Books by Mary Edwards
Bloomsbury Academic Monograph, 2022
Western philosophical orthodoxy places many aspects of other people’s lives outside the scope of ... more Western philosophical orthodoxy places many aspects of other people’s lives outside the scope of our knowledge. Demonstrating an alternative to this view, however, this book argues that Jean-Paul Sartre’s application of his unique psychoanalytic method to Gustave Flaubert is the culmination of his project to show that it is possible to know everything there is to know about another person. It examines how Sartre aims to revolutionize our way of thinking about others by presenting his existential psychoanalysis as the means to knowledge of both ourselves and others. By so doing, it highlights how his determination to solve the longstanding philosophical conundrum about other minds drives him not only to incorporate insights from Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Marx, and Beauvoir into his philosophy, but also to supplement and enhance his philosophy through the development and application of a new form of psychoanalysis.
Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis integrates, for the first time, Sartre’s psychoanalysis into his overarching philosophical project. By offering a critical interrogation of the role his psychoanalytical studies played in the development of his existentialism, Mary Edwards uncovers the overlooked philosophical significance of his existential psychoanalysis and brings it into a new and productive dialogue with current research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy.
Papers by Mary Edwards
Review of Metaphysics, 2022
This paper traces the development of Sartre’s metaphysics with three interrelated aims in mind. T... more This paper traces the development of Sartre’s metaphysics with three interrelated aims in mind. The first is to situate Sartre’s metaphysical views in relation to those of his predecessors, his contemporaries, and ours. The second is to show that Sartre’s project to turn his phenomenology towards reality informs some of the key changes he makes to his existentialism during his career. The third is to bring Sartre the metaphysician into dialogue with key thinkers in the current realism/anti-realism debate in continental philosophy by showing that the defense of materialism he offers in his later work preserves many hard-won insights of phenomenology and has significant advantages over many contemporary articulations of realism.
Sartre Studies International, 2021
This paper aims to show that Sartre's later work represents a valuable resource for feminist scho... more This paper aims to show that Sartre's later work represents a valuable resource for feminist scholarship that remains relatively untapped. It analyses Sartre's discussions of women's attitude towards their situation from the 1940's, 60's, and 70's, alongside Beauvoir's account of women's situation in The Second Sex, to trace the development of Sartre's thought on the structure of gendered experience. It argues that Sartre transitions from reducing psychological oppression to selfdeception in Being and Nothingness to construing women as 'survivors' of it in The Family Idiot. Then, it underlines the potential for Sartre's mature existentialism to contribute to current debates in feminist philosophy by illuminating the role of the imagination in women's psychological oppression.
Dicipline Filosofiche
It is widely accepted that the experience of persons from stigmatized groups is inflected by sham... more It is widely accepted that the experience of persons from stigmatized groups is inflected by shame. This paper aims to elaborate on the nature of this inflection for persons who are stigmatized on the basis of their perceived gender – primarily, but not exclusively, women. It argues that acute gendered shame (AGS) exacerbates and perpetuates the chronic shame that many of those classified as women are already burdened with. It also indicates how AGS may have the potential to engender a pathological relation to the self in its subject.
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy , 2018
This essay questions the social function of the pantsuit. Taking inspiration from John Berger's c... more This essay questions the social function of the pantsuit. Taking inspiration from John Berger's classic analysis of the 'overt' and 'covert' functions of the suit, it argues that if the overt function of the pantsuit is to act as the female equivalent of the (male) suit, then sexual class hegemony appears to be its covert function. However, it concludes by suggesting that it is possible to deactivate this covert function of the pantsuit by changing its overt function.
Book Chapters by Mary Edwards
Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies, 2023
Incels," or involuntary celibate men, have gained notoriety in recent years due to a series of ma... more Incels," or involuntary celibate men, have gained notoriety in recent years due to a series of mass killings committed by young men known to have been influenced by incel ideology. As incel subculture has mainly developed through online message boards, where views are exchanged between anonymous users on a wide range of topics, it difficult to study incels as a group as opposed to a collection of individuals who participate in incel sub-culture in unstructured and unpredictable ways. This represents a serious problem since it impedes our ability to understand their behaviour and it has been linked to the failure of governments to recognise incelinspired violence as a form of terrorism (Hoffman et al., 2020; Leidig, 2021). This chapter commences from the premise that the ability to comprehend incels as a group will enable us to gain a deeper understanding of how incel ideology has developed in and through anonymised interactions between individuals in virtual spaces, as well as how acts of violence perpetrated by some of these individuals can be attributed, at least in part, to the influence groups exert on their members. It proposes that the social ontology discoverable in the later work of Jean-Paul Sartre supplies us with the conceptual tools necessary to conceive of incels as a coherent group and to recognise the dehumanisation of women as their "group project." Then, it develops Sartre's theorisation of "presence" to show that the way incels are present to one another in their online interactions prevents them from providing support one another as individuals and finding solutions to the kind of problems that they attempt to resolve by becoming incels. Finally, it concludes by suggesting some new incel-specific interventions based on its analysis.
