Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Many of our beliefs, practices, and theories reflect the assumption that the world impinges on us via our senses and, by so doing, shapes and constrains what it is reasonable to believe. And most of us engage in the practice of justifying and judging claims about ourselves and the rest of the world by reference to experience. As much to the point of the present discussion, feminist philosophers have long insisted that the questions, methods, and theories of philosophy should reflect and be evaluated, at least in part, on the basis of women's experiences. Most of us are in these ways empiricists.But while empiricism so understood may be nonuncontroversial and, indeed, an impetus for much of the work undertaken in feminist philosophy, the content of the notion of experience, and the nature of its relationships to knowledge and the natural and social worlds about which we theorize, are hardly obvious. Many feminists have come to doubt, for example, that experience is “spontaneous” or “passively absorbed.” Further, although feminists often use women's experiences in their assessment of philosophical theories, many have come to doubt claims positing universals in those experiences. Finally, integral to the critiques postmodern feminists have leveled against the modern conception of selves – as constituting, for example, stable and unified entities – are critiques of conceptions of experience ... log in or subscribe to read full text