Elizabeth Barnes
Biographic Data
| ID | 3625173 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth Barnes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth |
| FAMILY NAME | Barnes |
| SIGNATURE | BARNES E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7873-7975 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Healthy skepticism
I think of Health Problems as having two main themes – one specific to the subject matter of health, the other more broadly methodological. The former is simply that health is distinctively philoso
Reply to commentaries on Health Problems
I am grateful to and honored by the time the authors in this symposium have taken to discuss my recent book Health Problems. I don’t have the space in what follows to fully address the issues they raise, but I hope to highlight some key points of challenge and disagreement, and offer some preliminary responses
Emancipatory Methodology
Analytic feminist philosophy is a political discipline.And, as a subfield of analytic feminism, feminist metaphysics and feminist approaches to social ontology are also often political.In giving a theory of the social world, we're doing something that is, at least in some sense, inherently political: we're attempting to give theories of topics like gender, race, sexuality, and oppression-topics which are of deep political significance.But many pe…
Trust, Distrust, and 'Medical Gaslighting
When are we obligated to believe someone? To what extent are people authorities about their own experiences? What kind of harm might we enact when we doubt? Questions like these lie at the heart of many debates in social and feminist epistemology, and they're the driving issue behind a key conceptual framework in these debates-gaslighting. But while the concept of gaslighting has provided fruitful insight, it's also proven somewhat difficult to a…
Health Problems
Health is weird. Health is weird in a way that resists simple explanations or elegant theorizing. This book is a philosophical explanation of that weirdness and an argument that grappling with the distinctive weirdness of health can give us insight into how we might approach difficult questions about social reality. After examining extant theories of health-and finding them lacking-the book explores some particularly intractable puzzles about the…
The girl did not recognise him as her husband”
Historians have demonstrated that white men used sexual violence as a weapon of terror after the Civil War to re-establish and strengthen white supremacy. Freedwomen’s testimonies against this violence have also been analysed as a key site of resistance in which women crafted alternative narratives about race, gender, and freedom. Little attention has been paid to the roles freedmen played in these processes, however. This article examines two wa…
Categories We Live by
Meeting at our favourite local coffee shop, Local Café, to discuss this critical notice of Ásta’s remarkable contribution to social ontology and feminist philosophy, we place an order with an individual behind the counter. We begin the interaction by assessing the individual, before attributing to them various social properties, including the property of being a barista, the property of being queer, the property of being trans, and the property o…
Precis of The Minority Body
Replies to Commentaries
Symmetric Dependence
Metaphysical orthodoxy maintains that the relation of ontological dependence is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. The goal of this paper is to challenge that orthodoxy by arguing that ontological dependence should be understood as non-symmetric, rather than asymmetric. A series of cases across a wide range of ontological commitments are presented, and it is argued that each case should be understood as one in which the relation of dependen…
Contested bodies
Contested bodies: pregnancy, childrearing, and slavery in Jamaica." Women's History Review, 27(4), pp. 658–659
The Minority Body
There is a massive disconnect between the way disability is understood in the disability rights and disability pride movements and the way disability is understood within analytic philosophy. The former see being disabled as primarily a social phenomenon—a way of being a minority, a way of facing social oppression, but not a way of being inherently or intrinsically worse off. But while this view of disability has been widely incorporated into aca…
Small buildings, big impacts
Current Controversies in Metaphysics
Current Controversies in Metaphysics
What You Can Expect When You Don't Want to be Expecting
Drowning (in) Kittens
Following Donna Haraway’s concept of the “killable” animal in When Species Meet, this essay looks at the social conditions and literary conventions that render ostensibly “priceless” objects, like pets and children, disposable in the Victorian period. Through the Victorian trope of the drowned kitten, Barnes shows how sentimental culture’s alternative “economy of feeling” colludes with, rather than opposes, a market economy chiefly concerned with…
A Theory Of Metaphysical Indeterminacy
This chapter develops a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy. It construes indeterminacy as a metaphysical primitive and contrasts this approach to more familiar (semantic or epistemic) accounts of indeterminacy. It argues that there is no conceptual barrier to understanding indeterminacy along these lines. It then shows how indeterminacy (taken as a metaphysical primitive) can be explicated using familiar modal resources. Using this modal framew…
Arguments Against Metaphysical Indeterminacy and Vagueness
In this article, I survey some of the major arguments against metaphysical indeterminacy and vagueness and outline potential responses
Indeterminacy, identity and counterparts
Women and Gender in the State of Sympathy
Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature
Book Review| June 01 2000 Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature By James D. Hartman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 1999. xii, 202 pp. $38.50. Elizabeth Barnes Elizabeth Barnes Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2000) 72 (2): 417–418. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-72-2-417 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Elizabe…
The Plight of Feeling
Karcher's Romance of the Republic
Karcher’s Romance of the Republic Elizabeth Barnes (bio) The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. By Carolyn L. Karcher. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. 804 pages. $37.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). One might balk at first viewing the size of Karcher’s biography of Lydia Maria Child: weighing in at more than 800 pages (including notes and bibliography), it has a presence on the shelf that would seem to b…
States of Sympathy
Trust, Distrust, and 'Medical Gaslighting
When are we obligated to believe someone? To what extent are people authorities about their own experiences? What kind of harm might we enact when we doubt? Questions like these lie at the heart of many debates in social and feminist epistemology, and they're the driving issue behind a key conceptual framework in these debates-gaslighting. But while the concept of gaslighting has provided fruitful insight, it's also proven somewhat difficult to a…
What You Can Expect When You Don't Want to be Expecting
Indeterminacy, identity and counterparts
