ABSTRACT
Non-philosophical considerations, including those involved in the teaching, learning and assessment of philosophy, as well as the discipline's role in providing support, justification or testimony for other social practices (including politics, religion and science), impinge on the way the discipline is practised and conceives of itself. Le Doeuff makes it clear that the discipline functions as it does only by hiding, covering over and disavowing its reliance on alterity-the alterity of other disciplines and discourses, the alterity of social practices, and the alterity of other subjects/knowers. Such an upheaval throws into question the goals of truth, knowledge, objectivity, self-evidence and mastery presumed by malestream knowledges. If the three French feminists examined in this book have a common denominator, it is the identification of prevailing intellectual norms and categories of knowledge as masculine; and the demonstration of the tenuous hold such knowledges have on their disavowed feminine preconditions and foundations.
