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3906Essentialism and anti-essentialism in feminist philosophyJournal of Moral Philosophy 1 (2): 135-153. 2004.This article revisits the ethical and political questions raised by feminist debates over essentialism, the belief that there are properties essential to women and which all women share. Feminists’ widespread rejection of essentialism has threatened to undermine feminist politics. Re-evaluating two responses to this problem—‘strategic’ essentialism and Iris Marion Young’s idea that women are an internally diverse ‘series’—I argue that both unsatisfactorily retain essentialism as a descriptive cl…Read more
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2535Natality and mortality: rethinking death with CavareroContinental Philosophy Review 43 (3): 353-372. 2010.In this article I rethink death and mortality on the basis of birth and natality, drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero. She understands birth to be the corporeal event whereby a unique person emerges from the mother’s body into the common world. On this basis Cavarero reconceives death as consisting in bodily dissolution and re-integration into cosmic life. This impersonal conception of death coheres badly with her view that birth is never exclusively material…Read more
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2024Frances Power Cobbe: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Feminist Philosopher (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2022.This volume brings together essential writings by the unjustly neglected nineteenth-century philosopher Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904). A prominent ethicist, feminist, champion of animal welfare, and critic of Darwinism and atheism, Cobbe was well known and highly regarded in the Victorian era. This collection of her work introduces contemporary readers to Cobbe and shows how her thought developed over time, beginning in 1855 with her Essay on Intuitive Morals, in which she set out her duty-bas…Read more
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1939Adorno, Hegel, and DialecticBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (6): 1118-1141. 2014.This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative . Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges whe…Read more
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1890Friedrich Schlegel, Romanticism, and the Re‐enchantment of NatureInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 48 (1). 2005.In this paper I reconstruct Schlegel's idea that romantic poetry can re-enchant nature in a way that is uniquely compatible with modernity's epistemic and political values of criticism, self-criticism, and freedom. I trace several stages in Schlegel's early thinking concerning nature. First, he criticises modern culture for its analytic, reflective form of rationality which encourages a disenchanting view of nature. Second, he re-evaluates this modern form of rationality as making possible an ir…Read more
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1620Against Matricide: Rethinking Subjectivity and the Maternal BodyHypatia 27 (1): 118-138. 2012.In this article I critically re-examine Julia Kristeva's view that becoming a speaking subject requires psychical matricide: violent separation from the maternal body. I propose an alternative, non-matricidal conception of subjectivity, in part by drawing out anti-matricidal strands in Kristeva's own thought, including her view that early mother–child relations are triangular. Whereas she understands this triangle in terms of a first imaginary father, I re-interpret this triangle using Donald Wi…Read more
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1222Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal SubjectivityRoutledge. 2011.In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive to regain th…Read more
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1211Alienation from Nature and Early German RomanticismEthical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (1): 41-54. 2014.In this article I ask how fruitful the concept of alienation can be for thinking critically about the nature and causes of the contemporary environmental crisis. The concept of alienation enables us to claim that modern human beings have become alienated or estranged from nature and need to become reconciled with it. Yet reconciliation has often been understood—notably by Hegel and Marx—as the state of being ‘at-home-with-oneself-in-the-world’, in the name of which we are entitled, perhaps even …Read more
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1123Towards a Genealogical Feminism: A Reading of Judith Butler's Political ThoughtContemporary Political Theory 4 (1): 4-24. 2005.Judith Butler's contribution to feminist political thought is usually approached in terms of her concept of performativity, according to which gender exists only insofar as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed, creating permanent possibilities for performing gender in new and transgressive ways. In this paper, I argue that Butler's politics of performativity is more fundamentally grounded in the concept of genealogy, which she adapts from Foucault and, ultimately, Nietzsche. Butler u…Read more
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799Hegel on women, law, and contractIn Maria Drakopoulou (ed.), Feminist Encounters with Legal Philosophy, . 2014.
