I'm with ita here. In terms of this being gendered I'm not agreeing or disagreeing. I just don't see it - have never encountered the idea before. If you don't want to post on it can you link? Or recommend a book readable by someone without a great background in feminist theory. (I've read a lot of Bell Hooks and Dierdre English plus Barbara Ehrenriech and Katha Pollitt and of course some of the feminist classics so by background is not zero, but damn close.)

Egad... urg...

I refuse to take the blame for any intelligent person feeling stupid here. Not calling anyone stupid, not encouraging it either. I'm just saying that I think the whole philosophical question has a great deal of ideological underpinnings (not saying one side is right and one is wrong), many of which are at least tacitly and sometimes explicitly linked to gender.

I guess for an idea as to where to start on theories that tend to gender the body as female and the mind as male, I dunno, Plato and Bacon, maybe throw in a bit of Aristotle? Not that I personally would want to reread them. But I guess I'd start there, then turn to the feminist rereadings of them. Evelyn Fox Keller's Reflections on Gender and Science is a pretty straightforward, if simplisitic (and by now wildly outdated), reading of the traditional dualism.

Burrell, were you to accept blame, you'd have to be creating it. I assigned nor assumed none.

But now I have somewhere to start resolving the blank space.

Burrell, were you to accept blame, you'd have to be creating it. I assigned nor assumed none.

Okay. No blame. I can handle that.

OK - so you are saying nind-body dualism is gendered. OK - I can get that. (If you define it that broadly I can think of at least one woman-written seires with a posltive take 0n Anne McCafferies Ship Who Sang series.)

Even so I'd have to concede your large point. Mind and Body seperate , mind good, body bad is almost always a male thing.

Where maybe we would have a difference (and maybe not) is that the particular example of heads in a jar is almost always portrayed as horrific. I mean I can't think of a case where head in a jar was portrayed positively in fiction. (Doesn't mean there isnt one. I just can't think of one.) I think the particular tropes of head in a jar or bodiless heads in general - to the extent that they deal with mind body dualism they do so critically. But I'm not wedded to this. It just never occurred to me that this was ever seen positively (the head-in-the-jar trope, not mind/body dualism in general.)

I mean I can't think of a case where head in a jar was portrayed positively in fiction.

My point was that it has been entertained in fact, or at least in theory, fairly often, often enough to indicate that there is a sizable number of the intellectual community that finds it a plausible enough idea to investigate.

Although, my only experience in reading the head in a jar thing was A Wrinkle in Time, which is by a woman.

not really argueing that it seems to be a male things, though. I have personally wondered, however, around the 7th grade, whether my life was real or whether I was dreaming it and would eventually wake up. Or maybe my dreams were real and the life was fake.

I have personally wondered, however, around the 7th grade, whether my life was real or whether I was dreaming it and would eventually wake up. Or maybe my dreams were real and the life was fake.

I did that in my first grade class. I can remember where I was sitting, who was around me, and how the room looked (not really detailed or anything, just lighting, etc.). It creeped me right out. My son asked me about that sort of thing this year, and he's in first grade, which got me creeped out all over again.

You know I don't want to defend Niven about anything. Put it this way - he is so far to the right I prefer Heinlein.

Are you sure you're not mistaking Niven for Pournelle?

No - I agree Pournelle is worse. The way I'd put it is that Heinlein was right-wing libertarian. Niven is very conservative, to the right of libertarians. Pournelle is a reactionary, to the right of conservatives. Anderson is (well was) also a reactionary, but tempered with a genuine humanitarianism and hatred of cruelty.