Christine Overall

In the philosophy of mysticism, an important and foundational problem concerns the nature of mystical experience. The problem is both significant and basic because an understanding of the nature of mystical experience is a necessary precondition for the evaluation of its epistemological, ontological, and ethical significance, and will in fact influence that evaluation. In other words, our ideas about the nature of mystical experience are premises for our conclusions about the role of mystical experience in human knowledge, about the ‘object ’, if any, of mystical experience, and about the value and moral implications of mystical experience

A serious moral weakness of reproductive ‘surrogacy’ is that it can be harmful to the children who are created. This article presents a proposal for mitigating this weakness. Currently, the practice of commercial ‘surrogacy’ operates only in the interests of the adults involved , not in the interests of the child who is created. Whether ‘surrogacy’ is seen as the purchase of a baby, the purchase of parental rights, or the purchase of reproductive labor, all three views share the same significant flaws. They endorse the transfer, for a fee, of the infant from the woman who gestated it to those who commissioned it, but without justifying such a transfer; they fail to demonstrate that the commissioners have any entitlement to the infant, or, for that matter, suitability to be the infant's parents; and they fail to take any notice of the infant's needs, interests, and wellbeing. A mere genetic connection is not enough to establish that the commissioners are entitled to receive the baby or that they are competent to raise it. Their good intentions, however caring, are not enough. Therefore, just as in the practice of adoption, there should be a formal institutionalized system for screening and licensing the prospective social parents, which would make the infant's needs, interests, and wellbeing paramount. I reply to several potential objections to this proposal, including the objection that genetic parents who raise their own child are not screened and licensed

Our universities are the locus of ongoing debates over the politics of gender, of class, of disadvantage and disability—and over the issue of “political correctness.” In _A Feminist I_ Christine Overall offers wide-ranging reflections from a first-person point of view on these issues, and on the politics of the modern university itself. In doing so she continually returns to underlying epistemological concerns. What are our assumptions about the ways in which knowledge is constructed? To what degree are our perceptions shaped by our social roles and identities? In the past generation feminists have led the way in recognising the importance of such questions, and recognising too the ways in which personal experience may be an invaluable reference point in academic theory and practice. But reliance on personal experience is fraught with problems; how is one to deal with tensions between the autobiographical and the analytic? This book points the way to resolving some of those tensions, and to fruitfully sustaining others. It is a book of considerable insight, warm humanity, and genuine importance.