Cheshire Calhoun

Can one theorize the lesbian within a feminist frame? I argue that a difference sensitive feminist frame closets lesbians because (1) heterosexist oppression has been under-theorized and thus gender analyses fail to intersect with sexual orientation analyses, (2) feminist values and goals have worked against representing lesbian difference from heterosexual women, and (3) difference sensitive feminism requires that lesbians be representable as women with a different sexuality and not as a “third sex”, not-women, not-men, i.e., not through the very image through which lesbians historically were made conceivable.

Because it is significantly unclear what ‘meaningful’ does or should pick out when applied to a life, any account of meaningful living will be constructive and not merely clarificatory. Where in our conceptual geography is ‘meaningful’ best located? What conceptual work do we want the concept to do? What I call agent-independent and agent-independent-plus conceptions of meaningfulness locate ‘meaningful’ within the conceptual geography of agent-independent evaluative standards and assign ‘meaningful’ the work of commending lives. I argue that the not wholly welcome implications of these more dominant approaches to meaningfulness make it plausible to locate ‘meaningful’ on an alternative conceptual geography — that of agents as end-setters and of agent-dependent value assessments — and to assign it the work of picking out lives whose time-expenditures are intelligible to the agent. I respond to the challenge confronting any subjectivist conception of meaningfulness that it is overly permissive.

This volume draws together important selections from the rich history of theories and debates about emotion. Utilizing sources from a variety of subject areas including philosophy, psychology, and biology, the editors provide an illuminating look at the "affective" side of psychology and philosophy from the perspective of the world's great thinkers. Part One features classic readings from Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume. Part Two, entitled "The Meeting of Philosophy and Psychology," samples the theories of thinkers such as Darwin, James, and Freud. The third section presents some of the extensive work on emotion that has been done by European philosophers over the past century, and the final section comprises essays from modern British and American philosophers.

Setting the Moral Compass brings together the (largely unpublished) work of nineteen women moral philosophers whose powerful and innovative work has contributed to the "re-setting of the compass" of moral philosophy over the past two decades. The contributors, who include many of the top names in this field, tackle several wide-ranging projects: they develop an ethics for ordinary life and vulnerable persons; they examine the question of what we ought to do for each other; they highlight the moral significance of inhabiting a shared social world; they reveal the complexities of moral negotiations; and finally they show us the place of emotion in moral life.