Peg Birmingham | |
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Institutions | DePaul University, Marist College, Duquesne University |
Main interests | Social philosophy, political philosophy, ethics, feminist theory |
Peg Birmingham is an American professor of philosophy at DePaul University. [1] Much of Birmingham's work has focused on the work of Hannah Arendt, to whose thought she is considered to have made a profound contribution, [2] although her interest has also ranged widely through other subjects, primarily in modern social and political philosophy, as well as feminist theory. [3]
Birmingham received her bachelor's from the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay in 1978 before moving to Duquesne University where she received her master's and doctoral degrees in philosophy in 1980 and 1986, respectively. [3] After receiving her doctoral degree, Birmingham accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Marist College, where she stayed until 1990. [3] In 1990, she moved to the New York City campus of Pace University as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Edward J. Mortola Scholar. [3] In 1992, she accepted an appointment at DePaul University as full Professor of Philosophy. [3]
Birmingham has published two books - Hannah Arendt and the Right to Have Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility in 2006, and Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics in 1995. [3] She's also contributed a large number of book chapters, an encyclopedia entry, and a dozen peer-reviewed papers. [3] Most of Birmingham's work has focused on or built on top of the work of Hannah Arendt [3] (though despite Arendt's moral minimalism, Birmingham is a moral maximalist.) [2]
In Hannah Arendt and the Right to Have Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility, Birmingham rejects claims that Arendt's notion of a basic 'right to have rights' is fundamentally flawed, and argues that the right to have rights (that is, to belong to a state that respects rights) is something that should be guaranteed by humanity (though Birmingham acknowledges that she is not sure whether this is in fact practical.) [2] [4] Birmingham views Arendt as having constructed the notion of the 'right to have rights' in such a way as to be meaningful in a world that lacks universal humanity. [4] Birmingham views Arendt's work as a whole as an effort to construct a 'right to have rights' absent the concepts of shared humanity, reason, individual autonomy, and other common justifications behind the idea of a 'right to have rights.' [4]
Political freedom is a central concept in history and political thought and one of the most important features of democratic societies. Political freedom was described as freedom from oppression or coercion, the absence of disabling conditions for an individual and the fulfillment of enabling conditions, or the absence of life conditions of compulsion, e.g. economic compulsion, in a society. Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as the freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action and the exercise of social or group rights. The concept can also include freedom from internal constraints on political action or speech. The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.
Hannah Arendt was a German-American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
Conscience is a cognitive process that elicits emotion and rational associations based on an individual's moral philosophy or value system. Conscience stands in contrast to elicited emotion or thought due to associations based on immediate sensory perceptions and reflexive responses, as in sympathetic central nervous system responses. In common terms, conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a person commits an act that conflicts with their moral values. The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based on reason has occasioned debate through much of modern history between theories of basics in ethic of human life in juxtaposition to the theories of romanticism and other reactionary movements after the end of the Middle Ages.
Ted Honderich is a Canadian-born British professor of philosophy, who was Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London.
Jean Paulette Bethke Elshtain (1941–2013) was an American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the University of Chicago Divinity School with a joint appointment in the department of political science.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.
"Little Eichmanns" is a term used to describe people whose actions, while on an individual scale may seem relatively harmless even to themselves, taken collectively create destructive and immoral systems in which they are actually complicit. The name comes from Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust, but claimed that he did so without feeling anything about his actions, merely following the orders given to him.
Auctoritas is a Latin word that is the origin of the English word "authority". While historically its use in English was restricted to discussions of the political history of Rome, the beginning of phenomenological philosophy in the 20th century expanded the use of the word.
Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-born American philosopher. Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting professor of law in spring 2019. She was the Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University from 2001 to 2020. She was director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from 2002 to 2008. Benhabib is well known for her work in political philosophy, which draws on critical theory and feminist political theory. She has written extensively on the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, as well as on the topic of human migration. She is the author of numerous books, and has received several prestigious awards and lectureships in recognition of her work.
Women have made significant contributions to philosophy 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.
Drucilla Cornell, was an American philosopher and feminist theorist, whose work has been influential in political and legal philosophy, ethics, deconstruction, critical theory, and feminism. Cornell was an emerita Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University the State University of New Jersey; Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. She also taught for many years on the law faculties of the University of Pennsylvania and of Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University.
Good is a 2008 drama film based on the stage play of the same name by Cecil Philip Taylor. It stars Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs, and Jodie Whittaker, and was directed by Vicente Amorim. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 8 September 2008.
Adriana Cavarero is an Italian philosopher and feminist thinker. She holds the title of Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università degli studi di Verona. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara, at the New York University and Harvard. Cavarero is widely recognized in Italy, Europe and the English-speaking world for her writings on feminism and theories of sexual difference, on Plato, on Hannah Arendt, on theories of narration and on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and literature.
Mary Golden Dietz is the John Evans Emerita Professor of Political Theory at Northwestern University. She holds a joint appointment in Northwestern's Department of Political Science and its Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She is the author of many books and articles in feminist theory and the history of philosophy and her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Czech, Turkish, and Japanese. She edited the journal Political Theory from 2005 to 2012. Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern in 2007, she taught at the University of Minnesota. She announced her retirement in 2022, after which Northwestern named her Professor Emerita.
Peg O'Connor, is a Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies as well as Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her present research interests include two separate but intersecting strains: Wittgenstein's approach to ethics, and the philosophy of addiction. She also contributes to public discourse about her areas of interest through contributing to popular media, especially around philosophical issues surrounding addiction, and has actively spoken out about issues of gender equity facing the field of philosophy.
Carol C. Gould is an American philosopher and feminist theorist. Since 2009, she has taught at City University of New York, where she is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College, and in the Doctoral Programs of Philosophy and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is Director of the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute. Gould is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Social Philosophy. Her 2004 book Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights received the 2009 David Easton Award which is given by the American Political Science Association "for a book that broadens the horizons of contemporary political science." Her 2014 book Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice received the 2015 Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Philosophical Association for "an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences."
The Life of the Mind was the final work of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), and was unfinished at the time of her death. Designed to be in three parts, only the first two had been completed and the first page of the third part was in her typewriter the evening of the day she suddenly died. The unfinished work was edited by her friend, author Mary McCarthy, and published in two volumes in 1977 and 1978.
Lyndsey Stonebridge FBA FEA is an English scholar and professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham. Her work relates to refugee studies, human rights, and the effects of violence on the mind in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is also a regular radio and media commentator, writing for publications such as The New Statesman,Prospect Magazine, and New Humanist.
Valéry Giroux is a Canadian philosopher, lawyer and animal rights activist from Quebec. She is an adjunct professor at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Law, associate director for the Centre de recherche en éthique, a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and an author and speaker on animal ethics issues and veganism, with a notable focus on the topic of antispeciesism through her co-editorship of the antispeciesist journal L'Amorce. Her philosophy argues for the equal moral consideration of all sentient beings, objects to the ethical notion that the utilization of non-human animals by humans as being morally permissible, and advocates for the individual right to freedom for all sentient beings, regardless of their species, emphasizing negative or republican freedom over positive freedom.
Helga Varden is a Norwegian-American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was Brady Distinguished Visiting Professor in Ethics and Civic Life at Northwestern University between 2014-2015. She is known for her works on Kantian philosophy.