Nancy Bauer (philosopher)

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Nancy Bauer
Education Harvard University (Ph.D.)
Occupation(s)Academic philosopher, Dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Dean of Academic Affairs, School of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University
PartnerMark Richard
Awards Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Joseph A. and Lillian Leibner Award for Distinguished Advising and Teaching
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Postanalytic philosophy, Ordinary language philosophy, Existentialism
Institutions Tufts University
Doctoral advisor Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam
Main interests
Feminism, Ethics, Higher education, Pornography
Notable ideas
Pornography as Illocutionary act

For the Canadian writer and editor, see Nancy Bauer.

Contents

Nancy Bauer is an American philosopher specializing in feminist philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology, and the work of Simone de Beauvoir. She was recently Chair of the Philosophy Department at Tufts University and is currently Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Philosophy as well as the Dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. Her interests include methodology in philosophy, feminism, metaphysics, social/political/moral philosophy, philosophy of language, phenomenology, and philosophy in film.

Education and career

Bauer earned an A. B. in Social Studies, magna cum laude, from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in 1982. She earned a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School in 1986, and was a Ph.D. candidate in the Study of Religion, 1986–1988. She earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1997, studying under Stanley Cavell. Prior to her position as a professor, she was a journalist, holding a position on the Metro Desk at the Boston Globe, where she also served as the paper's first full-time Cape Cod beat reporter. [1] She has also worked for Boston Children's Hospital and contributed to the New Child Health Encyclopedia.

Research and publications

Bauer's first book was "Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism," New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. She has also published on pornography, objectification, and philosophy of film.

In a June 20, 2010 New York Times opinion piece, [2] she wrote:

The goal of "The Second Sex" is to get women, and men, to crave freedom — social, political and psychological — more than the precarious kind of happiness that an unjust world intermittently begrudges to the people who play by its rules. Beauvoir warned that you can't just will yourself to be free, that is, to abjure relentlessly the temptations to want only what the world wants you to want. For her the job of the philosopher, at least as much as the fiction writer, is to re-describe how things are in a way that competes with the status quo story and leaves us craving social justice and the truly wide berth for self-expression that only it can provide.

She is a member of the Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology. [3]

Awards

Publications

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References

  1. "Nancy Bauer | Department of Philosophy". as.tufts.edu.
  2. Bauer, Nancy (June 20, 2010). "Lady Power". New York Times . New York, NY . Retrieved June 26, 2010.
  3. "Nancy Bauer." Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology. Retrieved 2014-02-20.