Wednesday, March 28, 2007
In early January of 1789, Frances Burney was approaching the third year of her court appointment as Second Keeper of Robes for Queen Charlotte. Having enjoyed certain success both monetarily and publicly after the publication of her first two novels, the appointment was graciously offered by the Queen as a way for Burney to [...]
i woke up this morning thinking that i need to search the 19th century. what women were reading the 19th c. Germans? who else, from other parts of Europe, was thinking about history as an autonomous philosophical inquiry? what women–from any era–were trying to answer the question “what is history?” or “what [...]
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Almost one hundred and fifty years after the publication of Renee Descarte’s Discourse on Method (1637) and a hundred and twenty after Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), Immanuel Kant published his short essay — or manifesto — answering the title question, [...]
Thursday, February 15, 2007
i have been starting to notice the gender biases in contemporary learned circles…i.e. dissertations listings in the history depts of universities, popular intellectual/literati publications like Harpers and the new Yorker etc…and of course le doeuff has evidences of her own…
Ranft has got me thinking…in order to include women in western intellectual history the definitions of [...]
I am interested in the history of knowledge, its production and transmission, but more importantly its codification and institutionalization. How does something earn its existence as something that is known? How do these smaller occurrences of things-becoming-known then turn into bodies of knowledge? It is here that I suspect there is room for politics. It [...]
Saturday, February 3, 2007
perhaps I am trying–in foucaultian terms–to come up with a geneology of knowledge…specifically a geneology of the gendering of knowledge…how have women been excluded from this enterprise…where have they succeeded in agreeing on their own…
and, incidentally, what is human knowledge? does this exist or is all knowledge politicized somehow?
I am off to a very slow start with this project for a couple of reasons. While trying to take a few more days to prepare for the GRE on Monday I wanted to jot down some of my initial ideas, whims, and hunches about this project. I will take this journal entry as an [...]
Saturday, December 16, 2006
For my final paper I would like to explore the evolutionary/biological philosophies of Edward O. Wilson; specifically those which contribute to his theory of biophilia. Using his ideas concerning “gene-culture coevolution” and “sociobiology” Wilson has created a legacy of evolutionary psychology/environmental ethics that I believe contributes to an attempted reconciliation between evolution and creation.
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Sunday, November 19, 2006
Hello Gina,
Well, I read Hilda Smith’s forthcoming essay on Friday morning and set myself down to writing you my thoughts as soon as I was finished. I’m so glad I didn’t send them because after three days of ruminating, my thoughts have really changed.
I was at first concerned about her [...]
Thursday, October 5, 2006
In both secondary sources assigned to us on Lamarck, both scientific historians, Stephen Jay Gould and Edward J. Larson, decided to preface their treatments not with anecdotes about Lamarck himself, but about his relationship to Georges Cuvier; colleague and [...]