Seyla Benhabib's critique of Jürgen Habermas's moral theory claims that his approach is not adequate for the needs of a feminist moral theory. I argue that her analysis is mistaken. I also show that Habermas's moral theory, properly understood, satisfies many of the conditions identified by feminist moral philosophers as necessary for an adequate moral theory. A discussion of the compatibility between the model of reciprocal perspective taking found in Habermas's moral theory and that found in Maria Lugones's essay “Playfulness,‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception” reinforces the claim that his moral theory holds as yet unrecognized promise for feminist moral philosophy.

Political action requires a concept of humanity grounded in an explicit notion of human nature. Feminists apprehensive about poststructuralism's implications for a feminist politics need methods and discourses that allow feminist politics to proceed toward a vision of human well-being. Recent work by Chris Weedon and Erica Sherover-Marcuse highlights the need for hypotheses that can guide efforts to dismantle oppressed habits of being and help women evaluate and develop political strategies for universal solidarity.

Postmodern aestheticism is defined as a way of thinking that privileges the art of continual reversal. The dynamics of reversal operate according to a theoretical model that, historically speaking, has been the vehicle for blatantly masculinist ideologies. This creates problems for feminist thinking that would appropriate the postmodern conception of the subjectivity of the artist or the aestheticist dissolution of the distinction between life and an.

This essay explores the epistemological significance of the kinds of beliefs that grow out of traumatic experiences, such as the rape survivor's belief that she is never safe. On current theories of justification, beliefs like this one are generally dismissed due to either insufficient evidence or insufficient prepositional content. Here, Freedman distinguishes two discrete sides of the aftermath of psychic trauma, the shattered self and the shattered worldview. This move enables us to see these beliefs as beliefs; in other words, as having cognitive content. Freedman argues that what we then need is a theory of justification that allows us to handpick reliable sources of information on sexual violence, and give credibility where deemed appropriate. She advances a mix of reliabilism and coherentism that privileges feminism. On this account, the evidence for the class of beliefs in question will depend on an act of sexual violence (or testimony, or statistics) to the extent that the act is a reliable indication of the prevalence of sexual violence against women.

Mainstream conceptions of autonomy have been surreptitiously gender‐specific and masculinist. Feminist philosophers have reclaimed autonomy as a feminist value, while retaining its core ideal as self‐government, by reconceptualizing it as “relational autonomy.” This article examines whether feminist theories of relational autonomy can adequately illuminate the agency of Islamist women who defend their nonliberal religious values and practices and assiduously attempt to enact them in their daily lives. I focus on two notable feminist theories of relational autonomy advanced by Marina Oshana and Andrea Westlund and apply them to the case of Women's Mosque Movement participants in Egypt. I argue that feminist conceptions of relational autonomy, centered around the ideal of self‐government, cannot elucidate the agency of Women's Mosque Movement participants whose normative ideal involves perfecting their moral capacity.

The question of diversity, both with regard to the demographic profile of philosophers as well as the content of philosophical inquiry, has received much attention in recent years. One figure that has gone relatively unnoticed is that of the foreigner. To the extent that philosophers have taken the foreigner as their object of inquiry, they have focused largely on challenges nonnative speakers of English face in a profession conducted predominantly in English. Yet an understanding of the foreigner in terms of the nonnative speaker does not exhaust the conceptual space of the foreigner. This article provides a more nuanced conceptual apparatus that allows for a more precise identification and discussion of other ways in which one can be a foreigner in philosophy. I develop a taxonomy of different conceptions of the foreigner, namely the linguistic, material, cultural, and epistemic foreigner; I discuss the different and specific challenges they face; and I show how foreigners enrich philosophical practice.

