23 Facts About Kelly Oliver

Kelly Oliver was born on July 28,1958 and is an American philosopher specializing in feminism, political philosophy and ethics.

Kelly Oliver is W Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Kelly Oliver is a founder of the feminist philosophy journal philoSOPHIA.

Kelly Oliver is a novelist and the author of three mystery series: The Jessica James Mysteries, The Pet Detective Mysteries, and The Fiona Figg Mysteries.

Kelly Oliver was raised in Montana, Idaho, and Spokane, Washington, the oldest of four children.

Kelly Oliver received her BA in philosophy and communications from Gonzaga University in 1979 and her PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1987.

In Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions, Kelly Oliver explores the reactions to the first pictures of Earth, including Earthrise and The Blue Marble, taken during the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Kelly Oliver argues that the central aim of this book is to approach contemporary problems raised by technologies of life and death as ethical issues that call for a more nuanced approach than mainstream philosophy can provide.

Kelly Oliver argues that what she calls "momcom" is a new subgenre of romcom.

Kelly Oliver is critical of rights-based ethical discourse that would simply expand its scope to include animals, since such a strategy would leave unquestioned assumptions about the nature of humanity on which rights depend.

Kelly Oliver argues that depression, shame, anger and alienation can be the result of social institutions rather than individual pathology.

Kelly Oliver concludes that depression, shame, anger and alienation can be transformed into agency, individuality, solidarity, and community through sublimation and forgiveness.

Kelly Oliver argues that recognition models of identity and subjectivity promote false oppositions and hostilities, including the split between subjectivity and agency evoked in antifoundationalist theories.

Kelly Oliver critically engages various theories of recognition from Charles Taylor's version of multiculturalism and Axel Honneth's analysis of struggles for recognition, to Jacques Lacan's notion of misrecognition and Judith Butler's theory of the performative.

Kelly Oliver develops a theory of subjectivity taking othered subjectivity as a starting point.

In Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers, Kelly Oliver explores the relationship between images of maternity, paternity, rhetoric, subjectivity and ethics.

Rather than choose sides, Kelly Oliver argues that we need to explore the dynamics of identity.

Kelly Oliver argues that the first assumes that we are absolutely identical, which erases our differences, and the second assumes that we are absolutely different, which erases our communion.

Kelly Oliver begins to explore the usefulness and limitations of the notion of recognition, and its flip side, abjection, in developing a theory of identity that opens the subject to otherness.

In Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture, Kelly Oliver continues where she left off in Womanizing Nietzsche.

Kelly Oliver argues that while Nietzsche and Derrida attempt to open up the notion of subjectivity so that is not autonomous and self-enclosed, they do so by excluding or appropriating femininity.

Kelly Oliver maintains that the model of intersubjective relations operating in extreme versions of these texts is an Hegelian model stuck at the level of the master-slave fight to the death where the only options are murder or suicide.

Kelly Oliver indicates how Kristeva's notion of a subject-in-process can be useful in formulating a notion of subjectivity that allows for an explanation of women's oppression and some possibilities of overcoming that oppression.