George Karuvelil

Paper: Feminist Epistemology: “…out of the Fly Bottle”

Abstract

Feminist epistemology, like other epistemologies that are built on the debris of modern epistemology, is strong in its critique of the infirmities of modern epistemology but weak in delivering genuine knowledge. At the heart of this quandary lies the problem of attaining objectivity without neglecting the inescapable subjectivity that enters into knowing. Since the heart of feminist epistemology is the situatedness of the knower (and knowledge) the problem boils down to how to attain objectivity or universality of truth without foregoing the situatedness, as the moderns did. Feminists cannot overlook this matter because unlike some shades of postmodernism that does way with all universal norms, feminists are committed to the Enlightenment ideals of justice, freedom, and emancipation, and these call for objectivity and universality beyond one’s preferred/ privileged group. And many feminist thinkers seem to have the right intuition inasmuch as they also make room for universal knowledge along with situated and constructed knowledge. Building on it and complementing it with Quine’s idea of “pure” observations, the present paper shows how contextual realism – an epistemological position that combines contextualism with a post-metaphysical (Platonic) version of realism – can respect both the constructed character of much of our knowledge as well as the mind-independence of realism.

George Karuvelil is a Jesuit, Ordinary Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth (JDV), Pune. Specialised in the epistemology of religious experience, his work spans the space between the disciplines of philosophy, theology and the empirical sciences. An accomplished scholar, who has published in prestigious national and international journals, he is also the editor of Jnanadeepa: Pune Journal of Religious Studies.