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Added by: Tomasz Zyglewicz, Shannon Brick, Michael GreerAbstract: At first glance it might appear that experimental philosophers and feminist philosophers would make good allies. Nonetheless, experimental philosophy has received criticism from feminist fronts, both for its methodology and for some of its guiding assumptions. Adding to this critical literature, I raise questions concerning the ways in which “differences” in intuitions are employed in experimental philosophy. Specifically, I distinguish between two ways in which differences in intuitions might play a role in philosophical practice, one which puts an end to philosophical conversation and the other which provides impetus for beginning one. Insofar as experimental philosophers are engaged in deploying “differences” in intuitions in the former rather than the latter sense, I argue that their approach is antithetical to feminist projects. Moreover, this is even the case when experimental philosophers deploy “differences” in intuitions along lines of gender.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Bart SchultzPublisher's Note: In Pythagorean Women, classical scholar Sarah B. Pomeroy discusses the groundbreaking principles that Pythagoras established for family life in Archaic Greece, such as constituting a single standard of sexual conduct for women and men. Among the Pythagoreans, women played an important role and participated actively in the philosophical life. While Pythagoras encouraged women to be submissive to men, his reasoning was based on the desire to preserve harmony in the home. Pythagorean Women provides English translations of all the earliest extant examples of literary Greek prose by Neopythagorean women, shedding light on their attitudes about marriage, the home, music, and the cosmos. Pomeroy sets the Pythagorean and Neopythagorean women vividly in their historical, ecological, and intellectual contexts, illustrated with original photographs of sites and artifacts known to these women.
Comment: Great work demonstrating how ancient Pythagorean philosophy welcomedwomen philosophers.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Clotilde TorregrossaAbstract: The publication of Arethusa 6 in 1973 inaugurated the serious study of women in antiquity in our time. Classics was one of many disciplines to begin developing a subfield of women's studies in the early 1970s. Since then, has the study of women in antiquity become part of the "mainstream"? In order to answer this question I decided to examine articles and reviews published in current periodicals. I spent one day (October 1, 1990) skimming through the journals on display racks at the Ashmolean and Bodleian Libraries, assuming that they constituted a random sample. I looked at all the journals in Classics, Archaeology, and Ancient History that could conceivably have some material on women in antiquity. I checked only the titles listed in the main index of each journal; book reviews that were not listed in such an index were not noted. My criterion for including an article or review was that it could be of special value to someone teaching a specialised course or doing research on women in antiquity as well as to readers with a more casual interest in the subject. I do not claim any statistical significance for this survey. Nor is it intended to alert readers to a dearth of articles and reviews on ancient women in particular journals; for example, Arethusa frequently publishes work in this field, but I happened to examine a special issue on pastoral. I looked at forty-five journals. Of these, twenty-two did not have an article or review relevant to the study of ancient women. Twenty-three journals contained at least one title and of these Helios had devoted an entire issue to Feminist scholars, including those who are not specialists in classical antiquity, would probably be particularly interested in some of the articles in Helios and in Larissa Bonfante's study of nudity. The vast majority of the publications are traditional historical or literary studies. But I doubt that they would have been so numerous without the inspiration of feminism, however remote from the mind of some of the authors. This little survey confirmed my sense that the study of women has, indeed, become part, albeit a very small part, of the mainstream of Classical Studies.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon FoktAbstract: Recent philosophy of science has witnessed a shift in focus, in that significantly more consideration is given to how scientists employ models. Attending to the role of models in scientific practice leads to new questions about the representational roles of models, the purpose of idealizations, why multiple models are used for the same phenomenon, and many more besides. In this paper, I suggest that these themes resonate with central topics in feminist epistemology, in particular prominent versions of feminist empiricism, and that model-based science and feminist epistemology each has crucial resources to offer the other's project.
