EQUALITY AND PROPHECY

Abstract

As a young philosopher, a third-generation atheist and already a feminist, Michèle Le Doeuff read the Bible on her own, without anybody’s guidance and on the basis of an assumed intellectual equality between the texts and herself. Later on, her friendship with Pamela Sue Anderson also developed thanks to their firm belief that a member of a given faith and an atheist can tolerate and indeed respect each other to the full through a common involvement in feminist philosophy. All this defines a standpoint from which a host of questions can be raised and many topics transformed.

Keywords:

• equality
• feminism
• friendship
• secularism
• Solomon
• truth

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This paper was presented at the “Prophetic Word Conference,” 13–16 September 2017, at Regent’s Park College, Oxford.

2 John 8.32.

3 Ecclesiastes 1.14.

4 A few years later I met Vladimir Jankélévitch, who deemed that story simply unmentionable in polite company.

5 “Introduction” in The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Knopf, 2010) 11.

6 Dordrecht: Springer, 2010.

7 New Topics xi.

8 Only parents and only in the courtyard: this maximal limitation was due to TB prophylaxis, an important issue at the time.

9 Plato, Symposium, 201e, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato on Love, ed. C.D. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006) 63.

10 Francis Bacon, “Of Unity in Religion” in The Works of Francis Bacon, eds. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman, 1861) VI: 381.

11 Matthew 12.30. Contrast with Mark 9.40: “For he that is not against us is on our part.”

12 Letter, “Etsi non displiceat.”

13 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols., trans. Robert Drew Hicks (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980) 2: Book viii, section 41.

14 Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act II, Scene 3.