This second edition of Women, Knowledge, and Reality continues to exhibit the ways in which feminist philosophers enrich and challenge philosophy. Essays by twenty-five feminist philosophers, seventeen of them new to the second edition, address fundamental issues in philosophical and feminist methods, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, language, religion and mind/body. This second edition expands the perspectives of women of color, of postmodernism and French feminism, and focuses on the most recent controversies in feminist theory and philosophy. The chapters are organized by traditional fields of philosophy, and include introductions which contrast the ideas of feminist thinkers with traditional philosophers. The collected essays illustrate both the depth and breadth of feminist critiques and the range of contemporary feminist theoretical perspectives.

The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased. Some contributors challenge and revise western conceptions of the body as the domain of the biological and 'natural, ' the enemy of reason, typically associated with women.

This volume of essays by Naomi Scheman brings together her views on epistemic and socio-political issues, views that draw on a critical reading of Wittgenstein as well as on liberatory movements and theories, all in the service of a fundamental reorientation of epistemology. For some theorists, epistemology is an essentially foundationalist and hence discredited enterprise; for others-particularly analytic epistemologists--it remains rigorously segregated from political concerns. Scheman makes a compelling case for the necessity of thinking epistemologically in fundamentally altered ways. Arguing that it is an illusion of privilege to think that we can do without usable articulations of concepts such as truth, reality, and objectivity, she maintains (as in the title of one of her essays) that epistemology needs to be "resuscitated" as an explicitly political endeavor, with trustworthiness at its heart. While each essay contributes to a specific conversation, taken together they argue for addressing theoretical questions as they arise concretely. Truth, reality, objectivity, and other concepts that problematically rest on shifting ground are more than philosophical toys, and the ground-shifting these essays enact is a move away from abstruse theorizing-analytic and post-structuralist alike. Following Wittgenstein's injunctions to just look, to attend to the "rough ground" of everyday practices, Scheman argues for finding philosophical insight in such acts of attention and in the difficulties that beset them. These essays are an attempt to grasp something in particular, to get a handle on a set of problems, and collectively they represent a fresh model of passionate philosophical engagement.

This second edition of "Women, Knowledge and Reality" continues to exhibit the ways in which feminist philosophers enrich and challenge philosophy. Essays by twenty-five feminist philosophers, seventeen of them new to the second edition, address fundamental issues in philosophical and feminist methods, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, language, religion and mind/body. This second edition expands the perspectives of women of color, of postmodernism and French feminism, and focuses on the most recent controversies in feminist theory and philosophy. The chapters are organized by traditional fields of philosophy, and include introductions which contrast the ideas of feminist thinkers with traditional philosophers. The collected essays illustrate both the depth and breadth of feminist critiques and the range of contemporary feminist theoretical perspectives.

Susan Hekman believes we are witnessing an intellectual sea change. The main features of this change are found in dichotomies between language and reality, discourse and materiality. Hekman proposes that it is possible to find a more intimate connection between these pairs, one that does not privilege one over the other. By grounding her work in feminist thought and employing analytic philosophy, scientific theory, and linguistic theory, Hekman shows how language and reality can be understood as an indissoluble unit. In this broadly synthetic work, she offers a new interpretation of questions of science, modernism, postmodernism, and feminism so as to build knowledge of reality and extend how we deal with nature and our increasingly diverse experiences of it.

Having enjoyed more than twenty years of development, feminist epistemology and philosophy of science are now thriving fields of inquiry, offering current scholars a rich tradition from which to draw. In addition to a recognition of the power of knowledge itself and its effects on women’s lives, a central feature of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science has been the attention they draw to the role of power dynamics within knowledge-seeking practices and the implications of these dynamics for our understandings of knowledge, science, and epistemology. Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge collects new works that address today’s key challenges for a power-sensitive feminist approach to questions of knowledge and scientific practice. The essays build upon established work in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, offering new developments in the fields, and representing the broad array of the feminist work now being done and the many ways in which feminists incorporate power dynamics into their analyses.

Rachel E. Dubrofsky examines the reality TV series The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in one of the first book-length feminist analysis of the reality TV genre. The research found in The Surveillance of Women on Reality TV: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette meets the growing need for scholarship on the reality genre. This book asks us to be attentive to how the surveillance context of the program impacts gendered and racialized bodies. Dubrofsky takes up issues that cut across the U.S. cultural landscape: the use of surveillance in the creation of entertainment products, the proliferation of public confession and its configuration as a therapeutic tool, the ways in which women's displays of emotion are shown on television, the changing face of popular feminist discourse (notions of choice and empowerment), and the recentering of whiteness in popular media.