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Added by: Sonja Dobroski and Quentin PharrAbstract: Indigenous ethics and feminist care ethics offer a range of related ideas and tools for environmental ethics. These ethics delve into deep connections and moral commitments between nonhumans and humans to guide ethical forms of environmental decision making and environmental science. Indigenous and feminist movements such as the Mother Earth Water Walk and the Green Belt Movement are ongoing examples of the effectiveness of on-the-ground environmental care ethics. Indigenous ethics highlight attentive caring for the intertwined needs of humans and nonhumans within interdependent communities. Feminist environmental care ethics emphasize the importance of empowering communities to care for themselves and the social and ecological communities in which their lives and interests are interwoven. The gendered, feminist, historical, and anticolonial dimensions of care ethics, indigenous ethics, and other related approaches provide rich ground for rethinking and reclaiming the nature and depth of diverse relationships as the fabric of social and ecological being.
Comment: available in this Blueprint
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Added by: Chris Blake-TurnerAbstract: In this article, I argue that (1) transgender adolescents should have the legal right to access puberty-blocking treatment (PBT) without parental approval, and (2) the state has a role to play in publicizing information about gender dysphoria. Not only are transgender children harmed psychologically and physically via lack of access to PBT, but PBT is the established standard of care. Given that we generally think that parental authority should not go so far as to (1) severally and permanently harm a child and (2) prevent a child from access to standard physical care, then it follows that parental authority should not encompass denying gender-dysphoric children access to PBT. Moreover, transgender children without supportive parents cannot be helped without access to health care clinics and counseling to facilitate the transition. Hence there is an additional duty of the state to help facilitate sharing this information with vulnerable teens.
Comment (from this Blueprint): Priest argues that the state should provide puberty-blocking treatment (PBT) for trans youth, even if their parents are not supportive. Priest’s argument is important partly because it avoids the issue of whether adolescents and children can give properly informed consent. This is a point that some of Priest’s critics seem to have missed (see, for example, Laidlaw et al. 2019. “The Right to Best Care for Children Does Not Include the Right to Medical Transition”, and Harris et al. 2019. “Decision Making and the Long-Term Impact of Puberty Blockade in Transgender Children”). Priest’s conclusion is founded instead on a principle of harm avoidance.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon FoktPublisher's Note: Controversies about abortion and women's reproductive technologies often seem to reflect personal experience, religious commitment, or emotional response. Laura M. Purdy believes, however, that coherent ethical principles are implicit in these controversies and that feminist bioethics can help clarify the conflicts of interest which often figure in human reproduction. As she defines the underlying issues, Purdy emphasizes the importance of taking women's interests fully into account. Reproducing Persons first explores the rights and duties connected with conception and pregnancy. Purdy asks whether conceiving a child or taking a pregnancy to term can ever be morally wrong. She challenges the thinking of those who feel the prospect of disability or serious genetic disease should not constrain conception or justify abortion. The essays next look at abortion from a variety of angles. One contends that killing fetuses is not murder; others emphasize the moral importance of access to abortion. Purdy considers the conflicting interests of women and men regarding abortion, and argues against requiring a husband's consent. The book concludes with a consideration of new reproductive technologies and arrangements, including the controversial issue of surrogacy, or contract pregnancy. Throughout, Purdy combines traditional utilitarianism with some of the most powerful insights of contemporary feminist ethics. Her provocative essays create guidelines for approaching new topics and inspire fresh thinking about old ones.
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Added by: Chris Blake-TurnerAbstract: There are some long-standing social issues that imperil Black Americans' relationship with health and healthcare. These issues include racial disparities in health outcomes (Barr 2014), provider bias and racism lessening their access to quality care (Sabin et al. 2009), disproportionate police killings (DeGue, Fowler, and Calkins 2016), and white supremacy and racism which encourage poor health (Williams and Mohammed 2013). Bioethics, comprised of humanities, legal, science, and medical scholars committed to ethical reasoning is prima facie well suited to address these problems and influence solutions in the form of policy and education. Bioethics, however, so far has shown only a minimal commitment to Black racial justice.
