The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, Alison Stone, Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, Alison Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317635314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers, and debates in feminist philosophy. Fifty-six chapters, written by an international team of contributors specifically for the Companion, are organized into five sections: (1) Engaging the Past; (2) Mind, Body, and World; (3) Knowledge, Language, and Science; (4) Intersections; (5) Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. The volume provides a mutually enriching representation of the several philosophical traditions that contribute to feminist philosophy. It also foregrounds issues of global concern and scope; shows how feminist theory meshes with rich theoretical approaches that start from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality, disabilities, and other axes of identity and oppression; and highlights the interdisciplinarity of feminist philosophy and the ways that it both critiques and contributes to the whole range of subfields within philosophy.

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Part I

ENGAGING THE PAST

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1

FEMINIST METHODS IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, OR, ESCAPE FROM COVENTRY

Moira Gatens

This chapter addresses the various forms taken by feminist enquiry into the relationship between women and the history of philosophy. It will focus mostly on philosophy from the early modern and modern period, and on feminist work produced in Europe, Australia, and North America (for Ancient and non-Anglophone approaches see the other chapters in this section). The chapter subtitle intentionally evokes the idea that the historical exclusion of women from philosophy has involved a kind of interdiction or exile from which women have only relatively recently, and even then only partially, escaped. This chapter closes with a brief consideration of the work of the writer, George Eliot (1819–1880), who may be seen as someone who metaphorically as well as literally escaped from Coventry, and who provides a fine example of a woman who was excluded from institutional contexts of knowledge but nevertheless produced outstanding philosophical thought although in a non-traditional format.

Second-wave feminism—roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s—raised the question: Why are there no female philosophers in the history of philosophy? Why do Christine de Pisan, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Simone de Beauvoir stand out as the apparently isolated exceptions who serve to prove the rule? What follows is a sketch of four influential methodologies developed by feminist thinkers in their attempt to answer the puzzle of women’s absence from philosophy. As will be shown, feminist responses to the question of women’s relation to philosophy have developed into a series of exciting and creative developments in philosophical thought. Critical readings of key works in the history of philosophy have often resulted in the generation of entirely new ways of conceptualizing traditional philosophical problems. This feminist philosophical scholarship, begun in earnest in the last quarter of the twentieth century, opened up many unexpected and productive lines of inquiry, including care ethics (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984), standpoint epistemology (Harding 1991), ontologies of embodied difference (Bordo 1993; Crenshaw 1989), sexual and racial contract theory (Mills 1997; Pateman 1988), and numerous other approaches.

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My exegesis of the path breaking thought that served to prepare the ground in which these innovative philosophies took root will favor work that responded critically to then prevalent dogmatic philosophical assumptions about women, such as the claim that the family and relations between men and women do not change across time or place. The idea that women and the family are ahistorical, simply part of nature rather than created in and through cultural practices, is common in the history of philosophical thought. For example, in Emile (1979 [1762]) Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to the family and to men’s relation to women as aspects of invariant nature. This erroneous view was echoed in Beauvoir’s otherwise challenging study, The Second Sex (1953), when she asserted that women have no history. One of the most important challenges for feminist philosophers is to understand and change these kinds of powerful, destructive, and entrenched dogmas of thought that associate women with nature, the body, and emotion.

