Born out of the struggles of the feminist movements of the 20th century, feminist political theory is characterized by its commitment to expanding the boundaries of the political. Feminism, as a political movement, works to fight inequality and the social, cultural, economic, and political subordination of women. The goal of feminist politics is to end the domination of women through critiquing and transforming institutions and theories that support women’s subordination. Feminist (...) class='Hi'>political theory is a field within both feminist theory and within political theory that takes a feminist approach to traditional questions within political philosophy, contemporary and historical. In this entry, I will explore the nature of feminist political theory by asking two questions: what is feminist about feminist political theory, and what is specifically political about feminist political theory. (shrink)

This paper examines recent feminist work on Spinoza and identifies the elements of Spinoza’s philosophy that have been seen as promising for feminist naturalism. I argue that the elements of Spinoza’s work that feminist theorists have found so promising are precisely those concepts he derives from Hobbes. I argue that the misunderstanding of Hobbes as architect of the egoist model of human nature has effaced his contribution to Spinoza’s more praised conception of the human individual. Despite misconceptions, (...) I argue that the model of human nature, the view on human emotions and the conception of individual power that Hobbes created and Spinoza developed is an uncommonly useful one for feminist political theory. Through reexamining Hobbes’ model of human nature and the emotions I will argue that Hobbes’ theory of the internal weighing of emotions provides an important mechanism for understanding how the individuals’ affects can be reformed. I will show how we can use this naturalistic model of the human individual to answer contemporary theoretical and practical questions of how to empower women and how to effectively identify, challenge and change social categories, norms and institutions which are disempowering. In particular, I will argue that feminist projects of empowerment need a way to measure empowerment and a way to understand how to understand the power of harmful norms and customs. Understanding the way certain norms and practices disempower women while forming their affects and self‐conceptions provides the first step to reform of these practices. Spinoza and Hobbes provide us with a further tool to reform, and that is their understanding of the role of emotions in human action and power, and the need to reform and reorganize the emotions of individuals in order to escape harmful patterns of behavior. (shrink)

In this article, I link Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion1 to decolonial perspectives that also challenge this universality of affect in cross-cultural facial expressions. After first outlining some of the present-day political stakes of these questions, I turn to Sylvia Wynter on the "ethnoclass of Man" in Western modernity, where she asks: how were concepts of not only being, truth, power, and freedom but also affect—the intelligibility of one's feelings toward others—framed by histories of colonial violence (...) and refusals of imaginative identification?2 Wynter argues that the overrepresentation of the Western ethnoclass results in the naturalization of a limited and contingent mode of being as... (shrink)

Judith Butler's contribution to feminist political thought is usually approached in terms of her concept of performativity, according to which gender exists only insofar as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed, creating permanent possibilities for performing gender in new and transgressive ways. In this paper, I argue that Butler's politics of performativity is more fundamentally grounded in the concept of genealogy, which she adapts from Foucault and, ultimately, Nietzsche. Butler understands women to have a genealogy: to be located (...) within a history of overlapping practices and reinterpretations of femininity. This genealogical understanding of femininity allows Butler to propose a coalitional feminist politics, which requires no unity among women but only loosely overlapping connections. For Butler, feminist coalitions should aim to subvert, not consolidate, entrenched norms concerning femininity. Butler has been criticized, however, for failing to explain either how subversive agency is possible or why the subversion of gender norms is desirable. Reviewing these criticisms, I argue that Butler offers a convincing explanation of the possibility of subversive agency, but that the normative dimension of her political thought remains relatively underdeveloped. I explore how the normative aspect of Butler's thought could be strengthened by recasting her notion of genealogy along more thoroughly Nietzschean and materialist lines, in terms of an idea of active and multiple bodily forces. (shrink)

This essay critically examines one of the dominant tendencies in recent theoretical discussions of anarchism, postanarchism, and argues that this tradition fails to engage sufficiently with anarchism’s history. Through an examination of late 19th-century anarchist political thought—as represented by one of its foremost exponents, Peter Kropotkin—we demonstrate the extent to which postanarchism has tended to oversimplify and misrepresent the historical tradition of anarchism. The article concludes by arguing that all political-theoretical discussions of anarchism going forward should begin (...) with a fresh appraisal of the actual content of anarchist political thought, based on a rigorous analysis of its political, social, and cultural history. (shrink)

The term ‘identity politics’ is used to refer to a wide range of political movements. In this paper, we look at the theoretical ideas underpinning two strongly, mutually opposed forms of identity politics, and identify some crucial differences between them. We critically compare the identitarian ideology of the New Right with feminist standpoint theory, focusing on two issues: relativism and essentialism. In carrying out this critical comparison we illuminate under-theorized aspects of both new right identitarianism and standpoint (...) theory; demonstrate how the two are distinct; reveal the depth and pervasiveness of the new right ideology’s flaws; and show what a coherent left-wing identity politics could look like. (shrink)