Health Problems
Health is weird. Health is weird in a way that resists simple explanations or elegant theorizing. This book is a philosophical explanation of that weirdness and an argument that grappling with the distinctive weirdness of health can give us insight into how we might approach difficult questions about social reality. After examining extant theories of health-and finding them lacking-the book explores some particularly intractable puzzles about the…
Arguments Against Metaphysical Indeterminacy and Vagueness
In this article, I survey some of the major arguments against metaphysical indeterminacy and vagueness and outline potential responses
Replies to Commentaries
The Epistemology of the "Real"
The Epistemology of the “Real”: A Response to Marianne Noble Elizabeth Barnes (bio) Reading Marianne Noble’s article, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” I am struck anew by the interest critics, myself included, have recently taken in the question of “real presence” and its relationship to sentimental epistemology. The attention signals for me an attempt to reinvigorate sentimental studies by reintroducing the issue of …
States of Sympathy
States of Sympathy
States of Sympathy calls for a new approach to reading early American fiction and politics, one that recognizes sympathy as crucial to the construction of American identity: to read sympathetically becomes synonymous with reading like an American. Examining philosophical and political texts alongside literary ones, Elizabeth Barnes explores the extent to which sympathy and sentiment are increasingly employed to construct the notion of a political…
The Plight of Feeling
Karcher's Romance of the Republic
Karcher’s Romance of the Republic Elizabeth Barnes (bio) The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. By Carolyn L. Karcher. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. 804 pages. $37.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). One might balk at first viewing the size of Karcher’s biography of Lydia Maria Child: weighing in at more than 800 pages (including notes and bibliography), it has a presence on the shelf that would seem to b…
Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature
Book Review| June 01 2000 Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature By James D. Hartman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 1999. xii, 202 pp. $38.50. Elizabeth Barnes Elizabeth Barnes Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2000) 72 (2): 417–418. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-72-2-417 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Elizabe…
Women and Gender in the State of Sympathy
Indeterminacy, identity and counterparts
Arguments Against Metaphysical Indeterminacy and Vagueness
In this article, I survey some of the major arguments against metaphysical indeterminacy and vagueness and outline potential responses
A Theory Of Metaphysical Indeterminacy
This chapter develops a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy. It construes indeterminacy as a metaphysical primitive and contrasts this approach to more familiar (semantic or epistemic) accounts of indeterminacy. It argues that there is no conceptual barrier to understanding indeterminacy along these lines. It then shows how indeterminacy (taken as a metaphysical primitive) can be explicated using familiar modal resources. Using this modal framew…
Drowning (in) Kittens
Following Donna Haraway’s concept of the “killable” animal in When Species Meet, this essay looks at the social conditions and literary conventions that render ostensibly “priceless” objects, like pets and children, disposable in the Victorian period. Through the Victorian trope of the drowned kitten, Barnes shows how sentimental culture’s alternative “economy of feeling” colludes with, rather than opposes, a market economy chiefly concerned with…
What You Can Expect When You Don't Want to be Expecting
The Minority Body
There is a massive disconnect between the way disability is understood in the disability rights and disability pride movements and the way disability is understood within analytic philosophy. The former see being disabled as primarily a social phenomenon—a way of being a minority, a way of facing social oppression, but not a way of being inherently or intrinsically worse off. But while this view of disability has been widely incorporated into aca…
Small buildings, big impacts
Current Controversies in Metaphysics
Current Controversies in Metaphysics
Symmetric Dependence
Metaphysical orthodoxy maintains that the relation of ontological dependence is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. The goal of this paper is to challenge that orthodoxy by arguing that ontological dependence should be understood as non-symmetric, rather than asymmetric. A series of cases across a wide range of ontological commitments are presented, and it is argued that each case should be understood as one in which the relation of dependen…
Contested bodies
Contested bodies: pregnancy, childrearing, and slavery in Jamaica." Women's History Review, 27(4), pp. 658–659
Categories We Live by
Meeting at our favourite local coffee shop, Local Café, to discuss this critical notice of Ásta’s remarkable contribution to social ontology and feminist philosophy, we place an order with an individual behind the counter. We begin the interaction by assessing the individual, before attributing to them various social properties, including the property of being a barista, the property of being queer, the property of being trans, and the property o…
Precis of The Minority Body
Replies to Commentaries
The girl did not recognise him as her husband”
Historians have demonstrated that white men used sexual violence as a weapon of terror after the Civil War to re-establish and strengthen white supremacy. Freedwomen’s testimonies against this violence have also been analysed as a key site of resistance in which women crafted alternative narratives about race, gender, and freedom. Little attention has been paid to the roles freedmen played in these processes, however. This article examines two wa…
Trust, Distrust, and 'Medical Gaslighting
When are we obligated to believe someone? To what extent are people authorities about their own experiences? What kind of harm might we enact when we doubt? Questions like these lie at the heart of many debates in social and feminist epistemology, and they're the driving issue behind a key conceptual framework in these debates-gaslighting. But while the concept of gaslighting has provided fruitful insight, it's also proven somewhat difficult to a…
Health Problems
Health is weird. Health is weird in a way that resists simple explanations or elegant theorizing. This book is a philosophical explanation of that weirdness and an argument that grappling with the distinctive weirdness of health can give us insight into how we might approach difficult questions about social reality. After examining extant theories of health-and finding them lacking-the book explores some particularly intractable puzzles about the…
Healthy skepticism
I think of Health Problems as having two main themes – one specific to the subject matter of health, the other more broadly methodological. The former is simply that health is distinctively philoso
Psychology (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · History (6 works)