Mary C. Rawlinson

In this introduction, we consider how this volume demonstrates not only that the question of sexual difference can be asked with Irigaray but that her project necessitates engaging the question if we are to take seriously her diagnosis of sexual difference as “one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” We consider how Irigaray's questioning of sexual difference implicates a dialectic of natural and cultural determinations, challenging reductive and essentialist readings of her project. In the process, we trace how the contributors of this volume think sexual difference with Irigaray, revealing the value of her thought for addressing contemporary debates about sex, gender, and race.

Luce Irigaray has written that “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” Spanning metaphysics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, her work examines how sexual difference structures being and subjectivity, organizes our experience of the world, and affects the images and discourses involved in knowledge production and practical action. No other philosopher has paid such careful attention to the consequences of the elision of sexual difference in philosophical thought. However, at a time when notions of sexual and gender difference are hotly contested, Irigaray’s thought has often been dismissed as essentialist or reductively binary. This book brings together leading scholars to consider the philosophical implications of Irigaray’s writing on sexual difference, particularly for issues of gender and race. Their essays directly confront the charge of essentialism, exploring how Irigaray’s thought opens new possibilities for understanding the complexity of gender identities, including nonbinary and trans experiences as well as alternative configurations of masculinity and femininity. Though Irigaray is sometimes accused of a failure to appreciate racial difference, contributors show the productive role of her work in thinking race. This book also illuminates how Irigaray’s work provides creative practices that help realign human experience and our relations with nature and each other.

Few works have had the impact on contemporary philosophy exerted by Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Twentieth-century philosophers in France were bound together by a reading of Hyppolite's translation and commentary. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Bataille were all shaped by Kojève's lectures on the book. Late twentieth-century philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Irigaray all operate against a Hegelian horizon. Similarly, in Germany Heidegger, Adorno, and Habermas developed their philosophies in large part through an engagement with Hegel. In the United States the book has had a profound influence on feminism and gender studies. Thinkers as diverse as Butler, Benhabib, Mills, and Honig have developed political theories as well as theories of sexual difference by rereading Hegel's reading of Antigone. As Derrida suggests, this text must be read. It lays out the infrastructures and architectures of life in the modern nation state. It unfolds a grand narrative of the ways of thinking and acting that comprise human experience in "our time." The purpose of the text is to effect a transformation in readers, so that they cease to think of themselves as particular humans and come to know that their existence inheres in membership in a complex community-social, cultural, economic, religious, aesthetic, and political infrastructures that form the culture of possibilities in which self-consciousness emerges and is sustained. Rawlinson's reading reveals how Hegel's politics of the "we" is undermined both by his effacement of sexual difference and by his misappropriation of art as a "betrayal of substance." Both of these gestures discount specificity in favor of a generic subject and a mutual recognition in which the other is the same. She uses Hegel's own critique of abstraction against him to rethink the "we" as a community of difference, figured materially in the differentiated styles or signatures of art, and in so doing argues that that the task of phenomenology is never completed and that the abstract concepts of logic will always be dependent on phenomenology's productive or generative movement. In her reading Hegel is neither a metaphysician nor a subjective idealist. He is a phenomenologist, analyzing experience to articulate the ways in which humans generate narratives and material infrastructures to sustain the complexities of life.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC 2015) estimates that 35 percent of American adults are obese, while 69 percent are overweight. The CDC also estimates that nearly one in every five children in the United States is obese. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that medical treatments of obesity cost US$168.4 billion a year, or 16.5 percent of national spending on medical care (Cawley and Meyerhoefer 2010). Public Health England (n.d.) estimates that 25 percent of the adult population in England is considered obese, while 62 percent of adults are overweight. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in North America, large portions of Central and South America, most of Europe, Russia, and Australia, 60 percent of the population is overweight. The United States and the United Arab Emirates have the highest obesity rates, according to the WHO, at 32.6 and 33.8 percent, respectively. The rest of North America, those large portions of Central and South America, Europe, Russia, and Australia exhibit rates over 20 percent (WHO n.d.).

Corine Pelluchon is professor of philosophy at Paris-Est-Marne-La-Vallée and one of the foremost feminist political philosophers and bioethicists in France. Her major works, which have been translated into Spanish, German, Korean, Greek, Italian, and Japanese, include L’autonomie brisée. Bioéthique et philosophie, La raison du sensible. Entretiens autour de la bioéthique, and Eléments pour une éthique de la vulnérabilité. Les hommes, les animaux, la nature.Recently, Bloomsbury published a translation of Les...

Dear IJFAB Readers,This tenth anniversary issue of IJFAB will be the last to appear under the Stony Brook masthead. In 2007, on the day of the blizzard that came to be known as the St. Patrick’s Day Snowstorm, the “protoeditorial board” met at Stony Brook Manhattan to begin creating IJFAB. We were guided in this endeavor by the late, great Anne Donchin, a cofounder of FAB as well as a beloved mentor and friend. As a philosopher, Anne held that concepts imply practical commitments or creeds. She had a very clear idea of the creed of FAB, and she meant, through her gentle but firm guidance, to see that IJFAB adhered to it.1First, IJFAB was always to maintain an international or transnational perspective. Urgent...

While the history of philosophy has traditionally given scant attention to food and the ethics of eating, in the last few decades the subject of food ethics has emerged as a major topic, encompassing a wide array of issues, including labor justice, public health, social inequity, animal rights and environmental ethics. This handbook provides a much needed philosophical analysis of the ethical implications of the need to eat and the role that food plays in social, cultural and political life. Unlike other books on the topic, this text integrates traditional approaches to the subject with cutting edge research in order to set a new agenda for philosophical discussions of food ethics. The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over 35 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into 7 parts: the phenomenology of food gender and food food and cultural diversity liberty, choice and food policy food and the environment farming and eating other animals food justice Essential reading for students and researchers in food ethics, it is also an invaluable resource for those in related disciplines such as environmental ethics and bioethics.

In the past decade UNESCO has pursued a leadership role in the articulation of general principles for bioethics, as well as an extensive campaign to promulgate these principles globally.1 Since UNESCO's General Conference adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights in 2005, UNESCO's Bioethics Section has worked with member states to develop a "bioethics infrastructure." UNESCO also provides an "Ethics Teacher Training Course" to member states and disseminates a "core curriculum," primarily targeting medical students. The core curriculum orients itself by the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and aims to articulate a set of "bioethical principles" that provide a "common global .