Eva Kittay

Last updated
Eva Feder Kittay
Education CUNY Graduate Center (PhD), Sarah Lawrence College (BA)
Notable workLove's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure
Awards Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), NEH Fellowship (2013), Phi Beta Kappa Lebowitz Prize (2013), Society for Women in Philosophy Women of the Year (2003-4)
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic philosophy, Feminist philosophy
Institutions Stony Brook University
Thesis "The Cognitive Force of Metaphor"
Doctoral advisor Peter Caws
Notable students Serene Khader, Bonnie J. Mann
Main interests
 Feminist philosophy, ethics of care, social and political theory, metaphor, disability studies
Notable ideas
Accounting for dependency as a feature justice, cognitive disability and moral personhood, reciprocity, semantic field theory of metaphor
Influences
Influenced
Website evafederkittay.com

Eva Feder Kittay is an American philosopher. She is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy (Emerita) at Stony Brook University. [1] Her primary interests include feminist philosophy, ethics, social and political theory, metaphor, and the application of these disciplines to disability studies. [1] Kittay has also attempted to bring philosophical concerns into the public spotlight, including leading The Women's Committee of One Hundred in 1995, an organization that opposed the perceived punitive nature of the social welfare reforms taking place in the United States at the time. [2]

Contents

Education and career

Kittay received her bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1967, and went on to receive her doctoral degree from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1978. [3] After receiving her doctorate, she accepted a position as visiting assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park for the 1978–1979 year, before accepting a permanent position at Stony Brook University in 1979 as assistant professor. [3] Kittay was promoted to associate professor in 1986, and full professor in 1993. [3] Kittay received a distinguished professorship from Stony Brook in 2009. [3] Kittay is also a senior fellow at the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook, and a women's studies associate. [3] In addition to these permanent positions, Kittay has accepted a variety of temporary appointments, including ones at Sarah Lawrence College and Newcastle University. [3] She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and NEH Fellowship, and the Lebowitz Prize for philosophical achievement and contribution from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa. She is the mother of a multiple disabled woman [4] and has also been recognized for her writing on disability by the Institute Mensch, Ethiks, und Wissenshaft, The Center for Discovery and IncludeNYC. She was named Woman of the Year by the Society for Women in Philosophy 2003–2004. She served as the president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 2016–2017.

Research areas

Kittay's research has focused on feminist philosophy, ethics, social and political theory, the philosophy of disability, metaphor, and the application of these disciplines to disability studies. [1] Her viewpoints on the ethics of care are quite similar to those of Virginia Held and Sara Ruddick – namely that human interactions occur between people who are unequal yet interdependent, and that practical ethics should be fitted to life as most people experience it. [5] Kittay has also extended the work of John Rawls to address the concerns of women and the cognitively disabled. [6] In developing the ethics of care, her most significant contribution has been the emphasis on the inevitable fact of human dependency and the need to incorporate such dependency and dependency work into ethical and political theories. She has been one of the major voices in the emergent field of philosophy of disability, focusing in particular on cognitive disability.

Selected bibliography

Books

Edited books

Selected chapters in books

Related Research Articles

Applied ethics refers to the practical Computer of moral considerations. It is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in the areas of private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and leadership. For example, the bioethics community is concerned with identifying the correct approach to moral issues in the life sciences, such as euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with ecological issues such as the responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Business ethics includes questions regarding the duties or duty of 'whistleblowers' to the general public or their loyalty to their employers.

Marilyn Frye is an American philosopher and radical feminist theorist. She is known for her theories on sexism, racism, oppression, and sexuality. Her writings offer discussions of feminist topics, such as: white supremacy, male privilege, and gay and lesbian marginalization. Although she approaches the issues from the perspective of justice, she is also engaged with the metaphysics, epistemology, and moral psychology of social categories.

The ethics of care is a normative ethical theory that holds that moral action centers on interpersonal relationships and care or benevolence as a virtue. EoC is one of a cluster of normative ethical theories that were developed by feminists and environmentalists in the second half of the twentieth century. While consequentialist and deontological ethical theories emphasize generalizable standards and impartiality, ethics of care emphasize the importance of response to the individual. The distinction between the general and the individual is reflected in their different moral questions: "what is just?" versus "how to respond?". Carol Gilligan, who is considered the originator of the ethics of care, criticized the application of generalized standards as "morally problematic, since it breeds moral blindness or indifference".

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.

