There has been significant interest in addressing the underrepresentation of various demographic groups in philosophy. Indeed, many have proposed remedies at the disciplinary level. However, underrepresentation is an issue that varies by subfield in philosophy. Women, for example, are especially underrepresented in subfields considered formal (e.g., logic). As has already been argued in the existing literature, addressing underrepresentation, even within subfields, is not as simple as recruiting more students from underserved populations. Instead, we advocate for a student-centered approach, promoting inclusive pedagogy. In this paper, we share a case study in which we implemented feminist and trauma-informed interventions in two undergraduate formal logic courses and investigated their impact with respect to elements of structural injustice. We found that our interventions successfully eliminated existing gender-based differences in perceptions of self-efficacy and largely diminished students’ perceptions of the objectivity of logic, but were unsuccessful at changing students’ impressions of the broader applicability of logic. By sharing our interventions, we hope to provide educators with practical tools and ideas for implementing similar approaches in their classrooms. By sharing our results, we invite educators to reflect on the potential impact of similar approaches in formal philosophy courses and on tools for measuring that impact.

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.

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.

Feminist understandings of shame often explore the machinations of power over gendered bodies. This article theorizes a feminist politics of shame to describe gendered shame-as-discipline, and possible resistance, within institutions. The central case comes from US medical education, in which a “culture of shame” has been identified. In July 2020 the Journal of Vascular Surgery published an article classifying trainee surgeons’ social media posts as either “professional” or “unprofessional,” with the latter category counting images of trainees wearing “inappropriate” attire including bikinis and swimwear. The article was interpreted as explicit shaming of gendered bodies in healthcare and met backlash through a Twitter (now X) campaign in which healthcare workers posted their bikini pictures alongside #MedBikini; the article was retracted by the journal. I analyze #MedBikini Twitter discourse and institutional responses to explore shame, discipline, knowledge, and power in the medical institution. The article made visible shame-as-discipline, utilizing surveillance, shame, and classification to manifest power and encourage institutional normativity. Participants in #MedBikini resignified bikinis (and their gendered, racialized bodies) as not-shameful, but valuable and resistant to dominant norms. This resistance clarifies the machinations of gendered discipline and surveillance and bolsters an intersectional feminist politics of shame for responding to power-knowledge-shame structures within institutions.

Intelligibility is often seen as a paradigmatic goal for overcoming epistemic oppression. Understanding oppression helps to undo structures of ignorance and to create the grounds for moral, political, and legal arguments that protect marginalized people from being silenced. This is especially crucial for those who experience sexual and gendered violence, as they often struggle both to understand their own experiences and to make others understand them. In this paper, I argue that social epistemologists and feminist standpoint theorists often focus in an unvariegated way on intelligibility, inadvertently reinforcing reliance on carceral structures—systems that tend to reproduce harm and violence for survivors. This concern is particularly relevant in feminist anti-rape politics, where the pressure to make experiences legible often intersects with calls for carceral solutions, which fail to address the root causes of harm and maintain cultures of sexual and gender violence. To remedy this, I propose a new epistemological framework that preserves the importance of intelligibility while challenging carceral reliance. Instead of focusing solely on comprehension, I suggest approaching intelligibility as a process of navigating layers of social legibility, allowing for alternatives that better support survivors and resist carceral thinking.

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.

This paper considers the practical application of the metaphor of “good boundaries” for working towards better interspecies relationships and multispecies cultures. Engaged philosophical methods are employed in the context of the author’s family farm with attentiveness towards both multispecies and colonial politics. The analysis centers interspecies relational dynamics across a spectrum of liminal forms of life on “the property,” in the “homestead,” and under the guise of “stewardship.” The paper concludes that the metaphor of good boundaries helps to generate better multispecies entanglements by (i) growing our capacity for ecological thinking, (ii) directing our attention to moral failure, and, at times, (iii) disrupting anthropocentric colonial ideologies and practices.

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.

Original accounts of feminist standpoint theory emphasize its fundamentally critical stance toward situated knowledge (Smith 1974; Hartsock 1983; Collins 1986). The function of a critical standpoint is not to carelessly accept the beliefs of marginalized people, but instead to interpret those beliefs in light of thoroughgoing and pervasive ideological distortions. Some formulations of standpoint theory capture this critical function in the achievement thesis. It claims that a standpoint is not obtained automatically but must be achieved through a struggle against a dominant ideology. Contrary to the standard acceptance of the achievement thesis, Bright has recently argued that the requirement of achievement can warrant the dogmatic exclusion of some perspectives from becoming standpoints. In turn, he advances an account of standpoint theory which abandons the achievement thesis. Against Bright’s non-achievement account of standpoint theory, I argue that doing away with the achievement thesis abandons standpoint theory’s original aim of being critical of the social structures which construct and legitimize situated knowledge. Further, I argue that Bright’s concern with the possible dogmatism of the achievement thesis is better addressed by a commitment to the classic account of standpoint theory rather than a revision of it.