Recent feminist critiques of development have questioned some fundamental assumptions of feminist political theory; such critiques have also been successful in subverting long-held assumptions of conventional economic development. Viewed in the context of women’s subordination in third world countries, a redefinition of development must not only be about economic growth, but ensure a redistribution of resources, challenge the gender-based division of labour and also seek to provide for an egalitarian basis in social arrangements. Further, as this (...) article argues, any starting point for feminist critiques of development must also seek to link the end of gender oppression to multiple theories of justice – a justice not juridical but one that recognises the cultural membership of women in the community. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism is a family of egalitarian theories of distributive justice that give a special place to luck, choice, and responsibility. These theories can be understood as responding to perceived weaknesses in influential earlier theories of both the left – in particular Rawls’ liberal egalitarianism (1971) – and the right – Nozick’s libertarianism (1974) stands out here. Rawls put great emphasis on the continuity of his theory with the great social contract theories of modern political thought, particularly emphasising (...) its Kantian character, while Nozick overtly develops his theory as an elaboration of John Locke’s account of property. By contrast, how luck egalitarianism is related to the history of political thought or philosophy more generally has been left unexplored by its proponents. Perhaps this is because they see luck egalitarianism, with its focus on individual choice and association with such contemporary concerns as equality of opportunity, as without significant predecessors in the canon. My purpose in this chapter is to make the tentative first steps towards identifying some historical antecedents of luck egalitarianism among the main works of Western political thought, in particular Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Locke. (shrink)

Plato is among the most influential philosophers in the course of history, and the range of his ideas about different issues makes other scholars impressed. Considering his various views on varied subjects, one can argue that many ideas of the thinkers originated from Plato’s ideas in the contemporary world. Plato, in different positions, discussed women and their equality with men, especially in Republic Book V. The study of the ideas makes one suppose that the book explores the roots of (...) feminist theory. In Book V, Plato deals with the equality of women and men related to learning different issues and positions. Besides, he has discussed the children-sharing system resulting in the elimination of the private family system. Plato’s opinions are highly disputed; on the one hand, his ideas are considered feminist, and on the other hand, however, they are seen with no relation to feminist philosophy. The present paper aims to judge opinions related to women in the Republic Book V. -/- . (shrink)

This paper provides a critical overview of the realist current in contemporary political philosophy. We define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political and so distinguish sharply between political realism and non-ideal theory. We then identify and discuss four key arguments advanced by political realists: (...) from ideology, from the relationship of ethics to politics, from the priority of legitimacy over justice and from the nature of political judgement. Next, we ask to what extent realism is a methodological approach as opposed to a substantive political position and so discuss the relationship between realism and a few such positions. We close by pointing out the links between contemporary realism and the realist strand that runs through much of the history of Western political thought. (shrink)

Feminist aesthetics can be characterized as a critical conceptual framework for analyzing the gender assumptions Western aesthetics, philosophy of the arts and the arts have had and their implications in the categories they have historically employed. It emerged as a result the influence feminism had in the study of gender bias in the artistic production and its reception. Works like Linda Nochlin’s Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971) and Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) (...) were fundamental for recognizing the exclusion of women from the history of the great visual artists and how the male gaze is a predominant kind of depiction that satisfies and is designed from a masculine and heterosexual point of view. -/- During the 1970s and 1980s it started the analysis of the male gaze in literature, film and visual arts, but also the women’s artistic production demanding its recognition. However, it was not until the 1990s that philosophical feminist aesthetics was first addressed as an important and necessary area of study with the special issues Feminism and aesthetics (Hein, Korsmeyer 1990) in “Hypatia: a journal of Feminist Philosophy”, and Feminism and traditional aesthetics (Brand, Korsmeyer 1990) in “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism”. And the first introductory book on the field, Gender and aesthetics: an introduction by Carolyn Korsmeyer (2004) was published during the first decade of the 2000s. -/- Although feminist aesthetics came later than feminist political philosophy, it appeared almost at the same time as feminist perspectives of other philosophical fields, such as epistemology and philosophy of science. Like other feminist approaches to different philosophical domains, there is not a unitary feminist perspective on aesthetics, however, despite the variety of approaches, all implicitly or explicitly demand the recognition of women in its sphere of influence, that is, philosophy and the arts. Nevertheless, contrary to other fields it does not only take contributions from analytic and continental feminism, but also from cultural theory, art history, comparative literature, film theory, psychoanalysis, just to name a few disciplines and theories. Feminist aesthetics’ literature covers a broad range of topics, but the most important are the feminist critique of philosophical aesthetics and the feminist philosophy and theory of the arts. (shrink)

Scholars studying classic political texts face an important decision: Should these texts be read as artifacts of history or as sources for still-valid insights about politics today? Competing historical and “presentist” approaches to political thought do not have a methodological dispute—that is, a disagreement about the most effective scholarly means to an agreed-upon end. They instead have an ethical dispute about the respective value of competing activities that aim at different purposes. This article examines six ethical arguments, (...) drawn primarily from the work of Quentin Skinner, in favor of the historical approach. It concludes that while both intellectual history and presentist theory are ethically justifiable, the best justification of the former enterprise is that it can help us achieve the purposes of the latter. (shrink)