Although men have generally dominated philosophical discourse, women have been philosophers throughout the history of the discipline. Ancient examples include Maitreyi, Gargi Vachaknavi, Hipparchia of Maroneia and Arete of Cyrene. Some women philosophers were accepted during the medieval and modern eras, but none became part of the Western canon until the 20th and 21st century, when some sources indicate that Susanne Langer, G.E.M. Anscombe, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir entered the canon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances Kamm</span> 20th- and 21st-century American philosopher

Frances Myrna Kamm is an American philosopher specializing in normative and applied ethics. Kamm is currently the Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is also the Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy Emerita at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, as well as Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at New York University.

Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that builds on the belief that traditionally ethical theorizing has undervalued and/or underappreciated women's moral experience, which is largely male-dominated, and it therefore chooses to reimagine ethics through a holistic feminist approach to transform it.

Hilde Lindemann is an American philosophy professor and bioethicist and emerita professor at Michigan State University. Lindemann earned her B.A. in German language and literature in 1969 at the University of Georgia. Lindemann also earned her M.A. in theatre history and dramatic literature, in 1972, at the University of Georgia. Lindemann began her career as a copyeditor for several universities. She then moved on to a job at the Hastings Center in New York City, an institute focused on bioethics research, and co-authored book The Patient in the Family, with James Lindemann Nelson, before deciding to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at Fordham University in 2000. Previously, she taught at the University of Tennessee and Vassar College and served as the associate editor of the Hastings Center Report (1990–95). Lindemann currently teaches courses on feminist philosophy, identity and agency, naturalized bioethics, and narrative approaches to bioethics at Michigan State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Crary</span> American philosopher

Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virginia Held</span> American feminist philosopher (born 1929)

Virginia Potter Held is an American moral, social/political and feminist philosopher whose work on the ethics of care sparked significant research into the ethical dimensions of providing care for others and critiques of the traditional roles of women in society.

Marilyn Ann Friedman is an American philosopher. She holds the W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

Alison Mary Jaggar is an American feminist philosopher born in England. She is College Professor of Distinction in the Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies departments at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. She was one of the first people to introduce feminist concerns in to philosophy.

Joan Callahan was a Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, an institution where she taught for more than twenty years and served in a variety of roles, including as director of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Callahan's research has focused on feminist theory, critical race theory, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and on the junctions of these topics.

Ann E. Cudd is an American philosopher. She is Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor & Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. She was formerly Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Boston University. Before that, she was Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies, as well as University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, at the University of Kansas. She was also an affiliated faculty member in the Women, Gender, and Sexualities Studies Program during her time there. Cudd is considered one of the founders of analytical feminism, was a founding member of the Society for Analytical Feminism, and served as its president from 1995-1999.

Diana Meyers is a philosopher working in the philosophy of action and in the philosophy of feminism. Meyers is professor emerita of philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Tronto</span> Professor of political science

Joan Claire Tronto, is professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, and was previously professor of women's studies and political science at Hunter College and the Graduate School, City University of New York.

Rosemarie "Rosie" Tong is an American feminist philosopher. The author of 1998's Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, an overview of the major traditions of feminist theory, she is the emeritus distinguished professor of health care ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Bonnie J. Mann is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. She is known for her expertise on feminist philosophy. She is co-editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

Susan Sherwin is a Canadian philosopher. Her pioneering work has shaped feminist theory, ethics and bioethics, and she is considered one of the world's foremost feminist ethicists.

Feminist bioethics is a subfield of bioethics which advocates gender and social equality through the critique of existing bioethical discourse, offering unique feminist arguments and viewpoints, and pointing out gender concerns in bioethical issues.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Stony Brook University Eva feder Kittay". Stony Brook University. Retrieved 29 March 2014.
  2. ↑ SWITALA, KRISTIN. "Eva Feder Kittay". Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech University. Archived from the original on 19 May 2015. Retrieved 29 March 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Stony Brook University. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 November 2016. Retrieved 29 March 2014.
  4. ↑ Cureton, Adam; Wasserman, David T, eds. (2020). "List of Contributors". Oxford Handbooks Online. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190622879.001.0001. ISBN   978-0-19-062287-9.
  5. ↑ Nancy Williams, Rosemarie Tong. "Feminist Ethics/". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford. Retrieved 30 March 2014.
  6. ↑ McAfee, Noëlle. "Feminist Political Philosophy". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford. Retrieved 30 March 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.