The Philosophy Club learned about the relationship between feminism and philosophy in a lecture entitled “The Feminist Thinker,” presented last Thursday by Kathleen Quinn, philosophy club president,

She opened the lecture by pointing out the highly respected philosophers whom are rarely viewed as sexist and unequal to women.

To Quinn, the philosophy of feminism is “that both men and women have an equal right to be whoever they want to be.

“If you’re opposed to it, you probably don’t understand it.”

She went on to mention philosophers that (feminists) are not proud of like Nichi, Russo, Kant and Aristotle, who believed that “Women lay somewhere in between human people and animals.”

Afterward, Quinn went over these theories and how they apply to feminism:

• existentialism,
• utilitarianism,
• subjectivism,
• relativism,
• marxism,
• egalitarianism,
• absolutism,
• pragmatism,
• phenomenology and
• dualism

The ‘Feminist Thinkers’ that she brought up were:

• Simone de Beauvoir,
• John Stuart Mill
• Judith Butler
• Donna Haraway
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Shulamith Firestone
• Jane Duran and
• Shannon Sullivan

Beauvoir, author of the book “The Second Sex,” held the philosophy that no woman should ever be labeled.

Mill is one of the first feminists of early 19th Century and argued that it is ridiculous to bar women from being able to move forward and wrote “The Subjugation of Women,” 1869.

Butler, known for her Women’s Studies, applied subjectivism and relativism and explained the reason for male and female roles.

She wrote the book “Gender Trouble” in 1990, which created the term gender performativity.

Haraway, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, applied Marxism and compared big business at the top of a pyramid in a capitalist system as men over women in a capitalist economy.

Wollstonecraft, writer, philosopher, feminist, fought for equal rights of education.

“It is unfair to infer that her virtue is built on narrow views and selfishness, who can caress a man, with true feminine softness, the very moment when he treats her tyrannically,” A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Shulamith Firestone, radical feminist, spoke of love being a social construction, wrote Freudian ideas about men being possessive of women as objects.

Duran, pragmatist, wrote to debunk dualism in gender.

“She believes absolutes are nothing but simplistic Platonisms and that drawing lines where there weren’t any over simplifies very complex theories,” Quinn said.

Sullivan, professor of philosophy of Women’s Studies and African /African American Studies at Penn State University, commented on the phenomenology of women and blamed the media of the construction of sexuality and envy.

Students such as Mary Love, anthropology major, asked questions such as “Do you think the evolution of feminist in western philosophy is somewhat ethnocentric in regards to other cultures attempts in egalitarian society maintenance? “

Quinn replied, “I think that people in western societies are developing a feminist attitude in a much higher rate than many other countries… We have had an impact on other countries.

“I want to cater to the audience enough to make it something that you guys can go home and see.”

Tracy Garcia, co-president of FMLA and sociology major, was also present.

“I learned that there are feminist philosophers, which was somewhat surprising for me,” she said. “I don’t really connect the two together thought. That’s the first time I ever heard anyone relate feminism and philosophy.”