Feminism Under Fire

Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 258, [4] pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Inscribed by the author on the second fep. Inscription reads 11/27/00 Diana--It was a delight meeting + working with you! Love, Ellen. Author's business cards (2) laid in. DJ has minor wear, soiling, and edge chips. Dr. Ellen R. Klein received her Ph.D. from the University of Miami and is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Flagler College in St. Augustine Florida. She is an NEH and Fulbright recipient who writes on, and speaks about, a broad area of philosophical issues including business ethics, pedagogy, academic freedom, and global norms. Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 - December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978. His major writings include the papers "On What There Is" (1948), which elucidated Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and contains Quine's famous dictum of ontological commitment, "To be is to be the value of a variable", and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), which attacked the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism, undermining the then-popular logical positivism, advocating instead a form of semantic holism. Quine took aim at traditional normative epistemology. According to Quine, traditional epistemology tried to justify the sciences, but this effort failed, and so we should replace traditional epistemology with an empirical study of what sensory inputs produce what theoretical outputs. For reasons largely political, mainstream philosophy is reluctant to attack feminism, instead relegating it to the status of a crazy aunt in the attic. In Feminism Under Fire, Ellen R. Klein scales the forbidden staircase to critique contemporary feminism. Ruthlessly analytical yet eminently accessible, with lucid prose she undresses academic feminism, exposing its pretensions, dogmas, fallacies, and peccadilloes. Discussing such diverse topics as feminist epistemology, philosophy of science, and pedagogy, Klein's work is a personal memoir of a female philosopher coming of age and coming to terms with feminism as it relates to university politics and teaching. Feminism Under Fire is a truly novel approach to the feminist canon. It is an enlightening personal memoir of a female philosopher coming of age and coming to terms with feminism as it relates to university politics and teaching. It is also a milestone in philosophical scholarship as the first systematic analysis of feminist epistemology, philosophy of science, and pedagogy. In lucid and clear prose, author Ellen Klein exposes the pretensions, dogmas, and fallacies of philosophical and academic feminism. While recognizing and eschewing the rampant sexism that still permeates academia, Klein believes that the "intellectually dishonest and scandalously unscholarly" state of feminism today is even more onerous to women. She argues that the true way to feminist liberation is not to fight against the philosophical method, but to embrace it. Feminism Under Fire provides the scholarly and intellectual foundation for both the rambunctious gender politics of Camille Paglia and the sociological work of Christina Hoff Sommers.