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Fuzzy logic: Toward a feminist philosophy of language and the animals
Abstract
This investigation explores the ways in which metaphysics, positioned at the intersections of essence/language/logic, both forms and informs certain ontological questions in a post-Cartesian universe. Central to my philosophical inquiry are animals: animals as trope and animals as speaking subjects. As a philosophy of language, it does not aim to produce results so much as to engage in the process of reflecting back on the toward itself, on the ways in which writing, making, thinking and doing take place. As a feminist philosophy of language, its critique of representation and subjectivity are focused on the epistemological revelations of ethics and/in discursive practice. Throughout I will argue that animal shapes and animal language are as sliding signifiers; language use alone is unreliable as proof of the rationality of man. Specifically, for naturalist Annie Dillard, poet-cum-social scientist Vicki Hearne and theologian Mary Daly, interspecial communication is in some way acknowledged as a language of human possibility. Each woman speaks philosophically about the world and our relationship to it; her literary and philosophical explorations are then organized according to certain conceptual comprehensions. In my reading of Dillard, words illuminate experience; reading Hearne, the focus is on grammars. For Daly, spinners write rhetorics in the webs of the Wickedary. My assumption has been that the presence of animal/forms in the emerging philosophies of these three twentieth-century women writers has had something to say about how all kinds of non- and extra-philosophical activities become the bases for philosophical reflection. Further, I have assumed that each of these writer/philosophers is important because each recognizes in her own way the problem of language and the ethical dimensions of knowing.
Subject Area
Literature|Labor relations|Philosophy|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Morstad, Jill Suzanne, "Fuzzy logic: Toward a feminist philosophy of language and the animals" (1994). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9519544.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9519544