Empowering
Philosophy
Christia Mercer
COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y
Presidential Address delivered at the one hundred sixteenth
Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical
Association in Philadelphia, PA, on January 10, 2020.
The main goal of my presidential address in January 2020 was to show
that philosophy’s past offers a means to empower its present. I hoped
to encourage colleagues to make the philosophy we teach and practice
more inclusive (both textually and topically) and to adopt a more publicfacing engagement with our discipline.
As I add these introductory remarks to my January lecture, it is June
2020 and the need to empower philosophy has never seemed more
urgent. We’ve witnessed both the tragic death of George Floyd and
the popular uprising of a diverse group of Americans in response to
the ongoing violence against Black lives. Many white Americans—and
many philosophers—have begun to realize that their inattentiveness to
matters of diversity and inclusivity must now be seen as more than mere
negligence. Recent demonstrations frequently contain signs that make
the point succinctly: “Silence is violence.”
A central claim of my January lecture was that philosophy’s status quo
is no longer tenable. Even before the pandemic slashed university
budgets and staff, our employers were cutting philosophy programs,
enrollments were shrinking, and jobs were increasingly hard to find.
Despite energetic attempts on the part of many of our colleagues to
promote a more inclusive approach to our research and teaching, the
depressing truth remains: philosophy lags behind all other disciplines
in the humanities and most in the social sciences in the percentage of
women and people of color who are active in the discipline.1 Despite
some gains in recent years, philosophy remains, as Linda Alcoff made the
point in her 2013 Presidential Address, “demographically challenged.”2
Professional philosophers face two options: we can remain silent and
continue to ignore the racism and misogyny that taint our discipline—
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and our culture—or we can attempt to change things. There are clear
moral and practical reasons for us to act, aggressively.
I am not naïve enough to think that professional philosophers will agree
on how to understand the political and ethical demands placed upon us,
much less on how to meet those demands. But I do want to suggest that
philosophers must no longer ignore either our discipline’s resistance
to change or some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For
those of us privileged enough to be in the academy (where we have
the opportunity to research, write, think, debate, rethink, and teach),
we owe it to our students and to the future of our discipline to apply
all of our critical tools to the philosophical issues at the core of today’s
challenges.
Given the dramatically disproportional rates of COVID deaths among
people of color and given the profound effects of Floyd’s public killing,
white Americans are finally recognizing, in the words of Jelani Cobb,
“a reality” long understood by the “more than forty million people of
African descent who live in the United States,” but which has remained
“largely invisible in the lives of white Americans.” Cobb writes:
As with men, who, upon seeing the scroll of #MeToo
testimonies, asked their wives, daughters, sisters, and
coworkers, “Is it really that bad?” the shock of revelation
that attended the video of Floyd’s death is itself a kind
of inequality, a barometer of the extent to which one
group of Americans have moved through life largely
free from the burden of such terrible knowledge.3
Whether it is the incapacity of one group of people to glimpse the reality
of family members and neighbors or the “shock of revelation” that
follows testimonies and public acts of violence, recent events are not
just shocking to many philosophers, they pose difficult philosophical
questions, which every single one of us has the skills to address.
Whether motivated by new insight into social injustices or by concern
for the future of the discipline, whether our specialty is metaphysics,
philosophy of science, formal epistemology, or another subfield usually
considered above the fray of social injustices, if we care about the health
and welfare of our discipline and our communities, then we must find
ways to address—at least in our courses—the philosophical questions
at the core of our current debates. The time is past when we can
introduce students to philosophy without discussing topics that touch
on issues like systemic injustice, climate change, and fake news and
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without introducing philosophical notions like hermeneutical injustice,
epistemic violence, and intersectionality.4
In order to persuade you that philosophy’s past affords a ready means
to empower its present, in what follows I show that the standard history
of philosophy warrants a radical revision (sections 1 and 3), reveal the
odd historical contingencies of that story’s origins (section 2), proffer
examples of how we can use the past to benefit the present (section 3),
and display the range of sources available to help us change our courses
(if not our research) and thereby empower philosophy (section 4).
SECTION 1: WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY THAT
NEEDS TO BE REVISED?
As a historian of early modern philosophy, I am especially keen to
interrogate and undermine the myth of the development of that part of
philosophy’s history. But the lessons extracted from that interrogation
can be applied more generally: the arc of the history of philosophy that
has been taught in US universities for decades was constructed in the
eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries by a relatively
small group of figures and bears little resemblance to the complications
and intellectual richness of philosophy’s past.
But in this section, I set my sights on early modern thought. David Fate
Norton offered a brilliant parody of the standard story back in 1981:
It came to pass that darkness covered the face of the
earth. And the creator saw that the darkness was evil, and
he spoke out, saying, “Let there be light” and there was
light, and he called the light “Renaissance.” . . . And thus
it was that Descartes begat Spinoza, and Spinoza begat
Leibniz . . . [and] Locke begat Berkeley, and Berkeley
begat Hume. And then it was that there arose the great
sage of Königsberg, the great Immanuel, Immanuel
Kant, who, though neither empiricist nor rationalist, was
like unto both. He it was who combined the eye of the
scientist with the mind of the mathematician. And this
too the creator saw, and he saw that it was good, and
he sent goodly men and scholars true to tell the story
wherever men should henceforth gather to speak of
sages past.5
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There are three features of this myth that I will disprove over the course
of my lecture: (1) that Descartes broke radically with past philosophy to
start something entirely new; (2) that the main topics of early modern
philosophy involve scientific concerns, presumably those of a new
science proposed by Descartes; and (3) that the history of philosophy is
properly studied as a series of great systems, each following the other
like a series of beads on a string.
