Claudia Card

Claudia Falconer Card (born 30 September 1940),^[1] is the Emma Goldman (WARF) Professor of Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with teaching affiliations in Women's Studies, Jewish Studies, Environmental Studies, and LGBT Studies.^[2]

Education

She earned her BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1962) and her MA (1964) and Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard University, where she wrote her dissertation under the direction of John Rawls.

Career

Joining the faculty in the philosophy department at Wisconsin straight from her Harvard studies, Card has been a significant voice there, and in the profession, ever since. Although securely rooted in and dedicated to Wisconsin, Card has held visiting professorships at The Goethe Institute (Frankfurt, Germany), Dartmouth College (Hanover NH), and the University of Pittsburgh. Card has written 4 treatises, edited or co-edited 6 books, published nearly 150 articles and reviews. She has delivered nearly 250 papers at conferences, colleges, and universities and has been featured in 29 radio broadcasts. In 2013, Card was invited to deliver the prestigious Paul Carus Lectures, a series of 3 lectures delivered to the American Philosophical Association; these will be delivered at the Central Division in 2016.^[3] She delivered the John Dewey Lecture to the Central APA in 2008.^[4] In April 2011 Card became the President of the APA's Central Division.^[5] Her Presidential Address was "Surviving Long-Term Mass Atrocities: U-Boats, Catchers, and Ravens."

In a career with extraordinary research productivity, not only in quantity, but also in breadth and depth of subjects investigated, Professor Card has always also taken teaching and service to be central to her life, as students and colleagues attest. She has won numerous teaching awards across her career. In 2011, Claudia Card was awarded the University of Wisconsin's Hilldale Award for excellence in teaching, research and service. In nominating her for this award, her department chair, Russ Shafer-Landau attested to Card's significance, saying, “Her books and articles have become as essential to feminist thinking as ‘Das Capital’ is to labor theory. You simply can’t do feminism without reading Card, and even if you don’t read Card, today’s feminism bears her mark so deeply that you may not even realize that you have in some other way digested her theoretical perspectives.”^[6] In an interview, Card said, that the Hilldale award, “feels like a reward for my whole career.”^[7]

Research

Claudia Card's research focuses on ethics and social philosophy, including normative ethical theory; feminist ethics; environmental ethics; theories of justice, of punishment, and of evil. With these interests, she has paid special attention to the ethical theories of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and has read widely in history, sociology, and survivor testimony. In the 1970s, Card was an active early member of the Midwest Society for Women in Philosophy, and was a pioneer in articulating lesbian feminist philosophy, and supporting a wide variety of LGBT research and activism throughout her career. In 1996, SWIP elected her elected Distinguished Philosopher of the Year. Card has taken some controversial stances, such as arguing against marriage, on the grounds that it gives each party rights over the person of the other that no one should have, and as being especially dangerous to women within patriarchy. While others were painting rosy pictures of equality in lesbian relationships, Card's realism came through in her articulation of the dangers of lesbian battering.^[8] Standing up for the oppressed and for persons at risk has marked her work from the start, in her now classic and still oft-cited "On Mercy.^[9]" More recently, her work has turned to understanding the nature of evil.^[10] It is an understatement to describe Card as exhibiting "fearless engagement with difficult subjects".^[11] She has tackled issues of racism, sexism, oppression, developed a theory of genocide as social death, developed theories of militarism, punishment, and as early as 1996 was urging us to see rape as a weapon of war.^[12]

Card's current work developing a secular conception of evil appears in two volumes of an intended trilogy. The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil,^[13] has generated significant discussion and support. There is an issue of Hypatia dedicated to the book, guest edited by Andrea Veltman and Kathryn Norlock, who also edited a collection of essays.^[14] These two volumes bring together twenty different philosophers commenting on Card's ground-breaking work.

The second book in the evil trilogy is Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide^[15] Here, Card examines her account of atrocity as a paradigm of evil, refining and expanding the views developed in the first book, with attention to structural evil, the role of harm, and the significance of culpability. She argues that evils are inexcusably wrong and that they need not be extraordinary—in fact, she argues we must pay attention to evils that occur so commonly that we tend to overlook them. She applies, tests, and extends this revised account in examining the moral wrongs of terrorism, torture, and genocide. While she was writing this second "evil" book, Card also co-edited a collection of philosophical papers on Genocide's Aftermath.^[16] This collection of essays by philosophers takes seriously the hope that philosophical analysis, conducted with attention to current and historical reality, has the chance to change thinking in ways that fights injustice.^[17]

Card is at work on the third book in the trilogy, on Surviving Atrocity. This book builds upon her 2010 APA presidential address, and while still maintaining a focus on mass atrocities that have become all-too-familiar, also includes attention to surviving long-term mass atrocities, surviving poverty, and surviving global and local misogyny.

Selected bibliography

• Card, Claudia (1991). Feminist ethics. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 9780700604838. 
• Card, Claudia (1995). Lesbian choices. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231080095. 
• Card, Claudia (1996). The unnatural lottery: character and moral luck. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press. ISBN 9781566394536. 

• Trilogy:

Card, Claudia (2002). The Atrocity Paradigm: a theory of evil. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195181265. 

Card, Claudia (2010). Confronting evils: terrorism, torture, genocide. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521899611. 

Card, Claudia. Surviving atrocity.  (forthcoming)

References

External links

• Profile: Claudia Card (a) Department of Philosophy, The University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Profile: Claudia Card (b) Department of Philosophy, The University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Profile: Claudia Card Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech University
• "Fearless Claudia Card defines feminism, confronts evil". News, College of Letters and Science, The University of Wisconsin–Madison. 9 January 2013. Retrieved 4 March 2015. 
• academia.edu (downloadable copies of some of Card's work)
• Carus Lectures American Philosophical Association
• John Bengson Department of Philosophy, The University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Mitchell, Jessica (25 October 2013). "Genocide definition explored". The Crusader. Retrieved 4 March 2015.