This week we are going to read the following paper by Sally Haslanger:

“What Good Are Our Intuitions?  Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 80, no. 1 (2006): 89-118.

We will meet on Tuesday 1st December at 11am in King’s Philosophy Department, Basement 306. Check here for directions or email me for more details.

Best,

Kalbir

Ishani Maitra
Silencing Speech
Canadian Journal of Philosophy – Volume 39, Number 2, June 2009, pp. 309-338

It’s available here and (in draft form) here.

We will be meeting at our new improved time of 11am on Tuesday 10th November in Basement 306 at King’s. If you don’t know where this is then drop me a line and I’ll send out directions (or look at the previous entry)

There is part of the introduction of the piece below the fold, hope to see you there!

Introduction

Pornography deserves special protections, it is often said, because it qualifies as speech. Therefore, no matter what we think of its content, we must afford it the protections that we extend to most speech, but don’t extend to other actions. ¹In response, Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton have argued that the case is not so simple: one of the harms of pornography, they claim, is that it silences women’s speech, thereby preventing women from deriving from speech the very benefits that warranted the special protections in the first place. ² At first glance, it is hard to see how to make sense of this response. If the claim is that pornography prevents women from actually uttering words, then it just seems false; on the other hand, if that isn’t the claim, then it isn’t clear how anyone can be said to be silenced. Faced with such worries, many have been inclined to dismiss these claims about silencing as confused.

In this paper, I offer a way of making sense of this notion of silencing, according to which it is coherent to claim that pornography silences women. On my view, the truth of this claim does not require that women be prevented from uttering words. Rather, I develop an account of silencing that, unlike the competing account, can help make clear why a speaker who is silenced is thereby unfairly deprived of (some of) the benefits that lead us to place a special value on speech in the first place. Moreover, on my account, silencing turns out to be a distinctively speech-related wrong, in the sense that a silenced speaker is deprived of benefits that speech, and only speech, can provide.

Cassidy, Lisa.
That Many of Us Should Not Parent
Hypatia – Volume 21, Number 4, Fall 2006, pp. 40-57

You can find it online here.

We will be meeting on Tuesday 27th October at 11 am (not 10.30am) in Basement 306 at King’s Philosophy Department (directions below).

Here’s a precis:

In liberal societies (where birth control is generally accepted and available), many people decide whether or not they wish to become parents. One key question in making this decision is, What kind of parent will I be? Parenting competence can be ranked from excellent to competent to poor. Cassidy argues that those who can foresee being poor parents, or even merely competent ones, should opt not to parent.

And how to get to the room:

Directions: King’s Philosophy Department is something of a rabbit warren. To get to Basement 306 you need to first get to the ground floor foyer area (marked by a couple of sofas and a coffee machine). If you are coming to the department from the main King’s building you need to take the stairs down if you have an option, this should lead you to the foyer.

From the foyer, find the wall with the staff photographs on it (near the stairs) and the stairs to the basement are to your right when facing the photos. If you have any trouble ask people or email me for more precise details (ie. how to get from the street to the room!)

Ferguson, Ann.

Gay Marriage: An American and Feminist Dilemma

Hypatia – Volume 22, Number 1, Winter 2007, pp. 39-57

The paper is available here or here. The abstract is below. We meet at 10.30am on Tuesday 13th October in King’s Philosophy Department, Basement 306 (email for more details).

Abstract

Gay marriage highlights a contradiction in American national identity: if gay marriage is supported, the normative status of the heterosexual nuclear family is undermined, while if not, the civil rights of homosexuals are undermined. This essay discusses the feminist dilemma of whether to support gay marriage to promote these individual civil rights or whether to critique marriage as a part of the patriarchal system that oppresses women.

Bartky, Sandra Lee. 2004. “Suffering to Be Beautiful.” In “Sympathy and Solidarity” and Other Essays, ed. Sandra Lee Bartky. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 13-29

The paper is available here. The download is reasonably large (~20Mb) so I recommend right-clicking on the link and choosing the “save as…” dialogue.

We will meet at the usual time and place: Basement 306 King’s Philosophy Department, 10.30am Tuesday 24th March

In addition to this I will also be listening to the Radio 4 show “Call yourself a feminist?” at 10.00am in the Graduate Common Room (up the stairs roughly where you go down to Basement 306 on the second floor). This will be the third part of the series and will discuss contemporary notions of feminism, including how the internet is changing the nature of collective political engagement and how young women feel about being called feminists. Sounds like fun!

Moody-Adams, Michele. 1994. “Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance.” Ethics 104 (2) (January): 291-309

This paper discusses the issue of to what extent the oppressors should be responsible for the oppression.A short blurb extracted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Feminist Moral Psychology:

“[Moody-Adams] questions whether having culturally induced blindness (i.e., being unable to know, due to one’s upbringing in a culture, that certain actions are wrong) and being unable to question the morality of the society’s practices absolves a person from responsibility for his actions.”

Tuesday 10th March, 10.30am, King’s Philosophy Department Basement 306

Hope to see you there!

Kalbir

Sorry for the ridiculously short notice but, just in case you hadn’t heard, this week we’ll be reading some of Anne Fausto-Sterling‘s (a biologist at Brown) work on the Biology of sex and gender, namely:

“Bare Bones of Sex: Part I, Sex & Gender.” Signs, 30(2): 1491-528

In which she uses a biological case study to draw conclusions about how the concepts of gender and sex operate in science.

If you have time you could also look at the very short papers:

“The Five Sexes”. The Sciences (March/April) pp. 20-25 and “The Five Sexes, Revisited” The Sciences (July/August) pp. 18-23

In which Fausto-Sterling argues that, rather than a binary categorisation of sex, we should be talking about at least 5 sex categories.

We’ll meet Tuesday 25th February, 10.30am in Basement 306 King’s Philosophy Department.

See you there,

Kalbir

This week we’ll be going back to a locus classicus of the view that gender and sex are distinct categories:

Judith Butler 1999, Gender Trouble, London: Routledge, 2^nd edition

We’ll be reading up to the end of section V of Chapter 1 (page 33). Available online at King’s (and perhaps elsewhere).

We’ll be meeting on Tuesday 3rd February at 10.30am in Basement 306.

Hope to see you there!

Kalbir

“Rethinking the Family”, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 20/1, (1991), pp. 77-97

The paper is available online here (thanks to Alice for finding it!).

It will be at the usual time and place: King’s Philosophy Department, Basement 306 at 10.30am.

See you there!

At the next meeting we will be looking at Susan Hurley’s paper:

Feminism and evolutionary theory – Can they be reconciled? http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/S.L.Hurley/papers/fep.pdf

This meeting will be on Tuesday 8th December at 10.30am in Basement 306 of the King’s Philosophy Department. Hope to see you there!

Kalbir