Dialogues in Philosophy: Thinking Difference - Feminism and Decolonialism

Full course description

For centuries, philosophy has interrogated and provided understandings of fundamental aspects of human life: What is it to be a human being? How can we gain knowledge and what qualities should a ‘knower’ have to obtain reliable knowledge? What is justice and which normative standards should we develop to know and do ‘the good’? While such questions concern all of us, the universalist and objectivist aspirations of meanstream philosophy have increasingly been challenged by feminist and post- and decolonial philosophers. These perspectives problematize how gendered, classed and racialized biases have profoundly shaped how philosophy has – both consciously and unconsciously – constructed boundaries between ‘selves’ and ‘others’, thereby providing justifications for social orders marked by inequalities and exclusions of those considered to be beyond the sphere of ‘the human’.

In this course we will engage with feminist and decolonial dialogues in philosophy, by reading original texts by canonical philosophers and the responses they have engendered among those labeled as ‘others’ and relegated to the margins of humanity. We will discuss for example how feminist philosophers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Genevieve Lloyd and Luce Irigaray engage with the androcentrism inherent in the writings of thinkers like Rousseau, Descartes and Plato. We will also examine how decolonial philosophers like Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak and Nelson Maldonado-Torres analyse how Western thinkers like Hegel, Marx and Heidegger (re)produced ontological and epistemological boundaries between the ‘self’ and racialized others. By centralizing a dialogical approach, the course will stimulate a critical engagement with key philosophical texts, while demonstrating how such an approach can help us to not just criticize, but to constructively expand the philosophical foundations of our societies.