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Added by: Sonja Dobroski and Quentin PharrAbstract:
Lecture as part of the Social Justice Institute Noted Scholars Lecture Series, co-presented by the Ecologies of Social Difference Research Network at the University of British Columbia.Tanesini, Alessandra. “Calm down, dear”: intellectual arrogance, silencing and ignorance2016, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90(1): 71-92.-
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Added by: Rie Izuka
Abstract: In this paper I provide an account of two forms of intellectual arrogance which cause the epistemic practices of conversational turn-taking and assertion to malfunction. I detail some of the ethical and epistemic harms generated by intellectual arrogance, and explain its role in fostering the intellectual vices of timidity and servility in other agents. Finally, I show that arrogance produces ignorance by silencing others (both preventing them from speaking and causing their assertions to misfire) and by fostering self-delusion in the arrogant themselves.Comment: This article examines intellectual vices of arrogance, and its counterpart: servility. The author explains how the former vice develops the latter: culpably breaking of the norms of turn-taking of conversation locutionarily silences other conversants, and such disrespectful behavior would lead conversants to fall into a vice of intellectual servility. This paper works well in teaching individual vice to undergrads, it does not require any prior knowledge of virtue epistemology, hence, perfect for introductory course of virtue epistemology.
Tanesini, Alessandra. An introduction to Feminist Epistemologies1998, Wiley-Blackwell-
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Added by: Giada Fratantonio
Publisher's Note: Could gender, race, and sexuality be relevant to knowledge? Although their positions and arguments differ in several respects, feminists have asserted that science, knowledge, and rationality cannot be severed from their social, political, and cultural aspects. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to feminist epistemologies situated at the intersection of philosophical, sociological, and cultural investigations of knowledge. It provides several critiques of more traditional approaches, and explores the alternatives proposed by feminists. In particular, this book contains extensive discussions of topics such as objectivity, rationality, power, and subject. Drawing on a variety of sources, the author also argues that when knowledge is conceived in terms of practices, it becomes possible to see it as normative and socially constituted."
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Tilton, Emily, Jenkins Ichikawa, Jonathan. Not What I Agreed To: Content and Consent2021, Ethics, 132(1): 127-154.-
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Added by: Emma Holmes, David MacDonald, Yichi Zhang, and Samuel Dando-MooreAbstract:
Deception sometimes results in nonconsensual sex. A recent body of literature diagnoses such violations as invalidating consent: the agreement is not morally transformative, which is why the sexual contact is a rights violation. We pursue a different explanation for the wrongs in question: there is valid consent, but it is not consent to the sex act that happened. Semantic conventions play a key role in distinguishing deceptions that result in nonconsensual sex (like stealth condom removal) from those that don’t (like white lies). Our framework is also applicable to more controversial cases, like those implicated in so-called “gender fraud” complaints.Comment (from this Blueprint): Tilton and Ichikawa attempt to work out what goes wrong in certain deception cases but not in others. This is useful as a reply to Dougherty's argument that sex from deception is always morally serious and it engages with the issues Fischel raises around gender deception.
Tyson, Sarah. Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better2018, Columbia University Press.-
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Added by: Rebecca BuxtonPublisher’s Note:
Philosophy has not just excluded women. It has also been shaped by the exclusion of women. As the field grapples with the reality that sexism is a central problem not just for the demographics of the field but also for how philosophy is practiced, many philosophers have begun to rethink the canon. Yet attempts to broaden European and Anglophone philosophy to include more women in the discipline’s history or to acknowledge alternative traditions will not suffice as long as exclusionary norms remain in place. In Where Are the Women?, Sarah Tyson makes a powerful case for how redressing women’s exclusion can make philosophy better. She argues that engagements with historical thinkers typically afforded little authority can transform the field, outlining strategies based on the work of three influential theorists: Genevieve Lloyd, Luce Irigaray, and Michèle Le Doeuff. Following from the possibilities they open up, at once literary, linguistic, psychological, and political, Tyson reclaims two passionate nineteenth-century texts―the Declaration of Sentiments from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and Sojourner Truth’s speech at the 1851 Akron, Ohio, Women’s Convention―showing how the demands for equality, rights, and recognition sought in the early women’s movement still pose quandaries for contemporary philosophy, feminism, and politics. Where Are the Women? challenges us to confront the reality that women’s exclusion from philosophy has been an ongoing project and to become more critical both of how we see existing injustices and of how we address them.Comment (from this Blueprint): In her book, Tyson discusses why it is valuable recognise the contributions of women philosophers, arguing that their lost contributions have the potential to transform the current field. This opens up interesting questions about the value of representation and how we ought to approach campaigning for the inclusion of women.
van Brabant, Petra, Prinz, Jesse. Why Do Porn Films Suck?2012, in Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, ed. by Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press).-
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Added by: Simon Fokt
Content: The authors present ‘the paradox of porn’: pornography seems to score very highly on various evaluative criteria which make art good (e.g. ability to elicit strong emotions), and has features similar to great art (e.g. ‘Brechtian’ acting, idealisation of the human body), yet is rarely consider art. They proceed to discuss some arguments for the exclusivist thesis, suggesting that they ‘reflect a limited knowledge of or experience with pornography’ (168). A review of various types of non-mainstream porn leads them to claim that the division between pornography and art is a false dichotomy. Section 3 revisits the paradox, offering an analysis of various reasons which could lead to so little porn being (considered) art. After rejecting most of the common arguments, the authors suggest that a great majority of porn is not art for purely contingent reasons: very few pornographers even try to pursue that possibility. But pornography has the potential to be great art, and section 4 explores the ways in which it could.Comment: This text is a fairly easy and a very entertaining read, and is presented in a form of an intriguing and unexpected paradox. This makes it an excellent introductory reading which can really interest students in the subject. It also paints a very varied and diverse picture of pornography, reaching far beyond the mainstream images most often discussed in the literature, and likely best known to students.
