The influential relationship between the two twentieth century philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida has profoundly challenged the way we perceive philosophy’s responsibility toward the...Show moreThe influential relationship between the two twentieth century philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida has profoundly challenged the way we perceive philosophy’s responsibility toward the other. While these philosophers in an ongoing exchange broach the question of the other’s response, there remains the question if the other can also respond to what they say. Challenging the attainability of “successful” dialogue, this thesis examines the limits of thinking the response of the other philosophically. It does this through an innovative reading of “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” a remarkable text by Derrida in which he examines what it means to write a response to the works of Levinas. It shows how such a response, in view of what Levinas writes, must necessarily fail. My reading of this text shows that we must nevertheless embrace the possibility of failure, even if it means putting Levinas’s entire work at risk, since the very finitude of my own response is also what allows the other to come in and respond. Seen this way, I propose that a reading specifically aimed at the “failures” at work in Derrida’s response to Levinas can be a viable strategy not only to arrive at a better understanding of this text, but also to come up with responses of our own.Show less
Over the past decade, the Netherlands has performed evidently worse in terms of gender inequality in its labour market compared to other European countries. The psychological model of implicit bias...Show moreOver the past decade, the Netherlands has performed evidently worse in terms of gender inequality in its labour market compared to other European countries. The psychological model of implicit bias, gaining popularity within the academic world as well as public discourses, is thought to account for such structural and persistent gender inequality. According to the implicit bias model, people harbour mental associations with the words ‘female’ and ‘male’, eliciting subtle forms of discrimination, with gender inequality as a consequence. It is my contention that the model of implicit bias is inadequate in order to account for structural and persistent gender inequality in the Dutch labour market. I will argue that the implicit bias model is inherently based on a dualistic ontoepistemological framework that is problematic from a feminist philosophical perspective. Grounding my arguments in the theories of the feminist philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, and Linda Martín Alcoff, I will show that theories of implicit bias overlook that (1) gender knowledge cannot be viewed independently from its producer and that (2) there is no reality of gender outside of the discursive. Based on the onto-epistemological findings on gender production, established throughout my thesis, I will introduce a non-dualistic framework from which gender inequality in the Dutch labour market can and should be studied, which I refer to as gender transactionalism. In this transactionalist model, gender inequality in the Dutch labour market is understood as the continuous transaction between unequal gender knowledges and the performativity of these genders as visible within our everyday lives. Implications of the findings and recommendations for future research will be discussed.Show less
