Philosophy and Gender

How are ‘philosophy’ and ‘gender’ implicated? Throughout history, philosophers—mostly men, though with more women among their number than is sometimes supposed—have often sought to specify and justify the proper roles of women and men, and to explore the political consequences of sexual difference. The last forty years, however, have seen a dramatic explosion of critical thinking about how philosophy is a gendered discipline; there has also been an abundance of philosophical work that uses gender as a central analytic category. In particular, feminist philosophy has become established as a major field of inquiry, and it is now complemented by related emerging areas, including the philosophy of race and the philosophy of sex and love.

For those working in Philosophy and Gender dizzying questions such as the following arise:

• What justifications were used historically for the exclusion or inclusion of women in political life, and what is their contemporary resonance?
• How is what counts as knowledge shaped by gender norms?
• What metaphysical questions about identity are raised by sex change?
• How might some feminist philosophies risk reproducing racist assumptions about what it means to be a woman, while some critical philosophies of race assume a masculine subject?
• What does it mean to say that moral theories are gendered?

Addressing the need for an authoritative and comprehensive reference work to enable users to answer these and other questions, and to make sense of—and to navigate around—an ever more complex corpus of scholarly literature, Philosophy and Gender is a new title in Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Philosophy series. Edited by Cressida J. Heyes, it is a four-volume collection of foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. It features critical analysis of gender as it relates to philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, social and political thought, aesthetics, and philosophy of science; it is also distinctive in showing how feminist thought has been intertwined in both analytic and continental traditions. The collection reconfigures ‘gender and philosophy’ into an integrated field of inquiry while providing an invaluable resource for scholars in all disciplines who need to know how to think critically about gender. In so doing it responds to recent curriculum developments, while providing a crucial reference guide for theoretically minded scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

Supplemented with a full index, and including an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the assembled materials in their historical and intellectual context, Philosophy and Gender is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource.