Can our epistemic environments render us closed-minded? This paper argues that they can. Drawing insights from feminist character theory, I examine two ways in which our epistemic environments can render us closed-minded. First, they can cause us to develop the intrinsic dispositions necessary for closed-mindedness. Our environments and their structures of power and our social locations in them can cause us to be unwilling or constitutionally unable to engage seriously with relevant alternatives to our beliefs. Second, closed-mindedness can also be relational: whether a person is closed-minded will partly depend on extrinsic features of her environment—on whether or not her environment supplies relevant intellectual options with which to engage. Drawing on relational accounts of autonomy and agency, I argue that just as one won’t have autonomy or agency in an environment that severely restricts freedom and opportunity, one won’t be open-minded in an environment that severely restricts intellectual options (e.g., an echo chamber). The absence of intellectual options renders one closed-minded, even when one has the intrinsic dispositions necessary for open-mindedness. Overall closed-mindedness (CMER) is an unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with relevant intellectual options or to revise one’s beliefs.
This paper considers whether apparently non-essentialist accounts of biological sex can avoid sex-essentialist uptake when expressed via generics. Recent work in philosophy of biology has defended realist accounts grounded in anisogamy as both empirically robust and compatible with diversity. I argue that Paul E. Griffiths' sex concept is the most compelling of these views and is not vulnerable to sex essentialism in itself. However, the generics literature shows that generic statements expressing biological generalisations can nonetheless have sex-essentialist uptakes. Drawing on Sterken's account of quantificational force and Leslie's cognitive mechanisms—characteristic dimensions and counterexample resistance—I argue that even Griffiths' carefully non-essentialist account gets processed as an absolute generic, erasing the nuance that distinguishes it from traditional gametic essentialism. Once essentialised at the level of cognition, these generics feed into broader social consequences: the assumption that biological sex determines behavioural dispositions, emotional capacities, and social roles. Generic expressions about behavioural dispositions, emotional capacities, and social roles inherit their apparent biological authority from realist sex concepts, lending scientific legitimacy to stereotypes that Griffiths' metaphysics was never designed to support. Ultimately, I argue that sex-essentialist uptake places significant constraints on the ability of realist accounts of sex to remain non-essentialist in practice.
Andrea Dworkin (1946 – 2005) is perhaps best remembered as the militant feminist who, in 1983—alongside feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon—drafted an ordinance defining pornography as ‘a violation of women’s civil rights’ for the City of Minneapolis. Though this ordinance was vetoed, Dworkin’s reputation as a porn-opposing, (cis-hetero) sex-negative feminist never died. Dworkin saw woman-hating everywhere, and she saw pornography—and intercourse more broadly—as a central site where this hate was realised. But does Dworkin’s opposition to pornography really rightfully earn her a ‘sex-negative’ reputation? This project proposes to undertake a close study of Dworkin’s oeuvre in order to reveal the contours of her views about sex. In bringing the nuances of her views about sex to light, I will argue that Dworkin’s observations may be central for an emancipatory feminist sexual ethics in the present.
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).
I extend Kate Manne’s account of misogyny by theorizing the rewards and forms of valorization offered to women who accept patriarchal social arrangements as a sustaining branch of patriarchal social order. Manne briefly notes that such rewards warrant critical attention, but she does not theorize their structural function. Contemporary discourse increasingly frames the pursuit of these rewards as a feminist choice or a lower‑cost form of empowerment compared to resisting patriarchal norms. I argue that this empowerment is illusory. Although such rewards may temporarily improve women’s material conditions, they reinforce economic dependence and narrow the range of opportunities meaningfully available to women. By presenting patriarchal arrangements as desirable and empowering, these reward‑based mechanisms attract women’s participation and thereby sustain the patriarchal order. I also address the concern that women may accept patriarchal arrangements out of adaptive preference or under conditions of survival. Following Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model, I stress that my argument concerns structural processes, not individual liability. This account shows that patriarchal order is upheld not only through punishment and justification but also through reward‑based mechanisms that draw women into its reproduction.
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.
