No collection of essays is ever complete. The one presented here is no exception and, I dare say, perhaps it is incomplete in a rather singular way. It is a collection of philosophical and feminist essays, or philosophical essays about feminism, or feminist essays about philosophy, if the distinction is in any way discernible. An excursion, therefore, in feminist philosophy, that travels along some of its most significant paths―from epistemology, to ontology, to ethics, to the revision of the philosophical canon itself―which creates new trails―and this is certainly one of the most surprising aspects of this volume―but leaves many others unexplored. Necessarily. Like all philosophical thought, feminist philosophy is, by definition, an open, critical field that simultaneously contains within itself the capacity to branch out ad infinitum and return to itself in an exercise of self-reflection. For this reason, the main purpose of this special issue of Forma de Vida is, in the first place, to accompany the reader on a journey through some of the possibilities created by the association of philosophy with feminism―its variants and variations.

The publication of this issue has another, more ambitious purpose, which must be declared, namely: to contribute significantly to the establishment of feminist philosophy as an academic discipline in Portugal. In fact, despite the existence of a considerable body of research on feminist topics, gender issues, and other social issues in the field of philosophy, the growing interest in these themes has not translated into a corresponding development within Portuguese institutions. If feminism as a political movement―and, therefore, the ideals of social justice that underlie it―is obviously the first victim of this state of affairs, it is equally true that philosophy itself―and, specifically, the health of the Portuguese philosophical milieu―suffers when systematically deprived of the possibility of addressing issues that are today, perhaps more than ever, central to the public sphere and public discourse. As is well known, this runs contrary to what happens in countries where professional philosophy finds greater institutional support and where philosophy degrees are more sought after by younger generations.

In relation to this, I would like to make three additional remarks. The first is that thanks to the exceptional work and persistence of philosophers such as Fernanda da Silva Henriques and Maria Luísa Ribeiro Ferreira, who generously accepted our invitation to contribute to this issue, feminist philosophy has not been completely neglected in our country. That there are currently any philosophical research projects on feminism or on women at all is owed, to a large extent, to their dynamism and courage. And yet, we are still far from regarding this as an autonomous field of study, deserving of its proper place in philosophy curricula. Secondly, I would like to recognise the indisputable contribution of academic disciplines akin to philosophy―such as literature, sociology and, more recently, gender studies―to the development of a kind of feminist thought that can be said to be truly philosophical, even if it has seldom been worthy of the stamp of traditional philosophy. I highlight here the work of Ana Luísa Amaral, who has left us recently and far too soon, and whose reflections on gender, the introduction of several international feminist authors into the Portuguese context and acclaimed poetry have left an indelible mark on so many of us at different stages of our journeys, personal and professional. Finally, the third aspect that I want to remark upon is the role played by Portuguese feminist activism―from its often-ignored origins at the end of the 19th century but, in particular, in recent years―in the dissemination of texts, resources and the most current debates in feminist practice and theory. The new wave of feminist activism is perhaps the greatest catalyst for a renewed interest in feminist theory that has led so many of us to bring otherwise neglected issues to academic settings, but above all, for a revived commitment to the struggle for the liberation of women and other marginalized groups in the face of patriarchal structures.

At this point, the reader may be questioning my insistence that the texts that follow are specifically essays in feminist philosophy as opposed to, say, texts that fall within the broader scope of what we call “feminist theory.” I would like to say a little about this.

When João Esteves da Silva, co-editor of this special issue, and Telmo Rodrigues, director of Forma de Vida, invited me to edit a publication on feminism, something was immediately clear to me: it was indeed necessary to publish this issue and it was necessary that it should be a publication about feminist philosophy. I accepted the challenge and was soon faced with a second moment of lesser clarity, guided by a doubt that threatened to test the robustness of my initial certainty: what do we mean by feminist philosophy? Which is the same as asking: why is it important to talk about feminist philosophy instead of feminist theory, that more common and perhaps less problematic notion? To start answering this question, we are called to think about the very concept of philosophy, about what eventually distinguishes it from other activities, academic disciplines or written formats. Surely this publication―or, in any case, this introduction to the publication―could not set out to provide a definitive answer to a question that remains open millennia after it was first posed. In any case, it was useful for me initially to think about the distinctive character of feminist philosophy as opposed to other academic disciplines such as sociology, law, anthropology, psychology, and so on.

