Feminist philosophy is an approach to philosophy
from a feminist perspective and also the employment
of philosophical methods to feminist topics
and questions.
Feminist philosophy involves both reinterpreting
philosophical texts and methods in order to
supplement the feminist movement and attempts
to criticise or re-evaluate the ideas of traditional
philosophy from within a feminist framework.
== Main features ==
Feminist philosophy is united by a central
concern with gender.
It also typically involves some form of commitment
to justice for women, whatever form that may
take.
Aside from these uniting features, feminist
philosophy is a diverse field covering a wide
range of topics from a variety of approaches.
Feminist philosophers, as philosophers, are
found in both the analytic and continental
traditions, and a myriad of different viewpoints
are taken on philosophical issues within those
traditions.
Feminist philosophers, as feminists, can also
belong to many different varieties of feminism.Feminist
philosophy can be understood to have three
main functions:
Drawing on philosophical methodologies and
theories to articulate and theorize about
feminist concerns and perspectives.
This can include providing a philosophical
analysis of concepts regarding identity (such
as race, socio-economic status, gender, sexuality,
ability, and religion) and concepts that are
very widely used and theorised within feminist
theory more broadly.
Feminist philosophy has also been an important
source for arguments for gender equality.
Investigating sexism and androcentrism within
the philosophical tradition.
This can involve critiquing texts and theories
that are typically classified as part of the
philosophical canon, especially by focusing
on their presentation of women and women's
experience or the exclusion of women from
the philosophical tradition.
Another significant trend is the rediscovery
of the work of many female philosophers whose
contributions have not been recognised.
Contributing to philosophy with new approaches
to existing questions as well as new questions
and fields of research in light of their critical
inquiries into the philosophical tradition
and reflecting their concern with gender.Feminist
philosophy existed before the twentieth century
but became labelled as such in relation to
the discourse of second-wave feminism of the
1960s and 1970s.
An important project of feminist philosophy
has been to incorporate the diversity of experiences
of women from different racial groups and
socioeconomic classes, as well as of women
around the globe.
== Subfields ==
Feminist philosophers work within a broad
range of subfields, including:
Feminist epistemology, which challenges traditional
philosophical ideas of knowledge and rationality
as objective, universal, or value neutral.
Feminist epistemologists often argue for the
importance of perspective, social situation
and values in generating knowledge, including
in the sciences.
Feminist ethics, which often argues that the
emphasis on objectivity, rationality, and
universality in traditional moral thought
excludes women's ethical realities.
One of the most notable developments is the
ethics of care, which values empathy, responsibility,
and non-violence in the development of moral
systems.
Care ethics also involve a greater recognition
of interpersonal connections and relations
of care and dependency, and feminist ethics
uses this to critique how an ethics of justice
is often rooted in patriarchal understandings
of morality.
Some feminist ethicists have shown concern
about how values ascribed to an ethics of
care are often associated with femaleness,
and how such a connection can bolster ideas
about moral development as essentially gendered.
Feminist phenomenology investigates how both
cognitive faculties (e.g., thinking, interpreting,
remembering, knowing) and the construction
of normativity within social orders combine
to shape an individual's reality.
Phenomenology in feminist philosophy is often
applied to develop improved conceptions of
gendered embodied experience, of intersubjectivity
and relational life, and to community, society,
and political phenomena.
Feminist phenomenology goes beyond other representation-focused
discourses by centering personal and embodied
experiences, as well as recognizing how experience
often operates outside of language, so can
be difficult to articulate.
Reflection upon time as a construct is a more
recent development in feminist phenomenology;
recent works have begun investigating temporality’s
place in the field, and how a more complex
understanding of temporality can further illuminate
realities of gendered experience and existence.
Feminist aesthetics, which concerns the role
of gender and sexuality in art and aesthetic
theorising, and deals with issues related
to subjectivity of creators, the reproduction
of gendered norms in art, the role of art
in enculturation, and representation of women
in art, both as subjects and creators.
An understanding of “women” and “artist”
as mutually exclusive identities has been
reproduced since at least the era of romanticism,
and this division has made interventions by
feminist aesthetics necessary to challenge
the patriarchal and masculine state of aesthetics.
Feminist metaphysics, which focuses largely
on the ontology of gender and sex and the
nature of social construction.
Feminist historians of philosophy also examine
sex biases inherent in traditional metaphysical
theories.
One of the main points at which this field
diverges from classical metaphysics is in
its attempts to ground social constructs into
understandings of the “fundamental” and
“natural”, around which metaphysics is
built around.
Feminist metaphysics attempts to balance the
relationship between social constructs and
reality by recognizing how the distinction
between what is perceived as “real” and
what is “socially constructed” creates
a binary that fails to acknowledge the interplay
between the two concepts.
Similarly, this field works to challenge systems
of classifications that are deemed natural,
and therefore unbiased, by revealing how such
systems are affected by political and moral
ideologies and biases.
Some theorists have raised questions regarding
whether certain fundamental aspects of metaphysics
inherently oppose a feminist approach, and
so the relationship between feminism and metaphysics
remains somewhat precarious.
Feminist philosophy of science, which is rooted
in interdisciplinary academic feminism, works
to challenge how the production of scientific
knowledge as well as the methodologies employed
in such productions are not free of bias.
Contrary to other perceptions of science,
feminist philosophy of science recognizes
the practice of science as value-rich instead
of value-free, suggesting that ideologies,
such as those related to gender, are tied
up within the models and practices that constitute
what science is and what knowledge it produces.
== Major figures ==
Influential feminist philosophers include:
Linda Martín Alcoff
Sandra Lee Bartky
Simone de Beauvoir
Judith Butler
Claudia Card
Lorraine Code
Bracha L. Ettinger
Miranda Fricker
Olympe de Gouges
Sally Haslanger
Luce Irigaray
Alison Jaggar
Julia Kristeva
Uma Narayan
Martha Nussbaum
Val Plumwood
Griselda Pollock
Mary Wollstonecraft
Iris Marion Young
== 
Critics ==
Critics of feminist philosophy are not generally
critics of feminism as a political or cultural
movement but of the philosophical positions
put forth under the title "feminist philosophy".Writers
and thinkers who have criticised aspects of
feminist philosophy include:
Susan Haack
Camille Paglia
== See also ==
Analytical feminism
Hypatia transracialism controversy
List of feminist philosophers
Women in philosophy
Socialist feminism
Feminist philosophy of science
Ethics of Care
Ethics of Justice
== References ==
== External links ==
Zalta, Edward N. (ed.).
"Approaches to Feminism".
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