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764Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century BritainOxford University Press. 2023.Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besan…Read more
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631Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and ChodorowphiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 1 (1): 45-64. 2011.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and ChodorowAlison StoneGod the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divin…Read more
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507The Romantic AbsoluteBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (3): 497-517. 2011.In this article I argue that the Early German Romantics understand the absolute, or being, to be an infinite whole encompassing all the things of the world and all their causal relations. The Romantics argue that we strive endlessly to know this whole but only acquire an expanding, increasingly systematic body of knowledge about finite things, a system of knowledge which can never be completed. We strive to know the whole, the Romantics claim, because we have an original feeling of it that motiv…Read more
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325An Introduction to Feminist PhilosophyPolity. 2007.This is the first book to offer a systematic account of feminist philosophy as a distinctive field of philosophy. The book introduces key issues and debates in feminist philosophy including: the nature of sex, gender, and the body; the relation between gender, sexuality, and sexual difference; whether there is anything that all women have in common; and the nature of birth and its centrality to human existence. An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy shows how feminist thinking on these and relat…Read more
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209Frances Power CobbeCambridge University Press. 2022.This Element introduces the philosophy of Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), a very well-known moral theorist, advocate of animal welfare and women's rights, and critic of Darwinism and atheism in the Victorian era. After locating Cobbe's achievements within nineteenth-century British culture, this Element examines her duty-based moral theory of the 1850s and then her 1860s accounts of duties to animals, women's rights, and the mind and unconscious thought. From the 1870s, in critical response to …Read more
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194Irigaray and Hölderlin on the relation between nature and cultureContinental Philosophy Review 36 (4): 415-432. 2003.This paper explores the compatibility of Luce Irigaray's recent insistence on the need to revalue nature, and to recognise culture's natural roots, with her earlier advocacy of social transformation towards a culture of sexual difference. Prima facie, there is tension between Irigaray's political imperatives, for if culture really is continuous with nature, this implies that our existing, non-sexuate, culture is naturally grounded and unchallengeable. To dissolve this tension, Irigaray must conc…Read more
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192Luce Irigaray and the philosophy of sexual differenceCambridge University Press. 2006.Alison Stone offers a feminist defence of the idea that sexual difference is natural, providing a new interpretation of the later philosophy of Luce Irigaray. She defends Irigaray's unique form of essentialism and her rethinking of the relationship between nature and culture, showing how Irigaray's ideas can be reconciled with Judith Butler's performative conception of gender, through rethinking sexual difference in relation to German Romantic philosophies of nature. This is the first sustained …Read more
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189Adorno and the disenchantment of naturePhilosophy and Social Criticism 32 (2): 231-253. 2006.In this article I re-examine Adorno's and Horkheimer's account of the disenchantment of nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment . I argue that they identify disenchantment as a historical process whereby we have come to find natural things meaningless and completely intelligible. However, Adorno and Horkheimer believe that modernity not only rests on disenchantment but also tends to re-enchant nature, because it encourages us to think that its institutions derive from, and are anticipated and prefi…Read more
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128Hegel and ColonialismHegel Bulletin 41 (2): 247-270. 2020.This article explores the implications of Hegel’s Philosophy of World History with respect to colonialism. For Hegel, freedom can be recognized and practised only in classical, Christian and modern Europe; therefore, the world’s other peoples can acquire freedom only if Europeans impose their civilization upon them. Although this imposition denies freedom to colonized peoples, this denial is legitimate for Hegel because it is the sole condition on which these peoples can gain freedom in the long…Read more
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86Being, knowledge and nature in NovalisJournal of the History of Philosophy 46 (1): 141-163. 2008.: This paper reconstructs the evolution of Novalis’ thought concerning being, nature, and knowledge. In his earlier writings (above all the Fichte-Studies) he argues that unitary being underlies finite phenomena and that we can never know, but only strive towards knowledge of, being. In contrast, his later writings, principally the Allgemeine Brouillon, maintain that the unitary reality underlying finite things can be known, because it is an organic whole which develops and organises itself acco…Read more
