By Nancy Bauer
Feminist philosophers have made very important strides in changing the overwhelmingly male-centric self-discipline of philosophy. but, in Nancy Bauer’s view, so much are nonetheless content material to paintings inside of theoretical frameworks which are essentially fake to human beings’ daily studies. this is often fairly insupportable for a species of philosophy whose valuable aspiration is to make the realm a much less sexist position. tips on how to Do issues with Pornography versions a brand new strategy to write philosophically approximately pornography, women’s self-objectification, hook-up tradition, and different modern phenomena. Unafraid to invite what philosophy contributes to our lives, Bauer argues that the profession’s loss of curiosity during this query threatens to make its firm irrelevant.
Bauer criticizes paradigmatic versions of Western philosophizing: the good guy version, in keeping with which philosophy is the made of infrequent genius; and the scientistic version, based on which a group of researchers works jointly to find once-and-for-all truths. The philosopher’s task is neither to perpetuate the unavoidably sexist trope of the philosopher-genius nor to “get issues right.” particularly, it's to compete with the Zeitgeist and allure humans to the exercise of reflecting on their settled methods of perceiving and figuring out the world.
How to Do issues with Pornography boldly enlists J. L. Austin’s the way to Do issues with phrases, exhibiting that it's going to be learn now not as a thought of speech acts yet as a innovative belief of what philosophers can do on the earth with their phrases.
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Additional resources for How to Do Things with Pornography
Sample text
16 • an advertisement, for a used-Â�car company called Ulster Trader, depicting only a woman’s large breasts, clad in a lowÂ�cut white bra, with the cutline “Nice Headlamps. 18 If the feminist perspective I sketched above is your perspective, then you will have experienced even my descriptions of these images as instances of what you would call sexual objectification, even if you couldn’t exactly specify what marks and features these images have in common. It is conceivable that you and I will disagree with respect to one or two of the images, just in the way that we might disagree that your CVS bag counts as a wastebasket rather than something that you’re using as a wastebasket.
In the case of my contribution, “Lady Power,” the first question takes the form of commentators’ doubting (to use the weakest possible verb) that a pop star merits philosophical attention, or even virtual space in The Times. €was the first of many people to criticize me for what was taken to be my claim that Lady Gaga herself is espousing a philosophical position that we ought to take seriously. “I’m sure it’s fun for LG to be getting all this attention,” Mike A. writes. ” I can understand why people might balk at the claim that, at the tender age of 24, a pop star should be seen as having a coherent philosophy that we should both take seriously and hold her to.
In this way, in fact, philosophical expression and young women’s sexualized attempts at self-Â�expression have something in common: neither can be fully controlled by an author’s intentions, and nothing guarantees that they will come off in the way their authors hope they will. Philosophers like to think that argument—╉“the pure light of reason”—╉will eventually lead everyone to accept the correct way to think about whatever they are writing about. But if we are honest, we will admit that the chances that all sensible readers will embrace the terms in which a philosopher proposes to illuminate some dark corner of the world are no higher than the chances that someone who is awed by Lady Gaga’s sui generis self-Â�comportment could say or do anything to convert people who find the mere mention of her name beneath contempt.