Feminist Interpretations of William James

Contents

Preface

Nancy Tuana

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Erin C. Tarver and Shannon Sullivan

Part I: The Promise and Peril of James’s Philosophy for Feminism

1 The Feminine-Mystical Threat to Masculine-Scientific Order

Charlene Haddock Seigfried

2 “The Woman Question”: James’s Negotiations with Natural Law Theory and Utilitarianism

Jacob L. Goodson

3 Women and William James

Erin McKenna

4 Lady Pragmatism and the Great Man: The Need for Feminist Pragmatism

Erin C. Tarver

Part II: Pragmatist Ethics of Care

5 The Energies of Women: William James and the Ethics of Care

Susan Dieleman

6 William James and the Will to Care for Unfamiliar Others: The Masculinity of Care?

Maurice Hamington

Part III: Embodiment and Emotion

7 Habit, Relaxation, and the Open Mind: James and the Increments of Ethical Freedom

Megan Craig

8 James and Feminist Philosophy of Emotion

Shannon Sullivan

9 “A Perverse Kind of Pleasure”: James, the Body, and Women’s Mystical Experience

Jeremy Carrette

Part IV: Epistemic and Narrative Contestations

10 The Will Not to Believe: Pragmatism, Oppression, and Standpoint Theory

José Medina

11 Incredulity and Advocacy: Thinking After William James

Lorraine Code

Afterword

Charlene Haddock Seigfried

Index

“A welcome and lively contribution on William James, and adds significantly to the series’ wider reconstructive project. . . . James is here revealed warts-and-all, and that certainly is to the good of Jamesian scholarship, pragmatism, and feminist philosophy more generally.”

—Clara Fischer, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society