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136Prostitution, Exploitation and TabooPhilosophy 64 (250). 1989.It is so generally accepted that prostitution is immoral, that this is one of the least discussed of all ethical issues. Few serious philosophical treatments of the subject have been published. Of these, at least one, Lars Ericsson's, ‘Charges against Prostitution’, throws into stark relief the apparent inconsistency of our community attitudes. For it demonstrates that, from the point of view of the simple free market liberalism, to which many subscribe, there is nothing immoral about prostituti…Read more
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1Will the real Enlightenment historian please stand up? Catharine Macaulay versus David HumeIn Stephen Buckle Craig Taylor (ed.), Hume and the Enlightenment, Pickering & Chatto. 2011.Argues that on an interpretation of the Enlightenment which emphasises its radical potential and importance for the development of democracy Catharine Macaulay should be recognised as a more centrally Enlightenment historian than David Hume.
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15The woman of reason: feminism, humanism, and political thoughtContinuum. 1995.This is a timely re-appraisal of feminist political thinkers and their male contemporaries, providing a re-evaluation of feminist humanism.
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48Psychologism and anti-realismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (4). 1986.This Article does not have an abstract
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98Freud, wollstonecraft, and ecofeminismEnvironmental Ethics 16 (2): 117-134. 1994.I examine recent arguments to the effect that there are significant logical, conceptual, historical, or psychosexual connections between the subordination of women and the subordination of nature and argue that they are all problematic. Although there are important connections between women’s emancipation and the achievement of important environmental goals, they are practical connections rather than conceptual ones
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12Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women, 1400-1800 (edited book)Springer. 2007.This volume challenges the view that women have not contributed to the historical development of political ideas, and highlights the depth and complexity of women’s political thought in the centuries prior to the French Revolution. From the late medieval period to the enlightenment, a significant number of European women wrote works dealing with themes of political significance. The essays in this collection examine their writings with particular reference to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and to…Read more
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88Was Searle's Descriptivism Refuted?Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 17 (1): 109-13. 1998.It is generally thought that Searle 's cluster theory of the sense of a proper name was soundly refuted by Kripke in Naming and Necessity. This paper challenges this widespread belief and argues that the observations made by Kripke do not show that Searle 's version of descriptivism is false. Indeed, charitably interpreted, Searle 's theory retains considerable plausibility
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From Le Miroir des dames to Le Livre des trois vertusIn Karen Green & Mews Constant J. (eds.), Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1550, Springer. 2011.
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47Rousseau's womenInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 4 (1). 1996.Abstract Feminists have interpreted Rousseau's attitudes to women as characteristic of a patriarchal ideology in which passion, nature and love are associated with the feminine and repressed in favour of masculine reason, culture and justice. Yet this reading does not cohere with Rousseau's adulation of nature, nor with the repression of writing and culture in favour of natural speech which Derrida finds in his texts. This paper uses Rousseau's accounts of his personal experiences to resolve thi…Read more
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17Logical renovations: restoring Frege's functionsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4): 315-334. 1992.Argues that because Frege's semantic ideas were introduced into analytic philosophy of language by Russell and Carnap the general understanding of his distinction between sense and reference has been severely misrepresented.
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Brooke A. Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (review)Philosophy in Review 22 1-3. 2002.
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96The Passions and the Imagination in Wollstonecraft's Theory of Moral JudgementUtilitas 9 (3): 271. 1997.According to Wollstonecraft. This suggests that for her ethical judgement is based on reason, and so she is an ethical cognitivist. This impression is upheld by the fact that she clearly believes in the existence of ethical truth and has little sympathy with subjectivism. At the same time, she places a great deal of importance on the role of the emotions in ethical judgement. This raises the question how the emotions can be relevant if ethics consists in a realm of truths, discoverable by reason…Read more
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What Were the Ladies in the City of Ladies Reading? The Libraries of Christine de Pizan’s ContemporariesMedievalia Et Humanistica 36 77-100. 2010.
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12Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1550 (edited book)Springer. 2011.This book locates Christine de Pizan's argument that women are virtuous members of the political community within the context of earlier discussions of the relative virtues of men and women.
