A Philosophical Reflection on "Feminist Epistemology"
Author：Yih-Mei Huang
Abstract /
Some feminists assume that there are distinctively female ways of knowing, and the oppressed, marginalized people (unquestionably including women) are epistemically privileged. Therefore there should be a different women`s epistemology. The first part of this essay summarizes some important assumptions and the content of "Feminist Epistemology", while in the second part we argue that there are no reasons to consider these assumptions are warranted, and because of these assumptions the feminist epistemology is even self-defeating. We also point out that another theoretical difficulty of feminist epistemology, the "bias paradox", was not successfully solved by Louise M. Antony, therefore, we conclude that the feminist epistemology is incongruous and not a legitimate subfield of analytic philosophy.