Comment (from this Blueprint): In this short, seminal piece, Keisha Ray argues that bioethics needs to address issues of health and well-being of Black individuals. She applies Beauchamp and Childress’s famous four principles of bioethics to a particular issue: the disproportionate maternal mortality rate of Black women in the United States. Ray argues bioethics must incorporate the lens of Black bioethics, if the discipline is to remain relevant.
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Added by: Deryn Mair ThomasAbstract:
A threat to women is obscured when we treat “abortion-as-evacuation” as equivalent to “abortion-as-killing.” This holds only if evacuating a fetus kills it. As technology advances, the equivalence will fail. Any feminist account of abortion that relies on the equivalence leaves moral room for women to be required to give up their fetuses to others when it fails. So an account of the justification of abortion-as-killing is needed that does not depend on the equivalence.
Comment: This text explores a common justification for the permissability of abortion, which the author describes as an equivalence between "abortion-as-killing" and "abortion-as-evacuation". The author also examines a series of dilemmas which arise from traditional pro-choice discussions of abortion (at least at the time of writing), such the two-horned dilemma which appears to trap pro-choice advocates in only two camps: one in which the fetus is morally signficant (and therefore can only be aborted, but not killed), and another in which the fetus is morally negligible (in which case, it does not matter). Reader challenges this dichotomy and aims to show that fetal killing can be justified without claiming that fetuses are negligible by focusing on relationship, in general, and motherhood, in particular. Therefore, the text would be most useful as a primary or supplemental reading in an intermediate or advanced course studying contemporary analytic debates on abortion or feminist thought and critical gender studies.
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Added by: Andrea Blomqvist, Contributed by: IselaPublisher's Note: Human genomes are 99.9 percent identical—with one prominent exception. Instead of a matching pair of X chromosomes, men carry a single X, coupled with a tiny chromosome called the Y. Tracking the emergence of a new and distinctive way of thinking about sex represented by the unalterable, simple, and visually compelling binary of the X and Y chromosomes, Sex Itself examines the interaction between cultural gender norms and genetic theories of sex from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, postgenomic age. Using methods from history, philosophy, and gender studies of science, Sarah S. Richardson uncovers how gender has helped to shape the research practices, questions asked, theories and models, and descriptive language used in sex chromosome research. From the earliest theories of chromosomal sex determination, to the mid-century hypothesis of the aggressive XYY supermale, to the debate about Y chromosome degeneration, to the recent claim that male and female genomes are more different than those of humans and chimpanzees, Richardson shows how cultural gender conceptions influence the genetic science of sex. Richardson shows how sexual science of the past continues to resonate, in ways both subtle and explicit, in contemporary research on the genetics of sex and gender. With the completion of the Human Genome Project, genes and chromosomes are moving to the center of the biology of sex. Sex Itself offers a compelling argument for the importance of ongoing critical dialogue on how cultural conceptions of gender operate within the science of sex.
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Added by: Carl FoxContent: A relatively short but very illuminating discussion of the application of two key metrics (social primary goods and capabilities) to the issue of gender injustice in non-ideal circumstances.
Comment: Offers a clear account of gender and what falls under 'gender justice'. Easy to read with some useful exposition but a reader would benefit from some background knowledge. Probably best as a specialised or further reading.
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Added by: Deryn Mair ThomasAbstract:
This article addresses the question whether a basic income will be a just social policy for women. The implementation of a basic income will have different effects for different groups of women, some of them clearly positive, some of them negative. The real issues that concern feminist critics of a basic income are the gender-related constraints on choices and the current gender division of labour, which are arguably both playing at the disadvantage of women. It is argued that those issues are not adequately addressed by a basic income proposal alone, and therefore basic income has to be part of a larger packet of social policy measures if it wants to maximise real freedom for all.
