Catherine Villanueva-Gardner

Professor Gardner is featured in the University Faculty Spotlight

http://www.umassd.edu/faculty/focus/catherinegardner.cfm

Group I: 381      CGardner@umassd.edu

                                                                                                                

Education

I came to the University in 2001 and I am currently an associate professor in the department. I also teach for the Women’s Studies Program.  I received the Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in the 1996 and the M.A. from the University College of Swansea in Wales. My B.A. (Hons.) is from the University of Leicester in England.  I have specialized in ethics throughout my education. My theses for my M.A. and my B.A. were in the field of applied ethics. My Ph.D. dissertation formed a critique of the dominant approaches to contemporary ethical theory.

                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                     

 

 

Prof. Gardner Arrives in the U.S.A.

 

Teaching

 

I usually teach ethics in its various subfields, but the revision of our curriculum has given me the opportunity to develop new courses in the history of philosophy and political/social philosophy.

In the Spring Semester of 2006, I am going to be teaching Medieval philosophy.

Research

 

My interests in theory critique, feminist philosophy and the history of philosophy came together in my book on medieval and modern women philosophers who have been omitted from the canon of the Western philosophical tradition. I argue that the work of these women was – and still is – labeled as non-philosophical because of the forms of writing they often employed to argue for their ideas and theories. The cultural and educational restrictions experienced by these women meant that they often wrote literature, allegories and so forth: appropriately “feminine” works. However, the dominant model of ethical theorizing excludes – by definition – these types of forms of writing. Thus an argument for the philosophical legitimacy of the work of these women entails interrogation of the content and structure of this model.

                              Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy

My Most Recent Research

 

I have just finished a reference work on the history of feminist philosophy. I found this work hard in many ways to write, but it has given me the opportunity to expand my knowledge of both the history of philosophy and contemporary feminist philosophy.  I am currently working on a critical analysis of John Stuart Mill’s version of Utilitarianism. The article is tentatively titled “Tea and Sympathy: John Stuart Mill and the Good Englishwoman.”

 

 

What is feminist philosophy ?

 

The fundamental distinction between feminist philosophy and mainstream philosophy is that feminist philosophy does not claim to search for knowledge for its own sake, but rather for the sake of a political goal: resistance to, and elimination of, the subordination of women. Feminist philosophy is no one thing, it covers a wide variety of perspectives and approaches. It is possible, however, to characterize the approach of many feminist philosophers to this political goal as one that uses gender as a lens of analysis, both to create a new, distinctly feminist, philosophy, and to expose the “maleness” of the Western intellectual tradition. The fact that philosophical work is done by a female philosopher, or that it focuses on the presence or absence of women in philosophical thought in some way, is not enough for that work to be identified as feminist.

 Last Updated On: 11/15/05