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In this book, a major feminist philosopher engages the work of the actor and director who has progressed from being the stereotypical “man's man” to pushing the boundaries of the very genres—the Western, the police thriller, the war, or boxing movie—most associated with American masculinity. Her highly appreciative encounter with the films directed by Clint Eastwood revolve around the questions “What is it to be a good man?” and “What is it to be, not just an ethical person, but specifically an ethical man?” Focusing on Eastwood as a director rather than as an actor or cultural icon, she studies Eastwood in relation to major philosophical and ethical themes that have been articulated in her own life's work. In her fresh and revealing readings of the films, the author takes up pressing issues of masculinity as it is caught up in the very definition of ideas of revenge, violence, moral repair, and justice. Eastwood grapples with this involvement of masculinity in and through many of the great symbols of American life, including cowboys, boxing, police dramas, and ultimately war—perhaps the single greatest symbol of what it means (or is supposed to mean) to be a man. The author discusses films from across Eastwood's career, from his directorial debut with Play Misty for Me to Million Dollar Baby. Her book is not a traditional book of film criticism or a cinematographic biography. Rather, it is a work of social commentary and ethical philosophy. In a world in which we seem to be losing our grip on shared symbols, along with community itself, Eastwood's films work with the fragmented symbols that remain to us in order to engage masculinity with the most profound moral and ethical issues facing us today.

In Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering, 16 authors— including both established feminists and some of today's most innovative new scholars— engage in sustained reflections on the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which those experiences are informed. Many of the topics in this collection, though familiar, are here taken up in a new way: contributors think beyond the traditional pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, speak to the manifold nature of mothering by considering the experiences of adoptive mothers and birthmothers, and upend the belief that childrearing practices must be uniform despite psycho-sexual differences in children. Many chapters reveal the radical shortcomings of convention philosophical wisdom by placing trenchant assumptions about subjectivity, gender, power and virtue in dialogue with women's experience. The volume is diverse both in its content and in its scholarly approach; certain of the essays are informed by their authors’ own experiences, others draw from extant narratives; many engage such canonical male thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger, while others draw from the works of contemporary feminists including Sara Ruddick, Iris Marion Young, Virginia held, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All readers, regardless of their philosophical training and commitments, will find much to appreciate in this volume.

The Feminine Symptom is a deconstructive, psychoanalytic, continental feminist study of Aristotle’s natural philosophy. It proposes that Aristotle’s theory of sexual reproduction is key to understanding his philosophical project as a whole. Just as a craftsman creates an artifact, the male supplies the form, which acts on matter provided by the female. The “feminine symptom” refers to the mechanism by which a female offspring is produced, namely a fault or misstep in the teleological unfolding of reproduction, occasioned by the presence of chance forces, but one that is necessary to the teleological cosmos. The book repositions Generation of Animals as the central text of Aristotle’s thinking, and traces the aleatory feminine symptom as accident, chance, coincidence and necessity operating in Aristotelian metaphysics and physics: in cause, place, motion, potentiality, and actuality, as well as exploring the relationship of Aristotle’s natural philosophy to Plato, atomism, and other predecessors. The methodology attends to Aristotle’s figures, his literariness and teleological momentum, seeking out textual aporias, slippages, and symptoms in relation to sexual difference. The analysis reveals the dual vectors at work in Aristotle’s thought: a movement toward system-building, hierarchy, and teleology, but also a phenomenological attunement to the singularity of things. The book engages Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, and remedies the lack of attention paid to Aristotle by 20th-century French thinkers, and also addresses an Anglophone literature on Aristotle’s biology and feminism. The book develops a politics of “aleatory feminism” that converges with the contemporary turn to “new materialisms” in the theoretical humanities.

This book offers a sustained analysis of the concept grounding Irigaray's thought: the constitutive yet incalculable interval of sexual difference. In an extension of Irigaray's project, it takes up her formulation of the interval as a way of rereading Aristotle's concept of topos and Bergson's concept of duration. A sexed hierarchy is diagnosed at the heart of Aristotle's and Bergson's presentations. Yet beyond that phallocentrism, this book points out how Aristotle's theory of topos as a sensible relation between two bodies that differ in being and Bergson's intuition of duration as an incalculable threshold of becoming are indispensable to the feminist effort to think about sexual difference. Reading Irigaray with Aristotle and Bergson, it is argued that the interval cannot be grasped as a space between two identities; it must be characterized as the sensible threshold of becoming, constitutive of the very identity of beings. The interval is the place of the possibility of sexed subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and is also a threshold of the becoming of sexed forces.

Although widely recognized as a founder and key figure in the current re-emergence of pragmatism, Charles Peirce is rarely brought into contemporary dialogue. This book shows that Peirce has much to offer contemporary debate and deepens the value of his view of representation in light of feminist epistemology, philosophy of science, and cultural anthropology. Drawing also on William James and John Dewey, the book identifies ways in which bias, authority, and purpose are ineluctable constituents of shared representation. It nevertheless defends Peirce's realistic account of representation, showing how the independently real world both constrains social representation and informs its content. Most importantly, the book shows how members of a given community not only represent but transform a shared world, and how those practices of representation may, and should, be improved.