Revising Philosophy Through the Wide-Angle Lens of Feminism

Hypatia, 2010

Thanks in large part to the record of scholarship fostered by Hypatia, feminist philosophers are now positioned not just as critics of the canon, but as innovators advancing uniquely feminist perspectives for theorizing about the world. As relatively junior feminist scholars, the five of us were called upon to provide some reflections on emerging trends in feminist philosophy and to comment on its future. Despite the fact that we come from diverse subfields and philosophical traditions, four common aims emerged in our collaboration as central to the future of feminist philosophies. We seek to: 1) challenge universalist and essentialist frameworks without ceding to relativism; 2) center coloniality and embodiment in our analyses of the intermeshed realities of race and gender by shifting from oppression in the abstract to concrete cosmologies and struggles, particularly those of women of color and women of colonized communities across the globe; 3) elaborate the materialities of thought, being, and community that must succeed atomistic conceptions of persons as disembodied, individually constituted, and autonomous; 4) demonstrate what is distinctive and valuable about feminist philosophy, while fighting persistent marginalization within the discipline. In our joint musings here, we attempt to articulate how future feminist philosophies might advance these aims, as well as some of the challenges we face.

Feminist philosophy is to be understood as a recent trend in philosophical analysis, which was always a male arena. Feminism is a stream of thought emerged along with the activities of women who worked for the welfare of women during the modern times. The emancipatory activism along with detailed academic studies and intervention into intellectual realm in the US and Europe brought the area into light. Most of the thinkers who took initiatives in this regard were from the discipline of philosophy. This paper is an attempt to read the thoughts of such feminist philosophers for bringing their contributions as an important trend in philosophical enterprise.

European Journal of Women's Studies, 2005

Choice Reviews Online, 1998

A whistling woman and a crowing hen Will never come to a good end.-Midwestern proverb PHILOSOPHICAL APPEALS TO "HUMAN NATURE" Essentially positive conceptions of human nature have figured prominently in the normative theories of Western philosophers: Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, and many others based their general ethical and political systems on substantive assumptions about the capacities and dispositions of human beings. Many of these views have been interpreted as affirming the inherent moral value and essential equality of all human beings, and a few have provided inspiration for emancipatory movements, including feminism. Nonetheless, for anyone who would find in these theories a message of universal equality, there is one immediate difficulty: none of the major philosophers intended their claims about the natural entitlements of "man" to be applied to women. 1 Contrary to what's maintained by many contemporary exegetes, it's unlikely that the philosophers' use of masculine terms in the framing of their theories was a "mere linguistic convenience." 2 For if one looks at the (very few) places at which the major philosophers explicitly discuss women, one finds that women are expressly denied both the moral potentialities and the moral perquisites that are supposed to accrue to "man" in virtue of "his" nature. 3 If "man" is generic, and women are "men," then how could this be? It's possible that the philosophers in question believed that men and women did not share a nature at all, in which case all their talk of "man" would be simply and literally talk of men. But this seems unlikely. Philosophers have not really wanted to claim that men and women are members of distinct kinds. Aristotle, Rousseau, and Kant, for example, who all made the possession of reason criterial of humanity, agreed that women could not plausibly be claimed to be utterly devoid of rationality. 4 Alternatively, then, the view must have been that men and women shared some sort of "human" nature, even while women differed from men in morally relevant respects.

Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy

In this paper, I address the problem about the role of academic philosophy for the feminist movement. I argue that the professionalization of feminism, especially within the sphere of academic philosophy, is detrimental to the stated goal of the feminist movement, which, as historically understood, is to procure women's rights and liberties and to reassess the (oppressive) treatment of women by different social institutions. The thought is that if feminism were to reap the rewards of a socio-political change, feminists should stop their fantastic theorizing and start bringing their advocacies to the proper forums.

2022

[Franklin & Marshall College, Spring 2022] — This course will introduce you to some of the key thinkers and concepts within Feminist Philosophy. You will be asked to consider questions such as: What is oppression, and how can you determine whether a person or group is oppressed? What is gender, and what effect should a contemporary understanding of gender have on our thinking about feminism and gender equality? What does it mean for feminism to be "intersectional"? What would a feminist approach to topics as wide-ranging as ethics, subjectivity, knowledge, and sexuality look like?

Philosophical feminism arose during the women's movement of the 1960s and '70s. During that period women in many academic disciplines, including philosophy, began to question why there were almost no works by women in the canons of their disciplines and why there were so few women in their professions. For feminist philosophers, part of the answer lay in the generally disparaging view of women that pervaded Western culture and was consequently reflected in the thinking of most male philosophers: compared with men, women were seen as irrational, emotional, unintelligent, and morally immature. Eventually women philosophers were led to ask more-pointed questions: how has philosophy been affected by the larger culture's attitudes toward women? What has philosophy left out or misunderstood because of those attitudes? The most obvious results, as women philosophers noted, were omissions. Until the late 20th century, women's philosophical contributions were generally dismissed (if they were noticed at all), and issues of concern to women were ignored. In the history of Western philosophy up to the 1970s, the topic of gender seldom arose, and when it did it was usually in the context of a rationalization of women's lower social status and their exclusion from public life. The exceptions to this rule, such as Plato's Republic and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1861), were few and far between.

Metaphilosophy, 1996

2005

This edition of the Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy features a number of reviews of recent books in feminist philosophy. The books range from social and political philosophy, to environmental philosophy, and continental philosophy. They attest to the flourishing of feminist scholarship, and the reviews demonstrate the ongoing dialogue that has long characterized the field. I have organized them somewhat thematically, though readers will also note the impressive variety of topics and ideas represented. But the news is not all good. In “Female-Friendly Departments: A Modest Proposal for Picking Graduate Programs in Philosophy,” Julie Van Camp undertakes a thorough scrutiny of Brian Leiter ’s The Philosophical Gourmet Report. Her analysis, however, is not limited to that Report. Van Camp raises a series of questions regarding the status of women in the profession, and her article is a “must-read” for anyone considering graduate school or participating in the profession in a facul...

The Philosophical Review, 1993