The Tools of Women's Studies and Philosophy: Critical Thinking in Writing Courses

by Cathryn Bailey


Some of the most important lessons I learned from philosophy and women's studies are related to critical thinking. Work in analytic philosophy taught me how to better locate and reconstruct arguments from what had often seemed like a morass of surrounding text. Philosophy also provided me with a stronger sense of entitlement about using my own judgment. I began to believe that I, too, had permission to evaluate the reasoning of others and learned to do so with greater tenacity and precision. It was also through philosophy that I gained an appreciation for the value of universal principles and abstract concepts, one that would be tested in women's studies, where I learned, instead, to value individual experience in all its messy particularity. It was through women's studies that I became sensitized to racial and sexual biases in a way that allowed me to recognize my right and responsibility to critique even the philosopher according to criteria that he might not even recognize as legitimate.