Light has often been privileged as a metaphor for objectivity and truth in Western thought, a status that has been challenged by recent feminist thought as giving entitlement to the masculine. This book presents a compelling new perspective on this metaphor, and explores the role the visual plays in Western philosophy by examining the thought of Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau- Ponty. Textures of Light is one of the first studies to challenge current interpretations by presenting Irigaray as a philosopher of (...) vision rather than touch. (shrink)

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

Summarizes author’s contextual empiricism and uses it to analyze the difference between neuro-endocrinological accounts of presumed behavioral sex differences and neuro-selectionist accounts. Contextual empiricism is a philosophical approach that both shows how feminist critique works in the sciences and makes a contribution to general philosophy of science.

This extremely accessible textbook provides a wide-ranging analysis of the relations between philosophy and feminist thought. Examining not only feminist critiques of philosophical ideas, Gatens also looks at the ways in which feminist theory can be informed by philosophical analysis and debates. Gatens adopts an historical approach, beginning with an analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of Rousseau. She then examines attempts by Harriet Taylor and J. S. Mill to extend liberal principles to women's situation. Other chapters discuss the work of (...) more recent philosophers, including Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Mary Daly and Dale Spender. Gatens concludes with a discussion of current debates in the politics of sexual difference. (shrink)

In The Bodies of Women , Rosalyn Diprose argues that traditional approaches to ethics both perpetuate and remain blind to the mechanisms of the subordination of women. She shows that injustice against women begins in the ways that social discourses and practices place women's embodied existence as improper and secondary to men. She intervenes into debates about sexual difference, ethics, philosophies of the body and theories of self in order to develop a new ethics which places sexual difference at the (...) very center of meaning. Diprose analyzes attempts in both feminist and non-feminist ethics to recognize the role of sexual difference. She critiques biomedical discourses whose descriptions mask a constitution and regulation of "the body." Drawing on insights from continental philosophy and feminist theory, The Bodies of Women includes critical readings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Foucault as well as productive engagementwith contemporary feminist scholars such as Irigaray, Cornell and Young. What emerges is a unique approach to the ethics of sexual difference which both locates and subverts mechanisms of sexual discrimination. (shrink)

This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibilographical essay assessing the ..

Feminist social theory and female body experience are the twin themes of Iris Marion Young's twelve outstanding essays written over the past decade and brought together here. Her contributions to social theory raise critical questions about women and citizenship, the relations of capitalism and women's oppression, and the differences between a feminist theory that emphasizes women's difference and one that assumes a gender-neutral humanity. Loosely following a phenomenological method of description, Young's essays on female embodiment discuss female movement, pregnancy, clothing, (...) and the breasted body. In an introduction that situates her work in the context of shifts in feminist theory and politics over the past decade, Young emphasizes the rootedness of her theorizing in a dedicated and seasoned political activism. (shrink)

This series presents issues which are central to 20th-century European thought, but unfamiliar to students of Anglo-American philosophy. In this book the author traces the development of the concept of situation through the work of Gabriel Marcel, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.

"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." —Alphonso Lingis "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." —Judith Butler Volatile (...) Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. (shrink)

____Ethics of Eros__ sheds light on contemporary feminist discourse by questioning the basic distinctions and categories in feminist theory. Tina Chanter uses the work of Luce Irigaray as the focus for a critique of French and Anglo-American feminism as it is articulated in the debate over essentialism. While these two branches of feminism represent opposing views, Chanter advocates a productive exchange between the two.