In this article, I draw on Adorno's concept of the non-identical in conjunction with Lacan's concept of the Real to propose a "theoretical outline of the subject" as central for feminist political theorizing. A theoretical outline of the subject recognizes the limits of theorizing, the moment where meaning fails, and we are confronted with the impossibility of grasping the subject entirely. At the same time, it insists on the importance of a coherent subject to effect transformations in the (...) sociopolitical sphere. Since the non-identical is more grounded in the material world than the Real, and the Real allows us more than the non-identical to grasp the anxieties and desires that lead to totalizing theories, a complementary Adornian-Lacanian theoretical framework holds a central promise for feminist political theorizing. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to Laury Naranch’s and Mary Caputi’s discussion of my book Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism (2017). In response to Naranch, I clarify how the political subject-in-outline translates into collective political action through the figure of the Chicana working-class woman. I also explain why the proletariat, more so than the precariat, implies a radical political imaginary if we rethink this concept in the context of my idea of the political subject-in-outline. (...) I also clarify that my chapters on Marx expose how Adorno and Marx have problematic imaginations of the working-class woman, which counter their otherwise radical imaginary. In response to Caputi, I clarify the meaning of capitalism in my book and underline that we need a rigorous critique of capitalism to counter the rise of the Far Right. I also explain why the fluid subject does not have agency and why the subject-in-outline is a better way to theorize transformative feminist agency. I also clarify that my conception of feminist political subjectivity does not assume a privileged vantage point outside power structures. (shrink)

Metaphysical considerations aside, today’s inheritors of the tradition of natural philosophy are primarily scientists. However, they are oblivious to the human factor involved in science and in seeing how political, religious, and other ideologies contaminate our visions of nature. In general, philosophers observe human (historical, sociological, and psychological) processes within the construction of theories, as well as in the development of scientific activity itself. -/- In our time, feminism—along with accompanying ideas of identity politics under the slogan “diversity, inclusion, (...) equity”—has emerged in science policies. The vast majority of scientists (including myself) are convinced that discrimination is reprehensible. We also believe that all individuals of any sex, race, ethnic group, or ideology should be valued in academia solely based on his or her merits and potential through equality programs. However, as I will show in this article, political indoctrination has inadmissibly undertaken the struggle for equality in academic institutions in Western countries. I argue here that universities and research institutes should be politically free (neutral) to encourage academic freedom. -/- One negative aspect of equality programs is that worldwide, scientists are harassed for expressing opinions related to the “gender” issue. This situation severely restricts scientists’ freedom of expression, even within the limits of the law. Codes of conduct extending beyond legal boundaries are examples of this issue. Scientists who express their views about “gender” are often harassed, bullied, and socially or academically excluded. Thus, we are witnessing a wave of proselytizing in research institutes and science-associated media. Today, there is widespread biased propaganda of “victimhood”. This propaganda proposes positive discrimination and increasing women’s participation in unnatural ways. It also bends the history of science by overvaluing the creations of forgotten women, offering lectures on indoctrination, organizing congresses on gender and science, and persecuting anyone who sees the subject differently. All of this covered by a multitude of associations that financially benefit from these discourses through succulent subsidies of public money. Apparently, feminism is no longer about fighting against discrimination. Instead, it is about imposing an ideology and giving more power to one group of people. Thus, we must ask whether the end justifies the means. (shrink)

Violence seems to be such that, once it has set in, it is hard to extract. Getting rid of violence appears to require violence. It reproduces only itself. Peace appears but a sheep exposed to predators. If the world were to abruptly become peaceful, it would only await the next Thrasymachus to reimpose tyranny. This sticky nature of violence and how to cope with it are the most potent themes of this much-needed work. It provides a fair though critical overview (...) of the subject of politics and violence through history. Violence and Political Theory examines a judicious selection of political thinkers, from Hobbes and Locke to Gandhi and Ruddick, on their notions of the role of violence in political life. (shrink)

The precondition of any feminist politics – a usable category of ‘woman’ – has proved to be difficult to construct, even proposed to be impossible, given the ‘problem of exclusion’. This is the inevitable exclusion of at least some women, as their lives or experiences do not fit into the necessary and sufficient condition(s) that denotes group membership. In this paper, I propose that the problem of exclusion arises not because of inappropriate category membership criteria, but because of the (...) presumption that categories can only be organised by identity relations or shared properties among their members. This criterion of sameness as well as the characterisation of this exclusion as essentialism attests to a metaphysics that is not conducive to resistance and liberatory projects. Following a strain of hybrid thinking in feminist and post-colonial theory, I outline an alternative pluralist logic that confronts oppressive binaries that impede theory work in gender, sexuality, and race theory, and limit political action and resistance. The problem of exclusion is neither irresolvable nor is it essentialism. Instead it is a denial of subjectivity due to pseudodualistic self/Other dichotomies that can be resisted by adopting a new categorial logic. While this paper focuses on the specific problem of formulating a category of ‘woman’, it has implications for other areas of gender, critical race, and postcolonial theory. Rather than working toward an inclusive category founded on sameness, theorists need to develop independent and positive categories grounded in difference. Our current categorial logic does not permit such a project, and therefore a new metaphysics must be adopted. (shrink)

