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Helga Varden rethinks Kant's work on human nature to make space for sex, love, and gender within his moral account of freedom. She shows how Kant's philosophy provides us with resources to appreciate and value the diversity of human ways of loving and the existential importance of our embodied, social selves.
List of contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I. Sex, Love, and Gender: Happiness and Virtue
- Introduction to Part I
- 1: Sexual and Affectionate Love: Happiness and Moral Responsibility
- 2: Kant and Women
- 3: Kant on Sex: Reconsidered
- 4: Sexual Violence and Oppression
- Concluding Part I: Reconciling Noumena and Embodied, Social Kantian Agents
- Part II. Sex, Love, and Gender: Right
- Introduction to Part II
- 5: The Innate Right to Freedom: Abortion, Sodomy, and Obscenity Laws
- 6: Private Right: Marriage and Trade in Sexual Services
- 7: Public Right: Systemic Justice
- Concluding Part II: Justice as Rightful, Human Freedom
About the author
Helga Varden is an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published on a range of classical philosophical issues— including Kant's answer to the murderer at the door, private property, political obligations, and political legitimacy-as well as on applied issues such as terrorism, poverty, and non-human animals. With a particular interest in Kant's contributions both to the philosophical canon and to contemporary issues, Varden is one of the few Kant scholars to have brought Kant's ideas to bear also on core issues in feminist philosophy as well as in the philosophy of sex and love, including abortion and same-sex marriage.
Summary
Helga Varden rethinks Kant's work on human nature to make space for sex, love, and gender within his moral account of freedom. She shows how Kant's philosophy provides us with resources to appreciate and value the diversity of human ways of loving and the existential importance of our embodied, social selves.
Additional text
Sex, Love, and Gender is a sweeping and systematic tour de force - an account of our sexual and gendered human nature, grounded in Kantian theory, that is courageously comprehensive in scope, carefully rigorous in its attention to the details of Kantian philosophy, and refreshingly forthright in its author's unwillingness to be limited by Kant's own failings... it [is] what historically informed philosophy can be at its very best: a direct and engaging conversation across centuries, which strives to leave the limits of each cultural context not by abandoning them, but by acknowledging and engaging them ... [Varden's] authorial vulnerability... [and]... sincerity is as refreshing as her consistent nimbleness of argument and seemingly encyclopaedic grasp of Kant's moral-political oeuvre found throughout this book.
