Feminist Philosophy

Feminism, though popularly understood as a social justice movement seeking to end gender-based oppression, is also a set of intellectual beliefs and theories examining solutions to such injustices. Through criticizing binary gender views, male privilege, and social practices revolving around historically harmful concepts of gender, feminist theory works toward correcting gender subordination at intersections such as racism, classism, and heterosexism. Feminist philosophy, then, generally aims to explore what “a woman” is, what it means to be a woman, to be free, and to have autonomy - though the presupposition that there is one universal definition of being a woman can be more problematic than it may seem initially (e.g., in the context of discussions about nonbinary and trans individuals). Feminism is thus a broad umbrella of often contradicting views about sexism’s nature and the category of “woman,” if there is a rightful category at all. However, feminists are alike in their commitment to solving the issue of injustice against women in society. Since feminist philosophy is such a broad, intersecting area, several methodologies approach feminist questions differently and with variations of critical dialogue. For example, analytic feminism - a methodology hailing truth, logic, objectivity, rationality, and justice as a means of not only countering androcentrism (i.e., purely male-centered thought) but also empowering women - differs from, say, pragmatist feminism - an approach with the core concept of pragmatism (and how to advocate for specific, practical social changes), valuing women’s personal and public experiences and, consequently, pluralism. A significant difference between analytic feminism and pragmatist feminism is that while analytic feminists pursue “truth” regarding concepts of good and justice to counter sexism, pragmatist feminists generally avoid such notions of one universal truth altogether. Feminist interventions describe efforts to reconfigure conventional, male-dominated areas of philosophical research beyond male biases (for example: ask a person their top 10 philosophers, and chances are they will all be men). A non-exhaustive list of such interventions may include feminist metaphysics, how frameworks studying reality’s structure may be privileging men and supporting sexism; feminist moral psychology, whether the patriarchy plays a role in motivation and action, how it affects a woman’s desires, and whether moral autonomy is even possible within patriarchy; and feminist philosophy of biology, how evolutionary models of sexual selection support androcentric stereotypes and depict the woman as passive and the man as active. All in all, feminist philosophy works to integrate the female perspective into philosophical practices and tropes by correcting traditional bias and theoretical weakness in ethics, politics, and epistemology. By doing so, feminism brings another shade to human experience and existence in hopes of building an overall more just society.