This book traces the career development and influence on American intellectual life of the first twenty women to earn a PhD in philosophy in the United States. Rogers explores the factors that led these women to pursue careers in academic philosophy, examines the ideas they developed, and evaluates the impact they had on the academic and social worlds they inhabited. This volume investigates not only the success stories of such women as Eliza Ritchie, Julia Gulliver, and Christine Ladd-Franklin, to name (...) a few, but also the policies and practices that made it difficult or impossible for others to succeed. (shrink)

Accounts of the lives and work of the men who helped develop American Idealist thought tell only half the story of the movement that began in St. Louis. Women were central to the movement and developed three major streams of thought within it: pedagogy, feminism, and progressive political theory. The works in this set allows scholars and students alike to see how: women contributed significantly to the St. Louis programme to develop a sound pedagogy; many of them developed feminist theory (...) as a natural outgrowth of that programme; and they originated political theories that intertwined thought and practice. (shrink)

The American idealist movement started in St. Louis, Missouri in 1858, becoming more influential as women joined and influenced its development. Susan Elizabeth Blow was well known as an educator and pedagogical theorist who founded the first public kindergarten program in America (1873-1884). Anna C. Brackett was a feminist and pedagogical theorist and the first female principal of a secondary school (St. Louis Normal School, 1863-72). Grace C. Bibb was a feminist literary critic and the first female dean at the (...) University of Missouri, Columbia (1878-84). American idealism took on a new form in the 1880s with the founding of the Concord School of Philosophy in Massachusetts. Ellen M. Mitchell participated in the movement in both St. Louis and Concord. She was one of the first women to teach philosophy at a co-educational college (University of Denver, 1890-92). Lucia Ames Mead, Marietta Kies, and Eliza Sunderland joined the movement in Concord. Lucia Ames Mead became a chief pacifist theorist in the early twentieth century. Kies and Sunderland were among the first women to earn the Ph.D. in philosophy (University of Michigan, 1891, 1892). Kies wrote on political altruism and shared with Mitchell the distinction of teaching at a coeducational institution (Butler College, 1896-99). These were the first American women as a group to plunge into philosophy proper, bridging those years between the amateur, paraprofessional and professional academic philosopher. Dorothy Rogers's new book at last gives them the attention they deserve. America's First Women Philosophers is indexed in H.W. Wilson's Essay and General Literature Index. (shrink)

This study is the first examination of the works and lives of the women of the St. Louis philosophical movement and Concord School of Philosophy , two branches of the same idealist movement in America that introduced German thinkers to the American reading public, particularly G. W. F. Hegel. The St. Louis branch of the movement focused primarily on education as a civilizing force in society. The concepts of "self-activity" and self-estrangement were seen as integral to the educative process and (...) therefore became predominant themes of the movement. ;Many of the women in this study were contributors to The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, America's first philosophy journal, edited by William Torrey Harris, the recognized leader of the St. Louis and Concord circles. Figures studied include Susan Elizabeth Blow , kindergarten education theorist; Anna Callender Brackett , proponent of higher education for women; Grace C. Bibb , feminist and educator, Ellen M. Mitchell , feminist and Concord School lecturer; and Marietta Kies , a political theorist who posited altruism as a valid ethical principle for use in public life. A number of less prominent women educators and thinkers of the St. Louis movement and Concord School are also discussed. ;All the women in this study were associates of Harris or his colleagues: Thomas Davidson , John Dewey , George H. Howison , George S. Morris , Denton J. Snider , and Louis Soldan. (shrink)

This paper introduces America's first women Idealists and discusses their appropriation and reconfiguration of Hegel's public/private distinction. Through their philosophies of education two of these women, Susan E. Blow (1843--1916) and Anna C. Brackett (1836--1911), legitimized women's active involvement in public life. A third, Marietta Kies (1853--1899), put forth a political theory of altruism. Her theory anticipates feminist critiques of male-centered political theory and has important implications for today's ethic of care. Blow and Brackett were associates of William T. Harris (...) (1835--1909) in the St. Louis Philosophical Movement (ca. 1860--1880) and contributors to The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Kies was associated with Harris through the Concord Summer School of Philosophy (1879--1888). She was also a student of John Dewey at the University of Michigan. (shrink)

