Rosalyn Diprose

Rosalyn Diprose is Emeritus Professor of philosophy at University of New South Wales.^[1] Engagement with her published research in Philosophy (sub categories (Comparative) Literary and Gender Studies) has placed her on Stanford University's "World Top 2% of Scientists" list for the years 2025, 2022, and 2021.^[2] Diprose is best known for the interdisciplinary application of her unique concept of "corporeal generosity" developed through engagement with existential phenomenology (particularly Merleau-Ponty and Levinas), the Continental philosophies of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Arendt, and numerous feminist philosophies of embodiment. She has been recognised for her contributions to scholarship on these philosophers.^[3] Her concept of "corporeal generosity" is now considered to be seminal in the emerging field of Critical Phenomenology.^[4]

Biography and Career ^[5]

Rosalyn Diprose was raised on a family farm in mid-Western NSW (on "unceded" Wiradjuri country). After graduating with a degree in Biomedical Science from the University of Technology Sydney in 1976, she worked for 2 years in pharmacology research in Sydney and 4 years for Top Deck Travel in London and Sydney in administrative and managerial roles,^[6] before undertaking a liberal Arts degree in Philosophy and History at The University of Sydney (1982-1986). She completed a PhD in Philosophy at UNSW Sydney under the supervision of Prof.Genevieve Lloyd (1987-1991). Diprose was the first woman appointed as a full-time lecturer in Philosophy at Flinders University of South Australia (1991-1994), before taking up a tenured position in Philosophy at UNSW Sydney in 1994. During her academic career she has also held fully funded visiting professorships at several institutions, including in the Department of Philosophy at Rhodes University, South Africa in 2002, in Human Geography, the Open University UK in 2006;^[7] and the Humanities Institute at SUNY Buffalo USA in 2014.^[8] She held the posts of Deputy Head of School and Research Coordinator for the School of History and Philosophy at UNSW (2009-2012). Diprose was awarded the "UNSW Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching for Postgraduate Supervision" in 2009 and went on to oversee 20 successful PhD completions as primary supervisor in 15 years 1998-2014.

Development of "Corporeal Generosity" as an Ethical Principle

In her first book, The Bodies of Women (1994), Diprose, as Alexandra Howson explains, broke new ground by developing a feminist ethics from a combination of Foucault's approach to ethics based on one's embodied "manner of being" and Irigaray and Derrida's notions of relational difference within sociality.^[9] In that book, Diprose also begins her entry into biopolitical critique by applying her feminist ethics to issues in human reproduction and genetics.^[10] At the same time she prefigures the later idea of generosity by positing gift-giving, as opposed to utilitarianism and social contract theory, as the basis of sociality. Through published scholarship on the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Arendt from the early 2000s, Diprose developed her mature concept of corporeal generosity.^[11] Diprose summarises her fully-developed concept of corporeal generosity in the "ontological sense as openness toward, or being-given to, others characteristic of human subjectivity [and] interrelationality", which is imbued with affectivity and is the basis of ethics.^[12] Veera Kinnunen explains the ethical and political dimensions of Diprose's concept in a chapter of her book devoted to the topic: "being open to difference is the basis of community" with the human and non-human.^[13] Other commentators, such as Marsha Meskimmon, elaborate the reasons why this openness to unknowable and irrepressible difference matters: rather than a moral principle, generosity, so understood, is the basis of corporeal self-hood, inter-subjectivity (affecting and being affected by others), communication, innovation, and agency.^[14] Conversely, foreclosing the other's difference is the path to injustice and totalitarianism. Meskimmon uses the idea of corporeal generosity to develop her own idea of "cosmopolitan imagination [as the] key to engendering a global sense of ethical and political responsibility" (ibid. p.7). Other theorists use Diprose's concept of corporeal generosity to develop an ethics of generosity applicable to a range of fields including issues in human reproduction (eg. Hird), environmental ethics (eg. Hawkins), "geographies of generosity" (eg. Barnett & Land), and business/organisation ethics (eg. Kinnunen; Hancock).

to be completed

• Biopolitics
• Gender performativity

In order of most cited and discussed:^[15]

• Diprose, Rosalyn, (BOOK) Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, SUNY, 2002, ISBN 0791453219 Selected for discussion at SPEP in 2003 (add ref)
• Diprose, Rosalyn, (BOOK)The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference, Routledge, London, 1994
• Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (eds. BOOK), Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, Acumen, 2008, ISBN 9781844651160
• Diprose, Rosalyn, "Corporeal Interdependence: From Vulnerability to dwelling in ethical community", SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, #132, 42(3), 2013
• Diprose, Rosalyn, N Stephenson, K Race, C Mills, G Hawkins, "Governing the future", Security Dialogue, 39(2), 2008
• Diprose, Rosalyn & E. Ziarek, (BOOK) Arendt, Natailty and Biopolitics, Edinburgh University Press, 2018 , ISBN 978-1-4744-4434-7 Awarded the "Symposium Book Prize 2019" by the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy^[16]
• Diprose, Rosalyn. "Nietzsche, Ethics & sexual Difference", Radical Philosophy, reprinted in
• Diprose, Rosalyn. "Biopolitical technologies of prevention", Health Sociology Review, 17(2), 2008
• Diprose, Rosalyn, "Toward and ethico-politics of the post-human: Foucault and Merleau-Ponty

• "Emeritus Professor Rosalyn Diprose". School of Humanities & Languages; UNSW Arts and Social Sciences. UNSW Sydney.