Through this distinction between philosophy and other academic disciplines, it is possible to arrive at a conception of feminist philosophy in which what is at stake is an application of the philosophical tools that are at our disposal, or of the philosophical canon itself, to the new topics that reach us from feminist practice and theory. At the same time, historically speaking, feminism did not enter academia and, in particular, philosophy departments to be yet another area of study, let alone an appendix to established fields. Feminism entered the academy, to a large extent, to question it from an eminently practical perspective, i.e. coming from the social world. It did not do so, of course, as some suggest, gratuitously or on a whim. It did so because it identified a close connection between the exclusion of women and other marginalized groups from academia and certain theoretical assumptions conveyed therein. In other words, what feminist authors denounced was not just the absence of certain social groups from university curricula, but the very content of those curricula. And this seems to leave us with a contradictory picture of what feminist philosophy is: on the one hand, an attempt to make sense of certain important claims for women’s lives using the tools of traditional epistemology, ontology, or philosophy of language, and on the other hand, as a questioning of the theoretical and methodological foundations of those same fields. It just so happens that this is precisely the relationship between feminism and academic philosophy: a critical use, and constant reassessment, of the philosophical resources we have at our disposal to improve the material conditions of women’s lives in society.

From a perhaps more constructive perspective, I like to think of this association between philosophy and feminism as one of reciprocity. In this sense, an important stage in this relationship is the moment when philosophical thought is put at the service of the emancipatory purposes of feminism in denouncing androcentric worldviews, the false universality of the philosophical tradition, the alleged neutrality of the categories it employs, the unintelligibility of the methodological abstraction it professes. Feminist thought returns the gesture by asking: are we in the presence of a radically different vision of the world? And this places us right in the eye of the storm: the philosophical outrage of epistemic non-neutrality. That is, by revealing its reliance on androcentric assumptions, by considering the epistemic and cognitive consequences of the absence of women and other marginalized groups from the Western philosophical canon, philosophy is challenged to recognize the importance of the perspectival character of knowledge―and, concretely, of the feminist standpoint―towards the realization of a more rigorous philosophical practice. To be sure, non-neutrality is not a consensual value among feminist philosophers, nor is it defended by all the authors of this issue. I believe, however, that we may confidently say that the critique of traditional conceptions of neutrality, objectivity, and universality as patriarchal resources that serve to perpetuate the oppression of women is a transversal theme to all feminist philosophy, which further instigates philosophy as a whole to rethink its theoretical assumptions.

But, of course, philosophy is not just an academic discipline. In fact, the usefulness of this first effort to define it in opposition to other disciplines finds its own limits in interdisciplinarity and in criticism itself, which are, moreover, essential pillars of feminist theoretical production. If, on the other hand, we can adopt a broader conception of what philosophy is, we will have to admit that not all feminist philosophy was made within the boundaries of the homonymous academic discipline, nor did it directly engage in dialogue with the great philosophers populating school curricula. This partially accounts for the reason why, for so long, it has not deserved the distinction “philosophy.” But let’s think about it: why not study Mary Wollstonecraft alongside Rousseau? Simone de Beauvoir in the context of existentialism? bell hooks as one of the great contemporary political thinkers? The phenomenon is not just anachronistic: in the same way that we resist identifying classic feminist texts with philosophy, we remain today reluctant to conceive of non-Western thought―and concretely, feminist production from the global South, as well as the emancipatory thought of so many other women’s movements that refuse the Western category “feminism” ―as philosophy. Therefore, I insist, if it is possible for us to broaden our conception of philosophy to include forms of critical thinking that are not concerned with following the models of the Western philosophical tradition, so much as with imagining radically new ways of looking at the world, then perhaps it is possible for us to identify feminist philosophy with the very critical character of feminist theoretical production.

Likewise, it is possible to say that the social sciences that inform feminist philosophy also themselves involve a philosophical dimension. And this is true if we see philosophy as this effort to critically reflect on our concepts, schemes, and theoretical foundations. Any social science that sets out to reflect upon its own foundations will, in this sense, be doing philosophy. In the same way, or perhaps even more blatantly, literature seems to concentrate in itself the power to evoke emotional responses that force us to take up new perspectives on the world, where purely argumentative methods fail. Feminist philosophy, like philosophy in general, comes into play when called to think about not just the categories that underpin our investigations in all these areas, but the very structures of society. It is, therefore, the radical nature of feminist theory itself.

As I thought about these questions, it became clear: if this publication was to do justice to this feminist critical tradition, it should seek to bring together texts that contribute to the kind of reciprocity that characterises the relationship between philosophy and feminist theory through various approaches and perspectives and making use of different tools. But this is nonetheless a volume specifically dedicated to feminist philosophy, that is, if the reader aligns with us in adopting a conception of philosophy that we might call “open,” as opposed to a rigid conception that would limit us to the constraints of academic philosophy. As co-editor of this publication, I should note that this is not a context that is foreign to me and I personally recognize the merits of the “academic” format of the article, often guided by ideals of systematicity, rigour, and non-ambiguity. Added to these, however, are values such as intellectual honesty, clarity, originality and relevance, aspirations that the academic article shares with other formats. It was these values that we decided to prioritise when we chose to include texts in this issue that, nowadays, would probably not be published in a professional philosophy journal. For the sake of orientation and to facilitate reading, however, we chose to organise the texts into three sections, the first two of which account for this divergence in formats, and the third consisting of a special section of translated interviews.