The first claim can be dispensed with pretty quickly. Although Descartes
was undoubtably a brilliant and an influential seventeenth-century
thinker, neither his contemporaries nor his immediate successors took
him to have broken radically with the past. Mid-seventeenth-century
German philosophers, as the young Leibniz exemplifies, commonly
lump Descartes together with Hobbes and Gassendi as a proponent of
a “new philosophy.”6 Their contemporaries regularly note Descartes’s
debt to past thinkers, especially Augustine.7 In his Dictionary, Pierre
Bayle mentions mathematicians and philosophers who complained
about Descartes “pirating” ideas from earlier sources.8 While it is
indubitable that Descartes’s natural philosophy was important and
original, many of his contemporaries found the metaphysical proposals
on which his physics was based to be second rate. For example, Henry
More, an important Cambridge philosopher—who was likely the first
proponent of Cartesianism in England—writes: While I “can never highly
enough admire” Descartes as a “Mechanical wit,” he is “no Master of
Metaphysics.”9 Leibniz places Descartes’s mechanical physics as one
among many philosophical options in a tradition going back to the
ancient atomist, Democritus. After comparing Descartes’s views with
those of Democritus, Leibniz explains that he rejects the Frenchman’s
metaphysical grounding of the mechanical philosophy replacing it with
a metaphysics “replete with life and perceptions.”10 And like many
others writing in the 1670s and 1680s, the English philosopher Anne
Conway ranked Descartes’s contributions in natural philosophy on par
with other mechanists, suggesting that “Cartesianism,” “Hobbesianism,”
and “Spinozism” are equally influential in their account of body, and
similarly mistaken.11
In my own work, I have exposed Descartes’s debt to the late medieval
meditative genre. I will say a bit more about the meditative tradition
later, but the point now is that there was a longstanding medieval
tradition, which Descartes and his contemporaries knew well and from
which Descartes’s own Meditations draws. Like Descartes, sixteenthcentury meditators sought self-understanding and knowledge of
metaphysical truths and faced deceitful demons along the way. That is,
the danger posed by deceiving demons to a truth-seeking meditator was
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a well-used trope.12 But, as I have shown, Descartes’s most important,
unnoticed source was the sixteen-century Spanish nun Teresa of Ávila,
who is probably the first philosopher to assign deceiving demons the
power to force the meditator to withdraw assent from all her former
beliefs. And like Descartes, Teresa rids herself of doubt through a careful
exploration of her mind and its capacities. Descartes would have learned
about Teresa as a boy in the Jesuit school he attended, and she was all
the rage in French intellectual circles at the very time that he was writing
his own meditations.13
Fast-forward to Kant, who does not include Descartes in his lists of
prominent figures in the history of philosophy. To be sure, Kant was
interested in Descartes’s proposals along with that of other prominent
seventeenth-century thinkers, but the philosophers he considers most
important in the lead up to his thought are Leibniz, Locke, and, of course,
his dogmatic alarm clock, David Hume.14
SECTION 2: THE STRANGE GENEALOGY AND RESILIENCE OF
THE STANDARD STORY
In section 1, I dispensed with the first of the standard story’s three
features. From the perspective of seventeenth-century thinkers,
Descartes did not break radically with past philosophy to start something
entirely new. In this section, I’ll challenge the remaining two features of
the myth, namely, (2) that the main topics of early modern philosophy
involve scientific concerns and (3) that the history of philosophy is
properly studied as a series of great systems.
An efficient means of exorcising ourselves of these historical demons is
to address an obvious question: What is the genealogy of this myth, and
why have philosophers embraced it for so long? As complicated as the
factors contributing to its origin surely are, I here expose a few major
steps in its development.
As prominent French eighteenth-century thinkers began to promote
new philosophical topics and methodologies, they found an ally in
Descartes. Jean-Baptiste d’Alembert (1717–1783), for example, was
keen to stress the power of reason to discern new truths and discovered
in Descartes’s philosophy a commitment to that power. According to
d’Alembert, his predecessor single-handedly cast aside the “yoke
of scholasticism” to create something brand new, which laid the
groundwork for Enlightenment thought.15 Eighteenth-century French
philosophers like d’Alembert were prepared to extract elements from
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the Cartesian system, which supported their own proposals, highlighting
the parts they liked while ignoring the less appealing bits.
But it was post-Kantian German thinkers who created the full-blown myth
according to which Descartes’s work created “new ways of thinking”
that propelled the rest of modern philosophy and that conveniently led
to themselves as its heroes. At first, the focus was on Descartes’s selfinvestigation, but it soon turned to his supposed invention of modern
science.
In his 1820s lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel credits Descartes
with breaking wholly with the past and setting the stage for the greatness
of Germanic philosophy, dramatically claiming: “Germanic, i.e., modern
philosophy begins with Descartes.”16 By 1847, Schopenhauer insists
“our excellent Descartes” is “the instigator of subjective investigation
and in this the father of modern philosophy.”17 A prominent German
professor (and popular lecturer), Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), who seems
to have been the first historian to distinguish between the rationalist and
empiricist schools, published a gripping (and multivolume) narrative
in the late 1850s about Descartes’s innovations and their impact on
subsequent thought.18 In a revealing passage from his extended
discussion of Descartes’s life and innovations, Fischer writes in 1878:
In the whole range of philosophical literature, there is
no work in which the struggle for truth is portrayed in
a more animated, personal, captivating manner, and,
at the same time, more simply and clearly, than in
Descartes’ essay on method and his first “Meditation.”
That irresistible desire for knowledge, that disgust with
book-learning, that distrust of all scholars, that aversion
to all instruction and improvement by others, that thirst
for the world and life, that longing for a fundamental
and complete mental renovation, are in those writings
conspicuous characteristics.
And then, channeling the ardent fans of the great German poet, author,
and sometimes philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fischer
transforms Descartes into a Romantic thinker on par with the titular
character in Goethe’s Faust:
If we bring before our minds the profound critic and
thinker in the “Faust” of Goethe, who struggling after
truth, falls into maelstrom of doubts, and resolves to
seek it henceforth only in himself and the great book
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of the world, flees out of his study into the wide world;
if we seek in actual life for a man corresponding to
this picture, who has lived all these characteristics,
and experienced all these conflicts and changes,—we
shall find no one who exemplifies this exalted type so
perfectly as Descartes, who lived not far from the period
which began to develop the Faust legend.19
Fischer’s portrayal of Descartes as a dramatic hero set the stage for the
myth. In the early twentieth century, although stripped of its Faustian
trappings, Descartes’s heroism was codified by prominent thinkers
like Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) and Étienne Gilson (1884–1978). In
Cassirer’s dramatic telling, Descartes single-handedly created the
“spiritual essence” of a new epoch, which would “permeate all fields of
knowledge,” to which eighteenth-century philosophers responded, and
out of which Kant and other German thinkers would arise as liberating
angels.20 Gilson endorses Cassirer’s position, writing in 1963: “Descartes
was the prophet of modern science,” which “accounts for the rise of the
‘Cartesian school,’ a family of great metaphysicians whose relation to
Descartes was less that of disciples to a master than of philosophical
geniuses inspired by a common spirit but working independently on the
same problems.”21
Based on his interpretation of the seventeenth century as a period of
“great metaphysical systems,” responding to Descartes, Cassirer advised
historians to “string its various intellectual formulations along the thread
of time and study them chronologically.”22 That is, in order to understand
“the sum total” of the period’s “philosophical content,” it was sufficient
to track its systems “lengthwise [Längsschnitt].”23 Once the standard
story took hold, it was reiterated and supported as historians burrowed
into the systems. In the words of Cassirer, historians of early modern
philosophy had only “to follow step by step the triumphal march of the
modern analytical spirit.”24
And so they did, throughout the twentieth century and into the twentyfirst. Consider the popular Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary
Sources, edited by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, both talented historians
of philosophy. Their first edition of 1998 contained only the authors
included in our myth, their works carefully excerpted so as to suit the
standard story and highlight the very philosophical topics contained
in the myth, namely, those that give centrality to the development of
modern science. Then, in response to a broadening of philosophical
context, their 2009 edition added excerpts from works by Michel de
Montaigne, Isaac Newton, and Thomas Reid, which were deemed
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relevant to the topics. In 2015, Andrew Janiak and I published an op-ed
in the Washington Post in which—among other things—we called out
this edition for not including any of the well-recognized and important
women authors of the period.25 In correspondence, Watkins was moved
to respond to our criticism and, to their credit, Ariew and Watkins included
in the Anthology’s third edition of 2019, in their words: “selections from
the corpus of traditionally under-represented philosophers . . . which is
of course, long overdue.”26 Although the edition contains selections from
three prominent seventeenth-century women (Elisabeth of Bohemia,
Anne Conway, and Margaret Cavendish), the myth prevails. The added
excerpts are ones in which the women directly criticize the great men
on the standard topics so that it’s impossible to surmise the woman’s
positive philosophical proposals and originality. As usual, women are
mere accessories to prominent men. But equally problematic is the
Anthology’s continued commitment to the very figures, systems, and
topics selected by our nineteenth- and twentieth-century myth-makers.
That is, despite its additions, Ariew and Watkin’s Anthology maintains
the second two features of our myth, namely, (2) that the main topics
of early modern philosophy involve scientific concerns and (3) that the
history of philosophy is properly studied as a series of great systems.
But for those scholars willing to break out of the standard narrative and
examine the positive proposals of thinkers like Elisabeth, Conway, and
Cavendish, the period seems much more philosophically interesting
and its topics much more wide-ranging. Persistent wars, plagues, and
social devastations prompted a wide range of early modern thinkers to
write about topics like the importance of peace (e.g., Elisabeth, Leibniz),
the role of suffering in life (e.g., Teresa of Ávila, Conway), and what we
now call epistemic injustice (e.g., Marie de Gournay, Mary Astell). The
period witnessed peasant wars, religious massacres, regicide, public
torture, the enslavement of Africans, colonialization, and women
demanding educational equality. All of these problems (and many more)
were taken up by a wide range of understudied authors as well as our
canonical figures. We will continue to misrepresent the early modern
period and misinform our students unless we become willing to explore
a wide range of the period’s proposals, debates, and conversations. For
example, had Ariew and Watkins merely included writings on education,
their Anthology might have contained brilliant proposals by women and
counterproposals by mainstays like Rousseau.27
Given our twenty-first century concerns with justice, inequality, social
hierarchies, sex, gender, dignity, health, epistemic injustice, war, peace,
discrimination, and systemic oppression, and given that the history of
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philosophy treats all these topics, the time seems right to uncork the
power of philosophy’s past.
Before turning to examples of how philosophy’s past might be used to
empower it, I want to address two obvious worries. The first concerns
the philosophical fecundity of the canonical texts. Many of you might
be willing to acknowledge that the triumphal march from great man
to great man is historically incorrect, but still insist on the value of the
systems and the worthiness of their study. Those of us engaged in what
we call “the new narratives project” agree that the canonical figures are
well worth studying. We do not want to throw the baby out with the
bathwater. But we do think that the strategy of treating the history of
philosophy as a triumphal march from great system to great system has
outlived its usefulness: too much of value is lost.
The second worry is relevant to those of you who neither work on
nor even teach bits of historical texts. You might wonder what this
reevaluation of philosophy’s past has to do with you and your work. For
reasons I suggested earlier, the teaching and practicing of philosophy
needs revitalizing. Philosophy programs are being cut; the intellectual
and cultural authority of our discipline is waning. If you care about the
future of philosophy, and even of your subfield, it is time to widen
your approach and introduce your students to a more diverse group of
authors. Whatever the subject matter of the course you teach (whether
causation, virtue ethics, probability, animal rights, or philosophy of
mathematics, to cite a few), there is a woman, underrepresented
minority, or non-western author who spoke intelligently about the topic.
Taking a diverse group of writers seriously or discussing the grave
challenges that women and people of color faced in doing philosophy
in the past would itself constitute an important intervention. And it has
never been easier to use well-selected historical materials to make your
courses more inclusive, in ways I’ll explain.
SECTION 3: USING PHILOSOPHY’S PAST TO EMPOWER IT
There are two straightforward means to use philosophy’s past to
empower it. The first is to apply questions of contemporary importance
to our canonical figures in ways that unearth understudied ideas and
topics. The second is to explore in a systematic way philosophically
sophisticated texts by women, people of color, Islamicate, Jewish
thinkers, and writers in other philosophical cultures who were left out
of philosophy’s history, but whose works have contemporary relevance.
Both of these strategies for using philosophy’s past to empower our
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discipline are fundamentally projects of retrieval. The process of
retrieval is straightforward enough: historians of philosophy broaden
the scope of their research with an eye to excavating and explicating
historical texts and topics that provoke the sorts of conversations we
think we want to have. When we use philosophy’s past to empower the
discipline, we don’t just study history willy-nilly. Rather, we rummage
around for topics and texts that raise questions that speak to us now
while taking the historical text seriously.28 As I suggested in section 2,
a narrow set of philosophical concerns generated the myth of modern
philosophy; and the myth then sustained interest in that limited range
of topics. The project of retrieval is not to reject the standard topics, but
to unearth new ones, ones that the myth helped to erase and obscure.
The newly unearthed texts and topics can provoke different sorts of
conversations, invigorate a wide range of philosophy courses, and even
effect a reconsideration of canonical systems.29
3.1 RETRIEVAL STRATEGY 1: SOCIAL HIERARCHIES AND
PERNICIOUS IGNORANCE
As a historian of philosophy, I’ve long been interested in conceptual
genealogies. My book series, Oxford Philosophical Concepts, publishes
books that track the (often surprising) developments of concepts like
sympathy, health, persons, dignity, and evil. More recently, my concern
has turned to the historical sources of social hierarchies, which has been
inspired by the work of critical race theorists, feminist philosophers,
and social epistemologists. Philosophers working in these areas offer
conceptual means to help us better understand the dynamic subtleties
of racism and sexism, forms of epistemic injustice, and the struggles of
marginalized people to find a modicum of authority. These tools allow
historians like me to uncover both hidden gems and disturbing truths in
philosophy’s past.
I display in this subsection the kind of dramatic results that occur when
we apply contemporary philosophical tools to the history of philosophy.
The issues that concern me here involve social hierarchies. Needless
to say, these are topics of central interest to our current students—and
our world—though they are not ones usually included in our standard
anthologies and courses. In section 2, I noted how a few prominent
eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century thinkers projected their
own philosophical concerns onto early modern thought, ignoring the
parts that didn’t suit them, and created the myth that became the history
of modern philosophy. I now want to broaden my target.
