Welcome to the website of Professor Alison Assiter - Professor of Feminist Theory at the University of the West of England, B.A. (Bristol); B.Phil.(Oxon); D.Phil. Sussex, Fellow of the RSA and Academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences.
Featured book
Kierkegaard, Eve and Metaphors of Birth, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015
There has been a recent revival of interest in reading Kierkegaard as an ontologist, as a thinker who engages with questions about the kinds of entity or process that constitute ultimate reality. This new way of reading Kierkegaard stands alongside a revival of interest in ontology and metaphysics more generally.
“In a brilliant, richly contextualized ‘speculative’ naturalist (re-)reading of Kierkegaard, Alison Assiter makes out a powerful case that – as Indigenous peoples have known from time immemorial and most other moderns have all but forgotten – nature is our mother, and evil is most fundamentally losing sight of this. Kierkegaard, Eve and Metaphors of Birth is philosophy at its best, addressing the really big issues of our time.”
“Kierkegaard, Eve and Metaphors of Birth is a passionately written and challenging text which engages with an important and neglected topic in the history of philosophy, namely natality and its links with an ontology of becoming. Focusing on biological reproduction as well as the treatment of women in Kierkegaard’s texts, it develops further and deepens the arguments of Assiter’s Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory (2009).”
“A startling and original book. Assiter’s profound engagement with Kierkegaard’s ontology results in a compelling ecological and feminist reinterpretation of his work. This is required reading for those wishing to move beyond the clichés of Kierkegaard’s heroic individualism.”
Research areas
Feminist Philosophy
Feminist Theory
Political Philosophy
Teaching and Learning Issues