Oracle of Wisdom Journal of Philosophy and Public Affairs

All Human beings are rational. This entails that they possess the experience of cognition; that process that allows consciousness to hold claim to knowledge. A scan of ancient philosophy however shows that all the contributors to the unravelling of the cosmological question as well as other issues which were the preoccupation at this time were male human beings who wrote about the issues, with an exclusion of the female gender. This exclusion of the female contributions to knowledge continues, as early female writers had to use male names to gain acceptability in the male dominated literary world. Could it be that the excluded gender was not as rational as the male? Miranda Fricker argues that the female gender is as rational as the male but only suffers what she calls epistemic injustice; an injustice which prevents one from exerting their epistemic authority as rational beings. This paper argues that a plethora of woman have been denied the privilege of epistemic expression. Consequently, the paper establishes that the female gender shares equal rationality as the male and their unique process of cognition should be appreciated as their unique way of knowing, peculiar to their gender.

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