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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Karen Green
Publisher's Note: This ground-breaking book surveys the history of women's political thought in Europe from the late medieval period to the early modern era. The authors examine women's ideas about topics such as the basis of political authority, the best form of political organisation, justifications of obedience and resistance, and concepts of liberty, toleration, sociability, equality, and self-preservation. Women's ideas concerning relations between the sexes are discussed in tandem with their broader political outlooks; and the authors demonstrate that the development of a distinctively sexual politics is reflected in women's critiques of marriage, the double standard, and women's exclusion from government. Women writers are also shown to be indebted to the ancient idea of political virtue, and to be acutely aware of being part of a long tradition of female political commentary. This work will be of tremendous interest to political philosophers, historians of ideas, and feminist scholars alike.Narayan, Uma. Undoing the ‘Package Picture’ of Cultures2004, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25 (4): 1083-1086.-
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Added by: Andrea Blomqvist, Contributed by: Nadia Mehdi
Abstract: Many feminists of color have demonstrated the need to take into account differences among women to avoid hegemonic gender-essentialist analyses that represent the problems and interests of privileged women as paradigmatic. As feminist agendas become global, there is growing feminist concern to consider national and cultural differences among women. However, in attempting to take seriously these cultural differences, many feminists risk replacing gender-essentialist analyses with culturally essentialist analyses that replicate problematic colonialist notions about the cultural differences between "Western culture" and "non-Western cultures" and the women who inhabit them (Narayan 1998). Seemingly universal essentialist generalizations about "all women" are replaced by culture-specific essentialist generalizations that depend on totalizing categories such as "Western culture,' "non-Western cultures," "Indian women," and "Muslim women." The picture of the "cultures" attributed to these groups of women remains fundamentally essentialist, depicting as homogeneous groups of heterogeneous peoples whose values, ways of life, and political commitments are internally diverge.Comment: This text can be used to teach about the pitfalls of imperialist feminism such as Susan M. Okin's as well as gender and cultural essentialism. It would also be excellent on any courses that attempt to discuss cultural value or cultural heritage as it complicates the idea of cultures as discrete, bounded and unified entities.
Heal, Jane. Mental disorder and the value(s) of ‘autonomy’2012, In Autonomy and Mental Disorder, Lubomira Radoilska (ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 3-25.-
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Added by: Jamie RobertsonAbstract:
Summary (from Introduction of Autonomy and Mental Disorder, Radoilska ed.): In 'Mental disorder and the value(s) of autonomy', Jane Heal identifies and critically examines a form of thought which is implicit in discussions about what we, as a society, owe to people with mental disorder. This form of thought builds upon intuitions which link respect for a person with respect for a person's autonomy. In light of these intuitions, the issue of how to treat a person with mental disorder may seem to revolve around the question whether or not this person has the capacity for autonomy. However, Heal argues, inquiries that share this logical form are methodologically inappropriate and potentially unhelpful in answering either of the questions they put together: what we owe to people with mental disorder and what is involved in autonomy as a capacity. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, the apparent consensus about autonomy as a capacity for self-determination that ought to be protected from interference by a corresponding right to self-determination is too shallow to ground a coherent course of action in terms of respect for autonomy. Even if we work with the assumption that autonomy is part of the Enlightenment project, we face an important dilemma since we have to choose between a Kantian or rationality oriented and a Millian or well-being oriented take on the nature and significance of autonomy. Secondly, even if we were to reach a substantive consensus on the concept of autonomy, it would arguably require an intricate array of mental capacities, outside the reach of at least some people with mental disorder. Getting clearer on what autonomy is will not help us find out what it means to treat these people respectfully.Comment: This text would be a good candidate for inclusion in a course about autonomy, philosophy of disability, or the ethics or political philosophy of mental health or aging (due to discussion of dementia). If assigned as part of a course on autonomy, students will benefit from considering Heal's approach to breaking down the logical components of the concept and her nuanced discussion of the limitations of autonomy as a moral principle for understanding our obligations toward people with mental disorders. This second element is the central question of the paper and would be of interest when examining disability or mental health from a philosophical perspective.