In this text, I consider two examples in the history of emancipation and manumission of enslaved, Black populations in the Caribbean and South America in order to theorize a colonial mode of conceiving of freedom at play in the first half of the nineteenth century. This mode is marked by the figure of the promise, enacting a notion of freedom as a constantly deferred, external compensation. Indeed, instead of an immediate decision deeming the practice of enslavement and trade of (...) human beings unacceptable, and an effective liberation of the enslaved Black populations in these different emancipation proclamations, the various histories of manumission in Latin America and the Caribbean show a long series of political and legal attempts to reduce and limit the extent of the slave trade that deferred the process of liberation for decades. Moreover, in many of these territories the practice did not end with the official proclamation of emancipation but was continued by illegal practices and mutations into legal forms of exploitation and oppression that are still operative today. After outlining this first trajectory, reconstructing the promise of manumission in the historical examples of Martinique (as read by Édouard Glissant) and La Gran Colombia and the Republic of Nueva Granada (contemporary Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador), I analyze a second mode of investigation in examples of individual and collective strategies of liberation coming from the enslaved themselves, as reconstructed by contemporary feminist scholars in South America. These strategies appropriate liberation not as a promise, but as a negotiation and calculation that begins with the enslaved’s resistance to their oppressive conditions and that ultimately depends on the external concession by juridical authorities. In the third section of the chapter, I read these practices not as marronage, as they are sometimes approached, but as a different mode of turning back to these glimpses of freedom that more effectively challenge the narrative of emancipation and, with it, the promise of manumission in our present. -/- . (shrink)

This book contributes to the feminist reconstruction of political theory. Although many feminist authors have pointed out the ways in which women have been property, they have been less successful in suggesting how women might become the subjects rather than the objects of property-holding. This book synthesises political theory from liberal, Marxist, Kantian and Hegelian traditions, applying these ideas to history and social policy.

In the history of modern liberal political thought the work of Friedrich Hayek stands out as one of the most significant contributions to liberal theory since J. S. Mill. This article provides a deep re-reading and engagement with key neoliberal texts from Friedrich Hayek and the development of understandings regarding the ‘‘spontaneous ordering’’ mechanisms of the market and the appreciation of the need for states to govern for the market rather than merely to withdraw from responsibility. My (...) intention is to bring some analytical clarity to the so-called incongruity and some of the ‘‘blind-spots’’ of neoliberal thought, but also to show why it makes such an important contribution to contemporary political theory. Doing so will, I suspect, expose the blurring lines that seemingly exist within the neoliberal intellectual project to describe some recent trends in our contemporary economic and political thoughts by illustrating the views and particularly the thinking of Friedrich Hayek. I conclude by reflecting upon the implications of these findings for the scholarly study of contemporary neoliberal political theories. (shrink)

In recent years, Islamic feminism has become a prevalent and controversial topic among scholars from Muslim countries and Western feminists. While respecting the efforts of Muslim activists, this paper argues that because Islamic perspective is inherently anti-pluralist, it is not conducive to feminism and even at odds with it. Since it is impossible to make any generalizations about Muslim countries, this paper focuses on the debate of Islam and feminism as it relates to Iran. Islamic laws that are the ground (...) for constitutions in many Muslim countries treat men and women unequally. In countries with a theocracy, Islam becomes a political system where the power of the ruling elite, which are the clerics, becomes an important obstacle on the way of reforms. As a worldview, Islam provides a fixed identity of women and men that is irreconcilable with any liberating theory. The significance of this discussion lies in the potential of celebration of “Islamic feminism” for reinforcing the fusion of religion and politics in a country such as Iran, which has a religious state. (shrink)

In the chapter “Emancipatory Engagement with Oppression: The Perils of Identity in Feminist and Anti-Racist Politics” Oda Davanger argues against basing emancipatory struggles on identity categories. According to Davanger, conceptualizing oppression in terms of different axes, i.e. identity categories, can be harmful to feminist philosophy and ideology since it contri- butes to upholding whiteness and maleness as norms and there- fore fails to “dismantle the system of domination”. In opposition to different versions of identity politics and the analytical (...) and political concept of intersectionality, Davanger complements bell hooks’ notion of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy with a post-structuralist perspective. Davanger’s answer to feminist and anti-racist struggles based on identity categories is a politics that is built around an “abstract and alienated desire” that makes possible engaging in the struggle for a world without oppression based on identity, regardless of individuals’ own experience of oppression. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed a sharp increase of interest in the cultures and regions of South and East Asia, owing in part to the prominent role Asian economies have played in the era of globalization. Asian Worldviews: Religions, Philosophies, Political Theories is a unique, reader-friendly introduction to the intellectual heritage of the region. Assuming no previous background in Asian cultural history, Asian Worldviews moves beyond chronological and geographic boundaries to present an integrated treatment of the beliefs, teachings, and (...) ideologies that have shaped the worldviews of approximately half of the global population. Rein Raud explores forms of knowledge in China, India, Tibet, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, providing balanced coverage of all historical periods from antiquity to the modern day. -/- Asian Worldviews embraces the connections rather than the divisions between the religious and philosophical dimensions of South and East Asian thought, and emphasizes a robust engagement with each culture's political, social, and economic contexts. Clear, accessible chapters discuss the development of religious, philosophical, and political thought in India, China, and Japan, and provide succinct overviews of the history of ideas in Korea, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. Throughout the book, Raud uses a comparative approach to examine the mutual influence and productive dialogue, past and present, between Asian cultures as well as with the West, and considers the impact of various worldviews on the development of modern Asian societies. -/- Comprehensive and well-informed by recent developments in the scholarship, Asian Worldviews: Religions, Philosophies, Political Theories is an unparalleled resource for a broad range of courses in Asian studies, philosophy, religious studies, and global politics, as well as an excellent introduction for non-specialist readers looking for a contextual foothold in the rich cultural and intellectual history of South and East Asia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the under-researched figure A.W. Rehberg in his exchange with Kant over the relationship between theory and practice in the philosophy of right. I argue that Rehberg raises, what I call, two problems of political matter which attempt to show that Kant's overly formal approach to political theory cannot justifiably determine political practice. The first problem is the problem of positive determinations of right, rather than merely negative prohibitions. Rehberg takes this to (...) mean that Kant cannot determine us to a specific form of constitution. I argue that Kant's innovation of intelligible property functions as a response to this critique in that it provides the possibility of synthetic propositions of right a priori. Second, Rehberg insists that an a priori system of right cannot relate to already formed historical communities. Here Kant's response comes close to agreeing with Rehberg as Kant takes prudential or historical reasoning to harmonize with the demands of a priori right in order to applied to the sensible world. Kant, in this instance, comes closer to Rehberg by denying centralized enlightened monarchy and the reliance on natural and historical development for the application of right. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to take the complexity of our histories of rights as seriously as the nature of rights themselves. Let me say immediately that the point is not to satisfy our sense of moral superiority by smugly pointing out the prejudices found in arguments made over three hundred years ago. We have more than our own share of problems and prejudices to deal with. Rather, in coming to grips with this history, and especially how early-modern (...) political theorists struggled with the extension and application of natural rights to the ‘New World’, we may learn something about our own struggles to extend human rights beyond the boundaries of the state system of which Grotius, Hobbes, Locke and Vattel were among the key intellectual architects. For Richard Tuck, the autonomous rights-bearing agent at the heart of liberal individualism is a product of seventeenth-century theorizing about the nature of the autonomous state acting in the international sphere. The sovereign individual is the ‘traditional cousin of the sovereign state’, argues Tuck, and especially the aggressive, violent, and minimally constrained relative described by Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Emer de Vattel. Thus the connection between liberalism and imperialism, on this reading, is not merely chronological or historical but metaphysical. The analogy between the sovereign state and the sovereign individual acting on the basis of their natural rights, constrained by the recognition of the basic rights of others (but not much more than that) represents an influential vision of liberal freedom. This minimalist account of freedom represents only one vision, however, and Tuck’s account of the pre-history of liberal rights has to be balanced against other conceptions, including more emancipatory ones. (shrink)

