Feminist philosophy has become a substantial and vibrant area of contemporary philosophy since 1960’s and 1970’s when it first arose during women’s movement. Feminist philosophy, as a discipline originated from feminist politics, included from the start discussion of feminist political issues and positions in terms of Marxist, liberal, radical and socialist feminisms. Within this political framework, feminist philosophers took on the task of re-reading and re-interpreting philosophical canon to question the historical absence of women in philosophy as well as other fields of research, and also to construct new methods and approaches to combat the sexist assumptions throughout the history of philosophy and science. 

The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by by Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader and Allison Stone is a comprehensive collection of papers aimed to trace how feminist philosophical debates have evolved into their current forms. The editors’ main aim in this volume is to provide possible solutions to the dilemma of focusing on more powerful or privileged—Western, white women’s—voices that have particularly influenced the formation of these debates. Their strategy to solve this dilemma is to include in this volume new debates and to challenge the terms of existing debates by re-inserting relatively neglected voices in these debates. 

In accordance with the aim of resolving the dilemma and facilitating different kinds of diversity, the book is divided into five sections. In all these sections, they seek to present both Anglo-American (or analytic) and continental European philosophical traditions. Their second concern in designing these sections is to foreground issues of global concern and scope. In doing this, even though they need to focus predominantly on the voices of the West, they also include chapters on non-Western philosophical approaches, such as Daoism, African feminism and Confucianism as well as Native American and Latin American traditions. 

The first section titled Engaging the Past consists of twelve papers focusing on the early work in feminist history of philosophy. Most of the papers collected in this section concentrated on the critiques of canon with the intention of re-thinking ethics, epistemology and other fields in the history of philosophy in a feminist light. 

The second section is titled Mind, Body, and World because, from it outset feminist philosophy has addressed issues in philosophy of mind metaphysics, particularly concerning the relations between body and mind, between selves and others, and the nature of identity. Four out of seven papers included here explore questions such as what it means for gender to be socially constructed (Chapter 13), or in what way, if any, all women count as women, especially if there are no common properties or experiences that all women share (the question of essentialism discussed in Chapter 14). 

The rest of the papers in this section is about identity and the self, especially in light of debates about identity politics. As formulated in Chapter 18, the discussions of self and identity among feminist philosophers focused on identities in the plural, in different contexts, and with more attention to actual experiences, in contrast to traditional philosophy’s preoccupation with the unity of the self and to the focus on thought experiments in much Anglophone philosophy of mind. Feminists also have considered how relations with individual others, and social situations, figure into our identities such that selves are not self-contained within a single person, as discussed in Chapter 17. As discussed in Chapter 19, some feminist philosophers have also turned to psychoanalysis to analyze how external social relations become internalized into our mental processes and how these processes, in turn, shape the social realm.

The third section titled Knowledge, Language and Science includes eight papers about feminist philosophers’ desire to reconstruct key concepts in theory of knowledge and philosophy of science such as reason, knowledge, language, truth and objectivity in ways that are more reflective of our actual epistemic situations, which are more richly conducive to social justice, and that better enable us to avoid past errors such as power-laden, gender-linked dichotomies. Some papers (Chapters 25, 26, 27) explore how, over the decades feminist philosophers of science, like feminists in other fields, have exposed sexism and andro-centric biases in the conduct of scientific research, the topics chosen for study, misunderstandings in the roles of values in science, and ways that power is unjustly manifested in science. Some of the papers in this section (Chapters 23 and 24) focus on the critical analyses of language by both continental and analytic feminist philosophers. 

The fourth section titled İntersections consists of nine papers providing intersectional analyses for feminist philosophy. Although many authors throughout the volume utilize intersectional thinking, this section begins by providing historical and critical analysis of the concept of intersectionality itself, especially as it has developed out of critical race theory, since the intersections between gender and race have been a particular focus of thinking about intersectionality (Chapters 28 and 29). Several chapters in this section (Chapters 29, 30, 31, 32 and 33) focus upon the intersections among distinct bodies of theory that have arisen around axes of oppression in social reality such as oppression of lesbians and gay men on the basis of their sexuality, queer theory and critical sexuality. Also included here are chapters on global development, ecological thought and environmentalism, and feminist engagement with religious diversity, which pertain to further problematic sets of power relations (Chapters 34, 35 and 36).

The fifth section titled Ethics, Politics and Aesthetics constitutes the most comprehensive section of the book as feminists both argue that oppressive values have shaped the content and methods of academic philosophy and advocate for philosophy informed by feminist values. Editors divide this section into three subsections and three papers are included in the section titled Aesthetics includes papers focusing on politics and art (Chapter 37), the relations between gender and aesthetics (Chapter 38) and feminist explorations of the sublime and beautiful (Chapter 39).

The following eight papers are included in the subsection titled Ethics consists of papers focusing on discussions of care ethics and virtue ethics. Some papers suggest that feminists should eschew justice altogether (Chapter 43) while some others argue that care ethics and Confucianism can be incorporated into a single perspective (Chapter 44). Wenfy Rogers (Chapter 46) and C. Mackenzie (Chapter 41) write about relational accounts of ethics and define autonomy in ways that highlight the autonomy-enhancing qualities of the right types of relationships and social conditions. There are papers (Chapters 34, 48 and 49) focusing on the concept of exploitation, especially on analyzing the use of women’s unpaid and undervalued labor to subsidize development.  

Since feminist philosophy has always been shaped by an engagement with political movements, the last subtitle titled Social and Political Philosophy includes papers focusing non-ideal approaches in moral and political philosophy emphasizing that political thought should focus on identifying existing injustices and developing normative principles and concepts that help us to move beyond them. Almost all of the essays in Social and Political Philosophy take this as a starting point and Wendy Rogers begins her discussion by taking our attention to existing healthcare disparities (Chapter 46), while Clare Chambers assumes that responsiveness to sexist oppression is a desiratum of liberalism (Chapter 52) to mention a few. There are also essays on transnational feminism, care ethics and bioethics that emphasize the increasing importance of developing theoretical responses to gender and racial impact of neoliberalism.

This volume is an excellent introduction to feminist philosophy, since it showcases the breadth and depth of feminist thinking across a wide range of philosophical traditions and topics, while featuring feminist perspectives that challenge and reconsider the history and contours of feminist thinking on these topics up to the present day. I believe this book can be perfectly used as a text book for both undergraduate and graduate level courses in feminist philosophy, women studies, history of feminism, gender studies and so on. The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy Mind will be an invaluable resource for advanced students and scholars of philosophy, and also researchers in neighboring disciplines seeking a better understanding of the shape of feminist philosophy so far. 

© 2020 Kamuran Elbeyoğlu

Kamuran Elbeyoğlu (Prof. Dr.), Toros University, School of Business Administration and Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, Yenisehir, 33140 Mersin, Turkey.

Categories: Philosophical

Keywords: philosophy, feminism