Kittay, Eva Feder. When Caring Is Just and Justice is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation2001, Public Culture 13(3): 557-580-
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Added by: Jamie Robertson
Summary: In this paper, Kittay advances a conception of justice that 'begins with an acknowledgement of dependency and seeks to organise society so that our well-being is not inversely related to our need for care or to care' (576). Her motivation for advancing this view is that ideals of citizenship in liberal society, including independence and productivity, perpetuate the victimisation, social exclusion, or stigmatisation of people with mental retardation and their carers. This is because liberal definitions of personhood do not provide resources for responding in a morally adequate way to the mutual dependence of people with mental retardation and their carers/advocates. People with mental retardation are inescapably dependent because of their central need for attentive care. And, carers' work is so deeply other-directed that they also do not fit the liberal model of the rationally self-interested actor. Thus, both carers and their charges are vulnerable and need to be advocated for so that they can be seen as having important entitlements to public resources and claims to justice. To this end, Kittay proposes a conception of personhood that is based on relationships. Although those with mental retardation are inherently dependent, they still count as persons because they are able to participate in relationships. This makes them entitled to the satisfactions that make life worth living. To achieve the twin goal of achieving justice for familial or paid carers, Kittay advances a new principle of justice, doulia, which calls for larger society to support those who care for the inexorably dependent. Kittay takes her relational conception of personhood and her principle of doulia to ensure that appropriate forms of social organization exist to support all those who become dependent. She claims her view is needed because principles of charity and beneficence are not adequate since they are consistent with the continued stigmatization of mental retardation and care work, and ground only low-priority social obligations.Comment: This paper, with it's helpful discussions of the elements of the liberal tradition with which Kittay specifically takes issue and the inadequacies of the Americans with Disabilities Act, would be an appropriate reading for courses about the philosophy of disability or about liberal political theory.
Detlefsen, Karen. Custom Freedom and Equality: Mary Astell on marriage and women’s education2016, In Penny Weiss & Alice Sowaal (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell. Pennsylvania State University Press, 74-92.-
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Added by: Benjamin Goldberg
Abstract: Whatever may be said about contemporary feminists' evaluation of Descartes' role in the history of feminism, Mary Astell herself believed that Descartes' philosophy held tremendous promise for women. His urging all people to eschew the tyranny of custom and authority in order to uncover the knowledge that could be found in each one of our unsexed souls potentially offered women a great deal of intellectual and personal freedom and power. Certainly Astell often read Descartes in this way, and Astell herself has been interpreted as a feminist - indeed, as the first English feminist. But a close look at Astell's and Descartes' theories of reason, and the role of authority in knowledge formation as well as in their philosophies of education, show that there are subtle yet crucial divergences in their thought - divergences which force us to temper our evaluation of Astell as a feminist. My first task is to evaluate Astell's views on custom and authority in knowledge formation and education by comparing her ideas with those of Descartes. While it is true that Astell seems to share Descartes' wariness of custom and authority, a careful reading of her work shows that the wariness extends only as far as the tyranny of custom over individual intellectual development. It does not extend to a wariness about social and institutional customs and authority (including, perhaps most crucially, the institution of marriage as we see in her Reflection on Marriage). The reason for this is that Astell's driving goal is to help women to come to know God's plan for women - both in their roles as human and in their roles as women. According to Astell, while it is true that, as individuals, women must develop their rational capacities to the fullest in order to honor God and his plan for women as human, as members of social institutions, including the institution of marriage, women must subordinate themselves to men, including their husbands, in this case so as to honor God and his plan for women as women. Once we understand the theological underpinnings of her equivocal reaction to authority and custom, we can see that Astell may be considered a feminist in a very tempered way. My second task is to use these initial conclusions to re-read her proposal for single-sexed education that we find in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. It is true that Astell encourages women to join single-sexed educational institutions for the unique and empowering friendships that women can develop in such institutions. Still, my argument continues, the development of such friendships is not entirely an end in itself. Rather, Astell encourages women to develop such friendships such that they can re-enter the broader world armed with the tools that will help them endure burdensome features of the lives that await them in the world, including their lives as subordinated wives - burdens that Astell does not, in principle, challenge.Comment: This is a useful paper for understanding how an early modern woman (Astell) understood the implications of Descartes' work for women, on the subject of marriage. It would be very useful in undergraduate courses that explore the social implications of early modern philosophy, as well as more advanced courses on early modern philosophy more generally.
Suchon, Gabrielle. A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings2010, University of Chicago Press.-
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Added by: Francesca Bruno
Publisher's Note: During the oppressive reign of Louis XIV, Gabrielle Suchon (1632-1703) was the most forceful female voice in France, advocating women's freedom and self-determination, access to knowledge, and assertion of authority. This volume collects Suchon's writing from two works - Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693) and On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen; or, Life without Commitments (1700) - and demonstrates her to be an original philosophical and moral thinker and writer. Suchon argues that both women and men have inherently similar intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual capacities, which entitle them equally to essentially human prerogatives, and she displays her breadth of knowledge as she harnesses evidence from biblical, classical, patristic, and contemporary secular sources to bolster her claim. Forgotten over the centuries, these writings have been gaining increasing attention from feminist historians, students of philosophy, and scholars of seventeenth-century French literature and culture. This translation, from Domna C. Stanton and Rebecca M. Wilkin, marks the first time these works will appear in English.Comment: This volume could be assigned in an early modern (survey) course together with other texts by women philosophers of this time, such as Mary Astell. Suchon's prose is long-winded but clear. There are a number of tensions in the text between (some of) Suchon's ideas, which offer a good opportunity for discussion with students.
