In most areas of philosophy, the typical paper is written impersonally, as if its author occupied what Henry Sidgwick calls “the point of view of the universe” or what Thomas Nagel calls “the view from nowhere” or what Donna Haraway (more skeptically) calls the “god’s-eye view.” In critical social traditions, however—feminist philosophy, philosophy of disability, philosophy of race—personal writing is widely embraced. I argue that there is more at stake here than mere style, and that we have good reasons, both political and epistemic, to abandon the “view from nowhere” pretense and write more openly about the ways in which our lived experiences inform our work. In the words of Eva Kittay, the personal is philosophical.

I provide an analysis of incel ideology which contributes to philosophical reflection on this distinctive form of online misogyny. The analysis complements extant feminist interpretations by illustrating some moral psychological limitations of popular objectification and entitlement frameworks. After emphasizing the central role of self-loathing in the incel worldview, I offer a partial explanation of the roots of this self-loathing by appealing to the underappreciated significance of masculine warrior ideals.

Conceptual innovation is highly prized in Western Anglophone philosophy. Yet it often stems from a relatively narrow tradition that takes little account of contributions from other cultures and philosophical practices. We illustrate this point using the example of work done by Dalit feminists on identifying and addressing hermeneutical injustice. Despite their relevance, Dalit feminist contributions are virtually unknown and remain unrecognized in Anglophone philosophical discussions of hermeneutical injustice. This article aims to investigate the reasons for this neglect. One potential reason is the generally low status accorded to experiential knowledge in epistemology, which is pivotal to Dalit feminist accounts. Another reason concerns systematic bias against non-Western philosophy, which may reflect prejudicial stereotypes and the privileging of existing disciplinary norms. We argue that these reasons may explain the exclusion of Dalit feminists’ scholarship. In light of this, we offer two modest suggestions. First, philosophers should cultivate greater openness to citing texts by non-philosophers where these texts are relevant to the topic at hand. Second, we argue that a more embedded and extensive practice of cross-cultural philosophy or comparative philosophy is needed. These two suggestions may reduce neglect of philosophically rich traditions such as Dalit feminism.

Taking a feminist critical approach, this paper employs Levinas’s thinking on sensibility and time in Otherwise than being to develop a concept of the body as an original intercorporeality through the fact of having been born which, I argue, provides material depth to his critique of the sovereign subject. Contra Guenther’s (2006) development of a maternal ethics based on Levinas’s assertion that the ethical relation of substitution is “like a maternal body,” I argue that modeling a Levinasian conception of ethics upon the maternal body risks perpetuating normative ideas surrounding motherhood and reproduction. Yet I argue that, apart from a Levinasian conception of ethics, the notion of substitution evokes the situation of pregnancy in which the mother breathes for the fetus. Finally, I conceptualize Levinas’s notion of the oneself as descriptive of all (human) bodies which retain a trace from the body from which they were born. Reading Levinas and Irigaray (2017) together, I argue that the notion of the oneself marks a move from the abstract concept of the subject to the concrete notion of the body as an original intercorporeality whose capacity to breathe autonomously rests upon an immemorial “inspiration” by the body from which it was born.

Regret risk is not consistently part of information sharing within informed consent. Yet two kinds of decisions that often invoke concerns about future regret, abortion and sterilization, raise considerations for the role of regret in clinical decision-making and informed consent, particularly regarding decisions about potentially transformative experiences. We distinguish between first-personal and second-personal anticipatory regret and argue that first-personal anticipatory regret can play a productive role, but second-personal anticipatory regret can function in ways that are pernicious. Introducing second-personal anticipatory regret into medical informed consent processes is, we argue, not only not required for informed medical decision-making, but impermissible within the clinical encounter. This view has broader implications for medical decision-making about potentially transformative experiences, and for empirical research on regret regarding healthcare decisions.

This paper examines central themes in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time from the perspective of María Lugones’s account of world-traveling. By thus reading Heidegger through Lugones rather than vice versa—a methodology I call “centering the margins”—I challenge a tendency in comparative work to approach historically undervalued work through a more canonical voice. I argue that doing so has interpretive consequences that tend to be occluded on a standard comparative approach: (i) a critique of the indexed nature of Dasein and the broader Eurocentrism of Heidegger’s project; (ii) a more nuanced account of the methodological value of lived experience; and (iii) a problematization of the early Heidegger’s recapitulation to a unified account of the self. Rather than ameliorate canonical philosophy by offering specifications to insufficiently differentiated philosophical accounts, turning to the margins on this methodology allows us to see where a canonical philosopher resorts to traditional motifs—the dangers of what Lugones calls “ossification in the homeplaces.” The epistemic advantages of marginalization notwithstanding, centering the margins is self-destructive in that the final aim is the dissolution of that dichotomy and the freeing up of new epistemological terrain.

