Val Plumwood
1939-2008 · Marxism · Known
Plumwood was an Australian ecofeminist philosopher who mounted one of the most thorough attacks on Western dualism, reading the mastery of nature and the mastery of women as one pattern. The West rests on a stack of paired oppositions: mind over body, reason over emotion, human over nature, male over female. Each pair turns one side into a resource for the other, and freedom means dismantling the stack.
Signature
The position Plumwood is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Nature
- strongly leans Harmony
- Ethics Basis
- Relational
Positions on the 6 axes the sources answer
- Society
- leans Collectivism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Order
- leans Horizontal (75 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Opposition
- leans Sublation (25 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Nature
- strongly leans Harmony (100 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage (25 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
- Allegiance
- leans Global (75 on a 0–100 scale from Local to Global)
14 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Plumwood refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Pantheism / Panentheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Communal Order
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Harmony / Justice
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Moral Realism
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - End of Things
- Open Future
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Embodied Perception
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Embodied Cognition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Relational
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Other
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Phenomenological Time / Sacred Time
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Expression
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Productive Tension
What is the status of paradox? - Law
- Restorative Justice
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Other / Ancestral Presence
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Embodied Appraisal
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Symbol-Maker
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- All Beings
What is your primary bond and loyalty?