ABSTRACT
Many philosophers have argued, quite correctly, that knowledge and feeling cannot, in all cases, be construed as conceptually distinct. Certainly, particular feelings-outrage, indignation, sympathy, perhaps "empathy", fuels the search for a more adequate knowledge of the other; moreover, they give shape and form to this knowledge. Few theorists have examined closely enough the emotional dimension that is part of the search for better cognitions or the affective taste of the kinds of intersubjectivity that can build political solidarities. Scheler's charges against emotional infection are misdirected in as much as he both overestimates the dangers of mass excitement to individual integrity and seriously misdescribes the problem in question. Postmodern feminism seems today to enjoy hegemony, at least among academic feminists. Postmodern feminism is, in some respects, a theoretical advance over some of the feminisms that preceded it. This chapter concludes with a few remarks that bear on the relationship of the foregoing discussion to political feminism.
