Justine McGill

Michael Haneke's film Hidden ( Caché, 2005) raises questions about responsibility and guilt in the context of post-colonial inequities that are profoundly discomfiting for the viewer, framing a meditation on identity, consciousness and responsibility that is at once visceral and intellectual. On the reading presented here, this film makes visible and palpable some of the effects of the ' strange suppositions' about personal responsibility and memory that were first articulated by a philosopher who also felt called upon to justify colonialism: John Locke. The perspective provided by the film casts light both on the unpleasant emotional resonances of Locke's theory of personal identity and points to the likely source of its structure in his celebrated theory of private property

Statistics reveal that women who show aptitude for philosophy nevertheless abandon study or work in this field at markedly higher rates than men. They fall silent, as it were, when they might have been expected to go on speaking. Why? This paper explores the hypothesis that philosophical speech acts performed by women are systematically liable to turn out ‘unhappily’ due to the effect of unexamined, prejudical presuppositions that work to undermine their success. This approach to the silencing of women is adapted from the work of Rae Langton and Caroline West (1999) who draw upon J.L Austin’s theory of performative speech acts, and David Lewis’ analysis of language games. I also consider Judith Butler’s position on how best to combat injurious speech, and advocate an alternative approach inspired in part by the teaching of an early Buddhist nun.