Background

Alison Mary Jaggar was born on September 23, 1942, in Sheffield, United Kingdom.

Education

In 1964, Jaggar received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of London. In 1967, she received a Master of Letters from the University of Edinburgh, and Ph.D. from the State University of New York in 1970.

Career

From 1970 to 1971, Jaggar worked as an assistant professor of philosophy at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Then, from 1972 to 1976, she was an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, and a the beginning of 1976, she became an associate professor of philosophy there. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, Jaggar became a professor of philosophy and women studies and director of Women Studies Program. In 1975, she worked as the visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and lecturer at educational institutions in New Zealand, Germany, Norway, and China.

Alison M. Jaggar joined the faculty at CU Boulder in 1990 and holds a joint appointment with the Women and Gender Studies Program. She is a College Professor of Distinction and a Research Coordinator at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo, Norway.

Jaggar works in the areas of contemporary social, moral and political philosophy, often from a feminist perspective. In the past decade, her work has introduced gender as a category of analysis into the philosophical debate on global justice. Currently, Jaggar is a member of a "Fempov," a multi-disciplinary and international research team whose aim is to produce a new poverty standard or metric capable of revealing the gendered dimensions of global poverty. In addition, Jaggar is exploring the potential of a naturalized approach to moral epistemology for addressing moral disputes in contexts of inequality and cultural difference.

Achievements

• The writings of philosopher Alison M. Jaggar in the area of feminist socialism have earned the author critical acclaim. She is equally admired for her edited works, which present a wide range of perspectives on feminist issues. These began to appear as early as the 1970s, when the discipline of women’s studies was in its infancy and the paucity of relevant reading materials hampered academic scholarship.
  
  In 2011, Jaggar won the University of Colorado Gee Memorial Lectureship for advancing women, interdisciplinary scholarly contributions and distinguished teaching.

Works

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  • Abortion: Three Perspectives

    (Moving beyond traditional "liberal versus conservative" a...)

    2009
  • Gender and Global Justice

    (Issues of global justice have received increasing attenti...)

    2014
  • Living With Contradictions: Controversies In Feminist Social Ethics

    (This book explores some of the moral and public policy is...)

    1994
  • Morality and Social Justice: Point/Counterpoint

    (These original essays by seven leading contemporary polit...)

    1994
  • Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men

    (Written by leading scholars in feminist theory, Feminist ...)

    1978
  • A Companion to Feminist Philosophy

    (Including over 50 newly-commissioned survey articles, thi...)

    1998
  • Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing

    (The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the...)

    1989
  • Just Methods

    ("Just Methods" is designed for upper-level undergraduate ...)

    2013
  • Recognition, Responsibility, and Rights: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (Feminist Constructions)

    (In the words of Catharine MacKinnon, 'a woman is not yet ...)

    2002
  • Feminist Politics and Human Nature 1983

Views

Jaggar pioneered feminist philosophy in America (teaching the first feminist philosophy course in 1971, and setting the agenda for feminist debate (1977)) and has emerged as one of the leading feminist philosophers today. Her Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1983) is a lucid, illuminating and systematic analysis of the development of four strands of contemporary feminist political theory: liberal feminism, traditional Marxism, radical feminism and socialist feminism.

Jaggar shows how feminism redefines political philosophy not only by extending its domain, but also by transforming its central questions. The book is a standard resource and text for feminist philosophy courses and an influential, rigorously argued defense of socialist feminism.

Turning her attention to moral philosophy, Jaggar (1991) provides a concise overview of the development of feminist ethics in the USA and a delineation of its main themes. She argues convincingly that a focus on male bias in the philosophical canon rather than on masculinity and femininity will more likely ‘produce the results that are not only textually defensible but also philosophically interesting and politically significant’.

Further, she demonstrates how feminist ethics illuminates with special clarity problems in moral epistemology and suggests theoretical as well as practical parameters for developing a feminist moral epistemology. She is developing her ideas in a book A Feminist Version of Discourse Ethics and is co-editor with Iris Young of the Blackwell Companion to Feminist Philosophy.

Membership

Jaggar is a member of the American Philosophical Association, American Association of University Professors, Mind Association, Society for Women in Philosophy and of the Canadian Philosophical Association.