Word: questionability
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Beauvoir, for her part, took on the question by denying its validity. Rejecting essentialist explanations for the female condition, Beauvoir famously declared, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The “eternal feminine”—those behaviors and character traits that set women apart from men—were humanly created, Beauvoir argued, not natural. Rather than evidencing a perverted female essence or mistaken choice, feminine traits reflected woman’s situation. For Beauvoir, women’s biological nature could never be experienced apart from...
...Second Sex” has since succumbed to obsolescence. New paradigms, denying the structuring of sexual difference as a binary opposition, claim to relegate Beauvoir’s text to a realm of secondary importance. Yet, even if Beauvoir never unequivocally answered the question she posed, she provided the terms of a debate which remains intensely contested. As Beauvoir’s tombstone turns 24, her legacy—whether fully or pseudo feminist—commands our continued attention...
During the question and answer session after the lecture, a number of audience members asked Fagan to elaborate on his views about homosexuality, but he declined to do so, saying that he was only referring to heterosexual relationships during the lecture...
...strength and weakness of philosophical novels is that they often feel like a multiple choice test for which the author has circled several answers to the same question. Whereas a traditional philosopher must present a rigorous argument that is carefully constructed and proven, the philosophical novelist revels in the ambiguity of his or her characters, and the conflicting ideas that make up their lives and conversations. Rebecca Goldstein—who has made a career out of presenting philosophical concepts in fictional form—offers with her latest book a showcase of the advantages and frustrations attendant to this...
...ambition to portray and explain the modern religious experience, it is unable to shake sufficiently free of its author’s initial presumptions. Like many new atheist tracts, “36 Arguments for the Existence of God” paints the religion-and-reason question in Manichean terms. This sort of framing can highlight sharp distinctions in philosophies, but doesn’t begin to approach the varieties of religious experience—or illusion—in the modern world. For Goldstein and her characters, the world divides into the rational and the irrational, the secular...