PHIL 2500 Lecture Notes - Feminist Epistemology, Frankfurt School, Western Canon
Document Summary
Feminist epistemologists contest: thinking knowledge is universal, objectivity, emotion-western tradition wrongly conceptualizes knowledge focuses on rationality. She focuses on how western tradition overlooks the role emotion when we conceptualize knowledge. Hostile reaction when it comes with validating knowledge attached to emotion. Western dichotomies: reason - emotion, rational - irrational, mental - physical, cultural - natural, universal - particular, public - private, male female. Left column associated with each other, right side associated with each other. By investigating the emotions those who are oppressed- minority contributes to the development of critical social theory, contests people who a just focus on rationality and positivism. Mixing social investigation/observations with what it means to have objective knowledge. We can"t have knowledge without being conscious of social theory. How we construct knowledge is not just the left side of the binaries, not the only valuable way. Within the western philosophical tradition emotions have been considered potentially or actually subversive of knowledge.