In the early 1990’s, many feminist philosophers found that the practice of the women´s movement as well as those of other new social movements, could be articulated most adequately in terms of citizenship. The classical political vocabulary of citizenship seemed to offer a viable alternative to the vocabularies that until then had been dominant in feminist political theory: the individualistic, rights-oriented discourse of liberalism, and the structuralist, interest-oriented perspectives of socialism and marxism.

Gender, race, and sexuality are not just identities; they are also systems of social organization – i.e., systems of privilege and oppression. This article addresses two main ways privilege and oppression (e.g., racism, misogyny, heteronormativity) are relevant topics in and for philosophical aesthetics: (i) the role of the aesthetic in privilege and oppression, and (ii) the role of philosophical aesthetics, as a discipline and a body of texts, in constructing and naturalizing relations of privilege and oppression (i.e., white heteropatriarchy). The (...) first part addresses how systems of privilege and oppression use the aesthetic. I will discuss various ways race, gender, and sexuality, as both embodied identities and broader social institutions, work with and through “the aesthetic”. The second part addresses racism and (hetero) sexism in the discipline of aesthetics. Both in its history and its present practice aesthetics’apparent neutrality on questions of privilege and oppression is actually evidence of its investment in systems of privilege and oppression. (shrink)

Debates in feminist political philosophy often focus on what problematic(s) to use in order to understand normative ideals, gendered differences, and their histories. For the purposes of this chapter, I will contrast two important problematics in these debates, the procedural/deliberative politics in the tradition of Critical Theory, represented here by Seyla Benhabib, and the poststructuralist or postmodern politics, represented here by Judith Butler. The goal of the contrast will be to set up the contribution that Gadamer’s work (...) can make to contemporary feminist philosophy. (shrink)

Controversial and provocative, To Be Real is a blueprint for the creation of a new political force.

The emergence of Critical Race Theory marked an important point in the history of racial politics in the legal academy and the broader conversation about race and racism in the United States. More recently, CRT has proven an important analytic tool in the field of education, offering critical perspectives on race, and the causes, consequences and manifestations of race, racism, inequity, and the dynamics of power and privilege in schooling. This groundbreaking anthology is the first to pull together (...) both the foundational writings in the field and more recent scholarship on the cultural and racial politics of schooling. A comprehensive introduction provides an overview of the history and tenets of CRT in education. Each section then seeks to explicate ideological contestation of race in education and to create new, alternative accounts. In so doing, this landmark publication not only documents the progress to date of the CRT movement, it acts to further spur developments in education. (shrink)

Debates in feminist political philosophy often focus on what problematic(s) to use in order to understand normative ideals, gendered differences, and their histories. For the purposes of this chapter, I will contrast two important problematics in these debates, the procedural/deliberative politics in the tradition of Critical Theory, represented here by Seyla Benhabib, and the poststructuralist or postmodern politics, represented here by Judith Butler. The goal of the contrast will be to set up the contribution that Gadamer’s work (...) can make to contemporary feminist philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter provides a historical reconstruction of how Alfred Schutz’s American writings were critically engaged by the feminist sociologists Dorothy E. Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. Schutz’s articulation of a phenomenological sociology in relation to, among others, the sociology of Talcott Parsons and the philosophies of science of Ernest Nagel and Carl G. Hempel proved fruitful to Smith in the development of her feminist standpoint theory in her 1987 The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. (...) Collins likewise draws on Schutz’s writing in the development of her own standpoint theory in her 1986 paper “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” but in a way that addresses some of her own concerns with Smith’s feminist sociology. As I hope to show with the recovery of this underappreciated history, the critical insights of Smith and Collins with regard to the possible uses and limits of phenomenology for feminist theorizing, are still valuable today. (shrink)

