Feminist Political Philosophy | Elective Course

In this course, we will get an overview of the history of feminist political philosophy. The readings will follow a historical trajectory, which means that non-feminist texts that have an impact on feminist philosophy will be mixed in with feminism itself. Thus, we begin with Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes before moving deeper into the seventeenth century with Anna Maria von Schurman and John Locke. Then we enter the eighteenth century to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft, followed by the nineteenth century with Karl Marx, Sojourner Truth, John Stuart Mill, and Jane Addams. We finally engage the twentieth century with Rosa Luxembourg, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and Michel Foucault. All of this prepares us for Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Allison Jaggar before engaging the explosion of feminist philosophy from the 1980s to today. This will include analytic as well as Continental philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, Virginia Held, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva for topics such as care ethics, feminist virtue ethics, intersectionality, and performativity.

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