Spinoza, Dutch philosopher of the seventeenth century, and Kant, the hero of enlightenment, have dealt with women and their differences with men in their works. In a few places, Spinoza pointed out the matter of women and the sexual difference between people. Among Spinoza's works, there is no work that talks about just this matter. However, in the case of Kant, there are some works on this matter. Dealing with the matter of women and their social states according to these (...) European philosophers of modern time, this essay tried to find out the similarities and differences of their attitudes. Thus, it has resulted that although their similar attitudes on the case of women, Spinoza's philosophy has some features which have made it the source and supporter of feminist philosophers and saved it from severe criticism of feminists have been proposed against Kant. (shrink)

In what sense, if any, does the dominant conception of the traditional theistic God as disembodied inform our embodied experiences? Feminist philosophers of religion have been either explicitly or implicitly preoccupied by a philosophical failure to address such questions concerning embodiment and its relationship to the divine. To redress this failure, certain feminist philosophers have sought to appropriate Luce Irigaray’s argument that embodied divinity depends upon women themselves becoming divine. This article assesses weaknesses in the Irigarayan position, notably the problematic (...) move from a woman’s subjectivity to divinity. In the light of these weaknesses the author looks for a better alternative. Drawing on the work of feminist and nonfeminist philosophers, a feminist-friendly conception of theism is sketched in terms of incarnation and intersubjectivity. Philosophical accounts of the ethical formation of gendered subjects by way of bodily practices offer new concepts for con. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers of religion such as Grace Jantzen and Pamela Sue Anderson have endeavoured, firstly, to identify masculine bias in the concepts of God found in the scriptures of the world’s religions and in the philosophical writings in which religious beliefs are assessed and proposed and, secondly, to transform the philosophy of religion, and thereby the lives of women, by recommending new or expanded epistemologies and using these to revision a concept of the divine which will inspire both women and (...) men to work for the flourishing of the whole of humankind. It is argued, firstly, that the philosophies of Jantzen and Anderson are by no means as different from each other as they might, at first, appear. Secondly, it is suggested that their epistemologies are not distinctively feminist, and that the classical divine attributes of the Abrahamic faiths do not necessarily privilege the masculine. Perhaps the only way in which a philosophy of religion might be distinctively feminist is by emphasising the inclusion of women. This might mean being more open to concepts of the divine which are not, even in a metaphorical sense, masculine, and enhancing awareness of the ways in which abstract arguments about the divine could be relevant to the practical aspects of human life which have traditionally been the preserve of women. Insofar as these are increasingly also the responsibility of men, however, a feminist philosophy of religion might now be more appropriately characterised as an inclusivist philosophy of religion. (shrink)