In The Ethics of Ambiguity (herein the Ethics), Simone de Beauvoir declares that science condemns itself to failure if it takes as its task the total disclosure of being (Beauvoir 1948/1976, 130). I suggest that the Ethics actually parallels the spirit of some scientific programs, specifically those that utilize positive skepticism as method. I draw out connections among the Ethics, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau‐Ponty 1945/1962) to which Beauvoir's works show much likeness, and Francis Bacon's The New Organon (Bacon 1620/2000), the latter being at once a scientific and a positive skeptical program. Underscoring the ways in which Beauvoir's method of interrogating the being of beings and reality is compatible with some scientific pictures is important. It complicates the usual thought that existentialism is antiscience, problematizes Beauvoir's overly simplistic depiction of science, and nuances her analysis of the existent's experience of itself.

Women's exclusion from political enfranchisement in Kant's political writings has frequently been noted in the literature, and yet has not been closely scrutinized. More often than not, commentators suggest that this reflects little more than Kant's sharing in the prejudices of his era. This paper argues that, for Kant, women's civil incapacities stem from defects relating to their capacities as moral agents, and more specifically, to his teleological account of the conditions within which we, as imperfect beings, develop our moral capacities. Women are not incidentally or tangentially excluded from the boundaries of political and moral agency, but rather must adopt an explicitly nonmoral character if we are to understand humanity as moving toward its naturally given, moral ends. I argue (1) that Kant's teleological view of human development requires women to develop an explicitly nonmoral character; (2) that this teleology is inextricable from his view of the moral agency that human—and not merely rational—beings are capable of; and (3) that taken together, these suggest that women's subordinate status is internally connected to Kant's view of moral personhood.

The gendered division of labor is the major cause of gender inequality with respect to the broad spectrum of resources, occupations, and roles. Although many feminists aspire to an equality of outcome where there are no significant patterns of gender difference across these dimensions, many have also argued that liberal theories of social justice do not have the conceptual tools to justify a direct attack on the gendered division of labor. Indeed, many critics argue that liberalism positively condones it, presuming that it arises from the free choices of individuals, which must be respected. In this paper I will accept the feminist goal of equality of outcome across roles, occupations, income, and wealth, but will argue that liberal theories of justice are consistent with strong measures aimed at promoting such equality. I will show that liberalism has the conceptual resources to justify a concrete policy measure that goes considerably beyond the measures usually championed by feminists. The example I focus on is “daddy quotas,” which refers to the tagging of a significant part of parental leave for the exclusive use of fathers.

The widely touted discovery of mirror neurons has generated intense scientific interest in the neurobiology of intersubjectivity. Social neuroscientists have claimed that mirror neurons, located in brain regions associated with motor action, facial recognition, and somatosensory processing, allow us to automatically grasp other people's intentions and emotions. Despite controversies, mirror neuron research is animating materialist, affective, and embodied accounts of intersubjectivity. My view is that mirror neurons raise issues that are directly relevant to feminism and cultural studies, but interventions are needed for the work to be compatible with nonreductionist critical thought. In this article I critique the dominant neuroscientific account of mirror neurons, called embodied simulation theory. I draw from feminist epistemologies as well as alternative interpretations of mirror neurons in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to consider mirroring as situated, embodied perception.

Feminist scholars adopt wide‐ranging views of self‐sacrifice: their critiques claim that women are inordinately affected by Christianity's valorization of self‐sacrifice and that this traditional Christian value is inherently misogynistic and necrophilic. Although Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love deems Christian love essentially sacrificial, love, in his view, sets significant limits on the role of self‐sacrifice in human life. Through his proposed response to one who requests forgiveness, “Do you now truly love me?” Kierkegaard offers a model of forgiveness that subverts traditional ideals of the self‐sacrificing and submissive woman while keeping love central. The question asserts self‐love, involves redoubling and double danger, and expresses a refusal to imitate Christ's suffering. I propose a reading in keeping with Grace Jantzen's vision for a feminist philosophy of religion, which reads against the grain and “seeks to break through to new ways of thinking that may open up divine horizons.” My reading is further supported by Kierkegaard's contention that everything essentially Christian bears a double meaning. In light of the subversive potential found in the discrepancy between apparent love and actual love, as well as the duty to name the sin of one who has behaved in an unloving manner, I argue that Kierkegaard's philosophy of love resists simplistic understandings of self‐sacrificing love.

This article is a critical examination of Nancy Fraser's contrast of early second‐wave feminism and contemporary global feminism in “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” (Fraser 2009). Fraser contrasts emancipatory early second‐wave feminism, strongly critical of capitalism, with feminism in the age of neoliberalism as being in a “dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism. I argue that Fraser's historical account of 1970s mainstream second‐wave feminism is inaccurate, that it was not generally anti‐capitalist, critical of the welfare system, or challenging the priority of paid labor. I claim Fraser mistakenly takes a minority feminist position as mainstream. I further argue that Fraser's account of feminism today echoes arguments from James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (2001) to Hester Eisenstein (2009), but such arguments ignore contemporary feminist minority positions. I challenge Fraser's arguments that feminism legitimates neoliberalism to women, that women's NGOs are simply service‐providers enabling the state to withdraw services, and that criticisms of microcredit lending programs can be generalized into criticisms of women's feminism and women's NGOs today. I argue that these claims are vast over‐generalizations and ignore countertrends. I give empirical evidence to support my objections by considering women's activities in post‐communist European countries, which Fraser discusses.

