Charlotte Witt

Feminist History of Philosophy

The past two decades have seen an explosion of feminist writing on the philosophical canon, a development that has clear parallels in other disciplines like literature and art history. Since most of the writing is, in one way or another, critical of the tradition, a natural question to ask is: Why does the history of philosophy have importance for feminist philosophers? This question assumes that the history of philosophy is of importance for feminists, an assumption that is warranted by the sheer volume of recent feminist writing on the canon. This essay explores the different ways that feminist philosophers are interacting with the Western philosophical tradition. Feminist philosophers engaged in a project of re-reading and re-forming the philosophical canon have noticed two significant areas of concern. The first is the problem of historical exclusion. Feminist philosophers are faced with a tradition that believes that there are no women philosophers and, if there are any, they are unimportant. Of course, women are not entirely absent from the history of philosophy, and that brings us to the second challenge we face. Canonical philosophers have had plenty to say about women and what we are like. In general terms, we often find that philosophical norms like reason and objectivity are defined in contrast to matter, the irrational or whatever a given philosopher associates with women and the feminine. Our tradition tells us, either implicitly through images and metaphors, or explicitly in so many words, that philosophy itself, and its norms of reason and objectivity, exclude everything that is feminine or associated with women. In response, feminist philosophers have criticized both the historical exclusion of women from the philosophical tradition, and the negative

What Is Gender Essentialism

In this chapter I distinguish among different theories of gender essentialism and sketch out a taxonomy of gender essentialisms. I focus primarily on the difference between essentialism about a kind and essentialism about an individual. I propose that there is an interesting and useful form of gender essentialism that pertains to social individuals. And I argue that this form of gender essentialism, which I call uniessentialism, is not vulnerable to standard, feminist criticisms of gender essentialism.

Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon

A s graduate students in philosophy in the late 1970s, we learned that almost every philosopher who had ever lived was male, and what little we learned about what these male philosophers thought about women was negative and degrading. To be perfectly honest, I can recall studying exactly one female philosopher (G. E. M. Anscombe), and I can remember only one class discussion of G. W. F. Hegel’s views on women. I recall annoyance at my professor’s gleeful description of Hegel’s assessment of women and the secondary (yet necessary) theoretical role women play in his political thought, but we all shared the assumption that whatever Hegel thought about women just wasn’t all that important. For the most part what we learned about women in the history of philosophy was nothing. For the past six months I have had on my bookshelf twenty-four vol-

Ancient Philosophy and Modern Ideology: Introduction

How should we read ancient texts? What use should we make of them? The ancient philosophy community has always displayed some tension on these questions. Some ancient philosophers are strongly committed to the idea that the Greeks have something to say to us today: if they did not, they would not be worth studying. This line of thought leads to the idea that even in such areas as science, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mathematics, there is something valuable to be gained by studying, for example, the Pythagoreans, the Hippocratics, Plato, and Aristotle. Others believe that the value of ancient texts has nothing to do with their contemporary relevance. Platos Timaeus and Aristotles Generation of Animals are worth studying for the internal complexity of the ideas they express, the relationship to evidence, the light they throw on ancient intellectual goals, and so on. Nowhere is this tension more evident than in the study of ancient ethics and politics. In this area, it is much more plausible than in science or mathematics that the ancients might have had insights that have escaped us today. This puts pressure on both lines of thought mentioned above. For those who think that the ancients can be treated as participants in our own debates, the challenge is to say why their acceptance of repugnant institutions like slavery and conquest should not simply rule them out of court. For those who think that ancient thought has no contemporary relevance, the problem is to show how Greek theories of virtue and of the state have been rendered obsolete by contemporary treatments of the same subject, and no longer have relevance. This volume was inspired by the trend in recent years of overt political criticisms, interpretations, assessments and co-options of classical philo-

Substance among Other Categories.

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Substance and other categories 2. Historically prominent accounts of substance 3. Collectionist theories of substance 4. The independence criterion of substance 5. Souls and bodies Appendix 1: the concrete-abstract distinction Appendix 2: Continuous space and time and their parts: a defense of an Aristotelian account Index.