Customer Reviews

Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (Re-Reading the Canon)

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i read this book on the road, and found many of its essays to be trite and simplistic, but some very exciting. so i admit some got skimmed and some pored over.
it is very easy to call Kant a woman hating enlightenment ivory tower jerk, which is pretty true, but harder to defend him.
some of the essays are very philosophically technical, and some are technical in their use of feminist concepts, but this book is primarily for folks who know a fair amount of philosophy (alot, in some cases, like the stuff about aesthetics and some political philosophy) and quite a bit less about feminism.
alot of the arguments assume the primacy of the "ethic of care" as suggested by gilligan, but some better essays answer this argument with alot of footnotes to "Feminist Ethics", which is a book for people with a larger understanding of feminism, and less of "philosophy" (e.g. kant and stuff).

this book assumes that you know alot about kant, or have certain popular impressions of him, like that he thought inclination was bad and duty good.

overall, if you think kant is a big loser and a jerk, and get angry every time he uses a male pseudogeneric, you have either already read this book or should.

also, it is well footnoted and i found many of its footnotes and citations very helpful.