PHILOSOPHERS' CORNER

What Makes A Man?

Does masculinity need a makeover for the 21st century? Should your gender matter to who you are as a person? Why think there’s just one thing it means to be a man? This week on Philosophy Talk, we’re discussing masculinity and what makes a man.

Sexy Beasts

Love it or hate it, Freud’s decades long exploration into the nature and power of human sexuality is something that any philosopher of sex needs to contend with. I turn to this curiously under-explored region of the philosophical landscape in the final installment of my Philosophical Freud series.

Queerness

Is queerness something that all lesbian, gay, bi, and trans people have in common? Is it a sexual identity, a political identity, both, or something else entirely? Sometimes “queer” is used as a slur, yet there are many people who proudly self-identify as queer.

Is Human Monogamy Genetic?

Are humans "genetically programmed" towards monogamy? Does monogamy ensure that offspring are cared for? What bearing does this have on the ethics of cheating in a romantic relationship? And how do we account for polyamory?

Transcending Intersectionality

Intersectional feminism is not a progressive advance over the non-intersectional sort. It is, rather, a rearguard attempt to recover from what I think of as original sin—that is, from a profound and consequential error. The original sin was the sin of treating some men as the unmarked case of man, some women as the unmarked case of woman.