Pandemic plans are increasingly attending to groups experiencing health disparities and other social vulnerabilities. Although some pandemic guidance is silent on the issue, guidance that attends to socially vulnerable groups ranges widely, some procedural (often calling for public engagement), and some substantive. Public engagement objectives vary from merely educational to seeking reflective input into the ethical commitments that should guide pandemic planning and response. Some plans that concern rationing during a severe pandemic recommend ways to protect socially vulnerable groups without (...) prioritizing access to scarce resources based on social vulnerability per se. The Minnesota Pandemic Ethics Project (MPEP), a public engagement project on rationing scarce health resources during a severe influenza pandemic, agrees and recommends an integrated set of ways to attend to the needs of socially vulnerable people and avoid exacerbation of health disparities during a severe influenza pandemic. Among other things, MPEP recommends: 1. Engaging socially vulnerable populations to clarify unique needs and effective strategies; 2. Engaging socially vulnerable populations to elicit ethical values and perspectives on rationing; 3. Rejecting rationing based on race, socioeconomic class, citizenship, quality of life, length of life-extension and first-come, first-served; 4. Prioritizing those in the general population for access to resources based on combinations of risk (of death or severe complications from influenza, exposure to influenza, transmitting influenza to vulnerable groups) and the likelihood of responding well to the resource in question. 5. Protecting critical infrastructures on which vulnerable populations and the general public rely; 6. Identifying and removing access barriers during pandemic planning and response; and 7. Collecting and promptly analyzing data during the pandemic to identify groups at disproportionate risk of influenza-related mortality and serious morbidity and to optimize the distribution of resources. (shrink)

In his article in a recent issue of the Classical Quarterly Mr. G. M. A.Grube attempts to vindicate the authenticity of the Hippias Maior, concentrating his attention upon an article by me as ‘embodying most of the objections of earlier scholars’ against the genuineness of the dialogue. I believe that I am still ‘the latest exponent,’ in any detail, of this view; but I may claim at least some good company in the heresy, and to the names already cited by (...) Mr. Grube or myself may be added in particular that of Wilamowitz, who also believes the Hippias Maior to have been written in the Academy within Plato's lifetime. I was not aware when writing my previous article of this noteworthy support in a work just then appearing. (shrink)

The developmental importance to humans of the human-constructed physical environment, including myriad modified natural objects or manufactured objects, is well recognized. The importance of the physical dimension of the constructed niche has also been recognized in nonhuman animals with respect to dwellings (e.g., beavers’ dams, birds’ nests, and bees’ hives), but has not previously been applied to technical traditions, despite the fact that enduring alterations of the physical environment left by social partners are part of the constructed niche that supports (...) the learning of technical skills through the phenomenon of delayed social facilitation. These alterations aid learning over a longer time scale than the actions themselves. Thus, technical skills that result in enduring physical artifacts, which themselves aid learning the skills, should be both more persistent in a population and more widespread than technical skills that do not share this feature. This perspective gives us a new lens through which to understand the origins of technical traditions in nonhuman animals, and by extension, in human ancestors. Understanding the process by which traditional technical skills are acquired in nonhuman species gives us insight into the ways that the combination of social and physical niche construction can support the evolution of technical aspects of culture from modest beginnings. (shrink)

Introduction, W G Runciman Social Evolution in Primates: The Role of Ecological Factors and Male Behaviour, Carel P van Schaik Determinants of Group Size in Primates: A General Model, R I M Dunbar Function and Intention in the Calls of Non-Human Primates, Dorothy L Cheney & Robert M Seyfarth Why Culture is Common, but Cultural Evolution is Rare, Robert Boyd & Peter J Richerson An Evolutionary and Chronological Framework for Human Social Behaviour, Robert A Foley Friendship and the Banker?s (...) Paradox: Other Pathways to the Evolution of Adaptations for Altruism, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides The Early Prehistory of Human Social Behaviour: Issues of Archaeological Inference and Cognitive Evolution, Steven Mithen The Emergence of Biologically Modern Populations in Europe: A Social and Cognitive ?Revolution??, Paul Mellars Responses to Environmental Novelty: Changes in Men?s Marriage Strategies in a Rural Kenyan Community, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder Genetic Language Impairment: Unruly Grammars, M Gopnik, J Dalalakis, S E Fukuda, S Fukuda & E Kehayia The Emergence of Cultures among Wild Chimpanzees, Christophe Boesch Terrestriality, Bipedalism and the Origin of Language, Leslie C Aiello Conclusions, John Maynard Smith. (shrink)

