Nowadays, major feminist philosophers often define their work in explicitly political terms. Elizabeth Anderson, for example, says that feminist epistemology and philosophy of science “identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups.” And Sally Haslanger, in her seminal analysis of gender and race, says, “At the most general level, the task is to develop accounts of gender and race that will be effective tools in the fight against injustice.” She goes on to offer the following definition of “woman”: “S is a woman [if and only if] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension — economic, political, legal, social — and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.”

Philosophers uneasy with strong feminist claims about the current poor treatment of women — or who just think it’s wrong to presuppose such claims in philosophical discussions — may feel that feminist philosophy has nothing to offer them. Even sympathetic male philosophers may see such philosophy as the province of women, particularly since most writing on feminist topics is by women and feminists sometimes seem not to welcome male contributions. (The 56 essays in the “Routledge Companion” are all by women.)

In fact, however, feminist philosophy should be an essential resource for all philosophers, whatever their views about its political agenda. To see why, it will help to reflect on an earlier disruption to the philosophical establishment: the “pluralist revolt” against the dominant analytic philosophy of the 1970s and ’80s. The pluralists were a disparate group of philosophers: pragmatists in the tradition of Peirce, James and Dewey; metaphysicians following classical thinkers such as Aristotle and Aquinas or the process philosophy of Whitehead; and, most prominently, “continental philosophers” working out of recent European movements such as phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre); post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida); and critical theory (Habermas and the Frankfurt School).

Pluralists challenged the dominance of the A.P.A. by the analytic philosophy that they saw as modeling itself on mathematics and natural science. This mode of thought, they said, imposed standards of conceptual clarity and logical rigor that restricted philosophical thinking to a narrow range of abstract and artificial questions. These restrictions, they argued, marginalized pluralist philosophers and, more important, excluded the great perennial questions that had defined philosophy from Plato to Hegel.

The pluralists gained a good deal of power within the A.P.A., made room for alternative voices and no doubt played a role in the broadening of analytic interests. Their efforts supported an increased interest in traditional questions, particularly in metaphysics and ethics, and a turn to pragmatic positions in epistemology. But the pluralists did not overcome the analytic hegemony, with analytic philosophers remaining a large majority in the most highly regarded departments.