Getting Personal

A Feminist Perspective on Philosophical Methodology

Bibliographic Data

ID12148204
AuthorsMoya Mapps (0000-0002-3293-0742, Stanford University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Pages1-20
Publication date2025-05-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHypatia (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0887-5367 • E-ISSN: 1527-2001
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/hyp.2025.7
OpenAlexW4410571503
LanguageEN
References cited22

In most areas of philosophy, the typical paper is written impersonally, as if its author occupied what Henry Sidgwick calls “the point of view of the universe” or what Thomas Nagel calls “the view from nowhere” or what Donna Haraway (more skeptically) calls the “god’s-eye view.” In critical social traditions, however—feminist philosophy, philosophy of disability, philosophy of race—personal writing is widely embraced. I argue that there is more at stake here than mere style, and that we have good reasons, both political and epistemic, to abandon the “view from nowhere” pretense and write more openly about the ways in which our lived experiences inform our work. In the words of Eva Kittay, the personal is philosophical

Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Feminist philosophy · Perspective (graphical · Philosophical methodology · Sociology · Computer Science · Engineering · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Artificial Intelligence

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