Alison Stone

This article provides an interpretation of the ecophenomenological dimension of Luce Irigaray's work. It shows that Irigaray builds upon Heidegger's recovery of the ancient sense of nature as physis, self-emergence into presence. But, against Heidegger, Irigaray insists that self-emergence is a material process undergone by fluid elements, such as air and water, of which the world is basically composed. This article shows that this “elemental materialist” position need not conflict with modern science. However, the article criticises Irigaray's claim that men and women inhabit radically different sexuate worlds. Although this claim has some phenomenological basis, ultimately it is undercut by Irigaray's own elemental materialism, which implies that sexuate difference colours our perception but does not cleave it down a radical difference in kind. We can therefore accept and develop Irigaray's contribution to ecophenomenology without her insistence on radical sexuate duality.

In this paper I contribute to the recovery of women in the history of philosophy by giving the first modern-day philosophical account of the ideas on aesthetics and ethics of Anna Jameson (1794–1860). Although Jameson was massive in her time, she wrote in a place and period, nineteenth-century Britain, and on an area, aesthetics, that the recovery effort has hardly reached yet. Throughout her work Jameson argued that aesthetics and ethics were very closely connected. Here I focus on how she made that connection in her 1832 work _Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical_. Looking at Shakespeare’s female characters, Jameson argued that they provide moral examples of various sorts: role models, warnings, or a mixture of the two. The characters only provide these examples because they are rounded, psychologically complete individuals who are therefore in a certain sense real. In addition, because they are complete, the characters are aesthetic wholes, and art-works in turn are aesthetic wholes just when they depict characters as aesthetic wholes. The consequence for Jameson is that art-works can only be aesthetically good – in virtue of being wholes – if they are also morally good – in presenting characters that serve as moral examples. Published on 2023-03-21 09:06:33.

This article contributes to recognizing and recovering women’s voices in the history of aesthetics by examining the aesthetic theory put forward in the 1860s by the Anglo-Irish philosopher and feminist Frances Power Cobbe. Cobbe addressed aesthetics and gender, maintaining that there are female geniuses. She addressed art and morality, arguing that art should always aim to express moral truth, and that artworks that express morally good thoughts poorly are artistically better than works that express morally bad thoughts well. She then modified her stance to argue that beauty contains but does not reduce to goodness. Cobbe also developed a comprehensive account of the arts, their relative merits, and the criteria for evaluating them. Her account had problems; nonetheless, it was ambitious, original, and interesting, and Cobbe deserves to be recognized as a woman who made significant interventions in the history of aesthetics.

The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers, and debates in feminist philosophy. Fifty-six chapters, written by an international team of contributors specifically for the Companion, are organized into five sections: Engaging the Past; Mind, Body, and World; Knowledge, Language, and Science; Intersections; Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. The volume provides a mutually enriching representation of the several philosophical traditions that contribute to feminist philosophy. It also foregrounds issues of global concern and scope; shows how feminist theory meshes with rich theoretical approaches that start from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality, disabilities, and other axes of identity and oppression; and highlights the interdisciplinarity of feminist philosophy and the ways that it both critiques and contributes to the whole range of subfields within philosophy.

This article puts forward a philosophical interpretation of Bettina von Arnim's epistolary bookDie Günderode, in the following stages. First I situate von Arnim's work in relation to women's participation in early German Romanticism and idealism. The ideal ofSymphilosophie, which was integral to Romantic epistemology, created possibilities for women to participate in philosophical discussion, albeit not on equal terms with men. This suggested that perhapsSymphilosophiebetween women could be more equal and reciprocal. However, interpreters have considered theSym-in Günderrode and von Arnim'sSymphilosophiemore than the-philosophie, whereas here I foregroundDie Günderode's rich philosophical content. I trace the stages in the unfolding dialogue between Günderrode and von Arnim and identify von Arnim's philosophical standpoint as it emerges from this dialogue. For Günderrode, finite beings are attracted together and can only fully unite by dying and superseding their boundaries. This feeds into a gigantic cosmic process through which the earth spiritualizes itself, progressively transcending its own materiality. Von Arnim likewise thinks that all finite beings are dynamically interconnected within the earth's creative process. But, unlike Günderrode, von Arnim thinks that finite beings can realize their interconnectedness within life without needing to die, which means in turn that material nature can rise into successive levels of spirit without its materiality having to be superseded. This metaphysical difference orchestrates many other philosophical disagreements between the two women. I then conclude that on balance, and with significant qualifications,Die Günderodeembodies a successfulSymphilosophiebetween women, but that von Arnim is simultaneously pointing out the fragility ofSymphilosophie. The more independence dialogue partners have, the more liable they are to move away in new directions and abandon or outgrow the conversation, just as Günderrode turns away from von Arnim by the end of the book.

