Ege Yumuşak

Serene Khader’s first book for a public audience packs philosophical rigor into a compulsive read. The book is primarily a call to action. In Khader’s view, the Dobbs decision’s final blow to abortion rights was unsurprising—not only because she was watching closely political developments but also because she was paying attention to how mainstream feminism had failed to evolve into an emancipatory movement. If mainstream feminists had seen their flaws, she tells her readers, they too would have seen that, in a sense, the Dobbs decision was inevitable.

Philosophers of mind and epistemology have studied extensively what beliefs are and what we ought to believe. Yet, we are guided toward many of our beliefs by our perspectives: cognitive structures that guide how we see and think. A chief role of ordinary perspective talk is to describe clashes between different points of view that arise when people interact. In this paper, I argue that the most developed extant account of perspectives, by Elisabeth Camp, lacks the resources to analyze interactions between perspectives. By contrast, my account of perspectives—the agenda view—better captures the kinds of differences and confrontations that underlie ordinary perspective talk by focusing on the ‘zetetic’ role of perspectives in directing inquiry.