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562Parity and Procedural JusticeEssays in Philosophy 7 (1): 4. 2006.In this paper I briefly set out Susan Moller Okin’s liberal feminist position and then rehearse a number of criticisms of Okin which together suggest that dismantling the gender system and adopting the principle of androgyny would not be compatible with liberalism. This incompatibility appears to vindicate an extreme feminist critique of liberalism. I argue that nevertheless a liberal feminism is possible. The liberal feminist ought to adopt the principle of parity, that is, guaranteed equal rep…Read more
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65Is a logic for belief sentences possible?Philosophical Studies 47 (1). 1985.In this paper I distinguish normative and descriptive reasons for attempting to construct a logic for belief sentences, and argue that because the interpretation of the content of an attribution of belief is context sensitive and ambiguous, no simple logic is adequate.
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12Dummett's Ought from IsDialectica 45 (1): 67-82. 1991.SummaryDummett has offered an argument which begins with certain criteria of adequacy for any account of the way in which communication functions and which ends with normative and revisionary conclusions concerning our logical practice. This argument, which hinges on Dummett's criticisms of holism, is inadequate as it stands, for the holist can give an adequate description of the functioning of communication. There is a plausible defence of intuitionism to be extracted from Dummett's writing, bu…Read more
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54A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800Cambridge University Press. 2014.During the eighteenth century, elite women participated in the philosophical, scientific, and political controversies that resulted in the overthrow of monarchy, the reconceptualisation of marriage, and the emergence of modern, democratic institutions. In this comprehensive study, Karen Green outlines and discusses the ideas and arguments of these women, exploring the development of their distinctive and contrasting political positions, and their engagement with the works of political thinkers s…Read more
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50Women's Writing and the Early Modern Genre WarsHypatia 28 (3): 499-515. 2013.This paper explores two phases of the early modern genre wars. The first was fought by Marie de Gournay, in her “Preface” to Montaigne's Essays, on behalf of her adoptive father and in defense of his naked and masculine prose. The second was fought half a century later by Nicholas Boileau in opposition to Gournay's feminizing successor, Madeleine de Scudéry. In this debate Gournay's position is egalitarian, whereas Scudéry's approximates to a feminism of difference. It is claimed that both femal…Read more
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Isolated individual or member of a Feminine Courtly Community? Christine de Pizan’s milieuIn Constant J. Mews & Crossley John (eds.), Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe 1100-1500, Brepols Publishers. 2011.
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83Rawls, Women and the Priority of LibertyAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (S1): 26-36. 1986.
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36Madeleine de Scudéry on love and the emergence of the "private sphere"History of Political Thought 30 (2): 272-85. 2009.Madeleine de Scudery played a previously unrecognized part in the development of modern ideas of married friendship, and the eighteenth-century version of the distinction between the public and private spheres, through the influence of her novels on the political views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Her development of the notions of tender friendship and tender love between the sexes helped change the way in which married love was conceptualized. She transformed the chivalric idea that women rule men…Read more
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160Frege on Existence and Non‐existenceTheoria 81 (4): 293-310. 2015.Despite its importance for early analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege's account of existence statements, according to which they classify concepts, has been thought to succumb to a number of well-worn criticisms. This article does two things. First, it argues that, by remaining faithful to the letter of Frege's claim that concepts are functions, the Fregean account can be saved from many of the standard criticisms. Second, it examines the problem that Frege's account fails to generalize to cases w…Read more
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59Women, Hegel, and Recognition in The Second SexHypatia 25 (2). 2010.This paper develops a new account of Beauvoir's "Hegelianism" and argues that the strand of contemporary interpretation of Beauvoir that seeks to represent her thought in isolation from that of Jean-Paul Sartre constitutes a betrayal of the philosophy of recognition that she denves from Hegel. It underscores the extent to which Beauvoir influenced Sartre's Being and Nothingness and shows that Sartre and Beauvoir both adapted Hegel's ideas and agreed in rejecting his optimism
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29Val PlumwoodAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2). 2008.This Article does not have an abstract
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39Reason and feeling: Resisting the dichotomyAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (4). 1993.It is argued that it is not enough for feminist standpoint theory to argue that a feminine standpoint is better than a masculine one because of its genesis in female psycho-sexuality, it needs to show that its content is actually objectively more accurate. It then argues that historical feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, have in fact tended to adopt a justice perspective, grounded in reason, which is objectively of greater value than that developed by many male authors, because these histor…Read more
Parkville, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |