Daly, Mary (1928—2010)
American radical feminism philosopher and theologian. Daly was born in Schenectady in New York State. She obtained two doctorates---one in philosophy and one in theology---and taught for more than 30 years at the Jesuit-run Boston College (she was eventually forced into retirement because of her refusal to teach male students, which ran foul of College policy). A provocative figure in the feminist movement, Daly is best known for Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), which argues that western culture reduces women to object status and that this, in turn, destroys women both mentally and physically. She argues that western society is not merely patriarchal in its organization, but that reality itself (by which she means, language, experience, and consciousness) is patriarchal and that feminism cannot succeed unless it addresses this basic fact. A highly influential figure, Daly has been criticized from within the feminist movement, particularly by Audre Lorde, for her failure to appreciate the unequal way oppression is distributed according to differences in race and class. Dasein German philosopher Heidegger, Martin’s word for the individual subject. Produced from two words in German ‘Da’ and ‘sein’ which separately mean ‘there’ and ‘being’ but together are usually translated as ‘existence’, Dasein is usually left untranslated and the most literal reading of it is the one that is recommended. In other words, Dasein is not the same as the subject, but replaces it in Heidegger’s philosophy with the precise aim of eliminating from his thinking all the baggage and presuppositions associated with the notion of the subject. Only by making this break in our thinking are we able to understand the subject in its being as a subject, which is first of all a matter of Dasein.