Elizabeth Barnes

Last updated
Elizabeth Barnes
Alma mater University of St Andrews
Notable workThe Minority Body (2016)
Era 21st century
Region Anglo-American philosophy
Institutions University of Leeds
University of Virginia
Main interests
Feminist philosophy, metaphysics, social philosophy and ethics

Elizabeth Barnes is an American philosopher working in feminist philosophy, metaphysics, social philosophy and ethics. Barnes is a professor of philosophy at the Corcoran Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia. [1]

Contents

Biography

Barnes was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and was raised around Charlotte, North Carolina. [2] Barnes holds a bachelor's degree from the Davidson College, [3] where she graduated magna cum laude , and a master's degree and PhD from the University of St Andrews, [4] where she studied under Katherine Hawley and Daniel Nolan. After graduating from St Andrews, Barnes held posts in the philosophy department at the University of Leeds from 2006, before joining the faculty at Virginia in 2014. [3] In 2012, she became editor-in-chief of the journal Philosophy Compass. [3] [5]

Barnes has published across various fields in philosophy, [3] and edited a volume entitled Current Controversies in Metaphysics, which was published with Routledge in 2015. [6] In 2016, her monograph The Minority Body was published with Oxford University Press. [7] In the book, Barnes challenges the view of disability common in analytic philosophy, arguing instead that it is primarily a social phenomenon. Disabled persons, she argues, are not intrinsically worse off in virtue of being disabled, even though disability can be, in a restricted sense, a harm. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

Personal life

She is married to the Scottish philosopher Ross Cameron; the pair met at St Andrews, and Cameron is also a professor at Virginia. [2] [13]

Selected publications

Books

Articles

Related Research Articles

Axiology is the philosophical study of value. It includes questions about the nature and classification of values and about what kinds of things have value. It is intimately connected with various other philosophical fields that crucially depend on the notion of value, like ethics, aesthetics or philosophy of religion. It is also closely related to value theory and meta-ethics. The term was first used by Eduard von Hartmann in 1887 and by Paul Lapie in 1902.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Existence</span> State of being real

Existence is the state of having being or reality in contrast to nonexistence and nonbeing. Existence is often contrasted with essence: the essence of an entity is its essential features or qualities, which can be understood even if one does not know whether the entity exists.

Metaphilosophy, sometimes called the philosophy of philosophy, is "the investigation of the nature of philosophy". Its subject matter includes the aims of philosophy, the boundaries of philosophy, and its methods. Thus, while philosophy characteristically inquires into the nature of being, the reality of objects, the possibility of knowledge, the nature of truth, and so on, metaphilosophy is the self-reflective inquiry into the nature, aims, and methods of the activity that makes these kinds of inquiries, by asking what is philosophy itself, what sorts of questions it should ask, how it might pose and answer them, and what it can achieve in doing so. It is considered by some to be a subject prior and preparatory to philosophy, while others see it as inherently a part of philosophy, or automatically a part of philosophy while others adopt some combination of these views.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metaphysics</span> Study of fundamental reality

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality. It is often characterized as first philosophy, implying that it is more fundamental than other forms of philosophical inquiry. Metaphysics is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some modern theorists understand it as an inquiry into the conceptual schemes that underlie human thought and experience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ontology</span> Philosophical study of being and existence

In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being. It investigates what types of entities exist, how they are grouped into categories, and how they are related to one another on the most fundamental level. Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of categories that encompasses the classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include substances, properties, relations, states of affairs, and events. These categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts, including particularity and universality, abstractness and concreteness, or possibility and necessity. Of special interest is the concept of ontological dependence, which determines whether the entities of a category exist on the most fundamental level. Disagreements within ontology are often about whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they are related to other entities.

In formal semantics, an ontological commitment of a language is one or more objects postulated to exist by that language. The 'existence' referred to need not be 'real', but exist only in a universe of discourse. As an example, legal systems use vocabulary referring to 'legal persons' that are collective entities that have rights. One says the legal doctrine has an ontological commitment to non-singular individuals.

