Against Objectivity: Philosophy and the Humanities
Loading...
Links to Files
Permanent Link
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2022-04-13
Type of Work
Department
Hood College Arts and Humanities
Program
Hood College Humanities
Citation of Original Publication
Rights
Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States
Abstract
This collection of works examines how philosophical approaches have long been coded as "rational" and "objective" (and "male"), creating a rift between philosophy and other fields of study in the humanities and privileging masculine modes of thinking over feminine. The central argument is that first, philosophy doesn't have to be objective to be meaningful (as in the case of existentialism), and second, that insisting on objective interpretations of things like art and literature can result in a sort of "othering" of the work itself. Objective (formalist) approaches to art, for example, often depend on dismantling the work into discrete parts to be analyzed rather than examining the work as a whole. All of the articles in this collection deal in some way with Self and Other, either from a Cartesian perspective or from a Sartrean perspective, and analyze literature or art criticism through these lenses.