ABSTRACT

One of the aims of this book is to use the subjective experience of women to question the abstractions assumed by mainstream philosophy of mind, by which I mean as found in philosophy developed by white middle-class males from the West. To use ‘personal experience’—or ‘subject position’—to question philosophy is to do something which in itself questions the knowledge base which underlies the (various) mainstream understandings of self-identity. It draws into question philosophy’s own understanding of itself as universal: unbounded by political considerations such as gender, which enter ‘personal experience’ and which contribute to ‘subject position’. In Chapters 2 and 3, I began a discussion of the use of personal experience to improve knowledge, but I left various threads hanging.