Feminist Philosophy of Mind

This is the first collection of essays to focus on feminist philosophy of mind. It brings the theoretical insights from feminist philosophy to issues in philosophy of mind and vice versa. Feminist Philosophy of Mind thus promises to challenge and inform dominant theories in both of its parent fields, thereby enlarging their rigor, scope, and implications. In addition to engaging analytic and feminist philosophical traditions, essays draw upon resources in phenomenology, cross-cultural philosophy, philosophy of race, disability studies, embodied cognition theory, neuroscience, and psychology.

The book's methods center on the collective consideration of three questions: What is the mind? Whose mind is the model for the theory? To whom is mind attributed? Topics considered with this lens include mental content, artificial intelligence, the first-person perspective, personal identity, other minds, mental illness, perception, memory, attention, desire, trauma, agency, empathy, grief, love, gender, race, sexual orientation, materialism, panpsychism, enactivism, and others.

Each of the book's twenty chapters are organized according to five core themes: Mind and Gender&Race&; Self and Selves; Naturalism and Normativity; Body and Mind; and Memory and Emotion. The introduction traces the development of these themes with reference to the respective literatures in feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind. This context not only helps the reader see how the essays fit into existing disciplinary landscapes, but also facilitates their use in teaching. Feminist Philosophy of Mind is designed to be used as a core text for courses in contemporary disciplines, and as a supplemental text that facilitates the ready integration of diverse perspectives and women's voices.

Keya Maitra is professor of philosophy and currently the Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities (2018-2022) at University of North Carolina Asheville. Her research and teaching focus in feminist philosophy of mind, third world feminism, cross-cultural philosophy, ethics of governance,
and epistemology of mindfulness.

Jennifer McWeeny is associate professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar National Research Award (France). Her research and teaching interests are in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, feminist philosophy, ontology, and decolonial theory.
She is Editor in Chief of Simone de Beauvoir Studies.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

What Is Feminist Philosophy of Mind?
Jennifer McWeeny and Keya Maitra

I. Mind and Gender and Race
1. Is the First-Person Perspective Gendered?
Lynne Rudder Baker

2. Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference: The Sexed Presuppositions Underlying the Turing Test
Amy Kind

3. Toward a Feminist Theory of Mental Content
Keya Maitra

4. Disappearing Black People through Failures of White Empathy
Janine Jones

II. Self and Selves
5. Playfulness, "World"-Traveling, and Loving Perception
María Lugones

6. Symptoms in Particular: Feminism and the Disordered Mind
Jennifer Radden

7. Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self: Reflections on the Views of Soran Reader and Sarah Buss
Diana Tietjens Meyers

8. The Question of Personal Identity
Susan James

III. Naturalism and Normativity
9. Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
Judith Butler

10. Enactivism and Gender Performativity
Ashby Butnor and Matthew MacKenzie

11. Norms and Neuroscience: The Case of Borderline Personality Disorder
Anne J. Jacobson

12. Embodiments of Sex and Gender: The Metaphors of Speaking Surfaces
Gabrielle Benette Jackson

IV. Body and Mind
13. Against Physicalism
Naomi Scheman

14. Why Feminists Should Be Materialists, and Vice Versa
Paula Droege

15. Which Bodies Have Minds? Feminism, Panpsychism, and the Attribution Question
Jennifer McWeeny

16. Sexual Orientations: The Desire View
E. Díaz-León

V. Memory and Emotion
17. Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity
Susan J. Brison

18. Does Neutral Monism Provide the Best Framework for Relational Memory?
Iva Apostolova

19. The Odd Case of a 'Bird-Mother': Grief and Relational Selfhood
Vrinda Dalmiya

20. Equanimity and the Loving Eye: A Buddhist-Feminist Account of Loving Attention
Emily McRae

Contributor Biographies

Index