Broad, Jacqueline, Karen Detlefsen. (eds.) Women and Liberty, 1600-1800: Philosophical Essays2017, Oxford University Press.-
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Added by: Francesca Bruno
Publisher's Note: This book addresses the theme of liberty as it is found in the writing of women philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or as it is theorized with respect to women and their lives. It covers both theoretical and practical philosophy, with chapters grappling with problems in the metaphysics of free will (both human and God's), the liberty (or lack thereof) of women in their moral, personal lives as well as their social-political, public lives, and the interactions between the metaphysical and normative issues. The chapters draw upon writing of both women and men, and notably, upon a wide range of genres, including more standard philosophical treatises as well as polemical texts, poetry, plays, and other forms of fiction. As such, this book alerts the reader to the wide range of conceptions of what counts as a philosophical text in the early modern period. Several chapters also grapple with the relation between early modern and contemporary ways of thinking about the theme of women and liberty, thus urging the reader to appreciate the continuing importance of these earlier philosophers in the history of philosophy and of feminism. Ultimately, the chapters in this text show how crucial it is to recover the too-long forgotten views of female and women-friendly male philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for in the process of recovering these voices, our understanding of philosophy in the early modern period is not only expanded, but also significantly altered toward a more accurate history of our discipline.Comment: This volume covers ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious notions of liberty, including chapters on women's ideas about the metaphysics of free will and chapters examining the topic of women's freedom (or lack thereof) in their moral and personal lives. Some of the papers in this collection could be assigned individually in an undergraduate early modern survey course; or it could be one of the main texts for a more advanced (undergraduate or graduate) course on the topic of liberty/freedom, from a variety of philosophical perspectives (ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious).
O'Neill, Onora. Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics2002, Cambridge University Press.-
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Added by: Chris Howard, Contributed by: Simon Fokt
Publisher's Note: Onora O'Neill suggests that the conceptions of individual autonomy (so widely relied on in bioethics) are philosophically and ethically inadequate; they undermine rather than support relationships based on trust. Her arguments are illustrated by issues raised by such practices as the use of genetic information by the police, research using human tissues, new reproductive technologies, and media practices for reporting on science, medicine, and technology. The study appeals to a wide range of readers in ethics, bioethics, and related disciplines.Comment: Parts of this book are an excellent supplement to units on autonomy and informed consent in an intermediate-advanced level medical ethics course. In particular, chapters 1, 2, and 4 would be excellent additions to a unit on autonomy, and chapter 7 would be a similarly excellent addition to a unit on informed consent.
Todd, Loretta. Notes on Appropriation1990, Parallelogramme 16(1): 24-33.-
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Added by: Erich Hatala Matthes
Summary: Todd (Métis) situates contemporary acts of cultural appropriation in the colonial appropriation of indigenous land. She offers a normative definition of cultural appropriation according to which it is understood as the opposite of cultural autonomy. In the course of her discussion, she responds to a number of defenses of cultural appropriation that, she argues, fail to recognize the asymmetries of power in which appropriation from indigenous communities is embedded.Comment: This is an excellent text to use in order to present students with a conception of the wrong of cultural appropriation that is firmly rooted in the context of colonial power dynamics. It is short, and can be usefully compared and contrasted with the arguments presented by James O. Young in "Profound Offense and Cultural Appropriation.".
Coombe, Rosemary J.. The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity: Native Claims in the Cultural Appropriation Controversy.1993, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 6(2): 249-285.-
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Added by: Erich Hatala Matthes
Abstract: The West has created categories of property, including intellectual property, which divides peoples and things according to the same colonizing discourses of possessive individualism that historically disentitled and disenfranchised Native peoples in North America. These categories are often presented as one or both of neutral and natural, and often racialized. The commodification and removal of land from people’s social relations which inform Western valuations of cultural value and human beings living in communities represents only one particular, partial way of categorizing the world. Legal and cultural manifestations of authorship, culture, and property are contingent upon Enlightenment and Romantic notions built upon a colonial foundation. I will argue that the law rips apart what First Nations peoples view as integrally and relationally joined, but traditional Western understandings of culture, identity, and property are provoked, challenged, and undermined by the concept of Aboriginal Title in a fashion that is both necessary and long overdue.Comment: In this wide-ranging essay, Coombe situates debates about cultural appropriation in the context of colonial power dynamics. She discusses both appropriation of styles and stories as well as alienation of material cultural property. In particular, she criticizes the appeal to Western conceptions of property in these debates, and questions whether Native identity and autonomy can be appropriately protected by subsuming Native intangible cultural property claims under Western frameworks for intellectual property. This is a long and challenging essay, best used for more advanced courses. Alternative texts that capture some of the ideas here include Loretta Todd's "Notes on Appropriation" (on which Coombe draws), or, for a text that situates some of these ideas in the literature on epistemic injustice, see Erich Hatala Matthes, "Cultural Appropriation without Cultural Essentialism?".
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Broad, Jacqueline, Karen Green. A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700
2009, Cambridge University Press
Comment: Offers an overview of women's works advocating for the spiritual and political equality of women and men from Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies to Mary Astell's Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Embeds these works within the wider traditions of political philosophy and in particular debates about virtue, liberty, religious toleration, equality, and good government.