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Perhaps we should not be surprised to learn that other major parts of
the long-told story about the history of western philosophy (with Plato
as its supposed progenitor) also display what social epistemologists
call “epistemic ignorance.” Philosophers like Charles Mills, Shannon
Sullivan, Nancy Tuana, Linda Alcoff, and many others have noted that
the production of ignorance needs to be understood as a substantive
practice itself.30 In this subsection, I want to suggest that our ignorance
of central components of philosophy’s great canonical systems—the
beads on the string—is a form of “invested “ or “pernicious ignorance,”
namely, an ignorance that, in the words of Cynthia Townley, is “sustained
to misrepresent reality in ways that not coincidentally sustain patterns of
. . . privilege.”31 Our tenacious commitment to a few great men marching
in triumph to thinkers just like them has kept philosophers ignorant,
not just of noncanonical systems in philosophy’s past, but also of major
parts of canonical ones.
First Example: Aristotle and Gendered Hierarchies
In Resisting Reality, Sally Haslanger is concerned “to clarify and defend
. . . that race and gender are socially constructed.” 32 She examines
the social production of dominant and subordinate groups and social
hierarchies, which she suggests are crucial for understanding kinds
of agency. In Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Manne
interrogates the complicated ways that misogyny works to sustain
patriarchy. According to Manne:
Patriarchy is “the system by means of which men control
women.”
Sexism is “the branch of patriarchal ideology
that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order.”
Misogyny is “the system that polices and enforces”
patriarchy’s “governing norms and expectations.”33
I’ve recently tried to contribute to our understanding of the production
of social hierarchies by offering a genealogy of sexism and misogyny
in ancient philosophical and medical texts. In “The Philosophical Roots
of Western Misogyny,” I recreate some of the most prominent ancient
arguments that were used to motivate what I will here call “male-female
hierarchical difference.”34
Male-female hierarchical difference is the view that
female bodies are inferior to male bodies, from which it
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is supposed to follow that women are morally inferior to
men and should be treated (and educated) differently.35
When we apply philosophical tools—honed by Haslanger, Manne,
and many others—to canonical texts, we begin to see some of our
philosophical heroes in radically new ways.
Aristotle famously begins his Metaphysics with the pronouncement that
“People by nature desire to know.”36 Like virtually all other professional
philosophers who read Aristotle as a student, I took him to maintain not
only that all human beings naturally desire to know, but that we all have
(something like) an equal chance to become fully rational creatures
and acquire virtue. As a young, first gen woman, I was exhilarated by
that simple insight. It came as a shock, therefore, to recently discover
that when we place Aristotle’s biological writings within the context
of his ethical and epistemological views, we can discern the powerful
argument he gives for male-female hierarchical difference—an argument
that is perfectly consistent with his metaphysical, physical, ethical, and
political thought. Because of the rigor and thoughtfulness of Aristotle’s
system and because of its wide-ranging influence, his argument for
male-female hierarchical difference laid the foundations for hundreds
of years of western sexism and misogyny.
Aristotle’s arguments for male-female hierarchical difference and their
huge impact on subsequent thinking are best understood against the
background of the following set of assumptions, which I’ll dub the “right
agency assumptions” and to which I’ll return in the next subsection:
Human beings are truth-seeking agents with innate capacities
to attain ultimate knowledge (i.e., the knowledge that will allow
the agent to get life right).
There are ultimate truths, knowledge of which are necessary
(and for some thinkers sufficient) to get life right.
A proper education or correct method of analysis promotes
the development of agents’ capacities so they will acquire
knowledge of ultimate truths and get life right.
So human beings have an innate capacity to get life right, which is
the goal of life. Getting life right is described in different ways in the
swath of the history of philosophy that concerns me here. The most
common are the following: to have wisdom, virtue, or a life worth living;
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to have a relationship with the divinity; to understand the most profound
metaphysical truths and what those truths entail.
Beginning with Aristotle, the most influential arguments for male-female
hierarchical difference make significant use of the notions of health and
teleology, both of which are thoroughly treated in Oxford Philosophical
Concepts. In the Introduction to Health: A History, Peter Adamson
notes that the concept of health “is unusual in seeming to straddle the
divide between descriptive, empirical concepts and normative, valueladen concepts.”37 In the Introduction to Teleology: A History, Jeffrey
McDonough explains that the simplest version of teleology “is that
some things happen, or exist, for the sake of other things.”38 Hippos lie
in mud for the sake of cooling themselves. People go to demonstrations
for the sake of justice. As we will see, robust teleology and related
notions of health helped philosophers like Aristotle justify and explain
the inferiority of women. Although I want to set my sights on Aristotle,
first, a bit of Plato as background.
In his dialogue the Phaedo, Plato is clear that “we philosophers have set
our sights on wisdom,” that the truth-seeking agent is the soul, and that
the means to get things right requires that the soul separate itself “as
much as possible from the body” so that it can “abide in reason” and
dwell “alone by itself.” If a soul cannot “purge” itself of bodily matters,
then it will never attain “the true moral ideal.”39 So the Phaedo suggests
that getting things right requires that the soul purges itself of the body
where it then “abides in reason.”
The Phaedo’s account of the soul appears to render it genderless, from
which it would seem to follow that the souls in female bodies are identical
in power and capacities to those in males. And if the souls of men and
women are equally capable of attaining wisdom, then it would seem
that all agents are equal in their capacities to get life right. But here’s
the rub: except for the priestess Diotima, who in Plato’s Symposium is
described as “a woman wise about many things,” women do not appear
as interlocutors anywhere in Plato’s dialogues, even as the sacrificial
victims of the Socratic method.40 Again, the Phaedo is instructive: unwise
and overly emotional women frame the text. The reader is introduced to
Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe, toward the beginning of the dialogue, as
his philosopher friends arrive to meet with him before his execution:
“As soon as Xanthippe saw us she broke out into the sort of remark you
would expect from a woman, ‘Oh, Socrates, this is the last time that you
and your friends will be able to talk together!’” Socrates sees no reason
to include Xanthippe in reflections about his impending death, and asks
her to leave, whereupon “servants led her away crying hysterically.”41
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Toward the end of the dialogue, in his preparation to drink the hemlock,
Socrates’s “children were brought to see him,” along with “the women of
his household.” He soon “came back to join” his friends, some of whom
begin to cry. In response to their emotional outbursts, he complains:
“Why, that was my main reason for sending away the women, to prevent
this sort of disturbance. . . . Calm yourselves and try to be brave.”42
Whether or not Plato took women to be capable of wisdom, Socrates did
not expect bravery of either his wife or her female companions.
