Lived religion: Rethinking human nature in a neoliberal age

This article considers the relationship between philosophy of religion and an approach to the study of religion, which prioritises the experience of lived religion. Considering how individuals and communities live out their faith challenges some of the assumptions of analytic philosophers of religion regarding the position the philosopher should adopt when approaching the investigation of religion. If philosophy is understood principally as a means for analysing belief, it will have little space for an engagement with what it feels like to live out one’s faith

It’s time: Generation and temporality in psychoanalytic feminism

In this paper I examine some key aspects of defining one’s generation: transmitting values to younger generations in a way that makes sense to them; cultivating a psychic flexibility that allows us to welcome the future and be prepared for the unexpected whilst not succumbing to the fear of social, political and economic precarity; thinking of generation as both our collective moment in time and as generative potential; reaffirming the value of communication and sharing experience; and maintaining a dialogue between psychoanalytic feminism and other strands of feminist philosophy

Diffractive Pedagogies- dancing across new materialist imaginaries

This paper outlines the affirmative potential of diffractive pedagogies, presenting learning through dance as its central empirical focus. Drawing on data from the university classroom and new materialist scholarship, we consider the problem of learning through the body for university students. We argue that embodied creative processes within pedagogical contexts can liberate those who learn from reproducing, or being reproduced, as the finite set of reductive yet historically determined and governed images, figures or metaphors assigned to them. Building on a feminist investment in the agency of materiality we think through the problem of the body as a site of learning in the university. Learning in higher education is popularly thought as pertaining to the transfer of abstract knowledge, and this process typically occurs in ways that largely ignore the physicality of learning. A pedagogical system which presents repeated structures and patterns of discourse as more valued vehicles for learning than experimentation and creation recognises only preconceived, representational models of thought and expression. This philosophical imaginary therefore requires reconfiguring, to allow for embodied and creative learning processes that are open-ended, nomadic and affirmative

Feminist challenges to conceptions of God: exploring divine ideals

This paper presents a feminist intervention into debates concerning the relation between human subjects and a divine ideal. I turn to what Irigarayan feminists challenge as a masculine conception of 'the God's eye view' of reality. This ideal functions not only in the philosophy of religion, but in ethics, politics, epistemology and philosophy of science: it is given various names from 'the competent judge' to 'the ideal observer' (IO) whose view is either from nowhere or everywhere. The question is whether, as Taliaferro contends, my own philosophical argument inevitably appeals to the impartiality and omni-attributes of the IO. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God