phlogma

Notes on J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, chapter 1
[The “feeling” Mill addresses is that the legal subordination of women is somehow justified.]
…So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a […]

Notes on J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, chapter 4
[All emphasis in the quoted passages is added by me.]
The self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the male. Human beings do not grow up from childhood in the possession of unearned distinctions, without pluming themselves upon […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
According Otto Weininger’s biographer, David Abrahamsen, Freud read an early draft of what later became Sex and Character. The encounter is also dramatized in Joshua Sobol’s play, Weininger’s Night.
—Editor’s note
 
xiii (Foreword by Nancy Chodorow)
Chodorow writes,
As someone who has written both appreciatively and critically about […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
“The Sexual Aberrations”
7
In every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex. These either persist without function as rudimentary organs or become modified and take on other functions.
These long-familiar facts of anatomy lead us to suppose that an […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
“Infantile Sexuality”
42
Of the third or fourth year of life:
It is during this period of total or only partial latency that are built up the mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow—disgust, feelings […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
“The Transformations of Puberty”
73
A normal sexual life is only assured by an exact convergence of the two currents directed towards the sexual object and the sexual aim, the affectionate current and the sensual one.
82
Freud’s anticipation of the discovery of sex hormones and how little adjustment […]

Notes on Cheshire Calhoun,“Standing for Something.”
[Against the background of some contemporary conceptions of integrity as a virtue, Calhoun will argue that this virtue, whatever private merit it may have, is in the end a “master” social virtue not only because of its deployment of so many other virtues but because of its critical role in […]

Notes on Isaiah Berlin,“Two Concepts of Liberty.”
119
Tobias Wong,Another notion of possibility
Berlin paraphrases Heine who was thinking of Kant: “philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.” [Heine, a friend of Karl Marx, was trying to weigh in on the side of philosophers, who, by and large, are ignored […]

Notes on Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law (1796)
There are, however, two crimes worthy of death, in respect of which it still remains doubtful whether the Legislature have the Right to deal with them capitally.
And since they cannot be dealt with “capitally,” they cannot, on Kantian terms, quite be seen as murder.
It is the sentiment […]

In Woolf’s story, “A Society”, from the early collection, Monday or Tuesday (1921), a group of young women set out to investigate and evaluate the world by forming “a society for asking questions”.
Clorinda says,
…We have gone on all these ages supposing that men were equally industrious, and that their works were of equal merit. […]