How might someone who endorses Plato’s apparent views about a
genderless soul account for the fact that so few women in the dialogues
engage in philosophical discussions, much less become philosophers?
Might there be something about the female body that makes it harder for
its soul to “purge” itself of bodily associations and “abide in reason”? A
Platonist could consistently believe that all souls are equal in capacities,
but that female bodies are harder for the genderless soul to escape.
Plato suggests something like this in the Timaeus, his mythic account of
how the world might have been created. In that dialogue, the narrator
spins a tale according to which the gods first created men and then
punished those “who lived lives of cowardice or injustice” by turning
them into women in their next lives.43 That is, the Timaeus suggests that
women are a degraded state of humanity, a kind of punishment that
results from improper behavior.
What about women’s bodies might make them so degraded? Enter
Aristotle who argues for a severe form of male-female hierarchical
difference. Teleology is the framing notion of Aristotle’s philosophy.
All living things are active and, in their agency, seek the good. In his
Nicomachean Ethics, human good is defined as rational activity in
accordance with virtue. So Aristotle’s right agency assumptions seem
straightforward enough: human beings have an innate capacity to seek
the good; Aristotle’s Ethics shows them how to do that. It would appear,
then, on the basis of his ethical works that Aristotle might be willing
to think of women as capable of acquiring virtue and in that sense of
getting life right.
Recent scholarship, however, suggests otherwise. Scholars have long
noted that Aristotle’s ethical works are written “for the freeborn, wellraised male citizen,” but in her book, From Natural Character to Moral
Virtue in Aristotle, Mariska Leunissen has dared to place Aristotle’s ethical
writings next to his biological works. In retrieving Aristotle’s views in
the latter, she reveals that in Aristotle’s words “women, barbarians, and
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‘natural slaves’” are ill-equipped to attain “full virtue and happiness.” The
reason for this is that such people face too many biological obstacles.44
The obstacles that women face arise from the biological reality that their
bodies are malformed, an inferiority that infects all aspects of their lives
and that fits neatly within Aristotle’s thoroughgoing teleology. The ancient
biologist explains that female bodies regularly shed blood because their
temperature is lower, which prevents them from using up their fluids.
The relative coldness of women correlates with their lower levels of
activity. Because male bodies are warmer than women, they tend to be
more active and so more powerful. Aristotle’s biological account of the
difference between female and male bodies is consistent with the best
medical science of his day (i.e., of Hippocrates and other early medical
theorists) and his own observations drawn from a variety of species. And
it is neatly consistent with other parts of his philosophical system.45
The power and genius of Aristotle’s sexism resides in his neat explanation
of the teleological importance of female inferiority: the fluids in a female
body are imbalanced precisely so that they can be made balanced in
bearing children. That is, the bodies of females are inferior to males for
the sake of human flourishing. Female health and the health of every
woman’s community depend on her physical inferiority and procreative
powers. In Aristotle’s words, “this is what it is to be male and female,
this is their difference in power.” We can begin to understand what led
western philosophy’s first systematic biologist to proclaim, “the female
is, as it were, a mutilated male.”
Nor is that all. Women’s physical deformity renders them morally
mutilated as well: “because the female is colder and less spirited than
the male a woman is more compassionate than a man . . . at the same
time, more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. She
is . . . less hopeful than man, more void of shame, falser of speech, more
deceptive . . . more difficult to rouse to action.”46
Let’s return to Aristotle’s right agency assumptions. His teleology insists
that every animal possesses a set of capacities, which it seeks to fulfill
and by means of which it becomes a good—i.e., flourishing—member of
its species. It looks like a woman’s soul might share the same cognitive
capacities as a man and so innately seek to get life right. But as a member
of a “morally unlucky group,” women’s inferior bodies prevent them
from developing their capacities in the way that men can.47 It follows
from their natural inferiority that they must be overseen and regulated.
Aristotle announces in his Politics: “As regards the sexes . . . the male
is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male the ruler and the
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female the subject.”48 In brief, for teleologists like Aristotle and his many
followers, the subordination of women was not just natural, but required
for the sake of humanity. As the influential second-century philosopher
of medicine, Galen of Pergamum, succinctly put it, “Indeed, you ought
not to think that our Creator would purposely make half the whole race
imperfect and, as it were mutilated, unless there was to be some great
advantage in such mutilation.”49
It is difficult to exaggerate the influence that Aristotle’s views about
women had on the history of philosophy and science. To be sure, at
every stage of western thought, there were women who were resourceful
within the restrictions forced upon them and who advocated for change.
In almost every era, there were moments when the tide might have
turned away from male-female hierarchical difference. But it never did.
The proponents for male superiority were always victorious. Aristotle’s
philosophy formed the curriculum for all European universities by
the fourteenth century and his biological writings were read—and
revered—until the end of the nineteenth century.50 As Seymour Haden,
a prominent Victorian gynecologist, wrote in 1867, “We, being men,
have our patients, who are women, at our mercy.”51 It is no wonder that
sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy are still so hard to shake.
Second Example: Kant and Racial Difference
I want to present very briefly another example of a canonical philosopher
whose commitment to social hierarchies has been ignored, although
this philosophical system lies outside the purview of my own research
and I have to rely on the work of others.
Scholarship on Kant offers a striking instance of invested ignorance.
Despite twentieth-century philosophers’ near obsession with Kant’s
thought, serious study and critique of his views on race only began in the
1990s.52 Charles Mills, Robert Bernasconi, and many others have recently
shown that Kant’s essays on race and their arguments for the inferiority
of Africans compared to Europeans are integral parts of his philosophy.53
That is, the retrieval of Kant’s views about racial hierarchies casts Kant’s
thought in a stark new light. Unless we philosophers want to persist in
our pernicious ignorance, it behooves us as scholars and teachers of the
great German system-builder to engage with the full spectrum of his
commitments and directly ask how such a thoroughgoing and brilliant
thinker could justify racial hierarchy. To be sure, one might draw on
some ideas in Kant’s philosophy without discussing his views on race,
but for those teaching his systematic philosophy, it no longer seems
appropriate to ignore a part of his system that has such contemporary
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importance. Whether or not (to return to demonstrators’ sign) silence
is violence in this case, it is surely a missed opportunity to provoke a
conversation that speaks to the concerns of our times.
The main lesson of this subsection is that when we apply contemporary
philosophical tools to canonical figures, not only do we help create a
more accurate account of philosophy’s past, we allow the past to speak
to contemporary interests and give ourselves the opportunity to enliven
our research and classrooms.
To be clear, I do not intend for us to dismiss a historical figure’s work on
the basis of a sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic remark. Finding
hateful remarks in historical texts is sadly not that surprising. Rather, my
purpose here is to encourage philosophical discussions—both inside
and outside our classrooms—about parts of canonical systems and to
provoke conversations about why those parts have been ignored and
what they tell us about topics like power, objectivity, and the social
construction of knowledge.
