Professor Lorraine Code

Distinguished Research Professor (Emerita)

Department of Philosophy

York University

Toronto, Canada

&

Distinguished Woman Philosopher of 2009

(named by The Society for Women in Philosophy)

We have taken the following from a message from the Society of Women in Philosophy:

Lorraine Code is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University in Toronto Canada, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She was the 2007-08 Nancy’s Chair of Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After receiving her PhD from the University of Guelph, she held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship for one year at Oxford University, and one year at the University of Waterloo. Her first book, Epistemic Responsibility (UPNE 1987), the outcome of her postdoctoral research, won the Brown University Press first book prize, together with a Mellon Foundation Fellowship to spend a teaching semester at Brown University. After several years on various research grants, Professor Code was appointed in 1987 as a Canada Research Fellow at York University, in 1990 as Professor in the Department of Philosophy, and in 1997 as the first woman Distinguished Research Professor at York University. She has held visiting fellowships at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University and at Macquarie University in Sydney, has been visiting professor at the University of New South Wales, scholar in residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown South Africa, and twice an invited scholar and guest lecturer at a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in Feminist Epistemologies - 1996 at Eugene Oregon and 2003 at Penn State University. From 1999-2001 Professor Code held the prestigious Canada Council Killam Research Fellowship; in 2005 she was awarded a Doctor of Letters honoris causa (D.Litt.), by the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, and in the spring of 2007 she held a Distinguished Research Fellowship at Durham University in the UK. In the winter semester of 2011 she will hold a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University.

Professor Code’s best known book, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Cornell University Press, 1991) is a path-breaking book in feminist epistemology, which has been reprinted several times. It traces the historical and present-day implications of inquiry in standard Anglo-American theories of knowledge which, in their regulative conceptions of knowledge and subjectivity, issue in descriptive and normative accounts of knowledge that tacitly exclude all but standard, presumptively white male knowers. In Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on (Gendered) Locations (Routledge, 1991), she addresses such issues in the politics of knowledge as incredulity, empathy, relativism, voice and voicelessness, and the epistemological value of gossip. Her most recent book, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (Oxford University Press, 2006) develops an “ecological naturalism”, which owes a debt to Quinean naturalized epistemology, but proposes looking to ecological science, where Quineans look to cognitive science, as a place - both literal and metaphorical - where knowledge is “naturally” made. Lorraine Code has edited five books including, most recently, Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Penn State University Press, 2003), she is General Editor of the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Feminist Theories (Routledge, 2000) which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, Journal of the American Library Association; and co-translator with Dr. Kathryn Hamer of Michèle Le Dœuff, The Sex of knowing (Routledge, 2003), translated from the French Le Sexe du savoir (Paris: Aubier, 1998).

Professor Code, who is currently Past President of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy, has served as an elected Member of the Board of Directors of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada; as Sprächerin on the Executive of the International Association for Women Philosophers/Internationale Assoziation der Philosophinnen; and as an elected member of the Status of Women Committee of the American Philosophical Association.