Reviews for Transforming Knowledge, Second Edition:

"In Transforming Knowledge, Second Edition, Elizabeth Minnich dissects the fundamental errors underlying patriarchal thought systems and explains the resistances faced by those working towards an inclusive, truly democratic restructuring of knowledge. This welcome new edition offers the philosophical foundation for the urgent tasks of holistic thinking and a truly life-and earth-saving activism. A brilliant and indispensable book."

— Gerda Lerner, Robinson-Edwards Professor of History, Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Creation of Patriarchy, Creation of Feminist Consciousness, and Fireweed: A Political Autobiography

"Transforming Knowledge, Second Edition enacts the urgent ethical project of demonstrating that informed, careful thinking and passionate politics are fundamental to envisioning a just, liberal (arts) education, and a democratic public university. Minnich challenges the reader in her gentle yet sharply critical arguments to examine the epistemic confusions and errors that underlie disciplinary knowledges, curricular strategies, and research paradigms. A brilliantly persuasive, deeply pedagogical book by one of the most insightful and compassionate feminist philosophers writing today."

— Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Professor of Women's Studies, Syracuse University, and author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

Reviews for Transforming Knowledge, First Edition:

"IN TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE, the philosopher Elizabeth Minnich dissects the errors underlying patriarchal thought with precision and admirable lucidity. As one of the founders of women's studies and an educational consultant to many universities on the subject of curriculum transformation, Minnich has for decades encountered every possible argument on the part of the defenders of tradition within and outside of the academy. In this book she recasts the feminist arguments she and others have marshalled against that opposition. Connecting with the most advanced feminist scholarship in many different fields, she offers an analysis of the underlying concepts and a critique of the errors of thinking which, in her view, are at the root of the errors in judgment, policies and actions of patriarchal thinkers. "Transforming the curriculum" means to Minnich transforming knowledge; it also means politics: "to begin to change who and how we are in the world we share."
. . .
"As Minnich sees it, the task of feminist scholars and activists is to transform knowledge, a task for which we will have to build alliances with all those who have been at the margins. By bringing into our teaching and thinking the lives and works of those who have been excluded, we can help students uncover the falsification and errors of the dominant tradition. To Minnich, the acceptance of plurality and difference is the essential prerequisite of error-free thinking, which leads to responsible action. In exploring the "rich complexity of differences" we and our students can become open to new understandings and more subtle ways of thinking.

"Following in the footsteps of her mentor and teacher Hannah Arendt in stressing the philosopher's responsibility toward politics, Minnich concludes with a visionary outline of a feminist reconstruction of knowledge. At its core is the insight of the connection between the personal and the political. We all have "membership in a number of different communities." In order to live our lives "attentively" we must realize

that what we need to comprehend is...related to what we need to do; what we need to do is related to what we need to comprehend...that the human condition of plurality is made visible in a free public life, that we need that plurality for knowledge that approaches comprehensiveness, and hence that knowing is related to acting as knowledge is related to politics. (p. 184)

--Gerda Lerner, "Women's Review of Books," Vol. VIII (1) [October 1990]

"Books with great potential for radical transformation come along rarely. When they are as well executed as Minnich's, we owe the author double thanks.
. . .
"The challenges Minnich presents so gently leave few standards of sex, gender, race or class distinctions intact. The radical transformation she prepares us for seems now at last a proper response to Rilke's line spoken by the archaic torso: "You must change your life!" Few others are as high on my list of works useful for undergirding social change right now, and I hope faculties on other campuses may be persuaded to engage it in a series of study sessions. The book grounded many free-floating anxieties about feminism on the part of the faculty at my own college, while it has given those of us already in tune with its underlying arguments strong training in reasoning well and passionately as we seek academic change."

--Bill Doty, "Society for Values in Higher Education," Vol. XXVII(2) [Winter, 1991]

"TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE is not the sort of book I usually read, but after hearing a talk by its author, Elizabeth Minnich of Charlotte, I wouldn't have missed it. Minnich . . . talks sense.

