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This pioneering book offers a fresh treatment of many issues in philosophy of mind by applying a diverse range of feminist perspectives. As the first collection of its kind,
Feminist Philosophy of Mind defines the content, scope, and methods of this emerging field. Each of its twenty chapters enlarges our understanding of the mind by considering the social contexts of minds. Topics pursued include personal identity, mental content, other minds, artificial intelligence, gender, race, sexual orientation, emotion, memory, perception, empathy, agency, trauma, embodiment, and others. Readers will discover new and expanded responses to timeless questions about the mind.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- What Is Feminist Philosophy of Mind?
- Jennifer McWeeny and Keya Maitra
- I. Mind and GenderandRaceand
- 1. Is the First-Person Perspective Gendered?
- Lynne Rudder Baker
- 2. Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference: The Sexed Presuppositions Underlying the Turing Test
- Amy Kind
- 3. Toward a Feminist Theory of Mental Content
- Keya Maitra
- 4. Disappearing Black People through Failures of White Empathy
- Janine Jones
- II. Self and Selves
- 5. Playfulness, "World"-Traveling, and Loving Perception
- María Lugones
- 6. Symptoms in Particular: Feminism and the Disordered Mind
- Jennifer Radden
- 7. Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self: Reflections on the Views of Soran Reader and Sarah Buss
- Diana Tietjens Meyers
- 8. The Question of Personal Identity
- Susan James
- III. Naturalism and Normativity
- 9. Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
- Judith Butler
- 10. Enactivism and Gender Performativity
- Ashby Butnor and Matthew MacKenzie
- 11. Norms and Neuroscience: The Case of Borderline Personality Disorder
- Anne J. Jacobson
- 12. Embodiments of Sex and Gender: The Metaphors of Speaking Surfaces
- Gabrielle Benette Jackson
- IV. Body and Mind
- 13. Against Physicalism
- Naomi Scheman
- 14. Why Feminists Should Be Materialists and Vice Versa
- Paula Droege
- 15. Which Bodies Have Minds? Feminism, Panpsychism, and the Attribution Question
- Jennifer McWeeny
- 16. Sexual Orientations: The Desire View
- E. Díaz-León
- V. Memory and Emotion
- 17. Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity
- Susan J. Brison
- 18. Does Neutral Monism Provide the Best Framework for Relational Memory?
- Iva Apostolova
- 19. The Odd Case of a Bird-Mother: Relational Selfhood and a "Method of Grief"
- Vrinda Dalmiya
- 20. Equanimity and the Loving Eye: A Buddhist-Feminist Account of Loving Attention
- Emily McRae
- Contributor Biographies
- Index
About the author
Keya Maitra is professor of philosophy and the Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities (2018-2022) at University of North Carolina Asheville. She was a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Senior Research Award (India) in 2015. Her research and teaching focus is in philosophy of mind, cross-cultural philosophy, transnational feminist philosophy, and epistemology of mindfulness.
Jennifer McWeeny is associate professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a past recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar National Research Award (France). Her research and teaching interests are in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, feminist philosophy, metaphysics, and decolonial theory. She is Editor in Chief of Simone de Beauvoir Studies.
Summary
This is the first collection of essays to focus on feminist philosophy of mind. It brings the theoretical insights from feminist philosophy to issues in philosophy of mind and vice versa. Feminist Philosophy of Mind thus promises to challenge and inform dominant theories in both of its parent fields, thereby enlarging their rigor, scope, and implications. In addition to engaging analytic and feminist philosophical traditions, essays draw upon resources in phenomenology, cross-cultural philosophy, philosophy of race, disability studies, embodied cognition theory, neuroscience, and psychology.
The book's methods center on the collective consideration of three questions: What is the mind? Whose mind is the model for the theory? To whom is mind attributed? Topics considered with this lens include mental content, artificial intelligence, the first-person perspective, personal identity, other minds, mental illness, perception, memory, attention, desire, trauma, agency, empathy, grief, love, gender, race, sexual orientation, materialism, panpsychism, enactivism, and others.
Each of the book's twenty chapters are organized according to five core themes: Mind and Gender&Race&; Self and Selves; Naturalism and Normativity; Body and Mind; and Memory and Emotion. The introduction traces the development of these themes with reference to the respective literatures in feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind. This context not only helps the reader see how the essays fit into existing disciplinary landscapes, but also facilitates their use in teaching. Feminist Philosophy of Mind is designed to be used as a core text for courses in contemporary disciplines, and as a supplemental text that facilitates the ready integration of diverse perspectives and women's voices.
