PO Box 440140 Aurora CO 80014-0140
Title: Siblings Under the Skin: Feminism, Social Justice and Analytic Philosophy
Author: Sharyn Clough
Series: Critical Studies in the Humanities
Imprint: The Davies Group, Publishers
soft cover
334 pp.
USD 28.00
ISBN 978-1888570694
January 2003
Western feminists and other philosophers concerned with social justice have begun to move beyond research programs that are defined over
and against our analytic inheritance. Building from a necessarily critical foundation, they have begun to construct positive theories that make
clear our debts to the analytic tradition…the methodological issues of analytic philosophy that have proven the most fruitful for feminist appropriation concern
epistemology and the philosophy of science. Analytic philosophy of language and mind are also becoming increasingly attractive for feminist investigators and other
philosophers concerned with challenging the political status quo…Analytic philosophers such as Neurath, Carnap, Hempel, Popper, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson ranged
easily over many of these topic areas, as do the feminist and other progressive thinkers who have used the analytic tradition as a springboard for further work.
It is in this shared spirit of social change and methodological focus that the current volume brings together the writings of contemporary western feminist philosophers, and
other progressive writers, alongside the classic texts of the analytic tradition that gave them inspiration.
Siblings Under the Skin represents a daring look ahead to a time when the affinity between social justice and analytic philosophy is assumed and used as a point of departure
for innovative work. The collection begins with an historical essay detailing the relationship between the philosophy and socialism of Reichenbach and Neurath, two of the
main members of the Vienna Circle from which much of analytic philosophy takes its cue. Essays by feminist philosophers of science, such as Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Hugh
Lacey and other progressive writers, are paired with the essays in the analytic tradition that gave them inspiration, including selections from Quine, Davidson, Hempel,
Sellars and Popper.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Sharyn Clough, Siblings under the skin.
Historical Context
Steve Gimbel, Politics and the Wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung: Neurath and Reichenbach
on science and socialism.
Conversations
Lynn Hankinson Nelson, A question of evidence; W.V. Quine, Epistemology naturalized.
Sharyn Clough, A hasty retreat from evidence: The recalcitrance of relativism in feminist epistemology; Donald Davidson, A coherence theory of truth.
Bjørn Ramberg, Charity and ideology: The field linguist as social critic; Donald Davidson, A nice
derangement of epitaphs.
Edrie Sobstyl, Lost in logical space? Wilfrid Sellars and feminist empiricism; Wilfrid Sellars, More on givenness and explanatory coherence.
Hugh Lacey, Where values interact with science; Karl Popper, On the sources of knowledge and of ignorance.
Heather Douglas, Hempelian insights for feminism; Carl Hempel, Science and human values.
Author
Sharyn Clough received her PhD in an interdisciplinary program combining the history and philosophy of science and feminist theory at Simon Fraser University. She
currently teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Oregon State University. She has published essays in journals such as Hypatia, Social Epistemology, and Studies in
the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences. In addition to Siblings Under the Skin she is the author of Beyond Epistemology: A Pragmatist
Prescription for Feminist Science Studies.