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas’s thought. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series (...) of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the ecstases of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. The author suggests that though Levinas’s conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger’s philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas’s philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics. (shrink)

Now, in an innovative and wide-ranging volume, Peter Burgard has brought together new studies by outstanding scholars in philosophy, feminism, comparative ...

Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine offers a new interpretation of the role of the female and the feminine in Plato's political dialogues--the Republic, Laws, and Timaeus--informed by Deleuze's film theory and Irigaray's psychoanalytic feminism. Irene Han reads Plato against the grain in order to close the gap between the vitalists and Plato, instead of magnifying their differences. Han explores the ambivalence that the vitalist tradition, Irigaray, and Derrida have towards Platonism. The application of Deleuzian and Irigarayan concepts to the ancient (...) texts produces a new reading of Plato, focusing on the centrality and importance of motion, change, sensuality, and becoming to Platonic philosophy and, thereby, reinterprets Platonic philosophy in the direction of Heraclitus rather than Parmenides: as feminist rather than masculinist, and as mimetic. It therefore prioritizes Heraclitean principles of movement and flux over Form, the feminine over masculine, and materiality, feeling, or sensation over abstraction and universal essence. Han's exploration illustrates how, in Plato's thought, the feminine maps itself onto the plane of phenomena--a plane associated with vitalist themes such as motion, tactility, and change (metabolē). Platonic metaphysics is recontextualized by illustrating how Being expresses itself through processes of (feminine) becoming. With this reformulation, the resulting account of Platonic Being destabilizes any purported Platonic dualism. (shrink)

In this comment Ichallenge two of the arguments made in the paper, “Toward the Feminine Firm.” First I challenge the claim that Gilligan’swork on gender differences in moral orientation provides a logically and empirically sound foundation for an alternative theory of the firm. I cite recent work that discredits any concise notion of a feminine ethic. Second I challenge the claim that, if such a firm were to exist, it would flourish in a competitive market economy. I suggest that, far (...) from flourishing, such a firm will rapidly perish. (shrink)

A critical interpretation of Sikh literature from a feminist perspective.

In this comment Ichallenge two of the arguments made in the paper, “Toward the Feminine Firm.” First I challenge the claim that Gilligan’swork on gender differences in moral orientation provides a logically and empirically sound foundation for an alternative theory of the firm. I cite recent work that discredits any concise notion of a feminine ethic. Second I challenge the claim that, if such a firm were to exist, it would flourish in a competitive market economy. I suggest that, far (...) from flourishing, such a firm will rapidly perish. (shrink)

Whilst the distinction between French and Anglo-American feminism was always rather dubious two specific linguistic differences between French and English have nevertheless determined two streams of feminist thought, and complicated the relation between them. Since the 1960s, English-language feminisms, in so far as they are distinctive, have centrally either presupposed or explicitly theorized the category of gender, for which there is no linguistic equivalent in French. At the same time, much (although not all) that came to be categorized as ʻFrenchʼ (...) feminism has been articulated around the category of le féminin, for which there is no ready equivalent in English, although there is an obvious translational choice: ʻthe feminineʼ. Various Anglo-American feminisms have made consideration of what have been seen as feminine attributes and values central to their critical and reconstructive projects, but it is not this (adjectival) sense which is at issue here in the translation of le féminin, a noun. For despite the fact that the French and English words connote differently (in particular, le féminin also covers most of what is meant by the English ʻfemaleʼ), ʻthe feminineʼ, as a direct translation of the different and specific uses of le féminin in various French discourses, has become a common category in English-language feminist discourse, specifically English-language feminist philosophy of a ʻcontinentalʼ disposition, where it is often presumed to be both the proper object of such a philosophy and the proper goal of feminism. But is it? Or what exactly is at stake in making it so? Is ʻthe feminineʼ a necessary or useful category for feminism today? (shrink)

Bonaventure in his Itinerarium mentis in Deum traces the mystical journey of the spiritual wayfarer from the state of man posterior to the Fall of Adam and Eveto union with the Trinity as a partaker of the inter-Trinitarian love life. This journey takes the form of an ascent characterized by a Procline and Augustinian influenced ontology. I argue that the first two levels of the three-tiered ascent are understood ontologically as feminine and masculine principles, or evaluative metaphors, and mirror the (...) coinciding of the opposites of Good and Being in Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology. Furthermore, the process of the ascent is operative by means of yearning, or desire, acting as a unitive force in the ascent. The ascent of the Itinerarium is best realized in the person of Francis of Assisi upon whose very corpus is the ascent impressed according to the signs of the crucified Christ, the stigmata. (shrink)

