From the Introduction: "Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson extend the work begun in the former’s book Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism, by showing that a Quinean understanding of logic as an empirical field implies that logic remains open to revision in light of fundamental shifts in knowledge. Nelson and Nelson point to the revisions in scientific understandings made possible by the incorporation of women and women’s lives as emblematic of the possible ways that feminist thought can provide a deep reworking of the structures of knowledge and thus potentially of logic. Although they are cautious of any conclusions that logic must change, their work offers a theoretical ground from which the effects of feminist theorizing on logic can be usefully explored."

From the Introduction: "Andrea Nye is also concerned with the role of logic in science, linking the adequacy of logic with its applicability in a domain of scientific knowledge. Nye argues that the dominant predicate logic cannot adequately represent the issues surrounding attempts to divide organisms into species. Feminist critiques of the extensional theory of meaning lay the ground for alternative theories of categorization. Without renewed models of categorization, Nye submits, science is in danger of becoming a self-enclosed “logical” system, rather than an instrumental model of reality."

From the Introduction: "Marjorie Hass addresses the limitations of logical concepts, including negation, by illuminating the ongoing critique of these terms in the work of Luce Irigaray. In Hass’s view, Irigaray’s work calls the neutrality of logic into question, suggesting that the standard formalism is capable of expressing only distorted and partial interpretations of negation, identity, and generality. More specifically, in Irigaray’s work, standard symbolic logic is shown to be unable to represent the form of difference proper to sexual difference, the form of identity proper to feminine identity, and the form of generality proper to a feminine generic. Hass interprets and evaluates Irigaray’s critique of logic, arguing that many of Irigaray’s readers have misunderstood its nature and force."

From the Introduction: "Dorothea Olkowski’s chapter offers an analysis of the need to develop a logic of sense. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Olkowski defends formal logic against feminist theorists who have urged that we organize thinking around the principles of embodiment. She warns us against the complete merging of bodily functions and sense-making activities. In Olkowski’s view, feminists need to acknowledge the usefulness of logical analyses at the same time that they must insist on formal systems that reflect and are tempered by human and humane values."

In our philosophical tradition and our wider culture, we tend to think of persons as agents. This agential conception is flattering, but in this paper I will argue that it conceals a more complex truth about what persons are. In 1. I set the issues in context. In 2. I critically explore four features commonly presented as fundamental to personhood in versions of the agential conception: action, capability, choice and independence. In 3. I argue that each of these agential features presupposes a non-agential feature: agency presupposes patiency, capability presupposes incapability, choice presupposes necessity and independence presupposes dependency. In 4. I argue that such non-agential features, as well as being implicit within the agential conception, are as apt to be constitutive of personhood as agential features, and in 5. I conclude.

In The Need for Roots, her most famous book, Weil reflects on the importance of religious and political social structures in the life of the individual. She wrote that one of the basic obligations we have as human beings is to not let another suffer from hunger. Equally as important, however, is our duty towards our community: we may have declared various human rights, but we have overlooked the obligations and this has left us self-righteous and rootless. Published posthumously, The Need for Roots was a direct result of Weil's collaboration with Charles De Gaulle, where Weil set out to address the past and to propose a road map for the future of France after World War II. She painstakingly analyzes the spiritual and ethical milieu that led to France's defeat by the German army, and then addresses these issues with the prospect of eventual French victory.

In this essay, Weil undertakes a meditation on the idea of “reading”, which she thinks can shed new light on a diverse range of conceptual and experiential “mysteries”, especially with respect to our existential responses to the world. A central concern is how we ascribe meaning and respond to phenomena. She argues that, for the most part, our reading of the world and the things in it are immediate, not subject to “interpretation”, at least as this is regularly conceived. Further, Weil says, our readings of the world are invariably tied to particular kinds of valuation, of ethical assessment and orientation, which appear to us as both obvious and immediate. This immediacy of reading, however, does not entail that our readings cannot be changed or challenged—only that such a change or challenge requires a particular kind of labor.

Is logic masculine? Is women's lack of interest in the "hard core" philosophical disciplines of formal logic and semantics symptomatic of an inadequacy linked to sex? Is the failure of women to excel in pure mathematics and mathematical science a function of their inability to think rationally? Andrea Nye undermines the assumptions that inform these questions, assumptions such as: logic is unitary, logic is independenet of concrete human relations, and logic transcends historical circumstances as well as gender. In a series of studies of the logics of historical figures--Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Abelard, Ockham, and Frege--she traces the changing interrelationships between logical innovation and oppressive speech strategies, showing that logic is not transcendent truth but abstract forms of language spoken by men, whether Greek ruling citizens, or scientists.

Is it possible for one and the same person to be a feminist and a logician, or does this entail a psychic rift of such proportions that one is plunged into an endless cycle of self-contradiction? Andrea Nye's book, Words of Power (1990), is an eloquent affirmation of the psychic rift position. In what follows, I shall discuss Nye's proscription of logic as well as her perceived alternatives of a woman's language and reading. This will be followed by a discussion more sharply focused on Nye's feminist response to logic, namely, her claim that feminism and logic are incompatible. I will end by offering a sketch of a class in the life of a feminist teaching logic, a sketch which is both a response to Nye (in Nye's sense of the word) and a counter-example to her thesis that logic is necessarily destructive to any genuine feminist enterprise.