November 2022

Carol Gilligan articulates an ethics of care framework that suggests an alternative model to the widely understood and used ethics of justice framework. In this essay, Chloe Davies aims to link women’s use of this care framework to their experience of injustice in public discourse in the West, arguing that the general public’s lack of awareness of an ethics of care framework explains some of the hermeneutical injustices suffered by women in public discourse. Chloe contends that this particular argument allows us to articulate the current limitations of projects of equality in discursive spaces and the possible steps that could be taken to move towards a genuine equality.

This essay poses the question “if slurs and their neutral correlates are both used to describe the same referent, why is one term considered harmful and the other not?” Ruby Allen argues that while slurs may have the same referent as their neutral correlates, they cannot have the same meaning. This is because slurs are created with the intent to discriminate and threaten the group being described, while neutral correlates simply classify and describe such groups. Ruby uses the terms “lesbian” and “dyke” to illustrate this point: while both words refer to the same group of people, their meanings are drastically and intrinsically different. This example is analysed using Christopher Hom’s “combinatorial externalism” and Luvell Anderson’s “deflationary theory”.

In this essay, Luke Gavin discusses Descartes’s foundationalism with respect to the indubitability of foundational ideas, offering a scenario where conceivable doubt might be placed on awareness of one’s mental states (one of the foundational beliefs). Luke responds to an objection that offers immediate acquaintance of mental states as a reason for privileging these beliefs on the basis of the origin of the mental/sensory apparatus.

Immanuel Kant develops a philosophy that values human freedom and provides an account of citizenship that remains relevant today. In this essay, Lily Elston-Leadbetter argues that the edifice of citizenship is fundamentally based on structural violence which excludes women and propertyless workers by delegitimising their labour. The limitations of Kant’s account of citizenship will be examined with specific emphasis on domestic labour, refuting his claim that birth is not a limiting factor to citizenship and revealing how the implicit structural violence of his theory has continued into the present.

In this essay, Andrew Millar explores Simone de Beauvoir’s re-configuration of the Other from traditional Sartrean existentialist notions of the Other, specifically focusing on her thesis of Woman as Other. Andrew highlights that Beauvoir’s thesis is an essential amendment to existentialist conceptions of Otherness in the way that she centres lived sexual experience in her ontology. Additionally, Andrew explores Beauvoir’s project of “authentic love” as a way of living harmoniously with Otherness by returning to the concept of a Heideggerian Mitsein as a means of dissolving an Otherness based in conflict.

In this essay, Conor Jedam interrogates Martin Heidegger’s theory of art as it appears in his essay, originally published in 1950, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. Conor explains Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of artwork which reveals art as “truth of beings setting itself to work,” meaning that artworks disclose the particular Being of beings through the necessary conflict between world and earth. Then, through examining Heidegger’s own examples of Vincent van Gogh’s painting of shoes and the Greek temple, Conor criticises Heidegger’s account and argues instead that the coming forth of world in art discloses some truth of the viewer’s Being.