This collection of essays places a distinguished academic career within the context of a personal and political reality that is grounded in a working-class background and a commitment to feminist activism. Kathryn Pyne Addelson reflects on her development as a philosopher and a feminist by reexamining the genesis of her own writings. Throughout these interdisciplinary pieces, she draws examples from the feminist, civil rights, and antiwar movements to offer a different way of approaching philosophical ethics. Impure Thoughts is divided into two parts: "Writing Philosophy" and "Writing Feminism." In the first section, she addresses such questions as how professional authority contributes to creating and maintaining hierarchies of class, gender, age, and race. With reference to various reproductive debates, Addelson takes issue with philosophers who "preempt our moral meanings and our solutions to our social problems" under the assumption that cognitive authority is neutral. Throughout these essays, she tries to demonstrate how philosophy might become more empirical. In the second section, the author describes the tension between upward mobility and class identity. She encounters the contradiction of her life--"I had left the love and anger of my own working-class neighborhood not by changing the world by moving up in it"--and works toward a resolution of her professional status with her working-class roots, her radical politics with her white professional-class privilege. Defining feminism as "a commitment to take women seriously," Addelson addresses class and gender bias, anarchist alternatives to several ethics, and the contradictions in writing feminism using the elite means and methods of the academy. The essays, written between 1972 and 1989, offer criticism of philosophical and feminist ethics and social theory. In them Addelson offers the beginnings of a new ethics based on "symbolic interactionism," an anthropological, qualitative sociology with its roots in the work of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. As part of her explicitly empirical method, she uses case studies in abortion, teen pregnancy, and other current moral problems. Author note: Kathryn Pyne Addelson is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Program in the History of the Sciences at Smith College.
In Moral Passages, Kathryn Pyne Addelson presents an original moral theory suited for contemporary life and its moral problems. Her basic principle is that knowledge and morality are generated in collective action, and she develops it through a critical examination of theories in philosophy, sociology and women's studies, most of which hide the collective nature and as a result hide the lives and knowledge of many people. Based on Addelson's twenty years of work in feminist philosophy and interactionist sociology as well as her long-standing involvement in women's community organization, Moral Passages investigates how morality and knowledge are collectively enacted in today's world.
Originally published in 1994, asks how moral theories, whether traditional or feminist are made a reality. Using detailed examples to bring moral norms to light, the book addresses historical cases and contemporary social problems such as teen pregnancy, contraception, abortion and gay rights. Her in-depth study of Margaret Sanger's early work on birth control shows how the knowledge of birth control as well as the action of abortion was (and still is) declared deviant and reveals the collective nature of both morality and knowledge.
Conversations in Context: Identity, Knowledge, and College Writing invites students to learn about and participate in a series of related conversations about student identities, the aims of the university, and the conventions of academic writing. Rather than seeing academic writing as consisting of objective statements of truth, the editors of this textbook view it as a social construction of knowledge that requires rhetorical choices as well as empirical research. This book represents academic writing as a sequence of continuing conversations within discourse communities provides a variety of oppotunities to engage with and participate in these converstaions.
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