Discovering Reality

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxxix

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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 Hubbard

   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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During the last decade, feminist research has attempted to add understandings of women and their social activities to what we all thought we knew about nature and social life. However, from the very beginning of this project, it has appeared to be in tension with some ofthe most fundamental insightsof the Second Women's Movement. Only recently has the nature ofthis tension become clear. Within the theories, concepts, methods and goals of inquiry we inherited from the dominant discourses we have generated an impressive collection of "facts" about women and their lives, cross-culturally and historically - and we can produce many, many more. But these do not, and cannot, add up to more than a partial and distorted understanding of the patterns of women's lives. We cannot understand women and their lives by adding facts about them to bodies of knowledge which take men, their lives, and their beliefs as the human norm. Furthermore, it is now evident that if women's livescannot be understood within the inherited inquiry frameworks, than neither can men's lives. The attempts to add understandings of women to our knowledge of nature and social life have led to the realization that there is precious little reliable knowledge to which to add them. A more fundamental project now confronts us. Wemust root out sexist distortions and perversions in epistemology, metaphysics, methodology and the philos­ ophy of science - in the "hard core" of abstract reasoning thought most immune to inftltration by social values.

• Philosophy of Science
• Plato
• René Descartes
• epistemology
• evolution
• experience
• language
• mind
• psychology
• reason

• Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

  Sandra Harding

• Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, USA

  Merrill B. Hintikka

Policies and ethics