Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science: 161 (Synthese Library, 161) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1402013191 ISBN 13: 9781402013195

Publisher: Springer, 2003

Synopsis

This collection of essays, first published two decades ago, presents central feminist critiques and analyses of natural and social sciences and their philosophies. This work provides a splendid opportunity for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy and the social sciences to explore some of the most intriguing and controversial challenges to disciplinary projects and to public policy today.

About this title

Synopsis

This collection of essays, first published two decades ago, presents central feminist critiques and analyses of natural and social sciences and their philosophies. Unfortunately, in spite of the brilliant body of research and scholarship in these fields in subsequent decades, the insights of these essays remain as timely now as they were then: philosophy and the sciences still presume kinds of social innocence to which they are not entitled. The essays focus on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx; on the 'adversary method' model of philosophic reasoning; on principles of individuation on philosophical ontology and philosophy of language; on individualistic assumptions in psychology; functionalism in sociological and biological theory; evolutionary theory; the methodology of political science; and conceptions of objective inquiry in the sciences. In taking insights of both Liberal and Marxian women's movements into the purportedly most abstract and value-free areas of Western thought, these essays chart sexist and androcentric assumptions, claims and practices in the cognitive, technical cores of Western sciences and their philosophies.

They begin to identify the distinctive aspects of women's experiences and locations in male-supremacist social structures which can provide resources needed for the creation of post-androcentric thinking in research, scholarship, and public policy. Such uses of feminist insights remain controversial today, and even among some feminists.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1402013191
• ISBN 13: 9781402013195
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 371
• Editor: Harding Sandra, Hintikka † Merrill B.