The inclusion problem for theories of gender arises when those theories inappropriately fail to include certain individuals in the gender categories to which they ought to belong. The inclusion problem affects both of the most influential traditions in feminist theorizing about gender: social-position accounts and identity accounts. I argue that the inclusion problem can be solved by adopting a structured theory of gender, which incorporates aspects of both social-position accounts and identity accounts. According to the theory I favor, an individual’s gender is determined by their gender identity if they have one; otherwise, it is determined by their social position. My structured theory of gender offers a more direct solution to the gender inclusion problem than alternatives recently advocated by Barnes (2020), Jenkins (2023), and others. It also points the way to a simple solution to inclusion problems that arise at the level of gendered language.

This project aims to identify and explain a phenomenon I call pain-related motivational deficit, which occurs when there is proper uptake of the epistemic contributions of a pain utterance, but defective uptake of the motivational contributions of a pain utterance. I argue that the normalization of fibroid pain in Black women, and of menstrual pain more broadly, causes a pain-related motivational deficit to be unfairly assigned to utterances about these pain experiences. I show that current ways of thinking about epistemic injustice cannot adequately explain these cases.

The study of hermeneutical injustice tends to restrict the category of “hermeneutical resources” to discursive resources: words, concepts, and expressive styles. This article foregrounds a diverse set of nondiscursive hermeneutical resources, including embodied skills, habits, comportments, and dispositions, and argues that such resources are vitally important for theorizing self-interpretative dysfunction. I reconstruct four accounts of gendered embodiment from Nancy Tuana, Bat-Ami Bar On, Iris Marion Young, and Simone de Beauvoir, and I argue that each implicitly treats embodied practices, comportments, and dispositions as hermeneutical resources. I also consider several implications of and objections to incorporating nondiscursive hermeneutical resources into the study of hermeneutical injustice, and argue that doing so complicates standard accounts of the relationship between hermeneutical injustice and epistemic injustice.

Emerging as a critique of the cultural paradigm in philosophy, new materialism has had a significant impact on the contemporary landscape of the humanities and social sciences, particularly since the 2000s. Following Donna Haraway’s 1988 critique of social constructivism, developed through her concept of situated knowledge, which invited feminists to make reality claims rather than merely addressing the extent to which this or that practice is socially constructed, new materialist feminisms proposed solutions for conceiving the agency of matter—as well as the body and the nonhuman—in its various entanglements with meaning and discourse. Most have criticized Judith Butler’s concept of performativity for reducing the body to either a sign or a fantasy, thus ignoring its agency. In this article, after positioning the new materialist critique of the cultural turn as a response to Haraway’s earlier call for faithful claims to reality, I argue that the underlying problem of the new materialists with Butlerian performativity is generally framed in terms of an objection to correlationism, as conceptualized by the French philosopher Meillassaux, which the new materialist feminisms themselves do not manage to evade either.

Feminist philosopher Lisa Tessman argues that sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is a burdened virtue: virtuous insofar as it serves as a ground of possibility for other virtues, but also burdensome because, taking into consideration the background condition of extreme suffering in the world, it evokes anguish by always being joined to its opposite, indifference. For Tessman, indifference is horrifying and an irredeemable meta-vice. However, in this essay, I bring Tessman into conversation with critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno to argue for a more nuanced feminist ethical appraisal of indifference. Adorno’s critique of coldness shares several important elements with Tessman’s critique of indifference; for Adorno, coldness made the Holocaust possible, and overcoming it means striving to cultivate identification-based solidarity. But Adorno’s dialectical approach to coldness has important implications for a character-focused liberatory ethical project, and his testimony to his own coldness, as a Holocaust survivor, introduces further complexity to this picture. Drawing on and moving beyond Adorno’s work, I argue that certain kinds of coldness—in particular, critical coldness and self-protective coldness—can have liberatory feminist potential. I introduce the concept of liberatory vices to delineate this new category of dispositions.

Some victims of sexual violence fight back, seriously harming their abusers as a way of taking power or exacting retribution. Although violence always raises moral questions, there is nevertheless something impressive about those whose actions succeed in posing a formidable challenge to their oppression. The aim of this paper is to offer two ways of thinking about the ethical value of such non-ideal acts of resistance. First, violent resistance may allow victims to maintain ground projects that are being undermined by their abusers. Second, violent resistance may display what I call the virtue of audacious integrity—a willingness to take moral risks, that is, to act in ways that may arouse severe moral censure, in order to uphold one’s values. Both explanations illustrate that victims of sexual abuse may choose to engage in violent resistance for a variety of ethical reasons, including but not limited to paradigmatic moral considerations.