About

Leslie A. Howe

Professor Emerita in philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan. Transplanted from Montreal, near life-long vegetarian, occasional woodworker, former hockey player, football (soccer) goalkeeper, rower, very slow runner, brewer of ales and meads. Socialist, feminist, and old-school lesbian.

In philosophy, I am interested in Kierkegaard and existentialism, moral psychology (especially why we almost always choose the wrong thing), self-deception, lying, misleading, and bullshit, and pretence of various sorts.

A lot of my work has been in the philosophy of sport and most of that has had something or other to do with where the self is in physical endeavour. I’ve written on our connection with the natural environment, on deception and gamesmanship, self-deception and bullshit, and on what excellence and fairness mean in sport.

Current work is mostly on questions of human rights and justice, the ordering of good in terms of rights vs preferences, and how these matter for our interaction with the natural world and for upholding the rights of women as a sex-class. I am spending a lot of time these days working on Simone de Beauvoir, particularly in relation to women and their possibilities for autonomy in self-realisation, the importance of sport for women, and the bad faith implications involved in “identifying as”.