Argentine historiography in general, and the history of the Argentine Left in particular, does not receive the attention it deserves in the Anglo-Saxon academic world, due to linguistic and cultural barriers. In this article, we attempt to review for the English-reading public three recent contributions to the history of Marxism in Argentina (Horacio Tarcus's Marx en la Argentina: Sus primeros lectores obreros, intelectuales y científicos, Hernán Camarero's A la conquista de la clase obrera: Los comunistas y el mundo (...) del trabajo en la Argentina, 1920–1935 and Osvaldo Coggiola's Historia del trotskismo en Argentina y América Latina) covering the entire historical spectrum from the early history of Argentine socialism to the history of the PCA and, finally, to the history of local Trotskyism. We attempt to place these works in the context of Argentine historiography and of the political context in which those books were written. (shrink)

In my dissertation, I derive a set of systematic principles and a conception of the political subject from Spinoza’s metaphysics and political writings and then bring these tools to bear on contemporary questions in democratic theory. I argue that Spinoza’s conception of the political subject answers feminist critiques of the liberal subject, while retaining an understanding of the need for empowered citizens in strong democracies. Spinoza’s normative political theory shows how political communities (...) become stronger through the empowerment and participation of their citizens. I argue that Spinoza’s naturalistic method provides a promising path for both ethics and political theory. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I sketch the history of the development and critiques of the ‘liberal’ conception of human nature. I argue that rather than a substantial conception of human nature, the liberal subject is a skeptical compromise developed for a very specific purpose following the post-Reformation Wars of Religion in Europe in the 16th century. I then take on a variety of critiques of the notion of human nature in general and of the liberal conception of human nature in particular. I argue that political theory requires a positive conception of human beings. Spinoza’s conception of the human individual, created in order to replace what Spinoza thought were problematic aspects of the theories of individuals proposed by Hobbes and Descartes, does not suffer from the problems of the liberal subject and is a good candidate for a positive conception of human nature. In Chapter Two, I set out the main components of Spinoza’s naturalistic conception of the human individual. Spinoza understands human beings as primarily affective, or emotional creatures, whose feelings mediate their conceptions of the world. For Spinoza, each individual can be understood to have an index of power, which can increase or decrease depending on the degree to which individuals understand and are able to control the forces that affect them. In Chapter Three, I show that Spinoza’s theory of the political state is parallel to his theory of the individual. For Spinoza, just as individual humans have an index of power that can increase or decrease depending on how their emotions are organized, so too states have different degrees of power depending on how the emotions and power of the human beings within them are organized. The challenge for a Spinozan state is to understand how to create social and political institutions to organize the emotions of the ‘multitude’ of individuals in the state in the best way to yield the strongest state. For Spinoza, the strongest, or most absolute state, is a democracy, which is also the freest kind of state. I set out Spinoza’s theory of democracy and show how it builds upon his notion of individual and collective power. In Chapter Four, I take up the potential objections of Iris Marion Young to Spinoza’s conception of democratic agreement. I say these objections are ‘potential’ because, although Young critiques Rousseau’s conception of the general will, she does not directly object to Spinoza’s view of ‘agreement’ as a necessary element in democratic deliberation. However, many of Young’s writings touch on this worry, particularly in her critiques of Rousseau, civic republicanism and contemporary deliberative democracy theory. I argue that Spinoza’s notion of agreement employs a different conception of reason than that found in Rousseau, or in the tradition of deliberative democratic theory. Reason, for Spinoza, is a collective achievement rather than a precondition for deliberation. Spinoza argues that agreements reached through large-scale discussion in a democracy are likely to be more ‘reasonable’ than those reached by few or by one. Spinoza and Young share, I argue, a similar conception of the role of affect in deliberation, and both recognize the importance of affects and imagination in social and political life. In Chapter Five, I contrast a Spinozan theory of empowerment to Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. Nussbaum’s approach and that of Spinoza are consonant in many of their major aspects; however, I argue that in practice, Spinoza’s theory is better able to account for the contextual nature of empowerment and of the necessity to reform harmful social, moral and cultural norms through affective mechanisms. In the conclusion, I consider the larger implications for a Spinozan naturalist approach to political philosophy, and for the role that theories of human nature and metaphysics can play in political theory. I argue that by avoiding metaphysics and by avoiding conceptions of human nature, those interested in projects of emancipation can have no criteria for determining whether or not individuals have become emancipated or whether their power has in fact increased. The model I derive from Spinoza’s conception of individual power and his view of the power of political states as a function of the power of the coordination of individuals provides a promising alternative to liberal theories of the subject and to extant feminist theories of the human individual, which ignore the psychological and metaphysical aspects of human individual and collective power. (shrink)

