In this article, Droege defends a nonreductive account of materialism, which in her view, can be endorsed by feminists since it considers the dynamic relations among mind, body, and environment. Droege shows how “new materialism” or nonreductive materialism preserves the role of social interactions in explaining the constitution of mental states, while at the same time, also considers the role of the physical. Droege argues that ignoring the physical is a mistake that some feminists commit that prevents us from offering a full picture of the nature of social constructs, such as “gender”. In the materialist view that Droege supports, physical causation is seen as “indeterminate, constantly in flux, and potentially both disruptive and supportive of human projects”. Droege closes the article by showing how feminist methods, by taking an interdisciplinary approach, can provide a more nuanced picture of the nature of the mind, one that considers both the role of the physical and social world.
Introduction: What Is Feminist Philosophy of Mind?
McWeeny and Maitra motivate the adoption of a feminist perspective in contemporary debates within the philosophy of mind to further illuminate the nature of conscious experience. They argue that the adoption of a feminist perspective leads to the implementation of a more nuanced investigation of the mind, one that avoids a conceptualization of the mind as a “uniform” concept across beings or groups, and instead, considers the role of the body and different societal contexts. In philosophy of mind, when thinking about “the mind”, we are usually prompted to think about the mind as a universal thing, as something that we all (humans) have. Moreover, when exploring and investigating what makes the mind to be what it is ( i.e. which are the intrinsic and special features or consciousness), traditionally, we have been encouraged to think about certain properties of the mind that are universal and can be attributed to anyone. McWeeny and Maitra argue that this mainstream methodology in philosophy of mind is a simplistic one. Not only it overlooks the many inter and intrapersonal nuances of each individual’s “mind”, but also the impact of social constructs, such as gender, race, and class, in our understanding of what the mind is, and who has a mind.
Against Physicalism
This is a revision of Scheman’s seminal paper originally published in 2000 which provides one of the first pieces showing how mainstream philosophy of mind can benefit from the insertion of feminist thought in its practices. In this article, Scheman criticises mainstream physicalism as ignoring the social context in its explanations of the mental. According to Scheman, this dismissal is a mistake since “beliefs, desires, emotions, and other phenomena of our mental lives are the particulars that they are because they are socially meaningful […]”.
Personal identity and transsexual narratives
In this article, Gonzalez-Arnal challenges Susan James’ embodied conception of personal identity by analysing transexual narratives. According to Gonzalez-Arnal, James’ account cannot fully capture the experience of transexual persons since they describe the continuity of their personal (but also gender) identity despite significant changes in their bodies. Gonzalez-Arnal examines how other two theories of personal identity, a reductionist and a dualist one, might provide a better picture of the transexual narratives. After concluding that none the reductionist nor the dualist account does much better than an embodied view of personal identity, Gonzalez-Arnal proposes an improvement to James’ view that accommodates transexual experiences, namely, acknowledging the integration of the “inner” self and other’s perception of one’s body in shaping one’s “outer self”.
Is the first-person perspective gendered?
The notion of gender identity has been characterized as “one’s sense of oneself as male, female or transgender.” To have a sense of oneself at all, one must have a robust first-person perspective – a capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself in the first person. A robust first-person perspective requires that one have a language complex enough to express thoughts like “I wonder how I am going to die.” Since a robust first-person perspective requires that one have a language, and languages embed whole worldviews, the question arises: in learning a language, does the robust first-person perspective itself introduce gender stereotypes? Without denying that we unconsciously acquire attitudes about gender that shape our normative expectations, this chapter argues that one’s gender identity is not just attributable to the biases implicit in the language one speaks. So the robust first-person perspective itself is not responsible for which gender-specific attitudes a person acquires.
Outliving oneself: trauma, memory, and personal identity
“How can one die in Vietnam or fail to survive a death camp and still live to tell one’s story? How does a life- threatening event come to be experienced as self- annihilating? And what self is it who remembers having had this experience?” By examining the lived experience of survivors from traumatic events, Brison sets to explore what exactly “the self” is. According to Brison, the self is “both autonomous and socially dependent”, which makes it prone to be disrupted by traumatic events, but also, can be healed through safe and healthy relationships.
Feminism in philosophy of mind: The question of personal identity
In this essay, James challenges current psychological theories on personal identity – theories arguing that psychological continuity is a criterion for personal identity. James offers a feminist examination of popular thought experiments aimed at showing that one’s person’s character and memories could be transplanted into someone’s else body, thus, preserving a person’s survival. According to James, those thought experiments don’t take into account the role of the body in constructing one’s identity and character, as well as influencing one’s memories.
Overcoming Hermeneutical Injustice in Mental Health: A Role for Critical Phenomenology
The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, Rituanno argues that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, Rituanno argues that issues of unintelligibility can be addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. She concludes by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility.
Enactivism and Gender Performativity
The enactivist paradigm of embodied cognition represents a powerful alternative to Cartesian and cognitivist approaches in the philosophy of mind. On this view, the body plays a constitutive role in the integrated functioning of perception, affect, and other cognitive processes. Enactivism shares many of the central themes of feminist theory, and is extended to apply to social and political concerns. Following a discussion of the key components of the enactive approach, we apply it to explain more complex social manifestations, specifically gender performance and its reproduction through time. By employing Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, we demonstrate how gender, as one marker of social identity and difference, emerges through processes of embodied and embedded sense-making as articulated by enactive theory. We argue that more attention to embodied and embedded values allows for the interruption and transformation of histories of oppressive practices and opens the door to more liberatory possibilities.
Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception
This paper considers the ontological implications of encountering varying levels of intelligibility when one traverses social structures, such as when one immigrates to a new culture or works in a place with people of a different economic class than one’s own. This paper terms this phenomenon “world-travelling,” which the paper understands as the shift in self-experience that occurs when an oppressed person moves from an environment where she is readily perceived as an active subject to one where she is perceived as a passive instrument of others’ wills and desires. Such a situation opens on an ontological paradox because it seems that the same person is capable of possessing two contradictory attributes at the same time. The chapter explains how this paradoxical situation could obtain by arguing that attributes of consciousness are world-dependent. It concludes that the self is actually “a plurality of selves” and that the structure of subjectivity is neither unitary, universal, nor ahistorical.