Abstract
This is the first paper in the invited collection. Koggel starts with Code’s first book to record the key objections she raises against traditional and mainstream epistemological accounts. They are the sort of objections that will thread their way through all her work and be important to the development of feminist epistemology. I will then introduce, summarize, and discuss the work Code does on virtue ethics in Epistemic Responsibility and speculate on why she abandons this path in the rest of her work. Code uses virtue ethics and, specifically, virtues of the intellect, to frame an account of moral responsibility that I find interesting, promising, and still relevant to the contemporary revival of virtue ethics and to feminist epistemology more generally.
Highlights
It is no exaggeration to say that a survey of Lorraine Code’s philosophical works over the past thirty years can help to trace the development of feminist epistemology: from Code’s initial and important criticisms of traditional approaches to knowledge in Epistemic Responsibility (1987)—which did not name her approach as “feminist”—to the explicit incorporation and application of feminist insights to knowledge claims in What Can She Know? (1991), to examining the significance of gendered locations in Rhetorical Spaces (1995), to the expansion of feminist epistemology to what it is to know well in a global context of intersecting factors of power, oppression, and threats to the environment in Ecological Thinking (2006)
“Hyberbolic relativism” appears in accounts by theorists who think virtue ethics is a form of relativism because it cannot give us absolute answers to questions of morally right action, as well as in accounts by those who charge feminist epistemologists with being relativists because they do not ground what we can know in a methodology that abstracts people from realworld conditions and contexts
If I have read too much into what Code attempted to do with virtue ethics in Epistemic Responsibility or speculated too freely on why virtue ethics was abandoned in her work after this first book, it is with the intention of tracing themes that continue to preoccupy those working on the intersections between epistemology and moral/political theory
Summary
It is no exaggeration to say that a survey of Lorraine Code’s philosophical works over the past thirty years can help to trace the development of feminist epistemology: from Code’s initial and important criticisms of traditional approaches to knowledge in Epistemic Responsibility (1987)—which did not name her approach as “feminist”—to the explicit incorporation and application of feminist insights to knowledge claims in What Can She Know? (1991), to examining the significance of gendered locations in Rhetorical Spaces (1995), to the expansion of feminist epistemology to what it is to know well in a global context of intersecting factors of power, oppression, and threats to the environment in Ecological Thinking (2006). The virtue ethics account that Code takes in Epistemic Responsibility cashes out in a form of realism (knowing how to live well in a community of knowers) that shifts in Code’s subsequent work.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
