Diversity Reading List

This reading group will follow four sessions of the blueprint ‘Class, Status, and Aesthetics’. The sessions will be run by Quentin Pharr (independent researcher) and Clotilde Torregrossa (Uppsala University), who also designed the blueprint, on the following dates:

• Session 1 – Thursday November 5th 2026, 3 – 4 pm (CET). 
  • Readings:
    • King, Alex. High Art, Low Art, and the Status of Aesthetics (blog post)
    • Eaton, A.W.. A Lady in the Street But a Freak in the Bed: On the Distinction Between Erotic Art And Pornography.
• Session 2 – Thursday November 12th 2026, 3 – 4 pm (CET). 
  • Readings: 
    • Excerpts from Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste;
    • Excerpts from hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. 
• Session 3 – Thursday November 19th 2026, 3 – 4 pm (CET). 
  • Readings: 
    • Excerpts from hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics;
    • Excerpts from Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions.
• Session 4 – Thursday November 26th 2026, 3 – 4 pm (CET).
  • Readings:
    • Starr, Ellen Gates. ‘Art and Labour’;
    • Du Bois, W.E.B.. ‘Criteria of Negro Art’`.

You can sign up here. We will share the readings and the link to join the meetings with you.

This reading group will follow four sessions of the blueprint ‘Feminist Logic’ designed by Franci Mangravity and Viviane Fairbank. The sessions will be run by Ravi Thakral (University of Nevada) on the following dates:

• Session 1 – Friday September 4th 2026, 9 – 10 am (PDT)//6 – 7 pm (CET).
  • Readings:  
    • Helen Longino – Circles of Reason: Some Feminist Reflections on Reason and Rationality (2005, Episteme)
    • Andrea Nye – Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (1990, Routledge) – Introduction.
• Session 2 – Friday September 11th 2026, 9 – 10 am (PDT)//6 – 7 pm (CET).
  • Reading: Val Plumwood – The Politics of Reason: Towards a Feminist Logic (1993, Australasian Journal of Philosophy) 
• Session 3 – Friday September 18th 2026, 9 – 10 am (PDT)//6 – 7 pm (CET).
  • Readings:
    • Marjorie Hass – Can There Be a Feminist Logic? (1999, In Is Feminist Philosophy Philosophy? (ed. E. Bianchi), Northwestern University Press)
    • Gillian Russell – From Anti-Exceptionalism to Feminist Logic (2024, Hypatia)
• Session 4 – Friday September 25th 2026, 9 – 10 am (PDT)//6 – 7 pm (CET).
  • Reading: Catharine Saint-Croix – Privilege and Position: Formal Tools for Standpoint Epistemology (2020, Res Philosophica)  

You can sign up here. We will share the readings and the link to join the meetings with you.

Session organised in collaboration with the British Postgraduate Philosophy Association.

Abstract

In her Principles, Anne Conway states that “shape is the instrument of life” and that “shape serves the operations of life” – a bold thesis about the relationship between her vitalism and her conception of figure. She is generally clear that creatures have figure, by which (I argue) she means that they are characterized by internal and external determinations on their extension which give them geometrical shape. However, there are some fascinating features of Conway’s conception of figure that follow from her commitments to vitalism, body-spirit monism, and creaturely impenetrability. In this paper, I offer an account of Conway’s conception of figure and argue that she inverts an agreeable mechanical thesis by injecting vitalism as a basic feature of her ontology. Conway holds that a creature’s shape is partially the result of its strongest spiritual parts affecting its bodily parts in accordance with the image or idea internal to the spiritual parts. In other words, Conway holds that a creature’s shape is to a great extent self-determined, according to a vital principle internal to that creature. Thus, Conway takes mechanical figure to be dependent on life; this is a surprising inversion of the widely-held Cartesian mechanistic view. Among philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza, explanations of the features of things in the natural world were held to be mechanical in nature. Thus, vital functions of living things were thought to be explainable as the results of mechanical features of bodies, like figure and motion. For Conway, however, it is figure that is explainable in terms of life, not the other way around.

Further, there is a question of the ultimate origin of figure in Conway’s system. God, who is explicitly conceived by Conway as having no figure whatsoever, is named as the ultimate source of figure in creatures. Given a plausible framework for understanding causation in Conway as a species of emanation, according to which causes and effects must be relevantly similar to one another, the source of figure in the system seems somewhat mysterious: how can God cause creaturely figure if God has no figure? I offer an account of figure in Conway that respects her commitments about emanative causality, divine simplicity, and creaturely impenetrability. This account has surprising implications for a recently popular debate in Conway scholarship about classifying her monism. If the account is right, then it provides some evidence that we should think of Conway as a priority monist with regard to creatures.

The aims of this paper are thus roughly threefold: (i) to explore and alleviate an apparent tension between Conway’s commitment to God’s being both figureless and the source of creaturely figure, (ii) to shed light on Conway’s metaphysics of figure as an innovative and highly original account, and (iii) to show that these considerations can help scholars to better understand Conway’s monism.

Biography

David Harmon is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and the University of Stirling. His research is in metaphysics, mostly in the early modern period and with a particular focus on Spinoza and Conway, as well as other expansions on and responses to Cartesianism. Of special interest in his work is the interaction between metaphysics and physics in the 17th century. David also has research interests in contemporary metaphysics.

Abstract 

Constance Naden (1858–1889) was a philosopher, poet, and student of science. While she most frequently appears on literature syllabi, there is an increasing body of scholarship concerned with her philosophical works. Certainly, her philosophical writings (underpinned by her scientific studies) and identity as a freethinker were the elements of her life’s work that she prioritized. While Naden initially propounded the theory of Hylo-Idealism – an idealist-materialist philosophy that rejected dualism – she became increasingly uneasy with dogmatic advocacy of a single creed and, influenced by Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy and the radical secularist movement, came to write more broadly about ethics and the social nature of humanity. Her mature writings focused upon Cosmic Identity, a relational system that found unity in diversity and prioritized mutual understanding over individualism. This talk will introduce Naden’s ideas, outlining her cumulative philosophical practice through which she synthesized diverse knowledge to develop a secular theory of life and mind.

Biography

Clare Stainthorp is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the nineteenth-century freethought movement and its periodicals. She is the author of Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet (2019) and co-editor (with Naomi Hetherington) of the Routledge resource volume Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society: Disbelief and New Beliefs (2020).