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This essay surveys twenty-five years of feminist epistemology in the pages of Hypatia. Feminist contributions have addressed the affective dimensions of knowledge; the natures of justification, rationality, and the cognitive agent; and the nature of truth. They reflect thinking from both analytic and continental philosophical traditions and offer a rich tapestry of ideas from which to continue challenging tradition and forging analytical tools for the problems ahead.

The juxtaposition encompassed in the phrase "feminist epistemology" strikes some feminist theorists and mainstream epistemologists as incongruous. To others, the phrase signals the view that epistemology and the philosophy of science are not what some of their practitioners and advocates have wanted or claimed them to be—but also are not "dead," as some of their critics proclaim. This essay explores the grounds for and implications of each view and recommends the second.

It is suggested that the field of feminist epistemology had developed in response to: challenges to men's claim to "know" the nature of women & the nature of the world; critiques of the substantive claims of "authoritative" texts on such questions; considerations of the adequacy of traditional conceptions of knowledge, reason, rationality, & the knowing subject; explorations of the causes & the persistence of defective epistemological theories; investigations of the influence of gender on modes of recognition; & analyses of the implications of particular theories of knowledge for feminist research in various academic disciplines. A survey of these topics & the range of positions advanced by feminist scholars on these issues is provided. 71 References. HA

"Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: An Introduction is structured around six questions and the answers to them that have been offered by feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science. By showing how these answers differ from those of traditional philosophical approaches, the book situates feminist work in relation to philosophy more generally. The questions are: Who knows? What do we have knowledge of? How do we know? What don't we know? Why does it matter? and How can we know better? In addressing these questions, the book reviews feminist accounts of objectivity, agnotology, issues in social epistemology--including epistemic injustice--and considers how feminist epistemology and philosophy of science aim at better knowledge production. The audience for the book is upper division undergraduates, but it will be useful as a foundation for graduate students and other philosophers who are seeking a general understanding of feminist work in these areas"--

Surgery is an important part of contemporary health care, but currently much of surgery lacks a strong evidence base. Uptake of evidence‐based medicine (EBM) methods within surgical research and among practitioners has been slow compared with other areas of medicine. Although this is often viewed as arising from practical and cultural barriers, it also reflects a lack of epistemic fit between EBM research methods and surgical practice. In this paper we discuss some epistemic challenges in surgery relating to this lack of fit, and investigate how resources from feminist epistemology can help to characterize them. We point to ways in which these epistemic challenges may be addressed by gathering and disseminating evidence about what works in surgery using methods that are contextual, pluralistic, and sensitive to hierarchies.

A review article on a book by Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Polity Press/Minnesota U Press, 1989 [see listing in IRPS No. 68]). Informing Fraser's collection of essays is a concern for the relationship between epistemology & politics. The book provides incisive critiques of recent developments in critical social theory & postmodernism. Fraser discusses the work of Jurgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, the French Derrideans, & Michel Foucault, who is criticized for developing a value-neutral account of modern power that fails when he adopts the language of domination & subjugation to describe the modern power/knowledge regime. Focusing on liberalism, Fraser offers a broad analysis of modernity & its connection with humanism, & attempts to posit a critical social theory that recognizes multiple discursive forms in a contested social arena. By privileging the discursive in her theory of the politics of need, it is argued that Fraser falls into the postmodernist trap of constructing linguistic puzzles in which real lives & their needs are often elided.

This paper discusses problems in dealing with masculinized knowledge and scientific enterprises, and seeks alternative epistemological strategies in achieving liberating and un-dominated knowledge production. A general problem with "mainstream" epistemology and philosophy of science from feminist perspectives is that the well accepted concept of knowledge and scientific practices derived from it deny the impacts of social and political dimension toward knowing activities and their results. Feminists observed that men and their masculinities have been reproducing their social and political domination into the practices and standard of objective knowledge. The paper takes on two questions. First, how masculinity as dominant social and political norm has influence the production of knowledge? Second, what epistemological strategies would allow the production of less dominating and liberating knowledge? Feminist theories of knowledge built on the belief that rational inquiry is social practice through which gender as cultural and political norms and reference give deep impacts toward knowing process and it results. A theory of liberating knowledge requires acknowledgement and acceptance of multiple methods and models of knowledge in accordance to specific situation of the knowing subjects. Through such epistemological understanding feminist theorists formulated epistemological strategies to reduce masculinity in the rational inquiries and well accepted science.

The paper offers a historical outline of the main positions and protagonists of feminist epistemology as a specific field in philosophy at the end of the twentieth century, in the context of a feminist critique of knowledge in academia in general as part of international feminist movements. The main question discussed is whether there is a specific feminist concept of philosophical and scientific knowledge. If so, what is its innovative aspect? What are the philosophical problems in arguing for feminist knowledge? Is there a specific insight or methodological approach? A further question is what role, if any, feminist epistemology plays in the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies. The discussion will centre on how feminist epistemology relates to non-scientific practices. In particular, the role of the concept of objectivity in feminist epistemology will be elaborated. This will illuminate the connection between the feminist knowledge project with other emancipatory projects and outline how feminist constructivism might play a prominent role in this context in the twenty-first century.

As Helen Longino's overview ofHypatia's engagement with feminist epistemology suggests, the last twenty‐five years' contributions to this field reveal a strong focus on the topic of knowledge. In her short outline, Longino questions this narrow focus on knowledge in epistemological inquiry. The main purpose of this article is to provide a framework for systematically taking up the questions raised by Longino, one that prevents us from running the risk of becoming unreflectively involved in sexist, racist, or otherwise problematic inquiry. I argue that a specific form of the method of Reflective Equilibrium, as it is widely discussed in moral epistemology, logic, and theories of rationality, enables us to cope with the problems of traditional epistemology, which feminist theorizers such as Sally Haslanger have pointed to. With the account of Reflective Equilibrium I am offering—drawing in many respects on the model provided by Catherine Z. Elgin—we have an ameliorative method that allows us to rethink epistemological values, goals, and standards in a systematic way, and that largely avoids implicit and explicit biases in epistemology.