Sally_Haslanger

Sally Haslanger

Sally Haslanger

American philosopher


Sally Haslanger (/ˈhæslæŋər/) is an American philosopher and the Ford Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1]

Quick Facts Education, Alma mater ...

Haslanger earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985. She has taught at Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.[2] Haslanger is particularly famous for her work on social and political theory, feminism and philosophy of gender and race .[3]

Biography

Prof. Haslanger graduated from Reed College in 1977 with a BA in philosophy, and earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1985 from the University of California, Berkeley.[2]

Haslanger was selected as the 2011 Carus Lecturer by the American Philosophical Association.[4] The Society for Women in Philosophy named her a 2010 Distinguished Woman Philosopher, citing her as one of the "best analytic feminists" in the United States.[4] Haslanger was the president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015.[5] In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[6] She co-edits the online publication Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy.[7]

She held the 2015 Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.[8] In 2023, Sally Haslanger gave the Walter Benjamin lectures hosted by the Humboldt University in Berlin.[9]

She is married to fellow MIT philosopher Stephen Yablo.[10]

Philosophical work

Video about the main contributions by Haslanger. English subtitles.

Haslanger has published in metaphysics, feminist metaphysics, epistemology, feminist theory, ancient philosophy, and social and political philosophy.[3] She writes that much of her work has focused on persistence through change; objectivity and objectification; and Catharine MacKinnon's theory of gender. She has done work on the social construction of categories often considered to be natural kinds, particularly race and gender.[10][11][better source needed] A collection of her major papers on these topics appeared as Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford University Press, 2012) which won the Joseph B. Gittler Award of the American Philosophical Association in 2014. This prize is given for an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences.[12]

Definition of gender

One of Haslanger's most influential notions is her analytic definition of 'woman'. Her definition is as follows:

S is a woman iffdf S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is "marked" as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.[13]

Criticisms have been made on the marginalization of trans women within the definition (Katharine Jenkins),[14] and the possibility of the Queen of England not being considered a 'woman' by the definition (Mari Mikkola [de]).[15]

Published works

  • Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader (co-edited with Elizabeth Hackett), Oxford University Press, 2005.[16]
  • Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays (co-edited with Charlotte Witt), Cornell University Press, 2005.[17]
  • Persistence: Contemporary Readings (co-edited with Roxanne Marie Kurtz), MIT Press, 2006.[18]
  • Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, Oxford University Press, 2012.[19]
  • Critical Theory and Practice, Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 2017.

References

  1. "MIT philosophy faculty: Sally Haslanger". www.MIT.edu. Retrieved June 11, 2017.
  2. "CV" (PDF). Sally Haslanger. Retrieved July 7, 2018.
  3. "Sally Haslanger". John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved July 7, 2018.
  4. "Gender, Race and Philosophy: The Blog". Gender, Race and Philosophy: The Blog. Retrieved June 11, 2017.
  5. "Walter-Benjamin Lesctures 2023". Evifa. Retrieved June 17, 2023.
  6. "Sally Haslanger". Retrieved July 7, 2018.
  7. "Q&A with MIT philosopher Sally Haslanger". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved February 6, 2022.
  8. Mikkola, Mari (2009). "Gender Concepts and Intuitions". Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 39 (4): 559–583. doi:10.1353/cjp.0.0060. ISSN 0045-5091. JSTOR 27822065. S2CID 143581926.
  9. "Oxford University Press book page". OUP.com. Retrieved June 11, 2017.
  10. "Cornell University Press". Cornell.edu. Retrieved June 11, 2017.
  11. Haslanger, Sally Anne; Kurtz, Roxanne Marie (June 11, 2017). Persistence: contemporary readings. Bradford Books/MIT Press. OCLC 64427549.

Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Sally_Haslanger, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.