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80On Alienation from Life: A Response to Wendell Kisner’s “A Species-Based Environmental Ethic in Hegel’s Logic of Life”The Owl of Minerva 40 (1): 69-75. 2008.In this article I respond to Wendell Kisner’s Hegelian environmental ethic. Kisner argues that because life is ontologically irreducible to mechanism it is rational to treat life not merely as a means to human purposes but as an end in itself. I argue that had Hegel consistently adhered to this position, he would have had to argue that the modern social world objectively alienates human beings from their rational selves. But Hegel in fact sees this social world as a home for rational humanity. T…Read more
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76The sex of nature: A reinterpretation of Irigaray's metaphysics and political thoughtHypatia 18 (3): 60-84. 2003.: I argue that Irigaray's recent work develops a theoretically cogent and politically radical form of realist essentialism. I suggest that she identifies sexual difference with a fundamental difference between the rhythms of percipient fluids constituting women's and men's bodies, supporting this with a philosophy of nature that she justifies phenomenologically and ethically. I explore the politics Irigaray derives from this philosophy, which affirms the sexes' rights to realize the possibilitie…Read more
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53Nature, continental philosophy, and environmental ethicsEnvironmental Values 14 (3): 285-294. 2005.Until recently, there has been relatively little self-conscious reflection - from either environmental or continental philosophers - on the specific contributions which continental philosophy, insofar as it is a distinctive tradition, might make to environmental thought. This situation has begun to change with several recent publications, such as Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine's edited collection Ecophenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, and Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman's collection R…Read more
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52Hegel's Philosophy of Nature: Overcoming the Division between Matter and ThoughtDialogue 39 (4): 725. 2000.RÉSUMÉ: La Philosophie de la nature de Hegel élabore une théorie complexe et systématique du monde naturel, qui est passée presque inaperçue dans la littérature secondaire. Selon cette théorie, la nature passe progressivement d'une division originale entre ses deux éléments constitutifs, la pensée et la matière, à leur unification finale, par une séquence rationnellement nécessaire d'étapes dans le processus. Cette progression naturelle présente une structure identique à celle de la progression …Read more
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48Gender, the Family, and the Organic State in Hegel's Political ThoughtIn Thom Brooks (ed.), Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Wiley‐blackwell. 2012.This chapter contains sections titled: Women's Place in the Hegelian State The Organic State and Individual Freedom Tensions in the Organic Model: For and Against Sex Equality Animal State, Vegetal State: Hegel versus Early German Romanticism Notes Abbreviations References.
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48II—Europe and EurocentrismAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 91 (1): 83-104. 2017.In this article I explore how philosophical thinking about God, reason, humanity and history has shaped ideas of Europe, focusing on Hegel. For Hegel, Europe is the civilization that, by way of Christianity, has advanced the spirit of freedom which originated in Greece. Hegel is a Eurocentrist whose work indicates how Eurocentrism as a broader discourse has shaped received conceptions of Europe. I then distinguish ‘external’ and ‘internal’ ways of approaching ideas of Europe and defend the forme…Read more
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46The incomplete materialism of french materialist feminismRadical Philosophy 145. 2007.French materialist feminists such as Christine Delphy and Monique Wittig maintain that the social fact of women’s exploitation by men within the family pre-exists and produces gender differences as well as the perception that men and women belong to different biological sexes. They take this position to be ‘materialist’ because it puts social facts prior to ideas and beliefs and so puts the ‘material’ prior to the ‘ideal’. However, I shall claim, drawing on arguments of Sebastiano Timpanaro’s, t…Read more
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43In response to Mader's and Deutscher's questions, the author defends her approach to reading Irigaray and Butler, which entails extending the ideas of these thinkers into areas of thought with which they do not engage directly themselves. This involves relating Irigaray's ideas to the tradition of the philosophy of nature and interpreting Butler as offering, in spite of her focus on the genealogy of claims about sex, also a theory of sex itself, a theory of sex as an effect entirely of gender. T…Read more
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