Bridging the traditionally separate domains of analytic and Continental philosophies, Pamela Sue Anderson presents for the first time, a feminist framework for studying the philosophy of religion.

The paper builds on the postulate of “myths we live by,” which shape our imaginative life (and hence our social expectations), but which are also open to reflective study and reinvention. It applies this principle, in particular, to the concepts of love and vulnerability. We are accustomed to think of the condition of vulnerability in an objectifying and distancing way, as something that affects the bearers of specific (disadvantaged) social identities. Against this picture, which can serve as a pretext for (...) paternalist and controlling attitudes to the groups in question – notably to women – Anderson urges us to reimagine our vulnerability as a condition not merely of exposure to violence but of openness to mutual affection, love, and friendship. Hegel’s celebrated image of the owl of Minerva, which takes wing only with the coming of dusk, suggests an association of (philosophical) wisdom with negativity – with the experience of death or loss. Anderson, by contrast, proposes an alternative and more hopeful image of the dawn of enlightenment, in the guise of new ethical dispositions shaped by an emancipatory (and so, no longer an oppressive or sexist) conception of our capacity for love. Her main interlocutors or influences in this piece are Judith Butler (who contributes the idea of a “relational ontology”), Michèle Le Doeuff, and Mary Midgley. (shrink)

Ideas of love within religion are usually driven by one of two mythologies – either a personal God who commands love or a mystical God of ineffable love – but both are inadequate for motivating love of neighbour. The first tends towards legalism and the second offers no cognitive guidance. The situation is further complicated by there being different understandings of love of neighbour in the various Abrahamic religions, as exemplified in the approaches of two philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel (...) Levinas. A better approach is therefore to explore actual practices of love in everyday life, and to discover how love might be performed openly and creatively. One such practice is recognition of vulnerability, and this too is often driven by a mythology, in this case one marked by fear, and by a violence either imposed or avoided. One paradigmatic example is the vulnerability felt by speakers, especially women, in front of an audience. A turning from wilful ignorance of vulnerability and a turning to reliance on collective work, modelled on an awareness of mutual vulnerability and openness to the unknown, will help to change our philosophical and social imaginary. The dark myth of vulnerability can be transformed into finding opportunities in vulnerability for openness to affection and so to an enhancement of life. It is only from the perspective of this new imaginary, and from everyday practices of it, that the double love-command – love of God and love of neighbour – will function as any kind of common ground between religions. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy of religion as a subject of study has developed in recent years because of the identification and exposure of explicit sexism in much of the traditional philosophical thinking about religion. This struggle with a discipline shaped almost exclusively by men has led feminist philosophers to redress the problematic biases of gender, race, class and sexual orientation of the subject. Anderson and Clack bring together new and key writings on the core topics and approaches to this growing field. Each (...) essay exhibits a distinctive theoretical approach and appropriate insights from the fields of literature, theology, philosophy, gender and cultural studies. Beginning with a general introduction, part one explores important approaches to the feminist philosophy of religion, including psychoanalytic, poststructualist, postmetaphysical, and epistemological frameworks. In part two the authors survey significant topics including questions of divinity, embodiment, autonomy and spirituality, and religious practice. Supported by explanatory prefaces and an extensive bibliography which is organized thematically, Feminist Philosophy of Religion is an important resource for this new area of study. (shrink)

The texts in this volume offer critical assessments of a number of leading figures in contemporary intellectual life, who are in different ways thinkers at the intersection of history and politics. They include Roberto Unger, advocate of plasticity; the historians of antiquity and of revolution, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and Isaac Deutscher; the philosophers of liberalism, Norberto Bobbio and Isaiah Berlin; the sociologists of power, Michael Mann and W.G. Runciman; the exponents of national identity, Andreas Hillgruber and Fernand Braudel; the (...) ironists of science, Max Weber and Ernest Gellner; Carlo Ginzburg, explorer of cultural continuity, and Marshall Berman, herald of modernity. A concluding chapter looks at the idea of the end of history, recently advanced by Francis Fukuyama, in its successive versions from the nineteenth century to the present, and considers the situation of socialism today in the light of it. (shrink)

