No abstract

In this interview, Margaret A. Simons describes her path to philosophy and existentialism, her struggles in the male-dominated field in the 1960s and 1970s, and her political activism in the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. She also discusses her encounters with Simone de Beauvoir and Beauvoir’s refusal to own her philosophical originality, suggesting that Beauvoir may have adopted a more conventional narrative of a female intellectual to circumvent the public’s resistance to her radical ideas in the 1950s.

Questions of power and ethics were implicitly present in the previous chapters. In this chapter, I deal with them in more detail, examining the power struggles in the classroom in terms of the relationship between the student and the lecturer as well as that between students. I also discuss ways out of the struggle, including a reflective attitude, classroom practices and considerations of spatial arrangements. Further, recognition, generosity and care are suggested as possible ways to overcome the difficult ethical situations in learning and teaching philosophy. In this context, I discuss the Oslo Summer School, where care ethics was used as the theoretical point of departure.

What alternatives have been created within feminist pedagogy to question power hierarchies and to make teaching more inclusive? What approaches were adopted in the Gender and Philosophy summer schools in order to achieve these goals? After discussing these questions, I demonstrate how the concepts of “alienation”and “situation” can be used to analyse power dynamics and the framework they provide to the rest of the book.

This chapter deals with the affective, social and bodily situation of learning and teaching philosophy, starting with a discussion of the views articulated by both students and professional philosophers in the interviews and answers to the questionnaire on attitudes to studying philosophy. The discussions of women students’ “love” or “passion” for philosophy and of the dynamics of alienation from philosophy lead to an examination of the alienation related to students’ social class, raceand sexual orientation. As we saw earlier, feminist pedagogy has typically tried to surpass the idea of reason that operates as separate from the feeling, sensing and moving body. In this chapter, I discuss the aspect of the senses and how they are and could be integrated in processes of learning more comprehensively. At the end of the chapter, I describe two summer schools. The first of these is the Icelandic one, Philosophy of the Body, which examined the possibility of teaching philosophy “through the body”. The second is the Danish summer school titled Feminist Political Philosophy.