End of Term + Fall Course

Well the course is now officially at an end. Thanks to all of you, the students, for making this such a great experience for me. I appreciate your interest and your dedication to the course. We worked through some very difficult material so you ought to be as proud of yourselves as I am appreciative of your efforts.

I will be teaching another course here at UCSC this Fall. The course is 'Philosophy of Race and Gender'. We'll be covering recent essentialism versus constructivism debates now raging in contemporary discussions of race and gender. We'll also consider how different views of race and gender lend themselves to affirming the importance of a politics of recognition. We'll likely read a few very good books by Cornel West, Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, and bell hooks. The course will start with introductory material on realism/constructivism in the work of Ian Hacking and as applied to gender and race by Sally Haslanger. Other introductory material will include the Nancy Fraser and Richard Rorty debates with which we ended PHIL/LGST 144. (Course Info: PHIL 153 - not yet added to the schedule but it will be soon - see the Philosophy Dept. course listings online).

Thanks again to all of you.

The false dichotomy between critical theory and post-structuralism can be overcome through Fraser's Pragmatic approach. She aims to examine both and separate the useful from the non-useful parts.
I think that her historical evaluation of women's past moral identity is vital in women's self-description. If one denies the creditability of past traditions one also denies the history of oppression and can therefore never successfully overcome it. Regardless of negative or positive attributes, history has to be taken as a whole. While critical theory is limited to the present, when tactfully used with a post-structuralist view of history, we can find useful the breakdown of the unjust social systems through a historical lens.

Nancy's critique on Rorty

Nancy Fraser criticizes Rorty’s claim that women should re-describe themselves using new language rather than bring up past traditions, mostly because of his view that women are rarely seen as full persons in the past. She claims that there are several past traditions that women could use to positively describe themselves. The danger of this is that not only can the positive be used but also the negative traditions. Then it becomes a matter of evaluating which characteristics carry more weight and it diminishes the argument that moral identity developed from a historical sense is useful in describing modern day women.

Fraser's Rorty

In Nancy Fraser's "Solidarity or Singularity?" she explains Richard Rorty's "Invisible Hand" and the "sublimity or decency?" concept, and I guess I'm just confused. It seems to me that Rorty contradicts himself in stating that "what promotes one will also promote the other," while also saying that pragmatism and Romanticism do not mix. Is this the evolution of his thought, or is he attempting to make a strong argument, while just confusing others? I tend to agree with the first of his arguments, that they do indeed mix. How do you feel?

Rorty: Feminism and Pragmatism

If we agree with Richard Rorty's conception of feminism, that is, that feminism and pragmatism are compatible, and the feminist project aims at simply creating a better kind of society, rather than a final step in creating a perfect society which has been ages in the making, then what does this do to the public/private distinction? Is it necessary to have separate public and private spheres in which to carry out this project, or is such a split utterly incompatible with it?