Though many have recently attempted either to locate Arendt within feminism or feminism within the great body of Arendt's work, these efforts have proven only modestly successful. Even a cursory examination of Arendt's work should suggest that these efforts would prove frustrating. None of her voluminous writings deal specifically with gender, though some of her work certainly deals with notable women. Her interest is not in gender as such, but in woman as assimilated Jew or woman as social and political revolutionary. In this paper, I argue that Arendt recognized that what frequently passes for a gender question is not essentially a matter of gender at all, but rather an idiosyncratic form of loneliness that typically affects, though is by no means limited to, women. In her work one finds the conceptual tools necessary to understand the “woman problem” rather than an explicit argument or a solution to it.

Feminist scholars have shown that research on sex/gender differences in the brain is often used to support gender stereotypes. Scientists use a variety of methodological and interpretive strategies to make their results consistent with these stereotypes. In this paper, I analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research that examines differences between women and men in brain activity associated with emotion and show that these researchers go to great lengths to make their results consistent with the view that women are more emotional than men.

In the 1980s extra‐parliamentary social movements and critical theories of race, class, and gender added a new sociocultural understanding of justice—recognition— to the much older socioeconomic one. The best‐known form of the struggle for recognition is the identity politics of disadvantaged groups. I argue that there is still another option to conceptualize their predicament, neglected in recent political philosophy, which understands exclusion not in terms of injustice, more particularly a lack of sociocultural recognition, but in terms of a lack of freedom. I draw my inspiration from Hannah Arendt's model of political action. Arendt diagnoses exclusion not solely as a mode of injustice, but as a lack of participation and public freedom. Consequently, she advocates a struggle for participation, political equality, and freedom as a strategy for emancipation or empowerment. Arendt could help feminists see that collective empowerment is made possible not by a shared identity (the target of poststructuralist critics) but by common action in the service of a particular worldly issue or common end. In other words, feminists would do well to appreciate the revolutionary quality and heritage of the feminist movement better, that is, its character as a set of practices of freedom.

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra‐Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential‐phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly on the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and on some recent film‐ and feminist‐theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film‐texts.

Feminist strong substantive autonomy (FSSA), as presented by Natalie Stoljar and Anita Superson, pronounces judgment on the autonomy status of certain women living under oppression. These women act on deformed desires, Superson explains, and as deformed desires cannot be the agent's own, the women are heteronomous. Stoljar argues that some women's choices violate the Feminist Intuition; by acting on false and oppressive values, these women render themselves heteronomous. I argue against Stoljar and Superson on epistemological grounds. I present six different ways in which agents' choices can be related to deformed desires, with varying results for their autonomy statuses. I show that Stoljar and Superson are not able to distinguish properly among the differing autonomy statuses in these six cases, because doing so requires attention to agents' inner processes of decision‐making, as those processes are enacted in the agents' social and temporal contexts. Stoljar and Superson judge others' autonomy statuses based on abstract generalizations rather than via empirical attention to agents' actual decision‐making processes. Consequently, their judgments are not adequate to the lived self‐direction of real persons. Assessing others' autonomy status requires consideration of agents' inner choice‐making in sociotemporal context, which favors a procedural or weak substantive account of autonomy.

Susan Faludi's Backlash, first published in 1991, offers a compelling account of feminism being forced to repeat itself in an era hostile to its transformative potentials and ambitions. Twenty years on, this paper offers a philosophical reading of Faludi's text, unpacking the model of social and historical change that underlies the “backlash” thesis. It focuses specifically on the tension between Faludi's ideal model of social change as a movement of linear, step‐by‐step, continuous progress, and her depiction of feminist history in terms of endless repetition. If we uphold a linear, teleological ideal of social change, I argue, repetition can only be thought of in negative terms—as a step backwards or a waste of time—which in turn has a negative and demoralizing impact within feminism itself. To explore an alternative model of historical time and change, I turn to the work of feminist philosopher Christine Battersby, who rethinks repetition through the Kierkegaardian mode of “recollecting forwards,” and the Nietzschean notion of “untimeliness.” I suggest that Battersby's philosophical reconceptualization of historical repetition, as a potentially creative, productive phenomenon, can be of great utility to feminists as we enact and negotiate the dynamics of backlash politics.

Although the ethics of humor is a relatively new field, it already seems to have achieved a consensus about ethics in general. In this paper, I implicitly (1) question the view of ethics that stands behind many discussions in the ethics of humor; I do this by explicitly (2) focusing on what has been a chief preoccupation in the ethics of humor: the evaluation of humor. Does the immoral content of a joke make it more or less humorous? Specifically, I analyze whether a sexist joke is more humorous because of its sexism. Contra recent trends in the ethics of humor, I answer this question affirmatively. To this end, the paper presents a detailed and novel reading of Bergson's philosophy of humor, which I argue connects most easily and significantly to the alternate view of ethics I have in mind.