Feminist Metaphysics

Although The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir inaugurated an exploration of the ontology of sex, gender and identity in the mid-twentieth century, the field of feminist metaphysics has been slow to develop. There are a number of explanations for this the more obvious relevance of ethics and political theory for feminism, the suspicion of some feminists working in the continental tradition towards metaphysics, and the assumption that metaphysical theories are ahistorical, fixed, and irrelevant to feminist concerns. A growing body of work in feminist metaphysics has succeeded in dispelling each of these presuppositions by showing that metaphysical questions are relevant to feminist philosophy (Frye, Witt, Haslanger) and that ontological questions need not be divorced from the changing social context in which they arise (Alcoff). Feminist Metaphysics will be a landmark volume in feminist philosophy because it is the first collection of papers devoted entirely to the field of feminist metaphysics.§§All of the papers will be new and cutting edge. They will cluster around several issues that form the core of the emerging field of feminist metaphysics: the metaphysics of sex and gender, personal identity and the self, and the relationship between ontology and politics. Questions about the metaphysics of sex and gender have been central to feminist writing for the past twenty-five years. Debates over realism and nominalism applied to sex and gender are ongoing and will be represented in the collection. Another vibrant debate in feminist metaphysics concerns how to understand persons and selves. Are persons autonomous, detached decision-makers or are they relational beings enmeshed in bodily, historical existence? How does the notion of a relational self connect to more traditional metaphysical questions like that of free will and determinism? How do traditional criteria for personal identity like sameness of memory fare when considered in relation to sexual violence? Finally, the volume will include papers that address the question of how politics and ontology might be related to one another, and that question traditional responses to it.