Composting Contemporary Metaphilosophy with Feminist Philosophical Perspectives: Towards an Account of Philosophy’s Concreteness

Abstract

Against the charge of abstractness leveled at philosophy, in this article, I argue for philosophy’s concreteness. To this end, I compost perspectives from contemporary metaphilosophy with feminist philosophical proposals (particularly, I refer to bell hooks, Rosi Braidotti, Kristie Dotson, and Donna J. Haraway). In sections 2 and 3, I present my theoretical tools: compost methodology and a Hegel-inspired notion of concreteness, which includes features such as complexity, involvement in transformative processes, intrinsic relationality, explanatory power, and effectiveness. I then outline how such characters are involved in (a) practicing (meta)philosophical theory and (b) producing philosophical methodologies. Specifically, in sections 4, 5, and 6, I consider the ‘real consequences’ of doing philosophy in terms of creating systems of relationships between people, concepts, and knowledges, while in section 7 and its subsections, I examine an innovative aspect of feminist methodology, its emphasis on combining critique with imagination. I discuss how this feature operates at the intersection of cartographic and genealogical methods and in the use of figurations. Based on my analysis in this section, I expose philosophy’s capacity to produce ‘content- methodologies’ as performative models to be inhabited and activated.