Pluralism is a term used in philosophy, referring to a worldview of multiplicity, often used in opposition to monism or dualism. The term has different meanings in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and logic. In metaphysics, it is the view that there are in fact many different substances in nature that constitute reality. In ontology, pluralism refers to different ways, kinds, or modes of being. For example, a topic in ontological pluralism is the comparison of the modes of existence of things like 'humans' and 'cars' with things like 'numbers' and some other concepts as they are used in science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aristotelianism</span> Philosophical tradition inspired by the work of Aristotle

Aristotelianism is a philosophical tradition inspired by the work of Aristotle, usually characterized by deductive logic and an analytic inductive method in the study of natural philosophy and metaphysics. It covers the treatment of the social sciences under a system of natural law. It answers why-questions by a scheme of four causes, including purpose or teleology, and emphasizes virtue ethics. Aristotle and his school wrote tractates on physics, biology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government. Any school of thought that takes one of Aristotle's distinctive positions as its starting point can be considered "Aristotelian" in the widest sense. This means that different Aristotelian theories may not have much in common as far as their actual content is concerned besides their shared reference to Aristotle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Applied philosophy</span> Branch of philosophy

Applied philosophy is a branch of philosophy that studies philosophical problems of practical concern. The topic covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, engineering, policy, law, politics, economics and education. The term was popularised in 1982 by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy by Brenda Almond, and its subsequent journal publication Journal of Applied Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Brake. Methods of applied philosophy are similar to other philosophical methods including questioning, dialectic, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation, thought experiments and logical argumentation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Frederick Ferrier</span> Scottish philosopher (1808–1864)

James Frederick Ferrier was a Scottish metaphysical writer and philosopher. He introduced the word epistemology in philosophical English, as well as coining agnoiology for the study of ignorance.

Philosophy and economics studies topics such as public economics, behavioural economics, rationality, justice, history of economic thought, rational choice, the appraisal of economic outcomes, institutions and processes, the status of highly idealized economic models, the ontology of economic phenomena and the possibilities of acquiring knowledge of them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Neale</span> British philosopher

Stephen Roy Albert Neale is a British philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

Feminist philosophy is an approach to philosophy from a feminist perspective and also the employment of philosophical methods to feminist topics and questions. Feminist philosophy involves both reinterpreting philosophical texts and methods in order to supplement the feminist movement and attempts to criticise or re-evaluate the ideas of traditional philosophy from within a feminist framework.

Metaontology or meta-ontology is the study of the field of inquiry known as ontology. The goal of meta-ontology is to clarify what ontology is about and how to interpret the meaning of ontological claims. Different meta-ontological theories disagree on what the goal of ontology is and whether a given issue or theory lies within the scope of ontology. There is no universal agreement whether meta-ontology is a separate field of inquiry besides ontology or whether it is just one branch of ontology.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. Someone who studies metaphysics can be called either a "metaphysician" or a "metaphysicist".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy</span> Study of general and fundamental questions

Philosophy is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its own methods and assumptions.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to metaphysics:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jessica Wilson</span> Canadian metaphysician

Jessica M. Wilson is an American professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on metaphysics, especially on the metaphysics of science and mind, the epistemologies of skepticism, a priori deliberation, and necessity. Wilson was awarded the Lebowitz Prize for excellence in philosophical thought by Phi Beta Kappa in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association.

Katherine Jane Hawley (1971-2021) was a British philosopher specialising in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of physics. Hawley was a professor of philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She was the author of How Things Persist, Trust: a Very Short Introduction, and How To Be Trustworthy. Hawley was elected a Fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2016, elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020, and she was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2003) and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2014–16).

Thomas Nail is a professor of Philosophy at The University of Denver.

References

  1. "Barnes Virginia staff page" . Retrieved 28 November 2016.
  2. 1 2 "Elizabeth Barnes". What Is it Like to Be a Philosopher. Accessed 29 November 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "BarnesCV" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 November 2015. Retrieved 28 November 2016.
  4. "StAndrewsPlacementRecord" . Retrieved 28 November 2016.
  5. Editorial Board, Philosophy Compass, Wiley Online Library. Accessed November 28, 2016.
  6. Barnes, Elizabeth, ed. (2015). Current Controversies in Metaphysics. London: Routledge.
  7. Barnes, Elizabeth (2016). The Minority Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  8. Campbell, Stephen M., and Joseph A. Stramondo (2016). ""The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability". Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2016.11.11). Accessed 24 February 2018.
  9. Kazez, Jean (2016). "The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability". The Philosophers' Magazine . 75: 114-7. doi : 10.5840/tpm201675143.
  10. Protasi, Sara (2017). "The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, by Elizabeth Barnes". European Journal of Philosophy 25 (3): 892-4. doi : 10.1111/ejop.12293.
  11. Hawkins, Jennifer (2018). "Barnes, Elizabeth. The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016." Ethics 128 (2): 462-7. doi : 10.1086/694278.
  12. Begon, Jessica (2018). "The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, written by Elizabeth Barnes". Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (1): 100-03. doi : 10.1163/17455243-01501007.
  13. Cameron, Ross. "Introduction". Ross Cameron (Google Sites). Accessed 29 November 2016.