We will empower our discipline when we debate philosophically subtle
arguments for social hierarchies and provoke conversations about how
brilliant men might offer elaborate justifications for offensive positions,
how dominant people construct arguments to maintain their dominance,
and how people of power so often speak, in the words of Kimberlé
Crenshaw, with “an authoritative universal voice.”54
3.2 RETRIEVAL STRATEGY 2: INCLUSIVE HISTORY OF
PHILOSOPHY
The second strategy that I propose for using philosophy’s past to
empower its present is straightforward enough: tell a more accurate
story about the history of philosophy. Recent scholars have begun the
important work of excavating the philosophically rich writings of longignored women, people of color, Islamicate, and Jewish thinkers. Many
of these have significant contemporary relevance. The example that I
offer here is short, unexpected, and (necessarily) schematic.
Early Christianity was replete with women speaking out, teaching,
and even preaching. A battle ensued about the appropriateness of
women joining men as agents of knowledge and purveyors of truth.
Conservative voices turned to Platonist views about the need for the soul
to “dwell in itself,” which many combined with Aristotelian misogynist
ideas about the inferiority of female bodies, to conclude—as Aristotle
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had—that women were morally mutilated and must be subordinate to
men. The early Christian interpreter Paul the Apostle helped secure the
dominance of the conservative movement (and his own fame) when
he insisted, for example, “A woman must quietly receive instruction
with entire submissiveness” for “I do not allow a woman to teach or
exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.”55 As the prominent
second century philosopher, Christian theologian, and saint Clement
of Alexandria summarized the point, “to act is the mark of the man; to
suffer that of the woman.”56
And suffer they did. We have little evidence of philosophical writings by
women between the fourth and the eleventh centuries.57 Maybe they
didn’t write; maybe they wrote and their works were suppressed. But
beginning in the twelfth century, women began to do philosophy. Many
escaped the burden of husbands and families to join monasteries or
have themselves confined to rooms attached to churches where they
could contemplate God, the self, the means to ultimate knowledge,
and write about their insights. A clear sign that women were gaining
some epistemic agency is that powerful men began to complain. For
example, the Chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson, wrote
in the early fourteenth century: “the female sex is forbidden to teach in
public. . . . All women’s teaching, particularly formal teaching by word
and by writing, is to be held suspect. . . . The reason is clear:” given the
legacy of Eve, women “are easily seduced, and determined seducers,
and . . . are not proven to be witnesses to divine grace.”58
Most of us trained in philosophy have (at least) some peripheral
knowledge of great scholastic thinkers like Duns Scotus, William
of Ockham, and Thomas Aquinas, though rarely have we heard a
word about the brilliant women who were putting their own ideas to
parchment, though outside the prestige of universities. Until very
recently, philosophers have ignored the elaborate meditative exercises
written by women in which they propose innovative ways to get life
right.59
One of my current projects is to provoke a radical rethinking of the history
of philosophy between about 1200 and 1700. Among other things I want
to show that the sharp divide drawn between late medieval and early
modern philosophy is misguided and that late medieval meditative
authors—especially women—foresaw many of the ideas that are taken
to be distinctively “modern” (e.g., about the self and what are supposed
to be Enlightenment developments about human equality and dignity).
To be painfully brief, from Hildegard von Bingen in the twelfth century
to Anne Conway in the seventeenth century, women began to debate
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(what I have called) the “right agency assumptions,” question malefemale hierarchical difference, and add brand new requisites to getting
life right, namely, compassion and an attentiveness to the suffering
of others. As we have seen, Aristotle claimed that women are more
compassionate than men, and Clement of Alexandria maintained that
women’s nature is to suffer. Perhaps it is not surprising that, as women
increasingly engaged in questions about right agency, they interrogated
the role that compassion and suffering play in understanding the truths
of God’s world.
Consider, for example, Conway, whose only work (published in 1690)
is a radical commitment to the equality of all human beings. Her
arguments are too complicated to summarize here, so I’ll just mention
a couple of her main conclusions, which expose how extraordinary her
views are. According to Conway, all human beings are innately capable
of reason and have the capacity for compassion and love for all other
creatures. Over a series of lives, all creatures (even nonhuman ones!)
develop these capacities fully and so get life right. Regardless of the
apparent differences among human beings, “all peoples” of the world
will eventually attain human perfection: “it is the nature of every creature
to develop and progress toward ever greater perfection to infinity.”60
There ain’t no hierarchy here.
In this brief section, I’ve offered a small sampling of the vast unexplored
riches of philosophy’s past that speak to contemporary concerns about
sexism, misogyny, dignity, equality, epistemic injustices, and many
others. It would be exceedingly easy for us to retrieve these sorts of
ideas and use them to empower our courses and even our research.
Before turning to my conclusion, I want to call attention to a closely
related and equally significant retrieval project.
Melvin Rogers and I are co-editing a new book series, Oxford New
Histories of Philosophy. As Rogers summarizes the motivation behind
a major part of the series, “the widespread interest in African American
political philosophy and the broader category of Africana philosophy
is stimulated by a desire to understand better than we do [now] how
black people in the West have grappled with the problems of slavery,
colonialism, and empire and the underlying logic of white supremacy
alongside the emergence of the otherwise philosophically rich and noble
ideals of freedom and equality.” Scholars like Lawrie Balfour, Tommy
Curry, Chike Jeffers, Robert Gooding-Williams, Meena Krishnamurthy,
Neal Roberts, Tommie Shelby, Shetema Threadcraft, Vanessa Wills,
and many others are committed to retrieve understudied parts of
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philosophy’s past so as “to enrich and reimagine our moral and political
lives together.”61
SECTION 4. CONCLUSION
The American Philosophical Association was founded one hundred and
twenty years ago, in 1900. Its members have seen challenging times
to which they have sometimes responded successfully, and sometimes
not. As I prepare my January 2020 address for publication in the summer
of 2020, the world seems newly precarious and the need for change in
academic philosophy as urgent as ever. Will we members of the APA
speak more directly to our students and our times or will we not?
In this paper, I have tried to motivate you, my colleagues, to face the
challenges of our time and have offered some aid to those of you inclined
to do so. One of my main goals has been to show how easy it would be
to change the way we teach philosophy so as to make it more inclusive.
I’ve tried to show—however odd it might seem at first glance—that an
efficient way to empower current philosophy is to rethink its past and
reconceive our relation to it.
