Natality and mortality: rethinking death with Cavarero

In this article I rethink death and mortality on the basis of birth and natality, drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero. She understands birth to be the corporeal event whereby a unique person emerges from the mother’s body into the common world. On this basis Cavarero reconceives death as consisting in bodily dissolution and re-integration into cosmic life. This impersonal conception of death coheres badly with her view that birth is never exclusively material but always has ontological significance as the appearance of someone new and singular in the world of relations with others. This view of birth calls for a relational conception of death, which I develop in this article. On this conception, death is always collective, affecting all those with whom the one who dies has maintained relations: As such, our different deaths shade into one another. Moreover, because each person is unique in virtue of consisting of a unique web of relations with others, death always happens to persons as webs of relations. Death is relational in this way as a corporeal, and specifically biological, phenomenon, to which we are subject as bodily beings and as interdependent living organisms. I explore this with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death from cancer. Finally I argue that, on this relational conception, death is something to be feared.     

Straight to heaven: Rectitude as spatial representation of morality

Abundant literature in cognitive sciences has shown that morality is grounded in bodily experience. Four studies tested the perceptual association between the spatial dimension of straightness and the abstract concept of morality. Study 1 (n = 61) employed an IAT and revealed an association between straight figures and moral related words. Study 2 (n = 83) employed a similar paradigm and further revealed that the effect we found in Study 1 cannot be attributable to the general association between straight figures and positivity. Study 3 (n = 64) revealed that participants showed a stronger preference for straight figures after recalling moral (vs. immoral) deeds. Study 4 (n = 183) showed the specific role of morality, in this sense, as recalling sociable (vs. unsociable) deeds had no significant influence on figure preferences. A small‐scale meta‐analysis confirmed the robustness of our findings. Results are discussed in light of the embodiment theory.     

Reflection and Critique: Philosophy's Hope for Education

1 Introduction Universities still,today,enjoy a specific type of respectability.Undoubtedly,this could be explained by the fact that universities,from medieval times onwards,have belonged to the cultural and intellectual landscape in general and to educational heritage in particular.From a distance,it looks like they are braving,with obvious confidence,every day's delusions;most people look at universities as quite stable institutions.Of course,there are good reasons for this:Universities have been and still are offering programs and training,consisting of individual courses,offered by professors.At the end,in exchange for ongoing efforts,students can get a degree,most likely opening the door to interesting,meaningful jobs with decent pay.     

Subjectivity and sexual difference: New figures of the feminine in Irigaray and Cavarero

This paper argues that the metaphors of breath and voice as employed in the recent works of Luce Irigaray and Adriana Cavarero yield a reconceptualization of subjectivity as unique, embodied and relational. When interpreted in light of Cavarero's reorientation of the question of subjectivity from a what to a who, this newly configured notion of subjectivity can serve as the basis for a non-essentialist politics of sexual difference.     

哲学退位——论康德哲学中哲学和政治的关系

V．格哈特从西方哲学传统和政治传统来解读康德的《论永久和平》,从康德对“公共契约”中“秘密条款”的反讽论述中揭示出康德的真正意图是为人民提供权利、并实现哲学和政治之间的关系的重要变革。在康德之前,西方哲学传统和政治传统一直继续柏拉图和亚里士多德的路线。按照柏拉图,哲学和政治应当合而为一,最高的理想是“国王从事哲学、或哲学家变成国王”;按照亚里士多德,哲学和政治具有一种类比结构,“从事统治就像从事哲学”。在康德那里,哲学和政治相分离,哲学批判和政治实践隶属于两个完全独立的行动领域,“从事统治和从事哲学是互补的社会活动”;因而康德为哲学和政治之间的关系确立起一个新的范式模型。这个范式模型意味着：哲学退出政治。格哈特把康德对哲学和政治的分离归因于理论知识和实践知识之间的差异。过去的哲学家往往把理论知识和实践知识同一化,从理论知识来推导实践洞见;康德看到,理论知识是先天的,实践知识则与境遇性和经验性的事务状态相关,因而不能从理论知识来推导实践知识。     

