Consciousness-Raising

This chapter examines consciousness-raising as a means of challenging oppression. Bringing the #MeToo movement into contact with first-person accounts and criticisms of the radical feminist consciousness-raising groups that formed in New York and Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, it suggests that they remain an essential force to challenge female oppression today. It touches on the various ways that patriarchal structures silence women, how consciousness-raising undercuts this silencing by giving women a collective voice, and how social media can amplify this voice. Finally, it addresses common criticisms of consciousness-raising movements, especially concerning the disproportionate focus on white women’s concerns that they have historically represented and universalized. It touches on Kimberlé Crenhaw’s theory of intersectionality as well as Paulo Friere’s conception of critical consciousness theory to explore the notion of truly inclusive consciousness-raising movements.

Race

This chapter introduces the fraught concept of race through the mythical and historical girl named Venus, who suffers the abduction of the transatlantic slave trade. Quite different from the abduction of Persephone that introduces this volume of essays, the story of Venus has never been fully told and digested by Western philosophy. The abduction of this girl, Venus, ontologically changes the meaning of “human.” Consequently, the chapter argues that, if philosophy is to wrangle with this unthought historical event, it must reconceptualize three fundamental categories: ontology, race, and blackness. The chapter, ultimately argues that the concept of “race” aids and abets the perpetuation of anti-blackness.

Autonomy

This chapter explains three conceptions of personal autonomy through a discussion of two teen girls’ struggles for self-definition. Autonomy is the ability to live a life that is genuinely one’s own. Starr, the protagonist of Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give, struggles to know herself because the demands of upward mobility seem to ask her to disavow her Blackness. Kiara, the author of a blog post on oppressive beauty standards, struggles to find self-worth in a society that devalues the way she looks. The chapter discusses how coherentist, reasons-responsiveness, and socially constitutive conceptions of autonomy illuminate the girls’ lives. It also explains why autonomy should not be conceived of as the rejection of all social influence.

Courage

This chapter attempts to demarcate and specify the virtue of courage. The author begins by providing an explication of what she takes to be aspects of the human condition: relatedness and fallibility. The author then suggests a reconceptualized framework for courage, given the constraints of human nature. She argues that courage works as a foundational virtue, and the practice of courage includes and grounds the practices of other virtues, including care. The author argues that courage has two necessary components: empathetic recognition and active response. A courageous person has practiced and is attuned to the needs of others empathetically, but she also acts to meet those needs. Finally, there is an aspect of justice incorporated in courageous acts; courage often arises to meliorate suffering, which may well be caused by various forms of oppression and require a just response.

Gender

What is gender? This chapter addresses this question by drawing on literary and imaginative resources rather than philosophical argument or dictionary definitions. To illuminate gender in the present, the author uses the parable of Height Society where Talls and Shorts stand in for the gender binary. The author also borrows from The Left Hand of Darkness by renowned science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin to spark thinking about future possibilities of gender beyond the binary. Throughout, the author discusses the history of gender binary language and proposes a social constructivist view of gender. Differences between gender and sex are explained, and the author explains the importance of intersexual approaches to the topic of gender as well.

Science

Anna Morandi was the foremost anatomist in eighteenth-century Bologna. Although her work was widely recognized as exceptional by the scientists of her day, she was not granted the standing of a scientist. In this chapter, the author uses Morandi as a case study to illuminate aspects of the philosophy of science. In particular, the chapter addresses conceptions of scientific objectivity and the role of social values in science, drawing on the work of Helen Longino. In addition to the phenomena described by Longino, the author argues that social values enter into science and impact scientific research by determining how individuals are positioned in scientific communities, or excluded from them.

Self-Knowledge

The chapter is a discussion of value of self-knowledge and the role that reflection plays in its acquisition. It employs the title character in Jane Austen’s Emma as an illustration of the importance of reflection in people understanding themselves and developing self-trust. It argues that appropriate self-trust is a virtue in Aristotle’s sense. The person with the virtue of self-trust employs self-doubt effectively, avoiding both insufficient and excessive confidence in her own judgment. The chapter shows how Emma uses reflection as a way of correcting her own tendency toward overconfidence, enabling her to have greater self-knowledge and hence, greater self-trust. The chapter explains how reflection conducive to self-knowledge and self-trust is a skill and argues that it is a skill worth acquiring.

Introduction

When we, the editors of this book, sought contributions for this volume of essays written by expert women in philosophy for their younger counterparts, we provided this directive to authors: “Consider yourself when you were roughly eighteen to twenty years old. What kind of book, with what kinds of chapters, do you wish had existed when you were discovering your own questions and growing intellectually? This is an opportunity to write that chapter.”...

Empathy

This chapter examines the role that empathy plays in understanding the experiences of human and nonhuman others. The chapter first distinguishes between two often confused concepts, sympathy and empathy, to show how empathy builds connections with others by trying to understand their perspectives and worlds. The chapter then traces different kinds of empathy (affective resonance, and storied empathy) to argue for a concept of entangled empathy, which requires recognizing the manifold relationships people are in, including social and material conditions. The chapter also addresses worries about empathy. The chapter concludes by showing how entangled empathy can help people address the ways that many human and nonhuman animals can be and are oppressed.

Logic

This chapter asks whether there is any such thing as feminist logic. It defines feminism and logic, and then goes on to present and evaluate four possible views, introducing and critiquing the work of Andrea Nye, Val Plumwood, and Susan Stebbing. It argues that Stebbing’s approach—on which feminism is one among many political applications of logic—is correct, but that feminist logic could do more, by providing a formal framework for the study of social hierarchies, much as it presently provides a formal framework for the study of numbers and similarity rankings among possible worlds.