Van Dyke, Christina. Eating as a Gendered Act: Christianity, Feminism, and Reclaiming the Body2008, in K. J. Clark (ed.) Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition. Peterborough: Broadview Press: 475-489.-
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Added by: Emily Paul
Abstract: In current society, eating is most definitely a gendered act: that is, what we eat and how we eat it factors in both the construction and the performance of gender. Furthermore, eating is a gendered act with consequences that go far beyond whether one orders a steak or a salad for dinner. In the first half of this paper, I identify the dominant myths surrounding both female and male eating, and I show that those myths contribute in important ways to cultural constructions of male and female appetites more generally speaking. In the second half, I argue that the Christian church should share feminism's perception of these current cultural myths as fundamentally disordered, and I claim that the Christian traditions of fasting and feasting present us with a concrete means to counter those damaging conceptions and reclaim a healthy attitude toward our hunger.Comment: A great reading for a feminist philosophy of religion course, or alternatively for a general philosophy of religion course as a way to introduce feminist philosophy of religion - this text could also be a further reading for the latter. I think that this reading would incite a great deal of interest, and provoke fruitful discussion. Would be potentially even more useful for a course on religious aesthetics.
Veltman, Andrea. The Sisyphean Torture of Housework: Simone de Beauvoir and Inequitable Divisions of Domestic Work in Marriage2004, Hypatia 19 (3):121-143-
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Added by: Deryn Mair ThomasAbstract:
This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir's account of marriage in The Second Sex and argues that Beauvoir's dichotomy between transcendence and immanence can provide an illuminating critique of continuing gender inequities in marriage and divisions of domestic work. Beauvoir's existentialist ethics not only establishes a moral wrong in marriages in which wives perform the second shift of household labor but also supports the need to transform existing normative expectations surrounding wives and domestic work.
Comment: This paper revisits the contemporary literature on the gendered divisions of household labour and argues for a new ethical framework based on Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of marriage in terms of transcendence and immanence. According to Beauvoir, 'marriage is oppressive and involves a moral wrong when it facilitates the transcendence of one spouse by relegating the other to the round of relatively uncreative chores needed to maintain life in the home.' Veltman also argues that, contrary to a common reading of de Beauvoir's account, de Beauvoir does not reject marriage per se, but in fact leaves open the opportunity for reform, such that a marriage 'has the potential to support equitable unions between free beings.' For this reason, the paper may be useful as specialised or further reading for courses interested in contemporary feminist critiques, the work of Simone de Beauvoir, or more broadly, 20th Century feminism. In addition, it also offers an interesting discussion of housework and domestic labor which may prove useful in the context of courses examining work and gendered divisions of labour. It would also be well paired with the work of Hannah Arendy, and another of Veltman's essays, "Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on Labor."
Vince, Rosa. Testimonial Smothering and Pornography2018, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4(3)-
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Added by: Andrea Blomqvist, Contributed by: Rosa Vince
Abstract: This paper defends the claim that there are two previously underexplored ways in which pornography silences women. These ways that pornography silences are (1) the smothering of refusal and (2) the smothering of sexual assault reports, and they can be explained in part through Kristie Dotson’s account of “testimonial smothering.” Unlike the work of other writers in the pornography as silencing literature, my discussion of silenced refusal of sex deals with the cases where women have said yes to sex but would have said no if they had felt that they could have. I show that this, and cases where women do not report sexual assault, count as testimonial smothering through identifying rape myths as a species of “pernicious ignorance.” I make the connection to pornography in presenting evidence that pornography contributes to acceptance of rape myths. This takes us to my general conclusion: Dotson’s account of testimonial smothering gives us a way in which pornography contributes to the silencing of women, by silencing their refusal of sex and their reports of sexual assault.Comment: This paper can be used as a stand-alone argument for how some pornography might silence women, or can be viewed as part of the literature on silencing and pornography; as an alternative strategy to Rae Langton's approach, using Kristie Dotson's work instead of J L Austin's. It can also be used as an example of how Kristie Dotson's work on Testimonial Injustice has broad application.
Waithe, Mary Ellen. Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy2020, In Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir and Ruth Edith Hagengruber (eds.), Methodological Reflections on Women’s Contribution and Influence in the History of Philosophy, Springer International Publishing.-
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Added by: Rebecca BuxtonAbstract:
In “Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy” I explore several questions: What does it mean for our understanding of the history of philosophy that women philosophers have been left out and are now being retrieved? What kind of a methodology of the history of philosophy does the recovery of women philosophers imply? Whether and how excluded women philosophers have been included in philosophy? Whether and how feminist philosophy and the history of women philosophers are related? I also explore the questions “Are there any themes or arguments that are common to many women philosophers?” and “Does inclusion of women in the canon require a reconfiguration of philosophical inquiry?” I argue that it is either ineptness or simple bigotry that led most historians of philosophy to intentionally omit women’s contributions from their histories and that such failure replicated itself in the university curricula of recent centuries and can be remedied by suspending for the next two centuries the teaching of men’s contributions to the discipline and teaching works by women only. As an alternative to this drastic and undoubtedly unpopular solution, I propose expanding the length and number of courses in the philosophy curriculum to include discussion of women’s contributions.Comment (from this Blueprint): In this scathing chapter, Waithe argues that people who have left women out of the history of philosophy are either inempt of bigoted. Rather than being an accidental fact of women's general exclusion, she argues that women philosophers have been ignored intentionally.
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TallBear, Kim. Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sexuality
2016, Lecture. The Ecologies of Social Difference Research Network. University of British Columbia.
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available in this Blueprint