phlogma

All the agents enjoy many advantages in order to ensure the egg is formed. There is no cause for envy, because even the worst of the conditions imposed on some agents happen to be ideal conditions for the egg. As for the satisfaction of the agents, they receive that, too, without conceit. They quietly savour […]

Introduction and Text
Gertrude Stein’s paper “Degeneration In American Women” first appears in the Appendix to biographer Brenda Wineapple’s 1996 book Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Wineapple writes:
I found the following essay in a nondescript folder tucked among the miscellaneous papers of Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder.* Eight pages long, typed on legal-sized paper, and titled […]

Notes on Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein.
254
Stein judges her cousin Bird as lacking in moral courage.
It takes very much courage to do anything connected with your being unless it is a very serious thing.

256
from notes, “yes I say it is hard living down the tempers we are born with.” The idea makes […]

In this classic paper in the literature on the idea of supererogation (acts above and beyond moral duty), Urmson argues for recognition of a special class of moral acts that, while clearly moral, cannot be required—at least not generally. In the course of his argument, he makes explicit a masculine assumption about the feminine relation to morality. Susan Wolf reacts to this paper. Together, Urmson’s seemingly off-handed remark and Wolf’s response, are symptomatic of the deep rift in moral perspective between women and men. The underlying clash of principles were first clearly examined by Otto Weininger a century ago. Luno picks up where Weininger left off, using Urmson and Wolf as philosophical occasions.

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
According Otto Weininger’s biographer, David Abrahamsen, Freud read an early draft of what later became Sex and Character. The encounter is also dramatized in Joshua Sobol’s play, Weininger’s Night.
—Editor’s note
 
xiii (Foreword by Nancy Chodorow)
Chodorow writes,
As someone who has written both appreciatively and critically about […]

Notes on Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law (1796)
There are, however, two crimes worthy of death, in respect of which it still remains doubtful whether the Legislature have the Right to deal with them capitally.
And since they cannot be dealt with “capitally,” they cannot, on Kantian terms, quite be seen as murder.
It is the sentiment […]

Notes on:
Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide.”
44
I do not share the general pessimism about the possibility of resolving the issue of abortion and infanticide because I believe it is possible to point to a very plausible moral principle dealing with the question of necessary conditions for something’s having a right to life, where the conditions in […]

Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.
[Agacinski, in this chapter, critiques Simone de Beauvoir. She does so, in our view, with considerable accuracy. Beauvoir is complicit, like J. S. Mill before her and many since (Susan Miller Okin, in particular, here, since Agacinski mentions her by name), in buying into a central doctrine that has, […]

Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.

61
What is really universal in a logical sense…is…the fact of being sexed: all humans are either ‘men or women.’
62
…abstract egalitarianism affirms the irrelevance of sexual difference
and is untenable in many areas including judicial and political.

63
…the problem is to know at what level of abstraction a category is theoretically or […]

Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.
100
Does everyone have an unconditional right to have a child? Agacinski asks.
And can a child be allowed to legally issue from two people of the same sex? I say issue and not raise because legally, education means nothing precise and doesn’t involve the identity of the child.
Can we […]