Discovering Reality

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Woman is Not a Rational Animal: On Aristotle’S Biology of Reproduction

   • Lynda Lange

   Pages 1-15

3. Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul

   • Elizabeth V. Spelman

   Pages 17-30

4. The Unit of Political Analysis: Our Aristotelian Hangover

   • Judith Hicks Stiehm

   Pages 31-43

5. Have Only Men Evolved?

   • Ruth Hub Bard

   Pages 45-69

6. Evolution and Patriarchal Myths of Scarcity and Competition

   • Michael Gross, Mary Beth Averill

   Pages 71-95

7. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Forerunner of a Feminist Social Science

   • Ann Palmeri

   Pages 97-119

8. The Trivialization of the Notion of Equality

   • Louise Marcil-Lacoste

   Pages 121-137

9. How Can Language be Sexist?

   • Merrill B. Hintikka, Jaakko Hintikka

   Pages 139-148

10. A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method

    • Janice Moulton

    Pages 149-164

11. The Man of Professional Wisdom

    • Kathryn Pyne Addelson

    Pages 165-186

12. Gender and Science

    • Evelyn Fox Keller

    Pages 187-205

13. The Mind’S Eye

    • Evelyn Fox Keller, Christine R. Grontkowski

    Pages 207-224

14. Individualism and the Objects of Psychology

    • Naomi Scheman

    Pages 225-244

15. Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics

    • Jane Flax

    Pages 245-281

16. The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism

    • Nancy C. M. Hartsock

    Pages 283-310

17. Why Has the Sex/Gender System Become Visible Only Now?

    • Sandra Harding

    Pages 311-324

18. Back Matter

    Pages 325-332

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Are Western epistemology, metaphysics, methodology and the philosophy of science grounded only in men's distinctive understandings of themselves, others, and nature? Does this less than human understanding distort our models of reason and of scientific inquiry? In different ways, the papers in this collection explore the evidence for these increasingly reasonable and intriguing questions. They identify how it is distinctively masculine perspectives on masculine experience which have shaped the most fundamental and formal aspects of systematic thought in philosophy and the natural and social sciences - precisely the aspects of thought believed most gender-neutral. They show how these understandings ground Aristotle's biology and metaphysics; the very definition of the problems of philosophy in Plato, Descartes, Hobbes and Rousseau; the `adversary method' which is the paradigm of philosophic and scientific reasoning; principles of individuation in philosophical ontology and the philosophy of language; individualistic assumptions in psychology; functionalism in sociological and biological theory; evolutionary theory; the methodology of political science; Marxist political economy; and conceptions of `objective inquiry' in the social and natural sciences. These essays also begin to identify for us the distictive aspects of women's experience which can provide the resources needed for the creation of a truly human understanding.
Audience: The book will be of interest to those involved in epistemology, and philosophy of the natural and social sciences, as well as feminist scholars in philosophy. The work will also be of value for theorists, methodologists, and feminist scholars in the natural and social sciences.

• Gender
• biology
• philosophy of science
• science

• Dept. of Philosophy, University of Delaware, USA

  Sandra Harding

• Dept. of Philosophy, Florida State University, USA

  Merrill B. Hintikka

Policies and ethics