Hobbes has an unwavering account of gender equality. This is so on two counts. The first count is based on a physiological account of species equality influenced by the work of Harvey. Insofar as biology is destiny, women as bearers and rearers of children have the first experience of dominion. The second count asserts that even if inequality is natural, the dictates of reason enjoin a moral valuation of each as equal. Without this, no social contract, no peace, is possible. For Hobbes, gender equality inheres in what counts as a species being and what reason dictates for society.
Cavendish takes a different view. As Nature abounds with diversity and hierarchy, so do humans. Indeed, heterogeneity is the defining principle of matter, including human matter. But this principle means that there is no arbitrary or conventional barrier based on characteristics of sex (or gender). Her own society constrains women, but her imagined other worlds are populated with empresses, women who are military strategists, and all manner of varieties of humans. Diversity, for her, implies the absence of restraint on the grounds of sex, an equal opportunity approach that will by nature result in difference (inequality).
Will trans philosophy be sufficient for trans women’s liberation? And if not, what interventions are required? To explore this, I will be critically evaluating Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood (2025) in order to argue that a generalised account of trans oppression fails to give us the tools required to understand trans women’s specific gendered experiences. Instead then, I argue we should be looking toward transmisogyny as a site for analysis. To do so, I seek to answer the following questions: how should we understand transmisogyny? How do we come to be through social kinds? And what constitutes transfeminism itself?
This paper argues that the Quaker concept of the Inner Light provides a neglected but powerful feminist account of moral authority—one that challenges both hierarchical epistemologies and the privatization of ethical life. Drawing on the political praxis of Catherine West, the paper reconceptualizes the Inner Light as a feminist moral epistemology grounded in relational responsiveness rather than abstract rationality or institutional legitimacy. Against dominant feminist frameworks that locate moral authority primarily in social position, discursive recognition, or collective standpoint, this paper shows how Quaker ethics articulate an alternative model: moral authority emerges through embodied attentiveness to injustice and the obligation to translate inward discernment into public action. Through a three-stage analysis, the paper traces how the Inner Light functions as (1) a non-hierarchical epistemic source, (2) an ethical grounding for equality and conscientious dissent, and (3) a catalyst for feminist political praxis oriented toward care, testimony, and community accountability. By situating West’s work within this ethical tradition, the paper contends that Quaker-inspired feminist praxis disrupts the private-public divide and reframes political agency as an extension of moral attentiveness, offering a distinctive contribution to feminist debates on epistemic authority, care ethics, and post-secular political philosophy.
Hyung Jin An achieved BA Buddhist Studies degree from Dongguk University (2020), MA Philosophy degree from Hindu College, Delhi University (2022). Now currently researching East Asian Pure Land Buddhism and Hindu Bhakti philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Delhi University... Read More →
This talk looks at the tensions between ideal and non-ideal theory through the lens of trans and feminist philosophy. On the one hand, it seems important to visualise liberatory futures: what are we fighting for? On the other hand, it can seem pointless to build pristine abstract theories when the debris of the present is choking us: what can we do from here? Utopianism doesn't put a roof over anyone's head. For that reason, ideal theory is often thought of as out of touch with real concerns; perhaps any reasonable socially-engaged philosophy is necessarily non-ideal? Hence, I aim to draw on trans philosophy to explore this tension explicitly in the pursuit of seeking broader ambitions for the field. In discussing the ambitions of both ideal and non-ideal social theories, I shall consider what kinds of critique are most useful when building social futures for oppressed groups. Drawing on trans metaphilosophy and elements of 1990s gender theory, I thus argue that we do need ideal theory, due to the limitations of non-ideal theory. In this way, I propose that the best emancipatory theories of gender already integrate both ideal and non-ideal theory to envision a more fruitful and liberatory perspective on trans futures.
This paper argues that explanatory pluralism provides the most defensible framework for governing psychiatric knowledge, and that the continued privileging of biomedical monism requires philosophical justification it has not adequately received. I contend that psychiatric phenomena are ontologically complex in ways that resist reduction to any single explanatory scheme, and that the systematic marginalisation of non-biomedical frameworks reflects the politics of knowledge production rather than their epistemic inadequacy. To ground this argument, I draw on Australian mental health consumer activism as a case study in which spiritual frameworks functioned as genuine competing explanatory systems. These were not pre-scientific residues but coherent accounts of psychological distress with their own internal logic, evidential basis in lived experience, and practical explanatory success. Drawing on Ian Hacking's concepts of interactive kinds and classificatory looping, I examine how the medicalisation of spiritual experience creates self-reinforcing cycles that delegitimise alternative frameworks structurally rather than on epistemic grounds. The paper concludes that recognising spiritual and experiential frameworks as legitimate contributors to psychiatric explanation is not a concession to relativism but a consequence of taking ontological complexity seriously. This has direct implications for how epistemic authority is distributed in clinical practice and mental health care design.
Gemma Lucy Smart is a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, where she researches the history of mental health self-help, consumer activism, and Mad Pride's relationship to the disability and neurodiversity movements. She is a senior lived... Read More →
