Anita Superson

Superson received a bachelor's in biology from DePaul University in 1981 and went on to receive a master's in philosophy (with a concentration in medical ethics) from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1985 and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1989. Superson is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of Kentucky, where she has held an appointment since 1992. She is an affiliated faculty member of the Gender and Women's Studies Department at the University of Kentucky. She also holds the visiting Churchill Humphrey and Alex P. Humphrey Professorship in Feminist Philosophy at the University of Waterloo for the winter of 2013. She also held a visiting professorship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2008. Before her current appointments, she held an assistant professorship at Kansas State University, and also taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. ==Research areas==

Superson's research brings the tools of analytic philosophy to bear on the issues presented by feminism, especially those issues that lie at feminism's intersection with ethics. Her recent anthology attempts to document the impact that analytical feminism has made on mainstream philosophy in recent years. ==Publications==

Superson has written one book - The Moral Skeptic, published in 2009. and Theorizing Backlash: Philosophical Reflections on the Resistance to Feminism, and published a number of peer-reviewed papers. In it, although Superson recognizes that there are problems inherent to the concept of justification, Superson still pursues the idea, believing it too central a part of philosophy to discard and that despite its problems, demonstrating that it is rational to be moral may have the effect of making people actually behave in a moral way. Superson believes that this model overlooks two important facts: first, that people often benefit from privilege in a way that cannot be captured by such a model, and second, that the theoretical moral skeptic's own preferences might be deformed by their own oppressive experiences (and thus fulfilling them may not actually maximize their own self-interest.) ==References==