nschema@umn.edu

804 Heller
612-625-3430

Trustworthy Expertise

I work in a wide range of areas but on one set of problems in the politics of epistemology. I am interested in how particular sorts of selves and subject positions are socially constituted, especially as privileged or stigmatized, and, relatedly, how epistemic authority and dependency are constituted and negotiated. In recent years my writing and teaching (half of which is in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies) have focused specifically on these issues as they arise in relation to transgressive or borderline gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic identities and perspectives.

My underlying conviction is that analytic philosophy can be revitalized by attention to social and political issues that arise from liberatory struggles framed by such identities and perspectives. These struggles call for transformed conceptions of such philosophically fundamental notions as personhood, identity, and epistemic justification as much as distinctively modern metaphysics and epistemology took shape in response to the social and political needs of the emerging bourgeoisie. I am interested in bringing back to what Wittgenstein calls the "rough ground" such topics as objectivity, realism, and physicalism, and, in so doing, recovering his radical insights into the nature of philosophy.

Selected Publications

"Non-Negotiable Demands: Metaphysics, Politics, and the Discourse of Needs." In Future Pasts: Reflections on the History and Nature of Analytic Philosophy, eds. Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh, Oxford University Press, 2001.

"Against Physicalism." In Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, eds. Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

"Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground." In Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, eds. Hans Sluga and David Stern. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

"Queering the Center by Centering the Queer: Reflections on Transsexuals and Secular Jews." In Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. Diana Tietjens Meyers. Westview Press, 1996.

Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege. Routledge, 1993