PROFILES Dr Kate Kirkpatrick The new Fellow and Director of Studies in Philosophy introduces herself and her work

Dr Kate Kirkpatrick

The new Fellow and Director of Studies in Philosophy introduces herself and her work

How should one introduce oneself to alumni when one is an alumna? I suppose the best place to start is to say that I read Philosophy and Theology at Regent’s Park from 2002–2005. During that time, I don’t remember doing much to distinguish myself in extracurricular matters: once I was nominated for a JCR award—Most Elusive Person in College—but (paradoxically, it seemed to me) because I was not present at the awards event, I was disqualified.

I came to Regent’s Park from the United States, and during my undergraduate years my intellectual interests were nurtured with care under the direction of another American abroad, the feminist philosopher Dr Pamela Sue Anderson. After graduating I worked in publishing for five years, as an editorial assistant and then commissioning editor of non-fiction books. I liked working in the book trade but soon realised that I was in the wrong part of it: I enjoyed the creative conversations with authors about honing their projects, but I also wanted to research and write my own. So, I returned to do my MSt and DPhil at St Cross College, Oxford, from 2010–2015.

A return to Philosophy My publishing years gave me time to reflect on the kind of research I valued: I was interested in methodology in philosophy and theology, the relation between philosophy and literature, and between philosophy and feminism. In all of these domains of ‘philosophy and’, questions of form and content fascinated me: what makes, for instance, something like Augustine’s Confessions a philosophical work? How does narrative context affect the meaning of what is said? Why are some philosophers so preoccupied by propositions or ideal theories? Do those preoccupations lead to the consequence that some people’s Jonathan questions—or even entire social groups—are Kirkpatrick unjustly excluded from the field of ‘philosophy’? I reached the conclusion that working in French phenomenology and existentialism would offer an opportunity to think through some of these questions in dialogue with views that continue to influence contemporary thinking about the world. I wrote my doctorate on the Dr Kirkpatrick with Professor Pamela Sue Anderson, Oxford, 2016 concept of nothingness Dr Kirkpatrick with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, adopted daughter of Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, 2018

in Jean-Paul Sartre’s early phenomenological ontology under the supervision of George Pattison, then Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, and Pamela Sue Anderson, then Professor of Modern European Philosophy of Religion. Now you might well wonder: What does phenomenological ontology have to do with contemporary ways of thinking about the world? I argued that Sartre’s ontology was indebted to the Christian doctrine of original sin, and to debates about the reception of Augustine in 17th-century French philosophy. According to Sartre, humans have a propensity to look at each other with a reductive gaze: a gaze that sees your surface or hears your voice and categorizes you according to class, race, sex (to give just three examples) without questioning these categories any more than a child who sorts her Lego by colour or shape. Lego do not suffer from this treatment, but for human beings the objectifying gazes of others often result in alienation and oppression – and perpetuate human suffering on a wide scale. Needless to say, these phenomena are not new. The question is: what can be done?

After completing my doctoral work, I was appointed to a Stipendiary Lectureship in Theology at St Peter’s College in 2015,

and to a Lectureship in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire in 2016. My first book Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness, was published in 2017, and my second book, Sartre and Theology the same year. The first was my doctoral project, and the latter explored the legacy of Sartrean existentialism in the works of significant twentieth-century Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and black liberation theologians. In 2018, I moved to King’s College London as Lecturer in Religion, Philosophy, and Culture.

From Sartre to Beauvoir In tandem with my work on Sartre I developed an interest in the reception of the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir was well known in the twentieth century as the feminist author of The Second Sex and for being in ‘some kind of relationship’ with Sartre. But she was a significant philosopher in her own right, and in my view her reception in the twentieth century was heavily distorted by both sexism and feminist politics. Rather than writing a monograph or journal articles to express my findings, I decided to experiment with form and write a biography, Becoming Beauvoir, which was published in 2019.

One of Beauvoir’s claims was that in the ‘feminine condition’ women were encouraged to see love as their supreme vocation. In capitalist societies, she thought, the market had to hide the relations of domination that exist between the dominant and the exploited by processes of mystification. In her view the home was too often a context of women’s exploitation, perpetuated by what she called an ‘idolatrous’ and mystifying conception of love. Writing in 1949, she claimed that women were raised from girlhood to think that to succeed at life was to succeed at self-sacrificial love—and that if they did not love in conventional ways as wives, mothers, or lovers, they would be judged failures. Why was it, she asked, that only some members of humanity were taught that love was self-sacrifice, or that to succeed at their own projects in life would make them less lovable?

Why was it, I wanted to ask, that Beauvoir’s own life and work were so often reduced to mystifying tropes about love or feminism? Beauvoir is a divisive figure—much loved and much loathed— but I found it satisfying to work on her philosophy in part because she is a thinker whose provocations clearly continue to touch nerves and change lives. In that respect, she serves as a counterexample to Karl Marx’s famous but false claim that ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’

Well before Marx, philosophers’ interpretations of the world have effected change. Today philosophical questions— about identity, ethics, and justice—are fiercely debated in public and private life. My hope for the generations of Regent’s philosophers who study during my tenure as Director of Studies is that they will learn to, as the college motto puts it, ‘test everything, keep what is good’.

Outside of research and teaching, I enjoy spending time with my family— some readers of Regent’s Now may remember my husband Matt Kirkpatrick (BA Theology, 2002; DPhil 2008), and together we are parents to two primaryschool aged children. In any spare moments I get I enjoy reading fiction, painting, playing the piano, and— during summer visits to my natal state, California—taking out the kayak.