Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T14:49:58.082Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Thinking with the Weight of the Earth: Feminist Contributions to an Epistemology of Concreteness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Linda Holler
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay proposes a possible direction for feminist epistemology—an embodied rationality that defines the process of knowing as a dialogue with particulars or the “things themselves.” On the grounds that modem reality is marked by abstract projects of homo mensura, I argue that the task of postmodernism is to ground cognition in the world by breaking the habit of looking at the world, as if from a distance, and by ceasing to think about the world as if it were composed of a collection of objects-in-general.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bergson, Henri. 1947. The creative mind: An introduction to metaphysics. New York: Citadel Press.Google Scholar
Bly, Robert. 1980. News of the universe: Poems of two‐fold consciousness. San Francisco: Sierra Club BooksGoogle Scholar
Bohr, Niels. 1958. Atomic physics and human knowledge. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Bordo, Susan. 1986. The cartesian masculinization of thought. Signs 11(3): 439–456.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, James. 1962. Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Buber and Barth. New York: Collier Books.Google Scholar
Burtt, Edwin Arthur. 1954. The metaphysical foundations of modem physical science. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Fee, Elizabeth. 1983. Women's nature and scientific objectivity. In Woman's nature: Rationalizations of inequality. Lowe, M. and Hubbard, R., eds. New York: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar
Galilei, Galileo. 1967. Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems‐Ptolemaic and Copemican. Drake, Stillman, trans. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Goodfield, June. 1981. An imagined world. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Griffin, Susan. 1978. Woman and nature: The roaring inside her. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1986. The science question in feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Heisenberg, Werner. 1958. Physics and philosophy. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Heisenberg, Werner. 1972. The representation of nature in contemporary physics. In The discontinuous universe. Sears, S. and Lord, G., eds. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox and Grontkowski, Christine R. 1983. The mind's eye. In Discovering reality: Feminist perspectives on epistemology, metaphysics, methodology, and philosophy of science. Harding, S. and Hintikka, M., eds. Boston: D. Rietiel.Google Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1983. Afeelingfor (he organism: The life and work of Barbara McClmtock. New York: W. H. Freeman and Co.Google Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1985. Reflections on gender and science. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of perception. Smith, Colin, trans. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1964a. Eye and mind. In The primary of perception. Edie, J., ed. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1964b. Signs. McCleary, Richard C., trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Needleman, Jacob. 1976. A sense of the cosmos. New York: E. P. Dutton.Google Scholar
Peters, H. F. 1962. My sister, my spouse: A biography of Lou Andreas‐Salomé. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. 1978. The dream of a common language. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Sartre, Jean Paul. 1964. Nausea. Alexander, Lloyd, trans. New York: New Directions.Google Scholar
Soelle, Dorothée, with Cloyes, Shirley A. 1984. To work and to love: A theobgy of creation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.Google Scholar
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1925. Science and the modem world. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Willard, Nancy. 1970. Testimony of the invisible man. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.Google Scholar