安妮·沃特斯

作品

• 2004美洲印第安思想：哲学论文集

  收录二十二篇美洲印第安哲学家的论文，作者包括小维因·德洛里亚、维奥拉·科尔多瓦和布赖恩·伯克哈特，讨论知识、科学、存在、伦理、法律和艺术，并按学院哲学的各个领域编排；沃特斯称之为第一部由拥有哲学博士学位的美洲印第安人撰写的此类文集。

• 2004语言很重要：非离散的非二元二元论

  本文论证，美洲许多原住民语言建立在一种“非离散”的本体论之上，其中万物相互渗透，因此男与女这样的对子是互补的而非互斥的；这样理解，性别就不必是一个本质化的范畴。

立场

Waters is on the map for helping to establish American Indian philosophy as a field of academic philosophy. “American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays” (2004), which Waters edited, brought together twenty-two essays by American Indian philosophers – among them Vine Deloria Jr., Viola Cordova, Brian Burkhart, Thurman Lee Hester Jr. and Dale Turner – arranged by the fields of the discipline, from epistemology and logic to ethics and aesthetics; Sandy Grande called it a landmark of Native intellectual life, and Burkhart counted it among the four key texts of a decade of Native American philosophy. Waters’ own essays deal with ontology and identity. “Language Matters” distinguishes the “discrete binary dualism” of Western thought since Plato, whose sharply bounded opposites permit hierarchies such as mind over body or male over female, from a “nondiscrete nonbinary dualism” in Indigenous languages of the Americas, in which each term remains itself and is also part of the other; gender, so understood, need not be an essentialised category, and feminist and race theory should take this into account. “Ontology of Identity and Interstitial Being” draws on Deloria’s idea of identity rooted in place and describes American Indian identity not as conformity to a definition of “Indianness” but as a consciousness woven from many meanings in the gaps between imposed categories. The newsletter, the association and the APA committee gave what Waters called the first generation of American Indians in professional philosophy a forum of their own.

生平与背景

Anne Waters writes in the dedication of “American Indian Thought” (2004) as “a Seminole woman”; in an autobiographical essay in the same volume Waters describes a family history that includes Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee ancestry. Waters took a doctorate in philosophy at Purdue University and a law degree at the University of New Mexico, both in 1992, the year in which Viola Cordova also received a doctorate in philosophy; the two were among the first American Indian women in the field. From 1996 Waters was a driving force behind the American Indian Philosophy Association, as its founding president, and behind the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on American Indians in Philosophy, approved in 1999, of which Waters was a founding member and chair. With Cordova, Waters edited the APA Newsletter on American Indians in Philosophy from 2001. Waters was a research associate at the State University of New York at Binghamton, co-edited a special issue of Hypatia on Indigenous women in the Americas (2003) and the SUNY Press series “Living Indigenous Philosophies”, and has also published poetry.

其他主要作品

• Indigeneity, Self-Determination, and Sovereignty (APA Newsletter on American Indians in Philosophy 2:1, 2002)
• Introduction: Indigenous Women in the Americas (Hypatia 18:2, special issue, co-ed., 2003)
• American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays (ed., 2004)
• Language Matters: Nondiscrete Nonbinary Dualism (in American Indian Thought, 2004)
• Ontology of Identity and Interstitial Being (in American Indian Thought, 2004)