Aesthetic Formalism Formalism in aesthetics has traditionally been taken to refer to the view in the philosophy of art that the properties in virtue of which an artwork is an artwork—and in virtue of which its value is determined—are formal in the sense of being accessible by direct sensation (typically sight or hearing) alone. While such Formalist intuitions have a long history, prominent anti-Formalist arguments

Submissions Submitting an Article for Publication The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy encourages philosophy professors with Ph.D.s to e-mail the general editors or a specific area editor with an offer to submit an article. Articles should have a length of 6,000 to 15,000 words except in special cases approved in advance by the general editors. Please consult our lists of the 100 most desired articles, our

Feminist Jurisprudence American feminist jurisprudence is the study of the construction and workings of the law from perspectives which foreground the implications of the law for women and women’s lives. This study includes law as a theoretical enterprise as well its practical and concrete effects in women’s lives. Further, it includes law as an academic discipline, and thus incorporates concerns regarding pedagogy and the influence

Legal Hermeneutics The question of how best to determine the meaning of a given text (legal or otherwise) has always been the chief concern of the general field of inquiry known as hermeneutics. Legal hermeneutics is rooted in philosophical hermeneutics and takes as its subject matter the nature of legal meaning. Legal hermeneutics asks the following sorts of questions: How do we come to decide

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) Michel Foucault was a major figure in two successive waves of 20th century French thought–the structuralist wave of the 1960s and then the poststructuralist wave. By the premature end of his life, Foucault had some claim to be the most prominent living intellectual in France. Foucault’s work is transdisciplinary in nature, ranging across the concerns of the disciplines of history, sociology, psychology,

Sarah Grimké (1792—1873) and Angelina Grimké Weld (1805—1879) Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld, sisters from a South Carolina slave-holding family, were active abolitionist public speakers and pioneer women’s rights advocates in a time when American women rarely occupied the public stage. Their personal stories about the horrors of slavery made them effective agents in the Northern abolitionist movement, and their subsequent marginalization in the leadership