Native American women and agriculture: A Seneca case study

This study examines the impact of European invasion on the mode of production, household lives, and ideology of one group of Native American women, the Seneca. Seneca women had high public status, a balanced division of labor, ownership of the land, and control over the means of agricultural production. The power derived from their role in production and the social institutions which had developed from this production were difficult to destroy, despite the efforts of missionaries, government, and reformers. The effects of disease, war, and the market economy on the Seneca women are specifically examined. Also described are attempts to impose the ideology of individualism and nuclear household patterns on the Seneca by withdrawing women from production outside the home and establishing male ownership of private property.Criticism by many women helped the development of this article at different stages. Anthropologists Bea Medicine and Peggy Sanday, women historians at Arizona State University, and community women in Phoenix all made valuable contributions to its evolution.     

Philosophy's Real-World Consequences for Deaf People: Thoughts on Iconicity, Sign Language and Being Deaf

The body of philosophical knowledge concerning the relations among language, the senses, and deafness, interpreted as a canon of key ideas which have found their way into folk metaphysics, constitutes one of the historically sustained conditions of the oppression of deaf people. Jonathan Rée, with his book I see a voice, makes the point that a philosophical history, grounded in a phenomenological and causal concern with philosophical thought and social life, can offer an archaeology of philosophy's contribution to the social oppression of deaf people.This article offers support for such a project while being critical of Rée's philosophical phenomenology, since it presumes, àpriori, two ideas about deafness and sign language: firstly, that deaf experience is like hearing experience but without hearing; and secondly, that the iconic qualities of sign languages are strictly superficial phenomena. Both presumptions, it is argued here, derive from the same philosophical knowledge which has linked deafness to the sense of hearing and the voice, and in doing so secured an intellectual basis for the oppression of deaf people in social life.Instead it is proposed, using examples of sign language use, that deafness as sensory experience is best understood by reference to the sense of sight; that iconicity is a central creative resource in sign language formation, maintenance and productivity; that Rée's philosophical phenomenology, as a metatheoretical critique of philosophical knowledge, proves unable to selfreflexively uncover (let alone overcome) existing presumptions in philosophy and social life; and that as a consequence that project itself risks perpetuating, within philosophy, key conditions of the oppression of deaf people.     

Thinking Sexual Difference with (and against) Adriana Cavarero: On the Ethics and Politics of Care

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces “bodies that queer” (Volcano 2013). For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by vulnerability, which is how ethics arises in the form of a decision between caring and wounding. At the same time, Cavarero's deconstructive method of appropriating stereotypes restricts the scope of sexual difference to dimorphism. In examining the implications of this, I build on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler by looking to the intersexed life of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, whose suicide in 1868 at the age of twenty‐nine was precipitated not through malice or cruelty, but through concerted care. This mode of care is anchored in the apparent self‐evidence of how we see and how we think with and through narratives that sediment in orders of power/knowledge. While agreeing with Cavarero's critique of the autonomous “I,” the article nevertheless argues for authorial audacity—the courage to name oneself—as a way of subverting asymmetrical power relations, including those that make it possible to inadvertently generate suffering through care.     

Philosophy,Early Modern Intellectual History,and the History of Philosophy

Historians of philosophy are increasingly likely to emphasize the extent to which their work offers a pay‐off for philosophers of un‐historical or anti‐historical inclinations; but this defence is less familiar, and often seems less than self‐evident, to intellectual historians. This article examines this tendency, arguing that such arguments for the instrumental value of historical scholarship in philosophy are often more problematic than they at first appear. Using the relatively familiar case study of René Descartes' reading of his scholastic and Aristotelian contemporaries, the article attempts to problematize this notion of pay‐off from an historian's perspective.