The French feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff has taught us something about “the collectivity,” which she discovers in women’s struggle for access to the philosophical, but also about “the unknown” and “the unthought.” It is the unthought which will matter most to what I intend to say today about a fundamental ignorance on which speaker vulnerability is built. On International Women’s Day, it seems appropriate to speak about – or, at least, to evoke – the silencing which has been imposed (...) on women by an oppressive form of ignorance. My question is: how do our resounding voices as women – on 8 March 2016 – avoid what feminist philosophers have distinguished as wilful forms of silencing? Silencing exploits vulnerability; and speaker vulnerability is an exposure either to violence or affection, in its dependence on an audience. My response seeks to undo the silencing of women by transforming an ignorance of vulnerability into a distinctively ethical avowal. To see the significance of this undoing, we will consider how our contemporary global world reduces vulnerability to an openness to violence, ignoring what has been unthought: an openness to affection. A wilful ignorance of vulnerability develops not as a lack of knowledge but its disavowal – on which various forms of oppression are built. An active disavowal of thinking (the unthought) is the other side of a striving for invulnerability; and this striving is encouraged by a social world which remains ignorant of its own wounding, as well as its own potential for ethical relations in vulnerability. Like la mauvaise foi of the French existentialist, invulnerability is a form of self-deception; and those who claim it embrace ignorance of their own and others’ vulnerability too. (shrink)

This article challenges a prominent claim in moral philosophy: that autonomy is a personal ideal, according to which individuals are authors of their own lives. This claim is philosophically dubious and ethically pernicious, having excluded women from positions of rational authority. A reading of Ibsen's A Doll's House illustrates how this conception of the ideal of autonomy misrepresents the reality of individuals' lived experiences and imposes a gendered identity which subordinates women to a masculine narcissism. In Ibsen's play the woman, (...) as a doll confined to home, remains dependent on an autonomous man. It would seem that men in modern philosophy could see only their own image as rational agents reflected in their ethics; but, in fact, this position is self-defeating. The recognition of our contingencies and so, vulnerability, motivated Kant himself to try to make the moral realm secure with something necessarily common to all human beings: our capacity to reason. The unwitting upshot of Kant's ethics has been the restriction of reason to a purely formal function; but this autonomy of reason undermines itself in being unable to guide the writing of the rational agent's own life. I propose instead to preserve the capacities of moral rationality, while urging the incorporation of ethical practices previously devalued by their association with vulnerability, such as attention, affection and relationality. My philosophical challenge is, first, to develop an internal critique of ethics which exposes its authoritative imposition of a gender identity and, next, to propose a revised conception of autonomy, namely, not just writing our own story, but reading the stories in which we find ourselves. (shrink)

I begin with the assumption that a philosophically significant tension exists today in feminist philosophy of religion between those subjects who seek to become divine and those who seek their identity in mutual recognition. My critical engagement with the ambiguous assertions of Luce Irigaray seeks to demonstrate, one the one hand, that a woman needs to recognize her own identity but, on the other hand, that each subject whether male or female must struggle in relation to the other in order (...) to maintain realism about life and death. No one can avoid the recognition that we are each given life but each of us also dies. In addition, I raise a more general, philosophical problem for analytic philosophers who attempt to read Continental philosophy of religion: how should philosophers interpret deliberately ambiguous assertions? For example, what does Irigaray mean in asserting. 'Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign'? To find an answer, I turn to the distinctively French readings of the Hegelian struggle for recognition which have preoccupied Continental philosophers especially since the first half of the last century. I explore the struggle for mutual recognition between womrn and men who must face the reality of life and death in order to avoid the projection of their fear of mortality onto the other sex. This includes a critical look at Irigaray's account of subjectivity and divinity. I turn to the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff in order to shift the focus from divinity to intersubjectivity. I conclude that taking seriously the struggle for mutual recognition between subjects forces contemporary philosophers of religion to be realist in their living and dying. With this in mind, the lesson from the Continent for philosophy of religion is that we must not stop yearning for recognition. Indeed, we must event risk our autonomy/divinity in seeking to recognize intersubjectivity. (shrink)

This text presents a new critical awareness of gender in philosophy and religion, suggesting new core concepts at the interface of philosophy and religion, and ethics and epistemology.

The assumption in current U.S. mainstream medicine is that birthing requires hospitalization. In fact, while the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists supports the right of every birthing person to make a medically informed decision about their delivery, they do not recommend home birth owing to data indicating greater neonatal morbidity and mortality. In this article, we examine the evidence surrounding home birth in the United States and its current limitations, as well as the ethical considerations around birth setting.

