Feminist philosophy

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Your argument is that all of this anticipates a very modern feminist concern, which is the concept of himpathy, um, and this is where we turn to Kate Manne, the wonderful Australian feminist philosopher, uh, currently at Cornell University, I think.

She introduced this term himpathy in her 2017 book, uh, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.

Just to clue us in here, what is himpathy according to Kate Manne?

I mean, so much of what we've been talking about here, you know, when we look at the, um, the way in which the sympathy of people can be manipulated by elites using rhetoric and social platforms, the way that sympathy can be directed in ways that are contrary to the interests of the people.

I mean, you know, don't need to sort of spell out all the ways in which that's an incredibly modern issue.

But there's also a question of how appropriate it might be to call Katherine Macaulay a feminist philosopher.

Um, so I know some historians of philosophy argue that she isn't a feminist, um, partly because, you know, the use of the word feminist to describe an 18th century philosopher is just anachronistic, but also because in her work, she barely discusses things like women's rights directly.

exciting.

That answer probably leads to your work on Spinoza, maybe? Because after what we call the second stage of your career, you move on to Spinoza and published two monographs and one is Spinoza on Philosophy Revision and Politics in 2012 and the other was Spinoza on Learning to Live Together in 2020.

So my question is What aspects of Spinoza, particularly in the 17th century philosophy, has attracted your interest to write to monographs?

Well, I think that I started, like most people, I guess, by reading the Ethics, because I was and I was teaching the ethics.