carters-world:
After a young male gay! grad student stated there were no women in philosophy in the Classical World, I got over my nausea and decided to read up on female pythagoreans, epicureans. Why isn’t there even a biography of Plotina….Anyway I just saw this below. I daresay he never thought about unmarried, independent Leontion.
reblogged from
http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/
I am a male philosopher and these are my impressions of women in philosophy for what they are worth. I have just as much respect for women philosophers in any area of philosophy as I have for men in an area of philosophy, except for one area: feminism. I am suspicious of feminism for several reasons. First, I think a lot of it (though not all) is very poor quality, often an embarrassment to the profession. (Most male philosophers think the same, even if they won’t admit it publicly, and so do many women philosophers who don’t work in feminism.) Second, I think feminism is too political, and philosophy should not have so much of a political agenda. I often think it is as much, if not more, political than it is philosophical. Third, not only is it political, but it is also very, very radical, often being anti-men, anti-family, even anti-children, and many feminists are lesbians as well (perhaps even by choice, because they hate men). I regard this type of feminist as a real oddity, even a total eccentric, a figure of amusement and of sociological interest, rather than someone to be taken seriously. Fourth, I have a bit of a stereotype of feminists, I guess, whenever I meet one: that they secretly hate me (or at least are very suspicious of me, and don’t really trust me or any man), and that they might be angry, disagreeable bitches, no matter how they appear on the surface. This puts me off wanting to discuss my views with them, or wanting to read them. This is a pity because I agree one hundred percent that women have to put up with a lot of terrible harassment, discrimination, and other problems detailed in earlier posts. But whenever I see a woman listing “feminism” among her interests, I become suspicious, even though I know that not all feminists fall into these categories and that the topic is worthy of discussion, and that some are doing very good work in that field.
Oh my what the for goodness’ I don’t even.
Is this some kind of ‘Poe’s law’ situation?
(Deep breath.)
Okay. Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that this passage absolutely reeks of misogyny. No, wait, let’s not set that aside. But let’s not bother saying much more about it because the world consists almost entirely of people who noticed that as soon as they read it and people who didn’t notice it and won’t suddenly realize it’s true just because I say it.
In stead, because this bit of text that Horténsia has quoted above has certain similarities with the ‘lack of higher-level discourse’ issue that we’ve been hearing about lately, let’s concentrate on this chap’s second point, the only one that isn’t flagrantly misogynistic: ‘I think feminism is too political, and philosophy should not have so much of a political agenda.’ Let’s do some higher-level discourse on that.
Axiom: My behaviour is the only thing over which I have any control. It’s the only thing my choices can directly affect. My behaviour in turn will have effects on various things, but those effects are all indirect. So the only choices I have to make are choices about my behaviour, and making choices about my behaviour is pretty much all I’m capable of doing as a human being. Apart from involuntary things like breathing, behaving this way or that is all I can do.
As a corollary, behaving this or that way is something I must do and something I cannot avoid doing. I can’t not have any behaviour. I can’t not make choices about what to do and not to do. Even choosing to do absolutely nothing would be a choice about what to do or not to do. Since I must behave in some way, and since I cannot eliminate the intervention of my consciousness in the process, I have no choice but to make these choices. So choices about my behaviour are both the only kind of choice I can make and also a kind of choice I cannot avoid making.
Given that I must make choices about my behaviour and that I can do nothing but make choices about my behaviour, it seems to me that a fairly important question is going to be, How do I decide what choices to make about my behaviour? In fact it seems to me that that’s got to be pretty much the only important question. Any other question is important to me only to the extent that it helps me answer that one.
The branch of philosophy that addresses that question is ethics. The study of choices and the qualities of character that shape those choices. So as far I’m concerned ethics is the central part of philosophy, because it’s the part that deals with the only thing that I can do and the thing I can’t help doing: making choices about how I behave.
Now, another axiom: I live among other people. ‘Being in the world is being with others’, as some guy said once, probably in German. And these people are fundamentally like me in their thoughts and feelings and experience of the world. Some are much more similar to me than others, of course, but we’re all similar in fairly basic ways, ways in which I am not similar to, say, a tree. The other people I experience seem to react to and be affected by my behaviour in a way that I can understand and empathize with. I recognize my own emotions and instincts and thoughts in their reactions. (This is true to a lesser extent of animals also, but that’s a topic for another post, I think, because this one is going to be more than long enough without it.)