For Tom Petty fans, who also like to do philosophy. Chapter forthcoming in Tom Petty and Philosop... more For Tom Petty fans, who also like to do philosophy. Chapter forthcoming in Tom Petty and Philosophy, Randall E. Auxier and Megan Volpert, eds., (Illinois: Open Court). In press: expected publication date: December 2018,
Gender and Violence in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, 2020
This chapter argues that 'standard' feminist approaches to criticizing popular works such as Fift... more This chapter argues that 'standard' feminist approaches to criticizing popular works such as Fifty Shades of Grey are unlikely to convince people that such works could harm women. It then draws upon research on the phenomenon of 'imaginative resistance' to show that a function of Fifty Shades of Grey's narrative is to disable readers' capacity to resist entertaining sexist beliefs. It, therefore, offers a novel, robust feminist critique of the novel.
Talks by Mary Edwards
Drawing upon the work of John Duncan (2005), Thomas R. Flynn (2014), and upon Frederick A. Olafso... more Drawing upon the work of John Duncan (2005), Thomas R. Flynn (2014), and upon Frederick A. Olafson’s (1967) classic text, Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism, this paper argues that the development of Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology is guided by his commitment to providing a robust foundation for philosophical realism. Its aim is to illuminate how, rather than merely enriching our knowledge of experience itself, Sartre’s mature phenomenology seeks to transcend experience toward the concrete realm of worldly being by affirming that human experience provides the basis for a ‘realistic materialism’. This paper proceeds by first discussing how, despite his initial, enthusiastic engagement with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Sartre departs from Husserl in his efforts to turn his phenomenology outward – towards deepening our understanding of others and things in the world – rather than inward – toward the self – which is how he interprets Husserl’s work. Then, it traces the development of Sartre’s phenomenological thought from Being and Nothingness through to the Critique of Dialectical Reason and argues that Sartre progressed from using the tools of ‘pure’ phenomenology as a means of examining consciousness, to developing a realist phenomenology that is committed to describing human experience as concrete experience of an embodied self, the world, and others. Finally, this paper highlights some idealist tendencies that persist in Sartre’s thought and poses the question of whether his mature phenomenology can support a defence of ‘realism-proper’. It concludes by gesturing towards an answer in the negative, but which defends Sartre’s choice not to isolate metaphysics from politics in his later work.
(This paper was presented at The British Society for Phenomenology's 2017 Annual Conference and it is now available in podcast form!)
I presented this paper on the 16th of March 2017, at The Second Annual Workshop on the Philosophy... more I presented this paper on the 16th of March 2017, at The Second Annual Workshop on the Philosophy of Social Agency on Social Self-conscious Emotions, held at University College Cork, and organized by Dr. Lilian O'Brien and Dr. Alessandro Salice.
I presented this paper on the 16th of November 2016, as part of the Philosophy Department's PhD S... more I presented this paper on the 16th of November 2016, as part of the Philosophy Department's PhD Student Presentation Series, at University College Cork.
I presented this paper, which is based a chapter of my PhD thesis, on the 12th of November 2015, ... more I presented this paper, which is based a chapter of my PhD thesis, on the 12th of November 2015, as part of the French Department's Guest Lecture Series at University College Cork.
I presented this paper at "Gender and Violence: in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives", an ... more I presented this paper at "Gender and Violence: in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives", an International Conference, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 24th September 2015.
I presented this paper at INTERACT!: the British Society of Aesthetics Postgraduate Conference, h... more I presented this paper at INTERACT!: the British Society of Aesthetics Postgraduate Conference, held at The University of Kent, on the 7th February 2015.