Comment: This paper explores questions as the intersection of feminism and the basic income literature, offering a take on one of the classic feminist critiques of basic income: namely, that the purported conditions of freedom that basic income is supposed to bring about are only really available to members of the population who do not belong to an oppressed or marginalised class. For those that do belong to such groups - in this case, women - the availability of such conditions of freedom will be highly dependent on existing gendered divisions of labour and restrictions on choice. As such, the author argues that proposals for basic income, if they are serious about ensuring real freedom for all, must take this into consideration. The author also challenges existing (at the time of writing) contradictions in the claims being made about the effect of basic income policy on women, as opposed to men. The paper would therefore be interesting to discuss in relation to feminist politics or a survey of the basic income literature, especially assigned in tandem with some of the foundational literature, such as Phillipe Van Parijs' work.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirAbstract: We apply Carol Gilligan's distinction between a "male" mode of moral reasoning, focussed on justice, and a "female" mode, focussed on caring, to the reading of literature. Martha Nussbaum suggests that certain novels are works of moral philosophy. We argue that what Nussbaum sees as the special ethical contribution of such novels is in fact training in the stereotypically female mode of moral concern. We show this kind of training is appropriate to all readers of these novels, not just to women. Finally, we explore what else is involved in distinctively feminist readings of traditional novels
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Added by: Alison StonePublisher's Note: The American idealist movement started in St. Louis, Missouri in 1858, becoming more influential as women joined and influenced its development. Susan Elizabeth Blow was well known as an educator and pedagogical theorist who founded the first public kindergarten program in America (1873-1884). Anna C. Brackett was a feminist and pedagogical theorist and the first female principal of a secondary school (St. Louis Normal School, 1863-72). Grace C. Bibb was a feminist literary critic and the first female dean at the University of Missouri, Columbia (1878-84). American idealism took on a new form in the 1880s with the founding of the Concord School of Philosophy in Massachusetts. Ellen M. Mitchell participated in the movement in both St. Louis and Concord. She was one of the first women to teach philosophy at a co-educational college (University of Denver, 1890-92). Lucia Ames Mead, Marietta Kies, and Eliza Sunderland joined the movement in Concord. Lucia Ames Mead became a chief pacifist theorist in the early twentieth century. Kies and Sunderland were among the first women to earn the Ph.D. in philosophy (University of Michigan, 1891, 1892). Kies wrote on political altruism and shared with Mitchell the distinction of teaching at a coeducational institution (Butler College, 1896-99). These were the first American women as a group to plunge into philosophy proper, bridging those years between the amateur, paraprofessional and professional academic philosopher. Dorothy Rogers's new book at last gives them the attention they deserve.
Comment: A book covering many US 19th-century women philosophers, mostly influenced by Hegel to some extent. Could be used as supplementary reading on a history of philosophy course if it covers the nineteenth century, so that students are aware there were women active in philosophy then.
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Added by: Alison StoneAbstract: Recent research on women philosophers has led to more discussion of the merits of many previously forgotten women in the past several years. Yet due to the fact that a thinker’s significance and influence are historical phenomena, women remain relatively absent in 'mainstream' discussions of philosophy. This paper focuses on several successful academic women in American philosophy and takes notice of how they succeeded in their own era. Special attention is given to three important academic women philosophers: Mary Whiton Calkins, Ellen Bliss Talbot, and Marietta Kies.
Comment: Focusing on three nineteenth-century women philosophers, Mary Whiton Calkins, Ellen Bliss Talbot, and Marietta Kies. Could be used as supplementary reading on a history of philosophy course if it covers the nineteenth century.
Comment (from this Blueprint): Pohlhaus begins by presenting her argument as a critical response to both Buckwalter and Stich's controversial article, and Antony's (2012) reply to it. What follows is an argument about the way x-phi practicioners have failed to fully incorporate feminist insights about the significance of intuition difference. For Pohlhaus, a discovery that some one or some groups has a different intuitive response to one's own is the jumping off point for a potentially transformative conversation, rather than a result that either puts to rest a philosophical concept, or needs to be explained away.