Just Words

Mary Kate McGowan is the Margaret Clapp '30 Distinguished Alumna Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She received her PhD from Princeton in 1996. She works in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of law, and feminism. She is the co-editor, with Ishani Maitra, of Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech (Oxford 2009).

• Introduction 1: Preliminaries 2: Conversational Exercitives 3: On Differences Between Standard and Conversational Exercitives 4: The General Phenomenon: Covert Exercitives 5: Speech and Oppression 6: On Pornography: Subordination and Silencing 7: Race, Speech, and Free Speech Law Conclusion

The author's discussions are intricate, ingenious and sophisticated. Perhaps most impressively, for a book that blends jurisprudence, politics and philosophy of language, they are also lucid, unpretentious, and often utterly persuasive.