Feminist Metaphysics: Can This Marriage be Saved?

In Pieranna Garavaso (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Academic Feminism. Bloomsbury. pp. 58-79 (2018)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Feminist metaphysics is simultaneously feminist theorizing and metaphysics. Part of feminist metaphysics concerns social ontology and considers such questions as, What is the nature of social kinds, such as genders? Feminist metaphysicians also consider whether gendered perspectives influence metaphysical theorizing; for example, have approaches to the nature of the self or free will been conducted from a masculinist perspective, and would a feminist perspective yield different theories? Some feminist metaphysicians develop metaphysical theories with the aim of furthering certain social goals, such as gender equality. Despite these and other intriguing research projects, feminist metaphysics faces challenges from two flanks: one might argue that "feminist metaphysics" is not metaphysics, or one might argue that it is not feminist. Recently, Elizabeth Barnes has made the case that, since contemporary accounts of the nature of metaphysics focus primarily on the fundamental, they have the problematic implication that feminist metaphysics is not, properly speaking, metaphysics. However, less emphasis has been paid, of late, to the idea that major strands of feminist thought also problematize feminist metaphysics. I will briefly assess the metaphysician's case against feminist metaphysics in Section 2 of this chapter. Then, in Section 3, I will examine in more detail possible feminist concerns over metaphysics. In Section 4, I sketch a different conception of metaphysics that avoids both mainstream and feminist challenges to feminist metaphysics.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Feminism and Metaphysics: Unmasking Hidden Ontologies.Sally Haslanger - 2000 - Apa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 99 (2):192--196.
Feminist Metaphysics and Philosophical Methodology.Mari Mikkola - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (11):661-670.
Latina feminist metaphysics and genetically engineered foods.Lisa A. Bergin - 2009 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 22 (3):257--271.
Substantivity in feminist metaphysics.Theodore Sider - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (10):2467-2478.
Doing Ontology and Doing Justice: What Feminist Philosophy Can Teach Us About Meta-Metaphysics.Mari Mikkola - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (7-8):780-805.
Going Beyond the Fundamental: Feminism in Contemporary Metaphysics.Elizabeth Barnes - 2014 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114 (3pt3):335-351.
The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender.Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir - 2011 - In Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics. Springer. pp. 47--65.
Feminist epistemology as social epistemology.Heidi Grasswick - 2002 - Social Epistemology 16 (3):185-196.
Can feminists be cartesians?Brie Gertler - 2002 - Dialogue 41 (1):91-112.

Analytics

Added to PP
2019-07-19

Downloads
40 (#347,990)

6 months
14 (#114,907)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Jennifer McKitrick
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Citations of this work

Metaphysics.Peter Van Inwagen, Meghan Sullivan & Sara Bernstein - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Add more citations