Against Objectivity: Philosophy and the Humanities

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.