Abstract: Biological knowledge does not fit the image of science that philosophers have developed. Many argue that biology has no laws. Here I criticize standard normative accounts of law and…
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Publisher’s note: Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, ‘essential’ notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category…
Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification
Publisher’s note: Rae Langton here draws together her ground-breaking and contentious work on pornography and objectification. She shows how women come to be objectified — made subordinate and treated as…
Can it be Rational to Have Faith?
Abstract: This paper provides an account of what it is to have faith in a proposition p, in both religious and mundane contexts. It is argued that faith in p…
The Language Situation in Africa Today
…various authorities, aid organisations and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) in their projects and campaigns. Of the latter, 41 languages are widely used as “lingua franca” for inter-ethnic, regional and/or international…
Different Voices, Perfect Storms, and Asking Grandma What She Thinks
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…
Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game
…in the social science literature. Consider, for example, this description of an early experiment, from a time that pre-dates contemporary political debate. Keywords: Pornography, conversational score, illocutionary acts Language: English…
Princess Elisabeth and the Mind-Body Problem
…the body and the body affects the mind. It is unsurprising, then, that the mind – body problem was first articulated as a response to René Descartes’ dualistic philosophy […]…
In Defence of Different Voices
Louise Antony draws a now well-known distinction between two explanatory models for researching and addressing the issue of women’s underrepresentation in philosophy – the ‘Different Voices’ (DV) and ‘Perfect Storm’…