Genevieve Lloyd

Genevieve Mary Lloyd (born 16 October 1941 at Cootamundra, New South Wales), is an Australian philosopher and feminist.

Biography Lloyd studied philosophy at the University of Sydney in the early 1960s and then at Somerville College, Oxford. Her D.Phil, awarded in 1973, was on "Time and Tense". From 1967 until 1987 she lectured at the Australian National University, during which period she developed her most influential ideas and wrote The Man of Reason, which was published in 1984. In 1987 she was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, being the first female professor of philosophy appointed in Australia. She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1995. On retirement, she was appointed Professor Emerita.

Philosophical work Lloyd's 1979 paper The Man of Reason explores the influence of seventeenth century rationalist philosophy on contemporary views of gender and reason. It argues that Cartesian method encouraged a new polarisation between reason, on the one side, and emotion and imagination on the other. The Man of Reason was further elevated to an ethical (not merely epistemic) ideal in Spinoza's Ethics. Even though Descartes and Spinoza's rationalism is less popular today, Lloyd argues that we continue to live with the ideal of the Man of Reason their work gave rise to. She went on to develop these ideas further in her 1984 book of the same name.