Affirmative action

By Boxill, Bernard R.

The term ‘affirmative action’ originated in the USA under President Kennedy. Originally it was designed to ensure that employees and applicants for jobs with government contractors did not ...

African feminism

By Chioma Steady, Filomina

The distinctiveness of African feminism lies in its social and humanistic thrust, which recognizes that unequal power relations can be based not only on gender, but also on ...

Charity, principle of

By Feldman, Richard

The principle of charity governs the interpretation of the beliefs and utterances of others. It urges charitable interpretation, meaning interpretation that maximizes the truth or rationality of what ...

Cultural identity

By Loughney, John A.

If cultural identity means that a person achieves the fullest humanity within an accepted context of traditional symbols, judgments, values, behaviour and relationships with specific others who self-consciously ...

Discrimination

By Nickel, James W.

A principle forbidding discrimination is widely used to criticize and prohibit actions and policies that disadvantage racial, ethnic and religious groups, women and homosexuals. Discriminatory actions often rely ...

Epistemic Injustice

By Catala, Amandine

The concept of epistemic injustice refers to the injustice that an individual suffers specifically in their capacity as a knower or epistemic agent – that is, as someone ...

Feminism

By James, Susan

Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under ...

Feminism

Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under ...

Feminism and psychoanalysis

By Whitford, Margaret

Broadly speaking, there have been two main types of philosophical response to psychoanalysis. The first sets out to assess the scientific status of Freud’s hypotheses; the second uses ...

Feminism and social science

By Wylie, Alison

Feminists have two sorts of interest in the social sciences. With the advent of the second-wave women’s movement, they developed wide-ranging critiques of gender bias in the conceptual ...

Feminist aesthetics

By Korsmeyer, Carolyn

Feminist perspectives in aesthetics and philosophy of art have emerged not only from the discipline of philosophy but also from cognate fields such as literary theory, film studies ...

Feminist ethics

By Tong, Rosemarie

Critics greet feminist ethics with suspicion, alleging that it is biased towards the interests of women. Feminist ethicists reply that it is traditional ethics which is biased. As ...

Feminist jurisprudence

By Kingdom, E.F.

The diversity of feminist philosophy and theory is represented in feminist jurisprudence, but two models of feminist jurisprudence predominate: the parity model, according to which women should be ...

Feminist literary criticism

By Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty

Feminist literary criticism looks at literature assuming its production from a male-dominated perspective. It re-examines canonical works to show how gender stereotypes are involved in their functioning. It ...

Feminist political philosophy

By Mendus, Susan

In all its forms, feminism asserts that social and political structures in society discriminate against women. Feminist political philosophy aims to show how traditional political philosophy is implicated ...

Feminist theology

By Suchocki, Marjorie

Feminist theology began as a reaction to the exclusion of women and women’s concerns from traditional Christian theology, but it soon incorporated constructive as well as critical elements. ...

Feminist thought in Latin America

By Oliver, Amy A.

Any analysis of feminist thought in Latin America is burdened by the task of combatting the frequent assumption that feminism is an ideology imported from the USA or ...

Gender and science

By Harding, Sandra G.

Gender-based analyses of philosophies of science have arisen at the conjunction of two other movements. First, in the 1960s it became increasingly the accepted position that scientific claims ...

Gender and Social Kinds

By Mason, Rebecca

Individuals belonging to a kind share properties in virtue of which they are members of that kind.¹ Consider the social kind asylum seeker. Roughly, what it is ...

Language and gender

By McConnell-Ginet, Sally

How do language and gender interact? This can be interpreted as asking about sexual difference in relation to language-use. How do the sexes speak, how do we speak ...

Linguistic discrimination

By Scheman, Naomi

‘Linguistic discrimination’ is a redundancy. Discriminating is at the heart of what languages do. The question, of course, is when they can be said to do it invidiously, ...

Marginality

By Oliver, Amy A.

Traditional definitions of marginal persons include those who live in two worlds, but do not feel well integrated into either and those who live in societies which are ...

Pornography

By Mendus, Susan

There are three main questions about pornography. (1) How is pornography to be defined? Some definitions include the contention that it is morally wrong, while others define it ...

Pornography

There are three main questions about pornography. (1) How is pornography to be defined? Some definitions include the contention that it is morally wrong, while others define it ...

Postcolonialism

By Quayson, Ato

The term ‘postcolonialism’ is sometimes spelled with a hyphen – post-colonial – and sometimes without. There is no strict general practice, but the hyphenated version is often used ...