To succeed, political science usually requires either prediction or contextual historical work. Both of these methods favor explanations that are narrow-scope, applying to only one or a few cases. Because of the difficulty of prediction, the main focus of political science should often be contextual historical work. These epistemological conclusions follow from the ubiquity of causal fragility, under-determination, and noise. They tell against several practices that are widespread in the discipline: wide-scope retrospective testing, such as much large-n statistical (...) work; lack of emphasis on prediction; and resources devoted to ‘pure theory’ divorced from frequent empirical application. I illustrate, via Donatella della Porta’s work on political violence, the important role that is still left for theory. I conclude by assessing the scope for political science to offer policy advice. (shrink)

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 paper argues that histories of the Green Revolution are often underpinned by commitments to theoretical models of technology and science which shape the parameters of such narratives in politically normative ways. This paper explores the accounts of the Green Revolution in India given by Vandana Shiva and Govindan Parayil and demonstrates the ways in which these accounts are influenced by their models of technology and science. It is argued that Shiva and Parayil represent key theoretical positions in technological (...) class='Hi'>theory, determinist and instrumentalist, respectively, and that examination of their Green Revolution narratives clearly indicates the ways in which such theoretical commitments can determine the scope and content of analyses of technology-driven development, and thereby exclude political content necessary for the evaluation of the efficacy of such development and the validity of the theoretical model. (shrink)

Maria Gołaszewska (1926–2015), a Polish philosopher, was associated throughout her life with Poland’s oldest academic institution, the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. She was a student of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, himself a student of Edmund Husserl. During the postwar and communist years in Poland, Gołaszewska conducted research focusing on issues related to art and aesthetics. She created her own conception of empirically and anthropologically oriented aesthetics, which I believe is a prime example of a theory that accounts for the (...) perspective of gender, and in this sense should be acknowledged as an important contribution to contemporary gender-sensitive/feminist philosophy. In the article, I present Gołaszewska’s life, academic career, and philosophy as a cognitively valuable response to feminist philosophy’s search for a suitable description of women’s experiences related to art and aesthetic perception. (shrink)

Solidarity has been a key topic for feminist thinkers of different times, schools and places. More than other disciplines, feminist theorists have dwelled upon the role of theory in the achievement of political and social goals. Calls for global sisterhood have incited proliferating debates as to the basis for solidarity between women and feminists. Theoretical disputes arising from the spread of deconstructionist ideas since the 1990s have led to a practical perplexity as to how to set (...) feminist political goals if the category of woman is no longer straightforward. This article looks at how expectations for practical usefulness have resonated in feminist debates on solidarity and, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of textuality and interpretation, reflects on the process of interaction between feminist theory and feminism as a social movement. It argues that in spite of the apparent lack of unanimity, or even outright hostility, that theoretical controversies might seem to indicate, the multiplicity of viewpoints and positions that various feminist theories collectively entail is a necessary vehicle for creating more solidarity between women in and outside academia in the contemporary world. Looking towards the future of feminist theory, the article invokes the metaphor of a sisterhood of letters to reflect on the value of shared intellectual endeavour in building solidarities between women of different social, racial, religious and cultural backgrounds. (shrink)

The Einstein of the New Age holds forth in his unique and brilliant style on the history of world views and how to put spirit back in our life. If you have the patience to learn his jargon and read slowly there is alot of serious brainfood here. I read this and his Sex, Ecology and Spirituality(1995) with Hofstadter´s famous Godel, Escher, Bach(GEB) written in 1980(both of which I have reviewed here). Wilber´s work has many parallels with GEB, both (...) of them massive works attempting to tie together disparate fields and different views of life. Unlike Hofstadter, who was mainly interested in the nature of intelligence, Wilber does not treat math, music or DNA, and he concentrates on world views that have a spiritual relevance but like Hofstadter he lacks any grasp of the logical structure of rationality, the dual systems of thought or the works of Wittgenstein and Searle, which obviates much of his work. For an account of those see my articles. He spent a vast amount of time working out the relationships between ideas and how they relate to individual and society, spirit and science. If you don´t have the time or patience for the whole book, read Superconsciousness Parts 1 and 2 which are an excellent summary. His shortest book, `The Marriage of Self andSoul is a much easier read that gives you a good idea of his style and purpose. He details alot of intellectual history (philosophy, psychology, religion, ecology, feminism, sociology, etc) and shows where nearly everyone went too far in the direction of Ascent (to the spirit) or Descent (to science,materialism, reductionism or Flatland). He trys to show how to heal the rifts by combining sense and soul (spiritual and material life, science and religion, internal and external, individual and social). Everything is related to everything else (holons in holarchies). The Age of Enlightenment denied the the spirit, the individual and the interior life but developed art, morals and science and led to democracy, feminism, equality and ecology, but this reductionism compressed the intellect and the spirit into the Flatland of science, rationality and materialism. He sees the loss of the spiritual point of view with the Age of Enlightenment as the major factor responsible for the malaise of modern times, but real spirituality or ìntelligent religion (i.e., the quest for enlightenment) as opposed to primitive religion (everything else-see my review of Boyer´s 'Religion Explained') was always rare. It is intelligent religion he sees as the panacea, but it is primitive religion that the masses understand, and it too has only materialistic goals. In sum, in spite of its shortcomings it is still unique and well worth the effort. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

