Sarah Tyson

Sex offender registries have given way to residency restrictions for people convicted of sex crimes in many communities in the US. Research suggests, however, that such restrictions can actually undermine the safety of the communities they are ostensibly meant to protect. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, this essay explores why such restrictions, and strategies like them, fail and are bound to fail. Then, it considers the work of generationFIVE, an organization that seeks to eliminate child sexual abuse in five generations, to explore modes of response to sexual abuse and assault that build community safety.

Western philosophy’s relationship with prisons stretches from Plato’s own incarceration to the modern era of mass incarceration. Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration draws together a broad range of philosophical thinkers, from both inside and outside prison walls, in the United States and beyond, who draw on a variety of critical perspectives (including phenomenology, deconstruction, and feminist theory) and historical and contemporary figures in philosophy (including Kant, Hegel, Foucault, and Angela Davis) to think about prisons in this new historical era. All of these contributors have experiences within prison walls: some are or have been incarcerated, some have taught or are teaching in prisons, and all have been students of both philosophy and the carceral system. The powerful testimonials and theoretical arguments are appropriate reading not only for philosophers and prison theorists generally, but also for prison reformers and abolitionists.

Luce Irigaray's work does not present an obvious resource for projects seeking to reclaim women in the history of philosophy. Indeed, many authors introduce their reclamation project with an argument against conceptions, attributed to Irigaray or “French feminists” more generally, that the feminine is the excluded other of discourse. These authors claim that if the feminine is the excluded other of discourse, then we must conclude that even if women have written philosophy they have not given voice to feminine subjectivity; therefore, reclamation is a futile project. In this essay, I argue against such conclusions. Rather, I argue, Irigaray's work requires that philosophy be transformed through the reclamation of women's writing. She gives us a method of reclamation for the most difficult cases: those in which we have no record of women's writing. Irigaray offers this method through an engagement with the character of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. The method Irigaray demonstrates is reclamation as love

Sex offender registries have given way to residency restrictions for people convicted of sex crimes in many communities in the US. Research suggests, however, that such restrictions can actually undermine the safety of the communities they are ostensibly meant to protect. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, this essay explores why such restrictions, and strategies like them, fail and are bound to fail. Then, it considers the work of generationFIVE, an organization that seeks to eliminate child sexual abuse in five generations, to explore modes of response to sexual abuse and assault that build community safety.

In the mid-1980s, feminist philosophers began to turn their critical efforts toward reclaiming women in the history of philosophy who had been neglected by traditional histories and canons. There are now scores of resources treating historical women philosophers and reclaiming them for philosophical history. This article explores the four major argumentative strategies that have been used within those reclamation projects. It argues that three of the strategies unwittingly work against the reclamationist end of having women engaged as philosophers. The fourth type, the one that seeks to transform philosophical practice and reconstruct its history, is the only strategy that will result in that engagement because it is the only strategy that pays sufficient attention to the mechanisms by which women have been excluded from philosophy and its history