The texts in the first section, organised there under the aegis of the notion of “Variants,” are, at first sight, articles that follow the more academic model. And yet, they all go beyond the boundaries of the discipline to a large extent and do so precisely because they are feminist texts. The resources of feminist philosophy are employed here, in various ways, to challenge the patriarchal philosophical canon and thereby provoke philosophy itself as an academic discipline. At the same time, the authors also draw on the philosophical tradition to illuminate certain aspects of the social world that help us understand current gender relations and systems. Contributing to this section are Fernanda da Silva Henriques, Jasmin Trächtler, Lisa McKeown, Luísa Afonso Soares, Manuela Teles, Maria Luísa Ribeiro Ferreira, p. feijó and Sandra Laugier, with texts that take as their starting point the sort of critical philosophical awareness that I have been drawing attention to. These feminist variants differ on more than one level: their purposes are distinct, their themes diverse, their styles rich in their multiplicity, and their philosophical views, in some cases, contradictory. However, they are united by their critical stance towards traditional philosophy and their suspicion that the misogynistic conceptions conveyed therein, its largely androcentric character and the absence of women from the philosophical canon cannot be dissociated from sexist oppression in our societies.

The second set of texts was organised into a section whose title “Variations” seeks to indicate, firstly, a deviation from the academic format that results in an evident stylistic diversity. From the essay to the autobiographical text, between brief and extensive reflections, the authors Ana de Miguel, Isabel Castro Silva, Maria Filomena Molder, Tatiana Salem Levy, Teresa Cunha and Tracy Llanera reclaim a textual space for philosophical work that rejects the constraints of professional philosophy through a genuine practice that is itself already feminist. But the idea of variations also indicates, in some cases, a dissonance with feminist theory itself. Here we encounter writings about women, for women; there is talk about relationships between women and other women, about mothers, sisters, and friends, and about relationships between women and men; they also invoke feminist philosophers and authors, but it is mainly in the voice and subjectivity of the authors that critical thinking emerges. In other words, if it is true that these authors bring us feminist themes, they sometimes do so without resorting to the codes of the feminist tradition itself or even by challenging them.

Finally, in the third and final section, we republish a set of interviews with three of the most internationally celebrated feminist philosophers: Alice Crary, Amia Srinivasan, and Kristie Dotson. Once again, the format of the texts takes prominence here as all three of them present a review of the work of these thinkers, who have been largely dedicated to feminist philosophy and, very specifically, to investigating the way in which resources from feminist practice and theory can shed light on certain traditional philosophical questions and vice versa. Our intention was, therefore, to close this volume of philosophical and feminist texts with a reflection on feminist philosophy itself, through the voice of three authors with established work in some of the great areas of philosophy such as ethics, epistemology, metaphilosophy, and political philosophy.

My wish, however, is that this organisation of the texts is not viewed rigidly, so as not to reify borders where they are in fact fluid, or to camouflage what is most original and innovative in the texts that follow. The reader is also invited to participate in this journey, challenged to identify the trails leading between one text and another, to trace the connections between the different themes, and to reflect upon them from their own experiences. The present issue will have been successful if, in the end, it has contributed to a broader conception of philosophy, which makes room for the personal, for the mundane, for the body, and for those creatures who, for too long, have been seen as beings deprived of reason. I believe the contributors to this volume have achieved this purpose. In one way or another, all of the texts take as their starting point the very category of feminism as a liberation movement whose history is inseparable from critical reflection on traditional conceptions of rationality, language, knowledge, objectivity, subjectivity―that is, from philosophy itself.

I would like to thank the authors for their work, collaboration and incessant enthusiasm, which made the process of editing this issue a little less strenuous. I am grateful to our colleagues who offered to collaborate with us in translating and revising the texts, as well as Sara e Tralha for creating the powerful images that accompany them, on a pro bono basis, a practice which is unfortunately all too common in a country where culture and the humanities are seen as second-rate professional pursuits. I am also grateful to Telmo Rodrigues, director of Forma de Vida, for the invitation and for the trust he placed in me throughout this entire process. I leave my final thanks to João Esteves da Silva, co-editor of this special issue, with whom I hope to spend hours talking about philosophy again, after a hiatus in which our correspondence was largely limited to editorial issues, more or less technical. It will have been worth it.