The Philosophical Imaginary and the Héloïse Complex

Michèle Le Dœuff made an early and influential contribution to the task of dismantling destructive philosophical conceptions of women. Her pioneering interpretation of the relationship between women and philosophy centered on the proposition that philosophical thought deploys an extensive repertoire of metaphors and images, including images of irrational, emotional, and objectified women. In The Philosophical Imaginary (1989), Le Dœuff shows that contrary to philosophy’s self-conception as a master discipline based in truth and reason, one finds that the canonical texts are replete with images of trees, clocks, islands, storms, horses, donkeys, and so on. Certain aspects of the philosophical imaginary—for example, the Baconian image of nature as a woman that science must conquer and penetrate if her secrets are to be known—conspire against associating women with reason, culture, and knowledge. Sexed associations between dichotomous values (e.g. reason–emotion, subjective–objective) are endemic to philosophical thought and philosophy has played a major role in defining what it means to be male (e.g., rational, objective) or female (e.g., emotional, subjective). It is partly for this reason that Le Dœuff argues that what turns women away from the practice of philosophy is intrinsic to philosophy, at least as it is presently conceived and practiced. How could I, a woman, join the Baconian quest for knowledge if that venture is imagined in terms of the sexual subjection of women? Of course, an alternative kind of philosophical practice may not need to project negative values onto women or exclude them from the privilege of being recognized as subjects capable of reason. This type of non-totalizing philosophy, Le Dœuff muses, would be capable of accepting the necessarily incomplete and provisional nature of all thought. Le Dœuff writes about this approach to philosophical thought as “operative,” open-ended, and as “thinking on the move.” Her engagement with philosophy and its history is not only critical but also constructive and productive of new, more inclusive ways of engaging in philosophical thinking. An inclusive approach to philosophy would acknowledge its imaginary component and accept responsibility for re-engaging that imaginary in order to shift it onto new, more equitable, ground. An inclusive approach would also need to lift the ban on the participation of certain kinds of persons in the philosophical conversation, including women.

In “Women and Philosophy” (1977) Le Dœuff introduced the idea of the “Héloïse complex” in order to explain why even those few privileged women in the past who managed to gain access to philosophical thought were nevertheless prevented from becoming philosophers. The historical person from whom the complex takes its name is Héloïse d’Argenteuil, who was the lover-student of the famous medieval philosopher Peter Abelard. The Héloïse complex describes an “erotico-theoretical transference” that takes place between a female pupil and a male philosopher, who are often, but not always, lovers. The female pupil looks up to the philosopher as “the one who knows.” The male philosopher finds such adoration satisfying because it protects him against self-doubt and the lack in knowledge that drives philosophical enquiry. In a subtle argument, Le Dœuff develops the idea that the transference on the female side, when coupled with women’s exclusion from institutions of learning, results in women’s access to philosophy amounting to mere appearance. In actual fact, this type of relation between pupil and master amounts to a ban, a “cunning prohibition” on women’s ability to philosophize, and condemns them to the role of acolyte. This is because insofar as women’s access to philosophy is mediated through a male lover-philosopher it amounts to access to only a particular kind of philosophy—his philosophy. This prevents women from developing their own independent relation to thought and so blocks their capacities to create philosophies that would represent their own perspectives and ways of knowing. Hence, she argues, this situation amounts to a surreptitious prohibition on women becoming philosophers. Although Le Dœuff does not deny the existence of an erotico-theoretical transference between male pupils and masters, she insists that there was not an in principle reason that prevented male pupils from becoming masters in turn because, unlike women, they enjoyed a formal status in institutions of learning. For males, the institution is able to function as a third term that mediates the intense dyadic relation between teacher and pupil and so can deflect the transferential relation onto other teachers or, indeed, onto the institution itself.

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In addition to Héloïse and Abelard, Le Dœuff offers examples of other couples caught in the complex, including Hipparchia (c.350 bc) and Crates, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, and Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Le Dœuff refined and sometimes revised elements of this argument in her later work, including in Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. (1991) and The Sex of Knowing (2003). As feminist research into the work of past female philosophers increased in scope, and their writings became more widely available, it became clear that women in the history of philosophy had a great deal more autonomy than had appeared at first sight. For example, Héloïse enjoyed high standing as a Classics scholar before she became Abelard’s student, and after their sexual relation ended she continued to study and compose works. Le Dœuff revised her view of women’s relation to philosophy in stages, and her more mature view is that women did produce philosophy, did engage in autonomous philosophical thought, but that often they did so in clandestine ways and through genres atypical for philosophical work such as letters, novels, poetry, and plays. In other words, she suggests, they wrote philosophy “on the sly.” Le Dœuff was one of the first second-wave feminists to put the names of neglected historical female philosophers in print and thereby helped to stimulate curiosity in works such as the letters of Héloïse and Abelard and the correspondence between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes, and Le Dœuff’s sustained engagement with the life and writings of Beauvoir reinvigorated study of Beauvoir’s contributions to feminism and philosophy.

