Cheshire Calhoun wins Journal of Applied Philosophy 2015 Essay Prize

The editors of the Journal of Applied Philosophy are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2015 essay prize is Cheshire Calhoun for her article, “Geographies of Meaningful Living“, published in the February 2015 issue.

The £1000 award is granted to the author of the best article published in that year’s volume. We offer Dr. Calhoun a hearty congratulations and are pleased to offer you free access to her winning article through the end of July.

About the Winner

Cheshire Calhoun, winner of the Journal of Applied Philosophy 2015 Essay Prize

Currently, Dr. Cheshire Calhoun teaches philosophy at Arizona State University and is serving as chair of the American Philosophical Association (APA) board of officers. She previously edited feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, and was chair of the APA’s LGBT Committee and the Inclusiveness Committee.

The majority of her work falls within normative ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of emotion, feminist philosophy, and gay and lesbian philosophy.

To learn more about her prolific career and work, please visit her website.

 

 

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About the Journal

The Journal of Applied Philosophy provides a unique forum for philosophical research which seeks to make a constructive contribution to problems of practical concern. Open to the expression of diverse viewpoints, the journal brings critical analysis to these areas and to the identification, justification and discussion of values of universal appeal. The journal covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, policy, law, politics, economics and education. Go here to subscribe today.

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The journal is run by the Society for Applied Philosophy. Founded in 1982, the society aims to promote philosophical study and research that has a direct bearing on areas of practical concern. To learn about the society’s work and how you can become a member, please visit its website.

Undoing Gender: New Experiments in Social Deconstruction

‘The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, “It’s a girl”,’ the American politician Shirley Chisholm once said. Exposed in this insight is the miraculous power of language; all that is required for something so fateful to be determined is not biological nature, not even social imposition, but, simply, speech. So seemingly simple is this mechanism, in fact, that some are doing their best to change it. It was revealed this week that a pre-school in Sweden has decided that the use of gender-specific pronouns such as ‘him’ (‘han’) and ‘her’ (‘hon’) is to be prohibited, in favour of gender-neutral terms, in an attempt to reduce the effects of linguistically determined gender-stereotyping.

The school, aptly name Egalia, is tackling an issue which has been firmly on the feminist agenda since Dale Spender’s influential book Man Made Language appeared in 1980. There Spender argued that, far from passively capturing the way that the world appears to us, language actively constructs the way that the world is. More specifically, the state of language, according to Spender, structures the world in a way that promotes males and inhibits females, whether by exclusion, alienation, control, or construction. The claim was supported by the famous studies in linguistics carried out by the American anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose extensive research on Native American languages led to the hypothesis that the structure of language restricts and determines our cognitive categories. It is hard to report an event in English without using the tense-marked words that the grammar requires, and it is hard to encode a fact in Hopi without marking its testimonial status, that is, whether it is first-hand knowledge, second-hand, third-hand, and so on, as required by the structure of the language. Importantly, it makes it hard to think outside of these limits, and, consequently, hard to behave outside of them. The way that we mark gender according to our grammatical structure is no different, an assumption which the new Egalia policy operates on.