The question of whether or not actual artists’ intentions should be included in interpretations and evaluations of artworks has long been a contentious one. Though the dispute over the relevance of artist’s intentions has been “pronounced dead” many times, yet ‘the author’ and its troublesome intentionality continues to plague aestheticians. Even if one focuses on literary artworks, where references to the author seem both natural and necessary to interpretation, intentionalism remains notoriously difficult to defend. Actual (author-) intentionalism comes up against ‘epistemic’ objections that assert it demands too much (and, in some cases, impossible) meta-textual knowledge of readers, as well as the formalist counterclaim that authorial intent is just not relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of literary works. Thus, this paper can be seen as something of a ‘CPR attempt’; my aim is to illuminate a new direction of argumentation for actual intentionalism, in the context of literary narratives.
I presented this paper at the SWIP-I and UCC Philosophy Department Workshop: Being Female in Phil... more I presented this paper at the SWIP-I and UCC Philosophy Department Workshop: Being Female in Philosophy: political and phenomenological perspectives, University College Cork, 27th June 2014. I analyze Jean-Paul Sartre's 'uneasy' masculinity through an 'author-interested' reading of his interpretation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, in his biographical work, L'Idiot de la famille.
Conferences & Workshops by Mary Edwards
Register by 29th November!
Technology is changing the way humans relate to the world and to each other at an ever-increasing... more Technology is changing the way humans relate to the world and to each other at an ever-increasing rate. While many of the changes are positive, the infiltration of technology into almost every aspect of human life and the potential for its misuse raise serious questions. An important dimension of such considerations concerns the impact of emerging technologies on feminism. While the question of feminist technology has been recently raised within the field of technology studies, and feminist philosophers have attended to problems posed by specific technologies, such as reproductive technologies, broader philosophical questions concerning the nature and scope of technology's challenges for feminism have yet to receive the sustained, critical attention they deserve. In recognition of this gap in the philosophical literature, this conference aims to bring together scholars working in feminist philosophy, philosophy of technology, technoscience, philosophy of mind and epistemology in order to facilitate a new and productive exchange between them.
Book Reviews by Mary Edwards
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Books by Mary Edwards
Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis integrates, for the first time, Sartre’s psychoanalysis into his overarching philosophical project. By offering a critical interrogation of the role his psychoanalytical studies played in the development of his existentialism, Mary Edwards uncovers the overlooked philosophical significance of his existential psychoanalysis and brings it into a new and productive dialogue with current research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy.
Papers by Mary Edwards
Book Chapters by Mary Edwards
Talks by Mary Edwards
(This paper was presented at The British Society for Phenomenology's 2017 Annual Conference and it is now available in podcast form!)
The question of whether or not actual artists’ intentions should be included in interpretations and evaluations of artworks has long been a contentious one. Though the dispute over the relevance of artist’s intentions has been “pronounced dead” many times, yet ‘the author’ and its troublesome intentionality continues to plague aestheticians. Even if one focuses on literary artworks, where references to the author seem both natural and necessary to interpretation, intentionalism remains notoriously difficult to defend. Actual (author-) intentionalism comes up against ‘epistemic’ objections that assert it demands too much (and, in some cases, impossible) meta-textual knowledge of readers, as well as the formalist counterclaim that authorial intent is just not relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of literary works. Thus, this paper can be seen as something of a ‘CPR attempt’; my aim is to illuminate a new direction of argumentation for actual intentionalism, in the context of literary narratives.
Conferences & Workshops by Mary Edwards
Book Reviews by Mary Edwards
Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis integrates, for the first time, Sartre’s psychoanalysis into his overarching philosophical project. By offering a critical interrogation of the role his psychoanalytical studies played in the development of his existentialism, Mary Edwards uncovers the overlooked philosophical significance of his existential psychoanalysis and brings it into a new and productive dialogue with current research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy.
(This paper was presented at The British Society for Phenomenology's 2017 Annual Conference and it is now available in podcast form!)
The question of whether or not actual artists’ intentions should be included in interpretations and evaluations of artworks has long been a contentious one. Though the dispute over the relevance of artist’s intentions has been “pronounced dead” many times, yet ‘the author’ and its troublesome intentionality continues to plague aestheticians. Even if one focuses on literary artworks, where references to the author seem both natural and necessary to interpretation, intentionalism remains notoriously difficult to defend. Actual (author-) intentionalism comes up against ‘epistemic’ objections that assert it demands too much (and, in some cases, impossible) meta-textual knowledge of readers, as well as the formalist counterclaim that authorial intent is just not relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of literary works. Thus, this paper can be seen as something of a ‘CPR attempt’; my aim is to illuminate a new direction of argumentation for actual intentionalism, in the context of literary narratives.