Anderson (philosophy, U. of Sunderland, England) presents an exegetical, restorative, and critical account of French philosopher Ricoeur's early work on human will, seeing in it a dual-aspect perspective of people that helps make sense of his later complex writings. Emphasizes the important impact of Kant on his original thinking. (Editor's note: this review corrects a misleading one appearing in the December 1993 issue.) Paper edition (837-0), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Michèle Le Doeuff's "Primal Scene": Prohibition and Confidence in the Education of a Woman My essay begins with Michèle Le Doeuff's singular account of the "primal scene" in her own education as a woman, illustrating a universally significant point about the way in which education can differ for men and women: gender difference both shapes and is shaped by the imaginary of a culture as manifest in how texts matter for Le Doeuff. Her primal scene is the first moment she (...) remembers when, while aspiring to think for herself, a prohibition is placed in her reading of literature. Her philosophyteacher—at a boys' school—told the young Michèle that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was "too difficult" for her to read. In recalling this scene, the older Michèle—now, a woman philosopher—directs her readers to this text by Kant, in order to demonstrate how knowledge has been constrained by the narrative and imagery in the text of a philosopher; similarly, in the texts of others. She finds the central imagery of Kant's text for setting the limits to human knowledge in his account of "the island of understanding," or "land of truth," surrounded by "a stormy sea" of uncertainty; the latter image also retains a seductive appeal, threatening to destroy the confidence of any knower who ventures out beyond the well-marked out island. Moreover, women have often been associated with the dangers at sea beyond the safety of the island, where falsehood and worse reign. I propose that "text matters" here not only for gender issues, but for the postcolonial theory which Le Doeuff's reading of island imagery enhances in western literature and culture. The suggestion is that women in the history of ideas have been more susceptible than men to prohibitions : women's negative education is against going beyond certain boundaries which have been fixed by a generally colonialist culture on the grounds of gender-hierarchies. I stress the significance of confidence in the production of knowledge. A lack or an inhibition of confidence in one's own ability to think critically risks the damaging exclusions of, for example, colonialism and sexism. My aim is to unearth the political biases evident in textual imagery, while also pointing to new epistemic locations, with island-and-sea imagery that transgresses patriarchal prohibition, liberating subjects for confident reading and writing of texts today. (shrink)

In this paper I explore a “variation” on the “theme” of intuition in the evolution of modern metaphysics. My aim is not to criticize A. W. Moore’s account of intuition as one of two ways by which Bergson makes sense of things (the other way is analysis). Instead I will suggest the significance in extending Bergson’s metaphysics to mystical life as “the ‘very life of things’ into which intuition installs itself.” When the metaphysical drama, in The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, (...) reaches chapter 16, “Bergson: Metaphysics as Pure Creativity,” Moore expresses astonishment that Bergson could have thought philosophers have ever agreed on aligning “analysis” in science with the impossibility of non-perspectival sense-making and “intuition” in metaphysics with the possibility of absolute (non-perspectival) knowledge. Using a method of intuition, not of analysis, as non-perspectival sense-making is the opposite of what Moore himself finds in other philosophical contributions to modern metaphysics as “a most general attempt to make sense of things.” He takes an influential example: Bernard Williams associates analysis, not intuition, with the possibility of non-perspectival sense-making and absolute knowledge. My response defends Bergsonian intuition in giving it a positive—and, why not, non-perspectival?—role in metaphysics as mystical; that is, as unique and inexpressible life. Moore describes intuition in Bergson as both the faculty and the method for the evolution of new concepts and new ways of making sense of things. I will stress that Bergsonian intuition is “an effort to place oneself into a movement, such as that of philosophy itself,” expressing “what is ‘living in philosophers’ rather than what is ‘fixed and dead in theses.’ ” This mystical life pushes out the limits set up by Kant for metaphysics (and science) by allowing intuition (with analysis) to reach for absolute, non-perspectival knowledge. (shrink)

In this contribution to Text Matters, I would like to introduce gender into my feminist response to Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of the capable subject. The aim is to make, phenomenologically speaking, “visible” the gendering of this subject in a hermeneutic problematic: that of a subject’s loss of confidence in her own ability to understand herself. Ricoeurian hermeneutics enables us to elucidate the generally hidden dimensions in a phenomenology of lost self-confidence; Ricoeur describes capability as “originally given” to each lived (...) body; but then, something has happened, gone wrong or been concealed in one’s loss of confidence. Ricoeur himself does not ask how the gender or sex of one’s own body affects this loss. So I draw on contemporary feminist debates about the phenomenology of the body, as well as Julia Kristeva’s hermeneutics of the Antigone figure, in order to demonstrate how women might reconfigure the epistemic limits of human capability, revealing themselves as “a horizon” of the political order, for better or worse. (shrink)

I am afraid that Nancy Cartwright and I will have to agree to disagree, on the whole. If my review comes through as harsh, it is perhaps the natural response of a quantum theorist who has worked in economics to a book in which physics and economics are treated as epistemically identical.