"When we recognize that our predecessors generalized too far from too few," she writes, "we open ourselves to diversity that can be arrayed before us in all its challenge to our minds, our imaginations, our hearts, our dreams with and for humankind."

"This concept seems to me to offer much of value at a time when the United States is embracing large numbers of individuals from different racial and cultural backgrounds. If we are to live together as one people, we must free ourselves from the rigidity of thought that results when a part is defined as the whole, thereby leaving no place of value for anything that differs from it. As Minnich puts it, "The world needs to hear all our voices."

-- Martha Byrd, "The Mecklenburg Gazette," July 11, 1990

"If books had to be labeled as cigarettes are, Transforming Knowledge might well carry the warning: "Not for readers seeking mere entertainment. To be avoided by those not prepared to dig for deep meanings. Unsafe for those not ready to have views unsettled. Written by a philosopher."

-- Alice Miel, Teachers College, Columbia University (Emeritus), "The Educational Forum," 55(3) [Spring 1991]

". . . Minnich places the need for curriculum reform in the broader context of our national interests . . . She speaks for many of us who believe that without linking research, policy and grassroots action—without linking historical and systemic analyses to pragmatic policies built by creative leadership from the ground up—we have little hope of finding long-term solutions for most social and economic inequities. The distortions of logic Minnich identifies are the engine that drives discrimination, gross economic disparity, violence in our society and militarism. Just as we can't transform curriculum in isolation from the world we live in, we can't continue to build foreign policy or social change projects without understanding where the logic behind them is flawed.

"Read this book. Savor its sanity."

-- Mary Ellen S. Capek, executive director of the National Council for Research on Women and Editor of A Woman's Thesaurus: An Index of Language Used to Describe and Locate Information By and About Women, in "New Directions for Women, May/June, 1991

"I just finished reading Transforming Knowledge, a book by Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). It is a book that is easy to like. For one thing, it's the work of a philosopher and humanist in an area that tends to be dominated by the social sciences; for another, it's written in good clear English, free of the leaden jargon that weighs down so much thought that should fly. I was delighted with the personal quality of its style, with the way it address its readers gently but directly, drawing them to the author's view of the world. Above all, it is a book marked by a certain serenitos, a calm smile alight with persistence and steadfast courage."

-- Carl A. Rubino, Editor, "Women's Classical Caucus," Vol. 17 [Fall, 1991]

"Transforming Knowledge is a feminist philosophical examination of the ideological underpinnings of androcentric thought. By revealing the faulty logic and incomplete theoretical assumptions inherent in stratified visions of the world, Minnich celebrates the theoretical depth and critical wisdom born of a multidimensional understanding of power and inequality. Minnich draws on her years as a teacher and theorist to produce a book able to satisfy the most rigorous of philosophical scholars while educating those not steeped in this disciplinary tradition. Incorporating and dissecting the complicated assumptions made by such philosophical giants as Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Kant, and Plato, she engages the scholarship in other disciplines with equal ease and insight.

"Although much of Minnich's writing and thinking for the book occurred prior to the media's explosive attention to the conservative and neoconservative attack on multicultural education, the book is one of the most substantial analytic critiques of this backlash to date. Minnich takes on the absurd illogic in the notion of reverse discrimination, explaining that it rests on the faulty assumption that man/woman, white/ black, privileged/unprivileged are categories that "persist in equal but oppositional positions" (p. 70). Within such ahistorical reasoning, power inequalities are rendered completely invisible.

"Minnich also offers a cogent critique of tokenism, which, she explains, "assumes that exclusion, which is an effect of complex hegemonic systems, is itself the problem" (p. 23). Tokenism rests on the contradictory assumption that a person can be both a self-made exceptional man or woman and simultaneously a representative of all people of a particular gender or race. This logic was recently illustrated in the Bush administration's construction of Clarence Thomas as representing both all Black people and an exception to them. Like reverse discrimination, tokenism ignores power differentials, substituting presence for representation, access to institutional power for permission to merely exist. Minnich provides the reader with the intellectual argument necessary to expose the misuse of power underlying such methods of manipulation."

-- Becky W. Thompson, Princeton University, "Gender & Society, September, 1993