The standard approach to the history of philosophy has not only led
to an inaccurate account of that history, it has ignored plentiful and
provocative ideas directly relevant to the problems we face in our current
world. If we can muster the courage to look outside the triumphal-march
approach, hone new tools, and grapple with unfamiliar ideas, we will
discover exciting new topics, methods, and arguments that will enliven
our discipline. Given the extraordinary challenges of our world in 2020, I
would think we need all the help we can get.
Finally, I would like to address a question that I hope many of you are
asking: How might you start using a wider array of materials in your
courses? Although there is a growing movement among historians of
philosophy to create new narratives and make new materials available,
a lot of that work is still in progress. The following list contains what is
available now (or soon coming):
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy increasingly offers
concise accounts of contemporary philosophical tools honed by
experts in critical race theory, feminism, and related areas along
with an ever-increasing number of neat summaries of a diverse
group of philosophers.62
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The APA website contains valuable resources, including the
Diversity and Inclusivity Syllabus Collection.63
Peter Adamson’s podcast, Philosophy without Gaps, has
been broadening its scope to include useful summaries of
(and interviews with experts about) figures in the recesses of
philosophy’s gaps.
The website for my Center for New Narrative in Philosophy at
Columbia will become a clearinghouse for new materials, with
links to other sites64 in collaboration with Lisa Shapiro’s important
Extending New Narratives Project’s website.65
Andrew Janiak’s Project Vox is an excellent source for information
about early modern women and how to include them in courses,
with links to other sites.66
Marcy Lascano and Lisa Shapiro have edited an anthology of
early modern philosophy that includes texts by women and a
wide array of topics (e.g., debates about education and about
gender equality), which will be available in 2021.67
Many of the books in my series, Oxford Philosophical Concepts,
reimagine parts of philosophy’s past and contain chapters on
ideas drawn from Jewish, Islamicate, medieval women, people
of color, and other philosophical traditions.68
Melvin Rogers and I intend our book series, Oxford New Histories
of Philosophy, to be the go-to place for help in teaching and
researching understudied philosophers and ideas.69
The time is right to contribute to the future of our discipline.70
ACKNOWLEGMENTS
I dedicate this work to my dear friend and inspiration, Eileen O’Neill (1953–2017), who
set me (and many others) on the path to rethink philosophy’s past. Thanks very much
to Gary Ostertag and Lisa Shapiro for insightful comments and to Aminah HasanBirdwell and my sons, Harris and Josiah Mercer, for advice about details of the lecture,
from which this paper came. Thanks to Emilie Chapman Biggs for bibliography help.
Finally, thanks to Tommie Shelby whose introductory remarks before my lecture were
so generous (and amusing!) that I wasn’t even that nervous giving it!
NOTES
1.
88
For example, only 27 percent of those who responded to the 2019 APA
Strategic Planning Survey identified as female. See https://www.apaonline.
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org/global_engine/download.aspx?fileid=9D4850D6-AEBF-4ADE-82100DA16768F8BA&ext=pdf. On the low percentage of Black students, see Eric
Schwitzgebel, “Philosophy Undergraduate Majors Aren’t Very Black, But Neither
Are They as White as You Might Have Thought.” Schwitzgebel writes, e.g, “Black
students are substantially underrepresented.”
2.
Linda Martín Alcoff, “Presidential Address: Philosophy’s Civil Wars.”
3.
Jelani Cobb, “An American Spring of Reckoning.”
4.
It is easy to find recent overviews of these topics. See, e.g., Ian James Kidd, José
Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., eds. Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice
and articles in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
5.
David Fate Norton, “The Myth of ‘British Empiricism,” 331. I have reordered a
couple of the sentences in the translation.
6.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, VI i 489-90: L 110, VI
ii 279–80. For more citations, see Mercer, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and
Development, 27–49.
7.
See, e.g., Johann Christoph Sturm, Philosophia Eclectica h.e. Exercitationes
Academicae, 51–53; and Hermann Conring in correspondence with Leibniz
in Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, II i 84f. For a study of Descartes’s
Augustinianism, see Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine.
8.
See Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, 158. On
the similarity of his views to Aristotle’s, see Sturm, Philosophia Eclectica, 161–65;
and Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises, passim.
9.
Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheism, A8r.
10. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Die Philosophischen Schriften, 217.
11. Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 9. 2-3. Like
many of her contemporaries, Conway is highly critical of Descartes’s metaphysics
while acknowledging his contribution in natural philosophy, writing, e.g., “It
cannot be denied that Descartes taught many excellent and ingenious things
about the Mechanical part of natural operations, and how all natural motions
proceed according to mechanical laws and rules” (Conway, Principles, 9. 2 [ii]).
12. See my “The Methodology of the Meditations: Tradition and Innovation,” 23–47.
13. See my “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Ávila, Or Why We Should Work on Women in
the History of Philosophy,” 2539–55.
14. Although Kant was familiar with Descartes’s philosophy, he gives much more
attention to other early modern thinkers, especially Locke and Leibniz. E.g., in the
Preface of the Prolegomena, when discussing “the origin of metaphysics,” Kant
ignores Descartes, mentioning only the “Essays of Locke and Leibnitz” before
turning to Hume’s “attack upon it.” See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any
Future Metaphysics, Preface, 7. Thanks to Ian Proops for calling my attention to
Kant’s frequent omission of Descartes in his accounts of important figures in the
history of philosophy.
15. Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, Discours Préliminaire de l’encyclopédie, 74. The
Discours Préliminaire de l’encyclopédie was originally published in 1751.
Among other things, d’Alembert surveys the progress of human knowledge,
emphasizing Descartes as a mathematician and impartial observer of nature.
Thanks to Borhane Blili Hamelin for helping me track down some of this material.
16. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 175.
17. Arthur Schopenhauer, Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, chapter
2, §7, 14. Thanks to Victor Cosculluela for calling to my attention this passage.
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18. The six volumes of Kuno Fischer’s massive history was first published 1854–1871,
though went through multiple editions. Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neueren
Philosophie, 6 volumes.
19. Fischer’s account of Descartes’s life and philosophy was wildly popular. It was
translated and published in English in 1890. This translation is from History of
Modern Philosophy, Descartes and his School, trans. from the Third and Revised
German Edition by J. P. Gordy; ed. Noah Porter (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1890),
167-68.
20. Ernst Cassirer first published his Die Philosophie der Aufklärung in 1932.
Quotations here are from The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C.A.
Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton University Press, 1951), 28.
21. Étienne Gilson and Thomas Langan, Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant, ix-x.
Gilson also explains that Descartes intended “to build on ground cleared of the
ruins of medieval thought, a new palace of scientific philosophy in which man
could find lasting shelter,” 1.
