Alison Stone is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University. She works in feminist philosophy and theory, with particular interests in French feminism and debates around embodiment, essentialism, sexual difference, and sex and gender. She also works in post-Kantian European philosophy, especially German idealism and Romanticism, Marxism, and the Frankfurt school. She is the author of Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel's Philosophy (2004), An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (2007) and Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Maternal Subjectivity (2011). She also edited The Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy, Volume 5: The Nineteenth Century (2011).

• Introduction: Luce Irigaray and the nature of sexual difference; 1. Re-reading Irigaray: realism and sexual difference; 2. Judith Butler's challenge to Irigaray; 3. Nature, sexual duality, and bodily multiplicity; 4. Irigaray and Hölderlin on the relation between nature and culture; 5. Irigaray and Hegel on the relation between family and state; 6. From sexual difference to self-differentiating nature; Conclusion: reconciling duality and multiplicity.