Simone de Beauvoir offers one of the most interesting philosophical accounts of childhood, and, as numerous scholars have argued, it is one of the most important contributions that she made to existentialism. Beauvoir stressed the importance of childhood on one's ability to assume one's freedom. This radically changed how freedom was construed for existentialism. Rather than positing an adult subjectivity that tries to flee freedom through bad faith, Beauvoir's account forces a recognition of a situated freedom that itself is also developmentally achieved. In this article, I explore the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. By reading Beauvoir through Rousseau—who was one of her favorite authors—we see not just one but two accounts of childhood in Beauvoir's philosophical work. On the one hand is the idealistic childhood wherein the child is an apprentice to freedom. On the other is the constrained childhood whose product is apprenticed to the serious. I begin with a brief summary of Rousseau's Emile. Next, I offer some justification for reading Beauvoir alongside Rousseau before offering an account of Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. I end by exploring some of the implications of my reading for freedom.

This paper critiques enlightenment notions of representation and rehearses an alternative model of mapping that is grounded in performance. Working from her own practice as a landscape painter, Bolt argues that the particular experience of the “glare” of Australian light fractures the nexus between light, form, knowledge, and subjectivity. This rupture prompts a move from shedding light ON the matter to shedding light FOR the matter and suggests an emergent rather than a representational practice.

In this paper I engage interdisciplinary conversation on inaction as the dominant response to climate change, and develop an analysis of the specific phenomenon of complacency through a critical‐feminist lens. I suggest that Chris Cuomo's discussion of the “insufficiency” problem and Susan Sherwin's call for a “public ethics” jointly point toward particularly promising harm‐reduction strategies. I draw upon and extend their work by arguing that extant philosophical accounts of complacency are inadequate to the task of sorting out what it means to be complacent on climate change. I offer a sketch for an alternative account, which I take to be a start in the direction of mapping out a diverse array of “motivational vices” that need to be named, grappled with, and (hopefully) remedied.

This essay examines Catharine Cockburn's moral philosophy as it is developed in her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay on Human Understanding. In this work, Cockburn argues that Locke's epistemological principles provide a foundation for the knowledge of natural law. Sheridan suggests that Cockburn's objective in defending Locke's moral epistemology was conditioned by her own prior commitment to a significantly un-Lockean theory of morality. In exploring Cockburn's views on morality in terms of their divergence from Locke's, the author hopes to underscore the extent of Cockburn's intellectual independence and her philosophical creativity.

By examining evidence from India, where quotas for women in local government were introduced in 1993, this article argues that institutional reform can disturb hegemonic discourses sufficiently to open a window of opportunity where deliberative democratic norms take root and where, in addition to the politics of recognition, the politics of redistribution also operates.

Drawing from four Arenaaan themes—plurality, the public realm, power, and perspective appreciation—I argue for citizenship as a “politics of enlarged mentality.” This term suggests an alternative conception of citizenship that surpasses the limits of both the liberal and civic republican traditions. Unlike die masculinized liberal ideal of the citizen and contrary to the gendered universality that defines the civic republican traditions, a politics based on enlarged mentality combines context sensitivity with principled judgments.

I analyze how machi discourse and practice of gender and identity contribute to feminist debates about gendered indigenous Others, and the effects that Western notions of Self and Other and feminist rhetoric have on Mapuche women and machi: people who heal with herbal remedies and the help of spirits. Machi juggling of different worlds offers a particular understanding of the way identity and gender are constituted and of the relationship between Self and Other, theory and practice, subject and object, feminism and Womanism.

Should Lesbian and women's events have policies banning sadomasochists or sadomasochistic acts? This question is being heatedly debated in the Lesbian community. In this paper, 1 examine the moral and political problems with sadomasochism from a Lesbian-feminist perspective, concluding that sadomasochism is antifeminist and antih'beratory for many reasons. Then, given this conclusion, I explore how events such as women's music festivals should determine their policies about sado-masochism.

The film Gandhi expands our understanding of how the virtue of care can function in the public sphere by portraying Gandhi dealing with Indian independence from Britain, the subjugation of women and Untouchables, and strife between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi illustrates in his social and political activism how the virtue of care is animated by benevolence and structured by the building blocks of the care perspective: responsibility and need, relationship and mutual dependency, context and narrative.