Frieder Vogelmann’s recent article** “Political Epistemology without Apologies” begins in this way:

The recent interest in political epistemology seems easy to explain. Its rise to prominence is routinely traced to two events in 2016: the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald J. Trump as 45^th president of the USA (e.g. Hannon & De Ridder 2021a: 1). Shocked, startled, or bewildered by the role that untruths played in both political upsets, philosophers—especially analytic epistemologists—turned their attention to the epistemic dimension of political processes and events, and found a field of phenomena rife to be finally analysed philosophically: propaganda (Stanley 2018), fake news (Jaster & Lanius 2019), post-truth (McIntyre 2018), conspiracy theories (Minkin 2022), and more. They did not come unprepared: the discussions about epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Kidd, Medina, & Pohlhaus, Jr. 2017) or about the relationship between truth and democracy (Estlund 2008; Elkins & Norris 2012; Landemore 2017) provided theoretical orientations and conceptual resources for the emerging field of political epistemology.

While this explanation may sound familiar, it is severely flawed. The story is told from a dangerously truncated, ahistorical view on political epistemology that obliterates the actual plurality of philosophy. It is told as if philosophy was reducible to analytic philosophy, to use a slightly problematic but handy label. Yet political epistemology—even the term itself1—is much older than seven years and is robbed of important contributions and insights if defined along the lines just sketched. In fact, as I will argue, the view on political epistemology as advanced, for example, in the Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology (Hannon & De Ridder 2021b), neglects the most interesting, complex, and important philosophical questions. To put it bluntly, the popular story that analytic philosophy tells about the recent rise of political epistemology amounts to an epistemisation and moralisation of politics that ignores the political presuppositions and implications of the epistemic concepts used for this task.2

I read Vogelmann’s article as I contemplated whether, and how, to respond to the revised Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on “Feminist Metaphysics” that Katharine Jenkins and Matthew Cull have co-authored. That is, I wondered if I could write a response to the ableist and other limitations of this SEP entry that explained the extent to which the entry comprises, and is motivated by, a number of exclusionary methodological and metaphysical assumptions of which these authors seem unaware. Indeed, I wondered if I should take the time, for the second week in a row, to point out the glaring ableism of SEP to which nondisabled feminist philosophers have, once again, contributed and expanded.

With respect to the second consideration, let me say in brief that this entry on feminist metaphysics reiterates the forms of ableism to which I drew attention in last week’s quote-of-the week post about the SEP entry on “Identity Politics”: discussion of the work on metaphysics of disabled feminist philosophers of disability is excluded from the entry; the cited work on disability is outdated; the entry is uninformed about and fails to include any of the relevant work from the 600+ page The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability; and the entry uses work on disability by nondisabled feminist philosophers that disabled philosophers have widely criticized.

Under the initial heading “Metaphysical Questions with Feminist Significance,” Jenkins and Cull write:

The most prominent example of metaphysical questions that bear importantly on feminist political projects are questions about the nature of sex and/or gender. These questions are explored in detail in the entry Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender. Accordingly, we will not discuss them here, except to illustrate broader points. However, feminists have also considered the structure of social reality and the relationship between the social world and the natural world more broadly. Because social structures are often justified as natural, or necessary to control what’s natural, feminists have questioned whether such references to nature are legitimate. This has led to considerable work on the idea of social construction that is not limited to the social construction of gender (or sex, for that matter). Feminists have also sought to understand the metaphysical aspects of ‘intersectionality’, along with the ways in which social categories (such as gender and race) and social structures (such as sexism/patriarchy and racism/white supremacy) are intertwined and co-dependant. Moreover, there has been a recent surge of interest in the metaphysics of pregnancy.

Despite the fact that the entry cites Butler, Wittig, and de Beauvoir, it should be acknowledged that this entry emerged from and is shaped in accordance with the theoretical, political, and discursive priorities, choices, and interests of nondisabled analytic feminist philosophers. For all intents and purposes, in the context of this SEP entry and in the context of the discipline more widely, analytic feminist philosophers have taken ownership of feminist metaphysics, that is, feminist metaphysics has become synonymous with the methodological priorities, textual decisions, and political interests of analytic feminism and, more exactly, of a handful of analytic feminist philosophers at a handful of elit(e)(ist) universities.

This allegiance to so-called analytic feminist philosophy entails that the work of so-called Continental feminist philosophers is misrepresented in the SEP entry that Jenkins and Cull have produced and in analytic feminist philosophy in other contexts. Indeed, the methodologies of this (nonanalytic) work are not appropriately considered in this entry, let alone seriously entertained.

For example:

Genealogy, which has increasingly become a way to do feminist metaphysics and feminist philosophy more generally, gets no space in the entry which, in keeping with analytic philosophy’s methods, avoids historical approaches and hence provides a decontextualized and ahistorical account of its subject matter;

a liberal juridical understanding of power is the lens through which nonanalytic work is understood, although much of this work itself assumes that power is productive;

dynamic nominalism gets no mention in the entry, even though it was one of the methodological devices that Ian Hacking introduced because–given the influence of Foucault on his thinking–he could not reconcile himself to the distinction between “the construction of ideas” and “the construction of objects” that Jenkins and Cull attribute to him;

the entry is conditioned by the artefactual distinction between “theoretical” and “applied” philosophy that props up analytic philosophy and hence structures the discipline and profession of philosophy at present, re-authorizing and enabling the persistence of its conceits of objectivity, rigor, impartiality, as well as contributing to the marginalization of philosophy of disability and disabled philosophers (among others);

and the notion of abolition–which Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, Beth Richie and a growing number of other black feminists and feminists of colour regard as fundamental to feminism (see here)–is ignored, likely due to its inextricable relation to historicity.

In short, although Jenkins and Cull claim at the outset of their SEP entry that they will not prioritize sex and gender, the entry manages to do so at the expense of various “underrepresented groups in philosophy” whose situation should be front and centre for feminist philosophers in general and privileged feminist philosophers in particular.

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**Although I find Vogelmann’s article quite insightful and useful, I continue to distance myself from the ableist language that it employs.