22. Cassirer, Enlightenment, 6-7.
23. Ibid., ix.
24. Ibid., 9. Scholars are beginning to uncover the story behind the steady removal
of prominent women philosophers from the history of philosophy. E.g., Sabrina
Ebbersmeyer has recently shown that “women philosophers were widely
discussed in Germany prior to 1800,” but in the nineteenth century women
were increasingly ignored. See Ebbersmeyer, “From a ‘Memorable Place’ to
‘Drops in the Ocean’: On the Marginalization of Women Philosophers in German
Historiography of Philosophy,” 1.
25. Andrew Janiak and Christia Mercer, “Philosophy’s Gender Bias: For Too Long,
Scholars Say, Women Have Been Ignored.”
26. Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources (third ed.), x.
27. On sex and gender as they relate to issues of equality, see Desmond Clarke’s
anthology, The Equality of the Sexes, which contains works by Marie de Gournay,
François Poulain de la Barre, and Anna Maria van Schurman. For a recent paper
on epistemic injustice in the early modern period, see Allauren Samantha
Forbes, “Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice.” For one of the
most misogynistic texts ever written, see Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, ou De
l’éducation, first published in 1762.
28. I do not mean to suggest that we should project our own contemporary concerns
onto historical texts; rather, my goal is to motivate us to explore topics that have
contemporary interest, but that were also important to historical figures. In my
“The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy,” I discuss how we
historians need to “get things right,” while also exploring new topics and texts.
29. See Lisa Shapiro, “Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical Canon,” 365–83, esp.
sects. 3–4, for important examples of how updating the canon can be relevant to
contemporary philosophical discussions and our pedagogy.
30. See, e.g., Charles Mills, The Racial Contract; Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan,
eds., Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Special Issue: Feminist
Epistemologies of Ignorance; Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race
and the Epistemologies of Ignorance; Linda Martín Alcoff, “Epistemologies of
Ignorance: Three Types,” 39–57; Kristie Dotson, “Conceptualizing Epistemic
Oppression,” 115–38. For a helpful overview of the issues and a list of important
work, see Heidi Grasswick, “Feminist Social Epistemology.”
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31. Cynthia Townley, A Defense of Ignorance: Its Value for Knowers and Roles in
Feminist and Social Epistemologies, x. Also see Charles Mills, “White Ignorance.”
32. Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, 5.
33. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, 20.
34. See my “The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny,” 182–208.
35. There has been much excellent philosophical work on gender construction and
fluidity, and the difference between gender and biological sex. Aristotle and
other ancient philosophers of medicine conflate gender and sex. In the words
of one historian, these writers did not distinguish “between sex difference,
understood primarily as a physical category, and gender, understood primarily
as a social category.” Rather, they “tended to collapse the two concepts into a
single form of difference that they referred to indifferently as ‘sex’ (Latin sexus).”
See K. Park, “Medicine and Natural Philosophy: Naturalistic Traditions,” 84. To
the point of explicating Aristotle’s ideas, I adopt his terminology and employ his
binary of female/woman and male/man.
36. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle.
37. Peter Adamson, Health: A History in Oxford Philosophical Concepts, 1.
38. Jeffrey McDonough, Teleology: A History, Oxford Philosophical Concepts, 1.
39. Plato, Phaedo, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, 69a–69e.
40. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, 201D.
41. Plato, Phaedo, 60a.
42. Plato, Phaedo, 115b–118a.
43. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zevl, in Plato: Complete Works, 90e. The Timaeus
was the Platonic dialogue most widely available in medieval Europe.
44. Mariska Leunissen, From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle, xvi. For
an alternative account of Aristotle’s views, see Sophia M. Connell, Aristotle on
Female Animals. For an important study of the relation between Aristotle on
sexual difference and politics, see Marguerite Deslauriers. Aristotle on Sexual
Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics.
45. For more details about how this all works and citations to other literature, see my
“The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny,” 182–208.
46. Aristotle, History of Animals, in Complete Works, 608a33–b16.
47. Women are not alone in being morally “unlucky.” So are “natural slaves,” who
Aristotle compares to animals. See his Politics. trans. B. Jowett, in Complete
Works, vol. 2, 1280a31-32.
48. Aristotle, Politics, 1254b13–14. Aristotle goes on to write that “it is better for . . .
inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master” and “that some men
are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both
expedient and right” (1254b18–38).
49. Galen, On the Usefulness of Parts of the Body, II, 299; II, 630.
50. See my “The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny” for more details.
51. Quoted in H. King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient
Greece, 1.
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52. R. A. Judy, “Kant and the Negro”; Emmanuel Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea
of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” 200–35.
53. Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the
Enlightenment Construction of Race,” 11–36; Robert Bernasconi, “Will the Real
Kant Please Stand Up? The Challenge of Enlightenment Racism to the Study of
the History of Philosophy,” 13–22; Charles Mills, “Black Radical Kantianism”; and
Charles Mills, Kant’s Untermenschen, in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy,
169–93. Thanks to John Harcourt for helping me understand more about the
extensive scholarship on Kant on race.
54. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist
Politics,” 154.
55. New Testament, Paul, Timothy 2:12. See also Paul, Corinthians, 14:34: “Women
should remain silent in churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in
submission, as the law says.” At Corinthians 11: 2–9, Paul endorses a version of
Aristotle’s gendered teleology: “for I want you to understand that Christ is the
head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife. . . . Indeed, man was
not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the
sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man.”
56. Quoted in B. Holmes, Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy, 79.
57. In fact, early Christianity is replete with examples of relatively independent
ascetic women whose exceptionable virtue was considered masculine in its
strength. The subjugation of women in early medieval Christianity is a fascinating
though complicated story. For an introduction, see Judith Bennett and Ruth
Karras, Oxford Handbook of Women in Gender in Medieval Europe.
58. Quoted in Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, eds., A Book of Showings to the
Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 vols., 151.
59. For important new work on medieval women and references to previous work,
see Christina van Dyke, Philosophical Contemplation: Self-Knowledge, Reason,
Will, Persons, and Immortality in Medieval Women Mystics.
60. Conway, Principles, 7.2 [vi]. Both this translation and a book of mine on Conway’s
philosophy will appear in in the book series, Oxford New Histories of Philosophy.
61. Email correspondence, January 2, 2020.
62. https://plato.stanford.edu/.
63. https://www.apaonline.org/members/group_content_view.asp?group=
110430&id=380970.
64. https://scienceandsociety.columbia.edu/content/research-cluster-center-newnarratives-philosophy.
65. narratives-in-philosophy.columbia.edu
66. http://projectvox.library.duke.edu.
67. Marcy Lascano and Lisa Shapiro, Anthology of Early Modern Philosophy,
Broadview Press, 2021.
68. For more information, see http://www.oxford-philosophical-concepts.com. For
example, a forthcoming volume, Humility: A History, edited by Justin Steinberg,
will include a chapter by Chike Jeffers that focuses on Black pride and humility.
69. https://www.oxford-new-histories.com
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