Heikes challenges Enlightenment rationality's tendency to be an achievement concept which excludes non-whites and non-males. She examines post-Cartesian criticisms of modernism, and pre-modern efforts to address the functional diversity of human cognition, arguing that such approaches offer a rationality that is diverse and morally substantive.

Deborah Heikes is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She is the author of Rationality and Feminist Philosophy and The Virtue of Feminist Rationality.