Woman — nature, product, style?

rethinking the foundations of feminist philosophy of science

Sara Heinämaa

Jyväskylän yliopisto

pp. 289-308

in: Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Jack Nelson (eds), Feminism, science, and the philosophy of science, Berlin, Springer, 1996

Abstract

Phenomenology questions the foundations of knowledge and science in a specific sense. It studies the meanings of the phenomena measured and generalized about in the empirical sciences: What do we mean, for example, by "natural processes", by "nature", "fact", "culture", "human being", etc.? And it studies the meanings of concepts basic to science: knowledge, objectivity, mistake, false belief, etc. Understanding the philosophy of science broadly, we can say that phenomenology is a specific viewpoint or approach within it; it critically attends to the basic concepts at work in both the natural and human sciences.