Feminist Philosophy

What it asks

The claim is not that philosophy has ignored women, though it largely did. It is that unexamined assumptions about who the thinker is have shaped conclusions in areas that look entirely impersonal.

The test of that claim is whether it produces results elsewhere, and it has. In epistemology, that knowers are situated and that the view from nowhere is a position rather than its absence. In ethics, that impartiality is one moral stance and dependency and care are not exceptions to the moral life but most of it. In political philosophy, that the household was placed outside the scope of justice by assumption rather than by argument.

It is included as a branch rather than a school for that reason: its subject is the whole discipline.

The recurring problems

Who the subject is. If feminist philosophy speaks for women, it must say which women - and the history of it speaking for all while describing some is exactly what intersectional analysis was developed to address.

Situated knowledge. If all knowers are positioned, is any position better? Standpoint theory holds that the perspective of the disadvantaged can be epistemically privileged, because those who must navigate a system understand it in ways those it serves need not. The argument is stronger than it first looks and has to avoid making privilege automatic.

Objectivity. Criticising a false ideal of detachment without landing in the position that any account is as good as any other. This is the field's permanent balancing problem.

Care and justice. Whether an ethics organised around relationship and dependency is an alternative to justice-based theories, a supplement, or a rediscovery of something virtue ethics had.

How it developed

Wollstonecraft's Vindication in 1792 argued that women appear less rational because they are educated to be, which located the problem in institutions rather than natures.

Beauvoir's The Second Sex in 1949 is the pivotal work. Its argument that one is not born but becomes a woman separated the biological from the social and made gender a philosophical subject rather than a given.

The field formed in the 1970s and moved quickly beyond ethics and politics. Feminist epistemology asked how knowledge practices are shaped by who does them; standpoint theory and situated knowledge gave it a positive account rather than only a critique.

Crenshaw's analysis of intersectionality in 1989 showed that categories treated separately miss those who fall at their junction, and reshaped how the field states its own subject.

Since then the work has spread into metaphysics, philosophy of science and philosophy of language, and much of it is now simply part of those fields rather than a critique from outside.

The positions within it

Liberal, radical, socialist and care-ethical feminisms; standpoint theory; feminist empiricism; poststructuralist approaches. All are in the Schools section, and they disagree with each other as sharply as with anything outside.

Where it stands now

Much of the programme has succeeded in the sense that matters: situated knowledge, epistemic injustice and the ethics of care are now discussed by people who would not describe their work as feminist.

The field's internal disagreements are substantial and public, particularly about the category of woman itself, and it has never been a single position. The most active current work is on epistemic injustice, on structural explanation, and on the boundary between analysing a social category and endorsing it.