In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, several feminist theorists began developing alternatives to the traditional methods of scientific research. The result was a new theory, now recognized as Standpoint Theory, which caused heated debate and radically altered the way research is conducted. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader is the first anthology to collect the most important essays on the subject as well as more recent works that bring the topic up-to-date. Leading feminist scholar and one of the founders of Standpoint (...) Theory, Sandra Harding brings together the a prestigious list of scholars--Dorothy Smith, Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, Nancy Hartsock and Hilary Rose--to not only showcase the most influential essays on the topic but to also highlight subsequent developments of these approaches from a wide variety of disciplines and intellectual and political positions. The Reader will be essential reading for feminist scholars. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Dangerous Diagnostics: The Social Power of Biological Information. By Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence Tancredi.

The Oxford or Tractarian Movement and later Ritualists and Anglo-Catholics schooled numerous converts in elements of the Catholic faith. Foremost among them was John Henry Cardinal Newman, one of the original founders of the Oxford Movement. Converts numbered in the hundreds and included another cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, the second Archbishop of Westminster, the religious foundress Cornelia Connelly, the priest novelist Robert Hugh Benson and later literary figures such as G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh and Mgr Ronald Knox. American historian, Patrick (...) Allitt, has argued that on both sides of the Atlantic converts dominated Catholic intellectual life between 1840 and 1960. While such 'Tractarian' converts have indeed greatly influenced Catholic life, many 'Tractarians' who never converted have also had a considerable impact on English-speaking Catholicism. C.S. Lewis is an obvious example. But there have been others, including author Charles Williams, poet T.S. Eliot and theologians John Macquarrie and Michael Ramsey. The author Dorothy L. Sayers also deserves to be counted among their number. (shrink)

This chapter provides a historical reconstruction of how Alfred Schutz’s American writings were critically engaged by the feminist sociologists Dorothy E. Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. Schutz’s articulation of a phenomenological sociology in relation to, among others, the sociology of Talcott Parsons and the philosophies of science of Ernest Nagel and Carl G. Hempel proved fruitful to Smith in the development of her feminist standpoint theory in her 1987 The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Collins likewise draws (...) on Schutz’s writing in the development of her own standpoint theory in her 1986 paper “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” but in a way that addresses some of her own concerns with Smith’s feminist sociology. As I hope to show with the recovery of this underappreciated history, the critical insights of Smith and Collins with regard to the possible uses and limits of phenomenology for feminist theorizing, are still valuable today. (shrink)

Moore much disliked the names ‘George Edward’ which his parents had bestowed upon him. Hence he was always known just as ‘Moore’ in his professional life, although at home there seems to have been a profusion of names—in his Commonplace Book he writes1: ‘I used to be called “Jumbo’, and used to be called “Tommy”; & also “Georgie”, & am still called by my brothers and sisters “George”; by Dorothy & others I am called “Bill”…‘.

This chapter introduces the articles by Marie C. Swabey, Thelma Z. Lavine, Grace A. de Laguna and Dorothy Walsh on the objectivity of scientific knowledge. We will see Swabey placing herself outside the historicist traditions of (later) authors (e.g., Thomas Kuhn), and arguing that the rationality and objectivity of science are grounded in synthetic a priori justified logical principles. Lavine and de Laguna, by contrast, embrace socio-historical approaches to the study of science, thus anticipating later developments in philosophy of (...) science. Still, whereas Lavine embraces a relativist notion of objectivity, de Laguna argues that science, at least in some respects, actually is universally valid. Walsh, finally, like Swabey, believes in context-independent objectivity that is grounded in metaphysics, but like de Laguna and Lavine, contends that such objectivity is discipline-specific. (shrink)