Challenging previous interpretations of Levinas that gloss over his use of the feminine or show how he overlooks questions raised by feminists, Claire Elise Katz explores the powerful and productive links between the feminine and religion in Levinas’s work. Rather than viewing the feminine as a metaphor with no significance for women or as a means to reinforce traditional stereotypes, Katz goes beyond questions of sexual difference to reach a more profound understanding of the role of the feminine in Levinas’s (...) conception of ethical responsibility. She combines feminist interpretations of Levinas with interpretations that focus on his Jewish writings to reveal that the feminine provides an important bridge between his philosophy and his Judaism. Katz’s reading of Levinas’s conception of the feminine against the backdrop of discussions of women of the Hebrew bible points to important shifts in contemporary philosophy toward the creation of life and care for the other. (shrink)

In early modern science, the struggle between feminine and masculine allegories of science was played out within fixed parameters. Whether science itself was to be considered masculine or feminine, there never was serious debate about the gender of nature, one the one hand, or of the scientist, on the other. From ancient to modern times, nature—the object of scientific study—has been conceived as unquestionably female.5 At the same time, it is abundantly clear that the practitioners of science, scientists, themselves, overwhelmingly (...) have been men.But what about science? What gender was it—as an activity and set of ideals—to have? In one tradition the answer was clear: science was a woman. This tradition, stretching back at least to Boethius’ sixth-century portrayal of Philosophy as a woman, was codified and explained in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, the Renaissance bible of iconography.6 In this work, Ripa portrayed each of the sciences as a woman. “Scientia”—knowledge or skill—was portrayed as a woman of serious demeanor, wearing stately robes . “Physica”—physical science—was a goddess with a terrestrial globe at her feet. Geometry was a woman holding a plumb line and compass. Astrology, too, was a woman, dressed in blue, with a crown of stars and wings signifying the elevation of her thoughts to the distant stars. With a compass in her right hand and the celestial sphere in her left, she studied the movement and symmetry of the skies. 5. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution .6. Boethius describes female Philosophy as she appeared to him in a dream in his De consolatione philosophiae. See also Cesare Ripa, Iconologia , first illustrated in 1603. Londa Schiebinger is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. Her book, “The Mind has no Sex”: Women in the Origins of Modern Science, will be published next spring. (shrink)

After her curriculum proposal is presented, Noddings' feminine ethics is submitted to a critique through an interpretation of her three books. Her distortion of Gilligan and Chodorow is explained. Indebtedness to male sources is noted. The over-emphasis upon good and upon first-person experience is criticised and traced to feminist rage, which is interpreted as the result of the oppression of women. Noddings' suppressed 'Kantianism' is explicated to maintain the dialectic between so-called male and female voices. Main strengths of her curriculum (...) proposal are interpreted more broadly than her perspective allows to indicate a promising return to normative, macro-theory of education. (shrink)

This paper concerns the influence of gender on a firm’s moral and economic performance. It supports Thomas White’s intimation of a male gender bias in the value system underlying extant business theory. We suggest that this gender bias may be corrected by drawing on the concept of substantive rationality inherent in virtue-ethics theory. This feminine-oriented relationship-based value system complements the essential nature of the firm as a nexus of relationships between stakeholders. Not only is this feminine firm morally desirable, but (...) it is also economically more efficient in that trust becomes a more feasible implicit contractual enforcement mechanism. In an organizational context, therefore, from both a moral and an economic perspective, long established economic man is dominated by nascent economic woman. (shrink)

This paper concerns the influence of gender on a firm’s moral and economic performance. It supports Thomas White’s intimation of a male gender bias in the value system underlying extant business theory. We suggest that this gender bias may be corrected by drawing on the concept of substantive rationality inherent in virtue-ethics theory. This feminine-oriented relationship-based value system complements the essential nature of the firm as a nexus of relationships between stakeholders. Not only is this feminine firm morally desirable, but (...) it is also economically more efficient in that trust becomes a more feasible implicit contractual enforcement mechanism. In an organizational context, therefore, from both a moral and an economic perspective, long established economic man is dominated by nascent economic woman. (shrink)