In what sense, if any, does the dominant conception of the traditional theistic God as disembodied inform our embodied experiences? Feminist philosophers of religion have been either explicitly or implicitly preoccupied by a philosophical failure to address such questions concerning embodiment and its relationship to the divine. To redress this failure, certain feminist philosophers have sought to appropriate Luce Irigaray’s argument that embodied divinity depends upon women themselves becoming divine. This article assesses weaknesses in the Irigarayan position, notably the problematic (...) move from a woman’s subjectivity to divinity. In the light of these weaknesses the author looks for a better alternative. Drawing on the work of feminist and nonfeminist philosophers, a feminist-friendly conception of theism is sketched in terms of incarnation and intersubjectivity. Philosophical accounts of the ethical formation of gendered subjects by way of bodily practices offer new concepts for con. (shrink)

Although companion birds are the third most-common animal companion—after dogs and cats—in U.S. households, few anthrozoological publications focus on them. This study examines the role of companion parrots in American households. The study combines a literature review with the results of a survey of bird owners and participant observation. The study uses the resulting qualitative and quantitative data in addressing the social dynamics of companion parrot ownership in the household. The data support the impression that companion parrots increasingly are being (...) considered family members, or "Fids" , thus following current trends in American society that accord companion animals in general a greater investment in time, money, and emotion. However, the general public is not well informed about the complexities of captive parrot care, and psittacine wellness is an important concern. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Practical Medical Ethics. By Alastair Campbell, Grant Gillett, and Gareth Jones. If I Were a Rich Man Could I Buy a Pancreas? and Other Essays on the Ethics of Health Care. By Arthur L. Caplan. Bloomington Ethics on Call: A Medical Ethicist Shows How to Take Charge of Life and Death Choices in Today's Health Care System. By Nancy Dubler and David Nimmons.

This essay explores the theme of sexual difference in relation to sacrifice by contrasting Girard's account of mimetic desire and cultural violence with Kristeva's extensive reflections on allied themes. Inspired by Reineke's critique of Girard the object of the paper is to generate discussion concerning the ethical implications of recognizing the play of sexual difference in any theory of sacrifice. Specifically it aims to contribute towards a subversion of the sexually specific violence of patriarchy.

Government whistleblowers are those who disclose classified government documents in violation of the law but do so to bring to light serious government wrongdoing. Scholarly debates have identified...

Leftist political theory remains trapped between two dominant conceptions of sovereignty: the liberal conception of popular sovereignty and the decisionist conception of sovereignty as the power to declare a state of exception. This essay offers a historical critique of the liberal and decisionist conceptions of sovereignty and develops a descriptive theory of aristocratic sovereignty, which is more suited to the history and the needs of radical political theory and praxis. By tracing the genealogy of sovereignty through early modern European political (...) thought to the founding of the United States, this essay reveals the debilitating shortcoming of notions of sovereignty derived from both Carl Schmitt and the liberal tradition and provides a basis for a distinctively radical analysis of the sovereign aristocracy in Amerika. (shrink)

This collection of essays is dedicated to the prolific career of Paul Ricoeur. Honoring his work, this anthology addresses questions and concerns that defined Ricoeur’s.

To introduce my case I would like to explain how it comes about that A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief is a prolegomenon to a new way of thinking, believing and feeling. To develop this case I will introduce and respond to various criticisms of my prolegomenon. This way of proceeding is consistent with my assumption that a distinctive quality of feminist philosophy is the willingness to reflect upon and respond to dissenting voices. In (...) the end the case for a feminist philosophy of religion will only be as strong as my ability to enable you to think differently and listen to voices different from what I call a 'male-neutral' philosophy. By male-neutral I mean philosophical conceptions, experiences or thoughts which are distinctively male but are presented with the pretence of sex/gender neutrality. (shrink)

Ever since, while continuing to develop his liguistic theories, he has been the most prominent US critic both of his country's foreign policy and of the intellectuals and media that give it overwhelming consensual support. "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" was followed by a series of ever more devastating attacks on American policy in Vietnam (collected in American Power and the New Mandarins and At War With Asia ): by 1970, he was far and away the best known intellectual opponent of (...) the US war effort. (shrink)

This essay argues for a Le Dœuffian dialogue with Spinoza's Ethics, intending the increase of affective knowledge and bodily power. This intention requires a striving to learn: first, what perhaps we do not already know; second, what our bodies can do; and third, to increase in joy. From this dialogue the reader can gain Spinozist knowledge of bodies, minds, affections, as well as gaining the power to affect and to be affected by other bodies. One of the features of this (...) Le Dœuffian practice is a collective exploration of what makes dialogue productive and joyful, opening up new possibilities, especially for women in philosophy today. (shrink)