The Man of Reason

Like Le Dœuff, Genevieve Lloyd stressed the importance of the fact that one of the oldest set of values in Western thought, the Pythagorean table of opposites, associates women with the table’s negative values—e.g. left, dark, bad, formless—and men with the table’s positive values—e.g., right, light, good, form. In her landmark text first published in 1984, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (1993), Lloyd’s aim was not to study the values of actual historical male philosophers but rather to attend to the symbolic and metaphorical aspects of canonical texts in the history of philosophy. She sought to demonstrate that the maleness of the “man of reason” cannot be reduced to a mere linguistic bias. Rather, reason has historically been defined in opposition to femininity and those qualities with which femininity is especially associated—emotion, the body.

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Of course there is a link between philosophy’s power to describe and define “male” and “female” and the experience of actual empirical men and women. Hence, women in the past (and perhaps in the present too) experienced not only exclusion from institutions of learning, illiteracy, domestic confinement, and so on, but they also experienced a discursive or symbolic dissonance between the practice of philosophy and their lived womanhood. In agreement with Le Dœuff, then, Lloyd’s analysis of philosophy from the Greeks to the twentieth century shows that even when women have had access to philosophy such access is constrained by the mismatch between philosophy’s highest values and the values associated with being a woman. In Lloyd’s view, philosophy is, in part, grounded in the conceptual exclusion of “woman,” and femininity as lived by women has been partially constituted by philosophical discourses. Reason defines itself against femininity and emotion and then burdens woman with the excluded terms. The difficult task of critical feminist philosophy, then, is to break this self-confirming circle of women’s supposed incapacity to reason.

Lloyd’s analysis is subtle and open to misinterpretation. Indeed, in the second edition of The Man of Reason (1993), Lloyd refined her stance in response to some of the ways in which her thesis had been misconstrued. She insists that her claim is not that women cannot, or do not, reason. Nor is it that they have their own feminine type of reason. Rather, the so-called maleness of reason should, Lloyd says, be understood in metaphorical terms. However, the power of metaphor should not be underestimated and the dissonance felt by women who study and practice philosophy, even today, may help to explain women’s massive underrepresentation in professional philosophy (see Haslanger 2008). Furthermore, the existence of an ideal sex-neutral reason to which we should all aspire is doubtful. Traditional philosophical ideals of reason were developed in contexts of gross inequalities—between men and women, colonizers and colonized, enslavers and enslaved—that distort human capacities and potentials. As Lloyd remarks “if there is a Reason genuinely common to all, it is something to be achieved in the future, not celebrated in the present” (1993: 107).

Both Le Dœuff and Lloyd made early contributions to the attempt to understand the complex historical relationship between women and philosophy, and part of that contribution has involved the development of new ways of practicing philosophy. Consistent with Le Dœuff’s view of philosophy as “operative” and open-ended, Lloyd too recommends feminist work that engages with traditional philosophy not only in order to expose its exclusions but also as an appropriable resource for enriching our understanding of the present (Lloyd 2000). This constructive approach to joining the conversation of philosophy, including “conversations” with historical figures, is bolstered by the steadily increasing amount of feminist scholarship on women philosophers of the past (for example by Shapiro, Green, Broad, O’Neill; see also the Penn State Press series “Re-Reading the Canon”). Not only are women philosophers, in the present, creating new philosophical approaches, but it ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy
• Routledge Philosophy Companions
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Engaging the Past
• Part II Body, Mind, and World
• Part III Knowledge, Language, and Science
• Part IV Intersections
• Part V Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics
• Index