Philosophy 1022E Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Absolute Time And Space, Virginia Held, Presupposition
26 Mar 2015
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They are not doubted, not because they have been sown to be true, but because we have never examined them. Often they are built into the structure of a given inquiry. One of the most useful sorts of work that philosophy can do is precisely to bring presuppositions into h light of day, so they can be properly assessed. Very often, major advances in any field of enquiry happen when a presupposition is overturned. It makes you feel disoriented, jostled, unsure of yourself. This is the kind of work that virginia held, and feminist ethics in general, have been doing. She argues the way ethics has been done for centuries rests on some subtle but well entrenched presuppositions about the nature of ethical theory. And these presuppositions have the effect of relegating the ethical experience of women to the sideline, and so leaving the half the ethical experience of the human race out of the account.
