Module description
This module offers students the opportunity to think critically and analytically about gender. It is also an opportunity to consider the ways in which critical analysis of gender-related issues might contribute to philosophy as a discipline. In pursuing these aims, it will engage with a wide selection of philosophical debates relating to gender across a range of areas within the discipline.
Assessment details
Summative assessment: 1 x 3,000-word essay (100%)
Formative assessment: 1 x 2,500-word essay.
Educational aims & objectives
- To offer the knowledge, skills and opportunity to think critically and analytically about gender
- To examine how specific philosophical debates across multiple areas including Political Philosophy, the History of Philosophy, and Philosophy of Science, might be transformed or advanced by examining their relation to gender and gender issues.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, the students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 6 module and in particular will be able to demonstrate:
- Knowledge and understanding of key themes, topics and debates relevant to the study of gender and philosophy.
- Knowledge and understanding of key feminist arguments in philosophy.
- The ability to understand, reconstruct, analyse and criticise philosophical arguments
Teaching pattern
One one-hour weekly lecture and one one-hour weekly seminar over ten weeks.
Suggested reading list
Suggested preliminary reading (not compulsory):
- Fricker, Miranda (2009) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- Hooks, Bell (1987) Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Pluto Press).
- Langton, Rae (2009) Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- Okin, Susan Moller (1989) Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books).
- Pateman, Carole (1988) The Sexual Contract (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press).
- Saul, Jennifer (2003) Feminism: Issues and Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- Thomson, Judith Jarvis (1971) ‘A Defense of Abortion’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, pp. 47–66.