Mary L. Edwards

One of the central bioconservative objections to pursuing human enhancement technologies highlights the risk that the development and dissemination of such technologies will exacerbate existing inequalities, with a particular focus on general considerations of distributive justice. This line of objection, typically framed to target cognitive enhancement's potential to exacerbate inequality, has also been extended to moral enhancement, which will be this chapter's focus. What will be suggested here is a comparatively more optimistic picture of the relationship between moral enhancement and inequality. It will be shown that there are at least two very specific kinds of moral enhancement proposals—i.e. Socratic artificial intelligence (AI) and psychedelic moral enhancement—which offer promising resources for combatting existing patterns of marginalisation and injustice in the case of both gender and race, and with important relevance to both feminism and social equality and justice effort more broadly. By exploring these benefits, we'll see that the question of whether moral enhancement would threaten to exacerbate existing inequalities is much more complex than some critics have appreciated, and consequently, that inequality-related risks identified by such critics should be suitably weighted against the kinds of benefits outlined herein.

This paper highlights how fetal ultrasound scanning involves an intrusion upon the integrity of the pregnant person’s body and their psychological space. It contends that this intrusion has the potential to harm the pregnant people subjected to it in medical contexts as a result of the normative practices and interpretative frameworks associated with it. The socio-cultural practices associated with fetal ultrasound pathologize pregnant bodies and perpetuate logics in which pregnant people are subordinated, discredited, devalued, and policed within social relations as women and mothers-to-be. Further, the paper argues that the intrusion of fetal ultrasound is obscured in the medical monitoring of pregnancy where it is taken for granted as a benign aspect of routine antenatal care. Consequently, we contend that fetal ultrasound is a normalized and gendered intrusion that can cause epistemic harm, scaffold obstetric violence, and may sometimes constitute a form of obstetric violence in and of itself.

This essay argues that the depiction of two female characters’ situations, friendship, and self-understandings in The Mandarins (Les mandarins, 1954) develops Beauvoir's theorization of feminine complicity in The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe, 1949). Through its prolonged focus on the concrete situations of two female characters, the novel enables Beauvoir to explore the (hetero)sexual and metaphysical sources of feminine complicity in depth. The result is that The Mandarins illustrates why women who are, to greater or lesser degrees, complicit with the structures of their own oppression can be understood neither as agents of gender-based oppression nor as passive victims of it, but only as human beings forced to invent means to survive the mutilation of their transcendence.

Western philosophical orthodoxy places many aspects of other people's lives outside the scope of our knowledge. Demonstrating an alternative to this view, however, this book argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's application of his unique psychoanalytic method to Gustave Flaubert is the culmination of his project to show that it is possible to know everything there is to know about another person. It examines how Sartre aims to revolutionize our way of thinking about others by presenting his existential psychoanalysis as the means to knowledge of both ourselves and others. By so doing, it highlights how his determination to solve the longstanding philosophical conundrum about other minds drives him not only to incorporate insights from Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Marx, and Beauvoir into his philosophy, but also to supplement and enhance his philosophy through the development and application of a new form of psychoanalysis. Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis integrates, for the first time, Sartre's psychoanalysis into his overarching philosophical project. By offering a critical interrogation of the role his psychoanalytical studies played in the development of his existentialism, Mary Edwards uncovers the overlooked philosophical significance of his existential psychoanalysis and brings it into a new and productive dialogue with current research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy.

This article traces the development of Sartre's metaphysics with three interrelated aims in mind. The first is to situate Sartre's metaphysical views in relation to those of his predecessors, his contemporaries, and current continental philosophy. The second is to show that Sartre's project informs some of the key changes he makes to his existentialism during his career. The third is to bring Sartre the metaphysician into dialogue with key thinkers in the current realism/antirealism debate in Continental philosophy by showing that the defense of materialism he offers in his later work preserves many hard-won insights of phenomenology and has significant advantages over many contemporary articulations of realism.

This paper aims to show that Sartre’s later work represents a valuable resource for feminist scholarship that remains relatively untapped. It analyses Sartre’s discussions of women’s attitude towards their situation from the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s, alongside Beauvoir’s account of women’s situation in The Second Sex, to trace the development of Sartre’s thought on the structure of gendered experience. It argues that Sartre transitions from reducing psychological oppression to self-deception in Being and Nothingness to construing women as ‘survivors’ of it in The Family Idiot. Then, it underlines the potential for Sartre’s mature existentialism to contribute to current debates in feminist philosophy by illuminating the role of the imagination in women’s psychological oppression.

This volume explores urgent questions surrounding the bidirectional relationship between feminist philosophy and emerging technologies. It underlines the exigency of feminist philosophical reflections on the design, use, and understanding of emerging technologies and at the same time accentuates how emerging technologies can uniquely impact the shape of future feminist critique and intervention. While feminist philosophers have attended to problems posed by a few specific technologies that emerged in the previous century-especially reproductive technologies-broader philosophical questions concerning the challenges various new technologies present to feminism have yet to receive the sustained, critical attention they deserve. Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies responds to this problem. It is divided into two sections. Section 1 provides theoretical considerations about the links between feminist philosophy and philosophy of technology (broadly construed) by developing-against the background of emerging technologies-methodological approaches and guidance for bringing those two fields of philosophical research together. Section 2 is dedicated to analyses of specific emerging technologies and user trends, their relation to extant structures of oppression, and to bringing to the fore various ways in which a feminist philosophy of technology can impact the design of current and future technologies. Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies is an excellent resource for scholars and advanced students working in feminist philosophy, philosophy of technology, ethics, political philosophy, feminist theory, gender and cultural studies, and science and technology studies.