This chapter introduces Beauvoir's conception of motherhood in The Second Sex. Beauvoir sets out to demystify motherhood by presenting women's experiences of pregnancy and mothering in all their difficulty, complexity, and ambivalence. However, Beauvoir works with a contrast between transcendence and immanence which inclines her to interpret pregnancy and maternity in terms of immanence (i.e. unfreedom). This chapter identifies alternative lines of thought in Beauvoir's work which portray maternity more positively: as disclosing our fundamental ambiguity, the bodily roots of free human agency, and the constitutive role of relationships with others in human existence.

Frances Power Cobbe led the Victorian movement against vivisection. Cobbe is often remembered for her animal welfare campaigning, but it is rarely recognized that she approached animal welfare as a moral philosopher. In this article, I examine the philosophical basis of Cobbe's antivivisectionism. I concentrate on her 1875 article “The Moral Aspects of Vivisection,” in which Cobbe first locates vivisection within the historical movement of Western civilization and the tendency for science to supersede religion and then endeavors to refute the defenses of vivisection one by one. I emphasize the philosophical considerations that led Cobbe to oppose animal experimentation on a reasoned basis.

Argues that affirming the irreducible differences between men and women can lead to more transformative politics than the struggle for abstract equality between the sexes. In The Symbolic Order of the Mother Luisa Muraro identifies the bond between mother and child as ontologically fundamental to the development of culture and politics, and therefore as key to achieving truly emancipatory political change. Both corporeal development and language acquisition, which are the sources of all thinking, begin in this relationship. However, Western civilization has been defined by men, and Muraro recalls the admiration and envy she felt for the great philosophers as she strove to become one herself, as well as the desire for independence that opposed her to her mother. This conflict between philosophy and culture on the one hand and the relationship with the mother on the other constitutes the root of patriarchy’s symbolic disorder, which blocks women’s (and men’s) access to genuine freedom. Muraro appeals to the feminist practice of gratitude to the mother and the recognition of her authority as a model of unconditional nurture and support that must be restored. This, she argues, is the symbolic order of the mother that must overcome the disorder of patriarchy. The mediating power of the mother tongue constitutes a symbolic order that comes before all others, for both women and men. Luisa Muraro is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Verona, Italy. Francesca Novello is an instructor at the University of Oklahoma. Timothy S. Murphy is Houston-Truax-Wentz Professor and Regents Professor of English at Oklahoma State University.

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) came to fame in 1798 with the first volume of her Plays on the Passions, which included her theoretical account of drama, including tragedy. This article reconstructs Baillie's theory of tragedy and shows how the theory informs the design of the Plays on the Passions. For Baillie, all human beings have powerful and dangerous passions that we need to learn to regulate. Tragedy can help with this and can serve an educative purpose by presenting us with narratives in which the protagonists repeatedly fail to check the growth of a particular passion, such as jealousy or hatred. We witness this passion gain more and more hold over the character's mind until they are destroyed. This offers a warning and motivates us to watch out for the growth of our own passions and keep them in check. Baillie's theory of tragedy is original and combines a moral orientation, a voluntarist belief in free will, and optimism about the human condition. For her, the sufferings undergone by tragic characters could have been avoided had the characters made better choices. Thus the message of tragedy is not that suffering is inescapable but that suffering can be minimized if we cultivate self-knowledge and emotional self-control.

This article provides the first detailed modern examination of Julia Wedgwood’s interventions in the Victorian debate about the origin of language. Wedgwood wanted to understand language, consistently with Darwin’s theory of evolution, as having evolved gradually out of other forms of animal behaviour. She focused specifically on imitative behaviours, siding with the imitative or “bow-wow” theory of language which her father Hensleigh Wedgwood also championed. She opposed the conceptualist or “ding-dong” theory of Max Müller, on which language is the “Rubicon” that radically separates humans from animals. I argue that Julia Wedgwood was right to emphasise that the human capacity for language is continuous with animal behaviours, though she was wrong to reduce this continuity to a single behaviour, imitation. Nevertheless, her language essays remain significant as an early attempt to forge a Darwinian account of language, and they illuminate the fact that women were able to take part in Victorian philosophical debates, including on an abstract topic such as philosophy of language. The essays also provide entry into Wedgwood’s thought and work more broadly, which are unjustly neglected and deserve to be recovered.