Andrea Maihofer

Background

Maihofer, Andrea was born in 1953.

Education

Universities of Mainz, Tübingen and Frankfurt. PhD in Philosophy. 1987.

Career

Assistant, Department of Social Sciences, University of Frankfurt.

Views

Andrea Maihofer is concerned with the roots of modern ethics in Enlightenment ideas of equality, humanity and dignity and their effects on the position of women in law and morality. She challenges the idea of universalism as a necessary basis for all modern ethics and as the sole alternative to relativism. The hegemony of the idea of identity or equality over the acceptance of difference is in itself already a feature of maledominated thinking and has to be scrutinized and revised if equality is to mean more than mere adaptation of the female to the male norm. Sources: Peui Kaan-Engel (1992) Against Patriarchal Thinking, Amsterdam: V U Press.

Interests

• Feminist ethics; feminist theory of law.