Background
Addelson, Kathryn Pyne was born on April 22, 1932 in Providence. Daughter of Joseph Abraham and Catherine (Newton) Etchells.
(This collection of essays places a distinguished academic...)
This collection of essays places a distinguished academic career within the context of a personal and political reality that is grounded in a working-class background and a commitment to feminist activism. Kathryn Pyne Addelson reflects on her development as a philosopher and a feminist by reexamining the genesis of her own writings. Throughout these interdisciplinary pieces, she draws examples from the feminist, civil rights, and antiwar movements to offer a different way of approaching philosophical ethics. Impure Thoughts is divided into two parts: "Writing Philosophy" and "Writing Feminism." In the first section, she addresses such questions as how professional authority contributes to creating and maintaining hierarchies of class, gender, age, and race. With reference to various reproductive debates, Addelson takes issue with philosophers who "preempt our moral meanings and our solutions to our social problems" under the assumption that cognitive authority is neutral. Throughout these essays, she tries to demonstrate how philosophy might become more empirical. In the second section, the author describes the tension between upward mobility and class identity. She encounters the contradiction of her life—"I had left the love and anger of my own working-class neighborhood not by changing the world by moving up in it"—and works toward a resolution of her professional status with her working-class roots, her radical politics with her white professional-class privilege. Defining feminism as "a commitment to take women seriously," Addelson addresses class and gender bias, anarchist alternatives to several ethics, and the contradictions in writing feminism using the elite means and methods of the academy. The essays, written between 1972 and 1989, offer criticism of philosophical and feminist ethics and social theory. In them Addelson offers the beginnings of a new ethics based on "symbolic interactionism," an anthropological, qualitative sociology with its roots in the work of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. As part of her explicitly empirical method, she uses case studies in abortion, teen pregnancy, and other current moral problems.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0877227535/?tag=2022091-20
(In Moral Passages, Kathryn Pyne Addelson presents an or...)
In Moral Passages, Kathryn Pyne Addelson presents an original moral theory suited for contemporary life and its moral problems. Her basic principle is that knowledge and morality are generated in collective action, and she develops it through a critical examination of theories in philosophy, sociology and women's studies, most of which hide the collective nature and as a result hide the lives and knowledge of many people. Based on Addelson's twenty years of work in feminist philosophy and interactionist sociology as well as her long-standing involvement in women's community organization, Moral Passages investigates how morality and knowledge are collectively enacted in today's world.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415910218/?tag=2022091-20
Addelson, Kathryn Pyne was born on April 22, 1932 in Providence. Daughter of Joseph Abraham and Catherine (Newton) Etchells.
Bachelor of Arts, Indiana U., 1961; Doctor of Philosophy, Stanford University, 1968.
Lecturer, Bryn Mawr College, (Pennsylvania)., 1965-1966; lecturer, City College of New York, New York City, 1966-1967; assistant professor philosophy, University of Illinois, Chicago, 1967-1972; professor philosophy, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, since 1972; Mary Huggins Gamble professor, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, since 1993.
(This collection of essays places a distinguished academic...)
(In Moral Passages, Kathryn Pyne Addelson presents an or...)
Member Society for Women in Philosophy.
Married Charles Pyne, August 14, 1954 (divorced). Children: Catherine Casey Pyne, Shawn Pyne. Married Richard Ullman Addelson, October 31, 1980.