THE CONCERN WITH TRUTH, SENSE, ET AL. – ANDROCENTRIC OR ANTHROPOCENTRIC?

Abstract

In her book Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, Pamela Sue Anderson generously discusses some of my ideas. In particular, she considers my views about a certain kind of philosophical nonsense. She argues that I am not interested in engaging seriously with such nonsense; and that my not being interested in engaging seriously with it betrays my gender. This essay is a response to Anderson’s discussion. I argue that she is guilty of certain errors, both exegetical and philosophical. In the course of doing so, I raise some issues about what we can aspire to as philosophers. These issues in turn bear on the relation between philosophy and the feminine, between philosophy and the masculine, and between philosophy and the human. Towards the end of my essay I urge that the third of these relations – the relation between philosophy and the human – is of far greater significance than either of the other two.

Keywords:

• feminine
• human
• masculine
• nonsense
• philosophy

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. All unaccompanied references will be to this book.

2 See, for example, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender, Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic, 2000); Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999); Mari Mikkola, “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, available <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/feminism-gender/> (accessed 25 Nov. 2019).

3 See, for example, Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006) 129–30, 140–41. This idea of a thick concept structures much of chapter 6 of Anderson’s book. See, for example, 113.

4 What follows draws principally on my Points of View (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997).

5 A possible exception is someone who has knowledge of a necessary truth: see my “Ineffability and Nonsense” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 77 (2003): 169–93 n. 16. I shall ignore that complication in what follows.

6 This is what Anderson is alluding to at 70, where she writes: “According to Moore, ineffability is ‘shown’ in ‘images of infinitude,’” though I would not express it like that. For clarification of my use of the terminology of “showing,” see Points of View chapter 7, esp. section 3.

7 Cf. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) 508.

8 Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees; trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) section XII.

9 “Arguing with Derrida” in Arguing with Derrida, ed. Simon Glendinning (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) 59.

10 Jacques Derrida, “Response to Moore” in Arguing with Derrida 84.

11 See Points of View 101–02, 108–09.

12 See Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1986) 15.

13 See Points of View 98–99.

14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness (London: Routledge, 1961).

15 I have another, entirely unrelated and frivolous reason for noting this error in Anderson’s text. It reminds me of a bizarre mistake of predictive texting in a message that Anderson once sent me, which resulted in much mutual hilarity. In response to my question whether she was able to accompany me to some event at short notice, instead of replying that she could not because she had a graduate student round helping her to proofread, she replied that she could not because she had a graduate student round helping her to procreate.

16 Op. cit. in note 2. For discussion of some of the issues that arise here, see Natalie Stoljar, “Essence, Identity and the Concept of Woman” in Philosophical Topics 23 (1995): 261–93; Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Studies in Feminist Philosophy) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006).

17 See 109.

18 One of Anderson’s own concerns is with the nature of philosophy. Her specific focus is the philosophy of religion; but it can scarcely be denied that this has, and is intended to have, repercussions for the discipline as a whole: cf. 47–48.

19 See Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,” reprinted in his Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. A.W. Moore (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006). I try to defend the view in “Sense-Making from a Human Point of View” in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, eds. Giuseppina D’Oro and Søren Overgaard (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017).

20 See Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan; trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002) Pt. II, Props. 37 and 40, Scholium 2. See also ibid. Pt. IV, Props. 35–37 (couched admittedly in what would now be classified as sexist terminology).