Abstract(s) of the Week!

I should go back sometime and see what percentage of these I've gotten out of women's studies journals. Half, maybe? Makes you think (unless you're a women's studies major). Here are a couple more, both from the current issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy:

Surviving Personal Identity Theory: Recovering Interpretability

Thane Plantikow [she's the fifth one down]

Marya Schechtman’s narrative self-constitution view relies on an account of reality as self-evident that eclipses the interpretive labor required to fix the content of intelligibility. As a result, her view illegitimately limits what counts as identity-conferring narrative and problematically excludes many with psychiatric disabilities from the category of full personhood. Plantikow cautions personal identity theorists against this move and offers an alternative approach to engaging in and conceptualizing narrative construction.

Pictures, Pluralism, and Feminist Epistemology: Lessons from “Coming to Understand”

Letitia Meynell

Meynell’s contention is that feminists should attend to pictures in science as distinctive bearers of epistemic content that cannot be reduced to propositions. Remarks on the practice and function of medical illustration—specifically, images Nancy Tuana used in her discussion of the construction of ignorance of women’s sexual function (2004)—show pictures to be complex and powerful epistemic devices. Their affinity with perennial feminist concerns, the relation between epistemic subject and object, and the nature of social knowledge, are of particular interest [sic].

Update: Thane Plantikow, meet Chantal Unfug (scroll to bottom of post) and Chuck Plunkett. They've been waiting for you.

Update: Some day I'm going to do a profile of Chantal Unfug just so I can title the post, "Chantal Unfugged."