S. Matthew Liao and Christian Barry argue that the patient-centered approach to deontology that I have developed—the restricting claims principle —‘is beset with problems.’ They think that it cannot correctly handle cases in which a potential victim sits in the path of an agent doing what she needs to do for some greater good, or in which a person’s property is used to benefit others and harm her. They argue that cases in which an agent does what would be permissible (...) but acts on a malicious reason show that agent intentions, rather than patientclaims, are fundamental to deontology. And they claim that the RCP presupposes the means principle in a way that shows that it is not really offering anything new. I argue here that all of these charges are mistaken. Doing so allows me to offer important refinements to the RCP, to highlight two common mistakes in reasoning about cases, and to set challenges for agentcentered approaches to deontology. (shrink)

Standpoint theory is an explicitly political as well as social epistemology. Its central insight is that epistemic advantage may accrue to those who are oppressed by structures of domination and discounted as knowers. Feminist standpoint theorists hold that gender is one dimension of social differentiation that can make such a difference. In response to two longstanding objections I argue that epistemically consequential standpoints need not be conceptualized in essentialist terms, and that they do not confer automatic or (...) comprehensive epistemic privilege on those who occupy them. Standpoint theory is best construed as conceptual framework for investigating the ways in which socially situated experience and interests make a contingent difference to what we know (well), and to the resources we have for determining which knowledge claims we can trust. I illustrate the advantages of this account in terms of two examples drawn from archaeological sources. (shrink)

In the context of feminist and postmodern thought, traditional conceptions of masculinity and what it means to be a “Real Man” have been critiqued. In Genevieve Lloyd's The Man of Reason, this critique takes the form of exposing the effect that the distinctive masculinity of the “man of reason” has had on the history of philosophy. One major feature of the masculine-feminine dichotomy will emerge as a key notion for understanding the rest of the paper: the dichotomy of (...) reason-feeling, a parallel and a foundational aspect to the dichotomy of masculinity and femininity. In exploring the history of symbolic conceptions of masculinity in ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the present, one finds that the oppression of women is integrally linked to the traditional tie between masculinity and reason. There have been many efforts in recent feminist philosophy to rewrite or redefine “Woman” in such a way as to alleviate the oppression of women. I argue that the effectiveness of rewriting Woman for this purpose is problematic, primarily because any rewriting of this type must occur in the current historical context of hierarchical dualisms, like Man-Woman, masculine-feminine, male-female. These binary oppositions arguably find their roots in Pythagorean philosophy and can be traced through the Renaissance to our current historical context. It is these dualisms that have traditionally valued the masculine side of the Man-Woman dichotomy more than the feminine. Further, it will be argued that the hierarchical dualism of Man and Woman is so pervasive that if we rewrite or redefine the inferior, deprivileged side of that dualism, we cannot correct its devalued status. Instead, we redefine that which is undervalued but retain its devalued status. This particular aspect of attempts to critique hierarchical dualisms like reason and feeling has been reflected in the writings of many feminists, male and female. This paper will show that in cases where women attempt to redefine the dichotomy by revaluing the traditionally feminine (like feelings and emotions) over the traditionally masculine (like reason) their work is often mistakenly criticized for being purely political; conversely, when men attempt to redefine the same dichotomy in an attempt to allow men to “get back in touch with their feelings,” to be nurturers, their work is described in terms of providing a better epistemology. The current literature on masculinity explores alternatives to rewriting or redefining Woman that try to avoid the problem of status remaining with redefinition. This alternative is rewriting or redefining Man. Through redefining Man, one may be able to reconceptualize the privileged side of the hierarchical dualism in such a way that it is no longer privileged. Deprivileging, as well as redefining Man, is argued by theorists of masculinity to be possible because while the devalued status of the inferior side of a hierarchical dualism tends to keep the same status when redefined, it may be possible to redefine the privileged side of the dualism in such a way that it loses its privileged status. Unfortunately, many of these attempts to rewrite or redefine masculinity have detrimental faults of their own. Finally, this paper will discuss more promising possibilities for new definitions of Man, as well as a vision for better interaction between the work of women and men in general. (shrink)

Hearing has traditionally been regarded as the second sense--as somehow less rational and less modern than the first sense, sight. Reason and Resonance explodes this myth by reconstructing the process through which the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality. For the past four hundred years, hearing has been understood as involving the sympathetic resonance between the vibrating air and various parts of the inner ear. But the emergence of resonance as the centerpiece of modern (...) aurality also coincides with the triumph of a new type of epistemology in which the absence of resonance is the very condition of thought. Our mind's relationship to the world is said to rest on distance or, as the very synonym for reason suggests, reflection. Reason and Resonance traces the genealogy of this "intimate animosity" between reason and resonance through a series of interrelated case studies involving a varied cast of otologists, philosophers, physiologists, pamphleteers, and music theorists. Among them are the seventeenth-century architect-zoologist Claude Perrault, who refuted Cartesianism in a book on sound and hearing; the Sturm und Drang poet Wilhelm Heinse and his friend the anatomist Samuel Sömmerring, who believed the ventricular fluid to be the interface between the soul and the auditory nerve; the renowned physiologist Johannes Müller, who invented the concept of "sense energies"; and Müller's most important student, Hermann von Helmholtz, author of the magisterial Sensations of Tone. Erlman also discusses key twentieth-century thinkers of aurality, including Ernst Mach; the communications engineer and proponent of the first nonresonant wave theory of hearing, Georg von Békésy; political activist and philosopher Günther Anders; and Martin Heidegger. (shrink)