People’s reactions to things matter to me because I am capable of, and can’t really help, empathizing with them to a certain extent. I can break a tree-branch and be largely unmoved by the experience because I have no way of understanding what it’s like to be a tree-branch getting broken, and the tree-branch can’t tell me. Any theory I have about it is sheer fantasy. But if I broke someone’s arm I would, I strongly suspect (for I have not tried it!), find it impossible to be unmoved by the experience, because I can and do and must empathize with the other person and have some vague idea of what it might be like to be a person having their arm broken; and even if I have no concept of it before I do it you can bet that the person whose arm I’m breaking will give me an idea of what it’s like, and that will resonate with experiences and feelings I’ve had.
So breaking someone’s arm will be a far more meaningful and significant experience for me than breaking a tree-branch will. And by and large the acts and behaviours that affect me most strongly will be those that produce effects in other people, because the effects I produce in other people are effects I recognize as being similar to my own most affecting experiences. I am moved, emotionally and intellectually, by other people’s reactions and actions. Empathizing with them, I find myself reacting to what I perceive and / or imagine to be their emotions and thoughts. And at the same time they provoke me to have emotions and thoughts. We’re all tangled up together and we can’t ignore each other. We are, as some other guy said in some other language, a social animal.
Which branch of philosophy deals with this mess? Well, ethics again, but most particularly the sub-set of ethics that is politics. Politics is the study of groups of people and how they organize themselves and, often, how they distribute power and authority among themselves. The personal is political, some lady said at some point, but most especially the interpersonal is political. And since, as I said earlier, all questions are secretly questions about how to behave, the political is personal. If I ask, How can power best be distributed in society? I am secretly asking, What distribution of power in society should I support and work towards? which is in turn really just a cover for, When faced with a choice that might have an impact on the way people relate to one another, what should I choose? Who to vote for is an ethical question. Whether to vote is an ethical question. Every political question is an ethical question. And ethical questions are the only questions that matter because ethical answers are the only answers I can act on and acting is the only thing I can do.
So, Mr Male Philosopher, what was that you said? Oh yes: ‘I think feminism is too political, and philosophy should not have so much of a political agenda.’ WHAT. To me this sounds like the equivalent of ‘I think the issues feminism addresses are too important, and philosophy should only deal with issues that have no importance.’
Feminism is about how individual people interact with one another, and it is also about how power and authority are distributed within society. So yes, it’s political. Like other social justice movements, it analyses how a particular way of categorizing people (by gender) affects the distribution of power in society, and also how it affects the moral psychology of individual people. It proposes, in broad terms, a particular way in which society as a whole and the moral reasoning of individuals could be changed so as to be better for people and to help people be better. In doing this it’s in the highly acclaimed philosophical company of schools like utilitarianism, Daoism, Kantianism, Aristotelianism, Confucianism, Rawlsianism, and so on. You may think it does it less effectively than some or all of these, but the fact that it does it at all is very far from being a reason to disparage it. In fact your belief that ‘philosophy should not have so much a political agenda’ suggests to me that you have a very narrow and indeed, in my view, totally misconceived notion of what philosophy actually is.
But if you want to regard philosophy that way, fine. It isn’t important to me for feminism or any other social justice movement to be regarded as a philosophy because I am not such an intellectual snob as to believe that philosophy is the only field in which rigorous and worthwhile thought about important questions occurs. What I do want to say to you is that feminism, whether it is philosophy or not, is not ‘too political’. It is exactly as political as it should be. It is a critique of the distribution of power in groups and the distribution of respect in people’s minds. This is important because it affects how people choose to behave. And how people should choose to behave is the only important question there is.
![torayot:
totheexperts:
[image: the first page of the NO2AV leaflet, with much of the information labelled as misleading or irrelevant].
[Most of original post omitted: click the link to read.]
Jamie was very >:C at the latest batch of No to AV leaflets that arrived at his flat.
No I wasn’t. I am a civil servant and therefore have no opinions about the ‘no’ campaign’s persistent attempts to confuse and scare people with arguments that they must have been told are provably, indisputably, mathematically false.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljumxunyX41qa9ndho1_r1_1280.jpg)
