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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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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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Brooke A. Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (review)Philosophy in Review 22 1-3. 2002.
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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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561Parity 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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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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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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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
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56Dummett: philosophy of languagePolity Press. 2001.Dummett's output has been prolific and highly influential, but not always as accessible as it deserves to be. This book sets out to rectify this situation.
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100Was Wittgenstein Frege's heir?Philosophical Quarterly 49 (196): 289-308. 1999.This paper argues that Dummett’s interpretation of the relationship between Frege’s anti-psychologism and Wittgenstein’s doctrine that meaning is use results in a misreading of Frege. It points out that anti-mentalism is a form of anti-psychologism, but that mentalism is not the only version of psycholgism. Thus, while Frege and Wittgenstein are united in their opposition to mentalism, they are not equally opposed to psychologism, and from Frege’s point of view, the doctrine that meaning is use …Read more
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133A Pinch of Salt for FregeSynthese 150 (2): 209-228. 2006.Michael Dummett has argued that a formal semantics for our language is inadequate unless it can be shown to illuminate to our actual practice of speaking and understanding. This paper argues that Frege’s account of the semantics of predicate expressions according to which the reference of a predicate is a concept (a function from objects to truth values) has exactly the required characteristics. The first part of the paper develops a model for understanding the distinction between objects and co…Read more
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191On the Error of Treating Functions as ObjectsAnalysis and Metaphysics 15. 2016.In his late fragment, ‘Sources of Knowledge of Mathematics and Natural Sciences’ Frege laments the tendency to confuse functions with objects and says, ‘It is here that the tendency of language by its use of the definite article to stamp as an object what is a function and hence a non-object, proves itself to be the source of inaccurate and misleading expressions and also of errors of thought. Probably most of the impurities that contaminate the logical source of knowledge have their origins in …Read more
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140The Context Principle and Dummett's Argument for Anti-realismTheoria 71 (2): 92-117. 2005.Dummettian anti-realism–the refusal to endorse bivalence–is generally thought to be associated with idealism This paper argues that this is only true of the position developed by early Dummett. In a later manifestation Dummettian anti-realism is better thought of as providing the logic for anti-realisms of an error theoretic kind. Early on Dummett distinguished deep from shallow arguments for giving up bivalence: deep arguments followed a strong ‘sufficiency’ reading of Frege’s context principle…Read more
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2Marilyn Friedman and Jan Narveson, Political Correctness: For and Against Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 15 (4): 241-243. 1995.
Parkville, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |