PHIL41280

This seminar will introduce students to key contemporary feminist philosophers and debates between feminist philosophers with a view to understanding how their work draws from and challenges dominant philosophical traditions in the creation of new philosophical understandings of knowledge, ethics, self and politics.

We begin with an exploration of what is feminist philosophy? Feminism has a much more recent history than Philosophy. Feminism can be characterised as a popular (or unpopular) social movement that seeks to change the status quo to enable equal participation by girls and women in the public to that of boys and men, and to create a cultural parity of esteem for both masculinity and femininity. Besides this egalitarian project feminism has another impulse which is to seek to deconstruct the meaning of what it is to be male or female and to inscribe new signification for these terms and for the relationship between them. The ambivalence of these goals might be seen to excite many of the debates among feminists. The initial seminar will seek to collectively arrive at definitions for what Philosophy is and does which will begin a discussion that will continue for the remaining weeks: how might we define feminist philosophy?

Feminist philosophy is vibrant with debate and revision and the topics that will be addressed in our reading and discussion will offer a variety of contestations among feminists. These topics will include:
(i) What is Gender and its significance?
(ii) Feminist epistemology and feminist philosophies of ignorance;
(iii) Feminist conceptions of what is a Self?;
(iv) Feminist Ethics;
(v) Feminist Political Philosophy;

We will meet face-to-face in our seminars . The lectures (powerpoint) and required reading will be available in advance on-line on the Brightspace learning platform. It is expected that students will engage with this material before our lecture time slot. When we meet for our seminars we will be able to have a lot of interactive discussion on the required reading. The lecturer will merely re-cap the key points of the lectures uploaded on Brightspace and answer points that students find confusing, interesting, exciting, debatable or even objectionable in the readings and lectures.