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Thinking through Vulnerability

Review products

Vulnerability and Critical Theory. By ESTELLE FERRARESE. Trans. Steven Corcoran. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018.

Philosophy and Vulnerability: Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion, and Audre Lorde. By MATTHEW R. MCLENNAN. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

Vulnerability Politics: The Use and Abuses of Precarity in Political Debate. By KATIE OLIVIERO. New York: New York University Press, 2018.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2023

Erinn Gilson*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Merrimack College, 315 Turnpike St, North Andover, MA, 01845, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: erinngilson@gmail.com

Extract

The topic of vulnerability has been the subject of intense scholarly interest and work, especially in feminist theory. It circulates in academic and nonacademic contexts, spans many disciplines, including both applied fields and highly theoretical ones, and in philosophy in particular has been taken up in multiple subfields and approaches to the discipline. The concept's widespread appeal might stem from the sense that vulnerability is intensifying, or at least from a heightened awareness of it.1 In any case, vulnerability's salience lies in how it names something significant about the world and suggests different ways that something ought to be addressed. That is, vulnerability's appeal lies in its normative pertinence or efficacy, in how the concept seems to hold the possibility of both diagnosing ethical failures and forging different, more adequate ethical responses to the injustices we witness and/or face.

Type
Invited Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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References

Cole, Alyson. 2016. All of us are vulnerable, but some are more vulnerable than others. Critical Horizons 17 (2): 260–77.Google Scholar
Ferrarese, Estelle. 2016. The vulnerable and the political. Critical Horizons 17 (2): 224–39.Google Scholar
Gilson, Erinn. 2021. The problems and potentials of vulnerability. In Vulnerability and the politics of care: Transdisciplinary dialogues, ed. Browne, Victoria, Danely, Jason, and Rosenow, Doerthe. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lorey, Isabel. 2015. State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Trans. Derieg, Aileen. New York: Verso.Google Scholar