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.

Precision medicine (PM) encompasses various emerging, data-intensive healthcare and biomedical research initiatives aimed at tailoring care to individual patient characteristics. While “precision” primarily denotes an epistemological shift in how biomedical research is approached and care delivered, the conviction that PM empowers patients in clinical decision-making is central to its vision as it is taken up across policy contexts. In this paper, I critically assess these promises by drawing on recent engagements in agential epistemic injustice (Lackey 2020; Medina 2022). I suggest that the social, cultural, and epistemological conditions in which the epistemic practice of precision care unfolds are conducive to epistemic injustice. Despite PM’s explicit aims to address longstanding criticisms regarding the disease-centric nature of contemporary biomedical care practices by including person-centered, non-biomedical features in clinical consideration, exploring its underlying logic suggests its epistemic economy is stacked against patients’ epistemic interests. As such, despite its laudable aim of patient empowerment, the exacerbated risk of epistemic injustice might truncate patients’ (epistemic) agency, further disempowering them in clinical decision-making. To conclude, I suggest that the reliance on “empowerment”- and “person-centered care”-rhetoric dominating PM discourse is a case of epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), further discouraging engagement with social, experiential, and phenomenological dimensions of illness, defanging critics of raising those concerns, and impeding the realization of epistemic justice in healthcare.

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.

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.

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.

When people reach for symbolic language like metaphor in an effort to express their understanding of a complex experience like baby and pregnancy loss it is usually because everyday language is inadequate. We demonstrate how an analysis of people’s accounts of stillbirth, miscarriage and termination for fetal anomaly collected in England suggests a variety of explanations for “what remains” after pregnancy loss. These include bodily traces, ashes, symbolic objects, and social relationships: a range indicative of the different physical, material, and affective elements that inform how a person understands bodily and temporal separation after pregnancy loss. We engage with the work of feminist philosophers who critique models of pregnant embodiment; those who propose parthood, and theorists who argue for more complex models of intercorporeal relationality. We then discuss insights from linguistics about embodied cognition and metaphorical language. Paying critical attention to symbolic language, combined with feminist thinking about intercorporeality, offers a methodology for analyzing the embodied metaphors that people use when they talk about their experiences of pregnancy loss. These articulations about “what remains” support our claim that the intercorporeal model of embodiment should be extended spatially and temporally beyond the moment of physical separation following pregnancy loss.

I develop a strategy of resisting oppression that is directed toward expanding the agency of other oppressed agents and is thus unhampered by some forms of internalized oppression. Using Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that freedom is intersubjective, I motivate intersubjective agency expansion which holds that even if internalized oppression has compromised the ability to resist for one’s own sake, oppressed agents can still marshal resistant agency on behalf of others. A secondary upshot of this strategy is that it may help repair some harms of internalized oppression. On this view, both resistance and repair are not solitary acts, but collective efforts. I first motivate the concept of ambiguous agency based on Beauvoir’s discussion of ambiguity and Qrescent Mali Mason’s concept of intersectional ambiguity. Specifically, I argue for the ambiguity between self-regarding and other-regarding forms of agency and hold that internalized oppression may harm the former but not necessarily the latter. I then develop the strategy of intersubjective agency expansion and its two forms: symbolic and direct agency expansion. Finally, I argue that a secondary upshot of this strategy is the repair of internalized oppression, and that this ought to count as a form of resistance to oppression.

In this paper, I examine some of the emotional dimensions of oppression under the heading of “emotional alienation.” If the experience of oppression is affectively attuned, then resisting oppression will likely involve dealing with these difficult, often painful, feelings. Resistance may require finding ways of pushing back against their potentially disempowering effects and developing other, more empowering, ways of feeling. Long-lasting forms of social oppression have a strong hold in people’s sense of self. Resistance, then, requires self-transformation. If emancipation requires undoing disempowering emotional patterns, then self-transformation will require “undoing” ourselves. How is this undoing tied to developing a new consciousness? How does developing a “radically altered consciousness” (Bartky 1990) involve radically changing our ways of feeling? In this paper, I will argue that emotional disalienation need not be thought of in terms of suppressing or excising disempowering emotional patterns. I will contend that narrative thinking, as a relational process, can play an effective role in the struggle towards emancipation.