Feminist philosophy

Feminist philosophy refers to philosophy approached from a feminist perspective. Feminist philosophy involves both reinterpreting philosophical texts and methods in order to supplement the feminist movement and attempts to criticise or re-evaluate the ideas of traditional philosophy from within a feminist framework.

There is no one school of feminist philosophy: feminist philosophers, as philosophers, are found in both the analytic and Continental traditions, and a myriad of different viewpoints taken on philosophical issues within those traditions; and feminist philosophers, as feminists, are belong to the many different varieties of feminism. For example:

(1) Feminist epistemologists have challenged traditional ideas of how we know things and of rationality, by arguing that these traditional philosophical ideas are based on male assumptions and perspectives and ignore women's voices.

(2) Feminist phenomenologists investigate how both cognitive senses (e.g., thinking, interpreting, remembering, knowing) and the construction of normativity within social orders combine to shape an individual's reality. As phenomenology is the study of phenomena, feminists use these theories to understand one's awareness of the self, of others, of one's own experience, and how one embodies their intentions and actions.

Feminist philosophy existed prior to the twentieth century but became labled as such in relation to the discourse of second wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S., Australasia, and Europe in particular. This is important to note because attributing this name to earlier works implies a modern-day context to those texts, resulting in an inaccurate reading of their arguments and removing it from the context of its time and place specificity. Feminist philosophy can be understood to have three main functions:

(1) Investigating how biases against women and assumptions about gender are embodied within philosophical writing which comprise the philosophical canon through critiquing texts that are classified as canonical and by rediscovering the work of many female philosophers whose contributions had been forgotten within contemporary areas of philosophical inquiry. Additionally, feminist philosophers reconstruct these philosophical fields in light of these critical inquiries.

(2) Drawing on philosophical concepts and theories to articulate feminist political claims and perspectives.

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