Nancy Bauer

After a while I got tired of writing ephemera and toyed around with the idea of trying to break into magazine writing. To pay the bills, I took a job at Children's Hospital in Boston and, with three other people, wrote The New Child Health Encyclopedia. I did most of the articles on mental health and found myself getting deeply interested in the ethics of treating children with diseases of the mind. The hospital sponsored a series of ethics rounds, which I started attending when the topic of discussion was whether to treat a suicidal 12-year-old with Lithium, then completely untested in children. The leader of the rounds was Arthur J. Dyck , to whom I am eternally indebted: he persuaded me to head back to Harvard to do some serious work in medical ethics.

These were the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and "medical ethicist" was a fancy name for "hospital chaplain": Harvard's medical ethics program was in the Divinity School, which became my next stop. These were the best two years of my long, long career as a student. The master's degree program I was in allowed students to take courses in any Harvard school. Dyck encouraged me to give the Philosophy Department another try. I started with a bread-and-butter intro to ethics course taught by the saintly Roderick Firth, to whom I also am hugely indebted. I doubt that Firth saw the slightest sign of philosophical talent in me, but he nonetheless took me seriously and encouraged me to continue in philosophy. In my second semester of Div School I stumbled into a graduate seminar on film melodrama taught by Stanley Cavell, without doubt the most exhilarating, inspiring class I ever took. (Cavell taught this class in concert with his writing Contesting Tears.) I also began taking classes with Hilary Putnam, without whose support I am sure I would never have been admitted to, or made it through, the Harvard PhD program in Philosophy.

Despite spending a lot of time in Emerson Hall while I was in divinity school, I was still undercooked philosophically when I finished. On Putnam's wise advice, I started the Ethics track in the PhD program in the Study of Religion at Harvard; after doing my MA work there, I transferred into Philosophy.

Anyone who knows his work will see in an instant in mine what a decisive influence Cavell has had on my philosophical thinking. My work pairs Cavell's attention to the ethical significance of the way we talk with each other -- what we say when, how we construe and weigh our own and others' intentions, how often our talk involves attempting to justify or excuse ourselves, how language endlessly saves and disappoints us -- with the insights of the early to mid-20th century phenomenologists, particularly Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and, especially, Simone de Beauvoir.

I came to write my PhD dissertation on Beauvoir almost by happenstance. In 1991, my first child, Anneliese was born. (She's now off to Columbia University!) Anneliese was, to put the point as benignly as I can, not a good sleeper. At around the same time, my dear friend Sanford Shieh urged me to read Hipparchia's Choice by Michèle Le Doeuff, an absolutely brilliant meditation on women's relationship to philosophy that focuses to a great degree on Beauvoir. When Anneliese awoke in the middle of the night, I walked up and down the hallway with her in a snuggly, a flashlight in one hand and The Second Sex in the other. About a year later, I abandoned a dissertation I was trying to write on J. L. Austin and wrote what eventually became Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism. In 1996, Anneliese became a big sister; her brother, Max, narrowly beat my thesis to the finish line.

In recent years I've returned to Austin. You can find versions of what's in my latest book project, How to Do Things With Pornography, by clicking the "Publications" and "In Progress" links.

Anneliese, Max, and I live with my partner, philosopher Mark Richard, and his kids, Eleanor and Michael, in the wilds of the Boston suburbs. In addition to having the usual casual hobbies, I am a fanatical knitter. Those in the know might want to check out my Ravelry page; my sobriquet is "Hipparchia." I have one sister, who is an expert in East Asian politics, environmental policy, and human rights. Forty-five years on, and for just a little while longer, my parents still, and still will, reside my childhood home, in Chatham, NJ.