A Phenomenological Grounding of Feminist Ethics

Abstract

The central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part 1 evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part 2 defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part 3 examines Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the view from nowhere, a totalizing God’s-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the ..