Gender

This Day in Philosophy — 30 August: the birth of Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London on 30 August 1797. Frankenstein, written when she was eighteen, has become two centuries later the most cited literary text in the ethics of artificial intelligence. The same day in 1871 brought the birth of Ernest Rutherford, who would discover the atomic nucleus.

Briana Toole: does who knows change what is known?

Toole has carried standpoint epistemology back into contemporary debate, and she is also the founder of Corrupt the Youth, a programme that takes philosophy into disadvantaged schools. A single thesis binds the two: knowledge is not independent of the position of the knower.

Judith Butler at The New School: 'Contemporary fascist passions'

Butler gave the keynote at the GSSI Symposium on 23-25 April 2026. In February she spoke to an audience of some two hundred at WashU on 'Who's Afraid of Gender?'.

Judith Butler

Julia Kristeva at 85: a line of thought from abjection to intertextuality

The Bulgarian-born French thinker turned 85 on 24 June. Kristeva, who visited Bulgaria in May, works with concepts that move between linguistics, psychoanalysis and feminism.

Julia Kristeva