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“What Do Women Want in a Feminist History of Philosophy?”

This paper began as a title, and it still may be little more than a title, but at least,

it’s a title whose allusions you may appreciate. In “What Do Women Want in a Moral

Theory?,” Annette Baier proposed that women would, or should, or do want an account

of appropriate trust. I don’t plan to give an answer like hers, because I don’t think that

there is any one thing that we should or do want from our critical histories of philosophy.

Different approaches can be fruitful without requiring reducibility to one, or even much

coherence among the many. My main question is also different from Annette’s: in 1985,

she wondered “what differences one should expect in the moral philosophy done by

women,” or more exactly, “what key concept, or guiding motif, might hold together the

structure of a moral theory hypothetically produced by a reflective woman, Gilligan-style,

who has taken up moral theorizing as a calling?” (1985: 55). To be frank, I’m a bit

suspicious of the Gilliganesque frame;1 in moving from empirical regularities about

women’s moral intuitions to normative theory, it seems to miss a crucial critical step. My

starting question would be better phrased as what should we want from a feminist history

of philosophy? I (ahem) trust that Annette would approve this question – after all, she

credits Hume with her first thoughts about trust.2

1Particularly insofar as it aims to correct exclusionary biases of normative ethical theory by considering the regularities supposedly distinguishing women’s moral intuitions from those typical of men. But our intuitions – and the theorist’s decisions about salient differences – are surely shaped by ideologically-layered preferences and desires, and so this project seems to miss a crucial, critical step. 2By her own reckoning, her “trust in the concept of trust” was grounded by “reconstructing [Hume’s] account of the artifices of justice as an account of the progressive enlargement of a climate of trust,” and so, I (ahem) trust that she would be sympathetically interested in the uses and abuses women can make of the history of philosophy

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Now, there are really two questions here: what should feminists hope to gain from

attention to the history of philosophy, and what should historians of philosophy hope to

gain from feminist approaches? The latter question is the easy one. What should

historians of philosophy learn? Why, to do our job better – we will discover new

materials to work on, win new tools for understanding the texts better, craft new and

fruitful questions for the history, and generally gain insight into the profiles of thought

we investigate. Admitting this requires only a few minor concessions. Women appear in

all sorts of visible and barely visible ways in the history of philosophy, both as topics and

makers – once you start looking for them. More tendentiously (although not by much),

gendered notions are ubiquitous in the history of philosophy, shaping patterns of thought,

informing values in often-unacknowledged ways, and generally “thickening” seemingly

neutral concepts. Bringing attention to the gendering of concepts, practices and values

gives historians resources of interpretation not otherwise available. Moreover, feminist

approaches have developed tools of interpretation profitable for any reader of a

historically rich text. One such is what I call “reading between the cracks:” that is, a kind

of critical reading that – without ignoring the letter of the text -- is attuned to what is not

highlighted in current interpretations, and in so doing, practices a certain contrariness

towards conventional wisdom about the author and what has been made of the works. In

that sense, it goes against the grain of current reception. This practice of reading between

the cracks may sometimes go beyond authorial intentions,3 but it also allows us to

3Invoking the notion of authorial intention is subject to multiple forms of ambiguity. Let me just say that I intend it here (!) to indicate a genuinely possible goal of reading, not the kind of inaccessible intention criticized (inconsistently) in, e.g., Beardsley’s & Wimsatt’s “The Intentional Fallacy.” But in suggesting that we might sometimes read a text in a way that is not (merely) tied to authorial intention, I mean something more robust than the sort of deciphering of

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exercise our imaginations about what could be made out of the texts. In short, feminist

approaches give us new ways of seeing the history of philosophy; if we care about the

history of philosophy, we should welcome new ways of seeing. And as human beings

(which presumably some historians of philosophy are), we should care about furthering at

least intellectual gender-justice and gender-equality.

But the other question, what feminists might gain from the history of philosophy,

is trickier. I can’t argue that we feminists should care about the history of philosophy

above all else – in place of, say, ending sexual harassment, or providing the conditions

for gender dignity, or bringin’ down the man. But that’s not what’s at issue; feminist

activity is a big enough tent to cover much specialization and division of labor. Feminist

historians of philosophy have done a lot to reshape the canon, uncovering forerunners and

especially foremothers, and thereby offering women not just a room, but a bit of

historical space of our own. Nonetheless, it is a live question why, or even whether

feminists should remain interested in the philosophy of canonical figures, most of whom

are dead white old men (henceforth DWOMs). [I use this acronym to prove the rigor of

my philosophy, and because I am childish enough to think it’s funny.] Once upon a time,

the negative justifications for attention to the DWOMs were clear enough. In that

benighted age, faced with assumptions that sexism and outright misogyny had little

purchase in philosophy, it was important to “document and deplore” (as Louise Antony &

Charlotte Witt put it).4 Doing so provided evidence of something like a hostile work

environment – proof for those folks who, despite being of reasonably good will, needed

speaker meaning that is required to determine that the text is written in English (or Latin, French, etc.), that such-and-such a string of words is a question, assertion, etc., and the like. 4The phrase comes from Louise Antony’s & Charlotte Witt’s introduction to A Mind of One’s Own (Westview: 1993), p. xiii.

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convincing that the paucity of women in philosophy is not due to choice, or an inherent

mismatch between philosophical subject matter or practices and gender identity, or some

other fairly benign explanation. Some still may not get it, but not for lack of evidence.

So, should feminists continue to pay more than passing attention to the history of

philosophy, especially to the history of DWOM-ish philosophy? I want to argue that we

should, but less in order to document and deplore than to “reinterpret and redeploy.” I

offer this somewhat cutesy alliteration to capture how at least some contemporary

feminist philosophers now approach history. Lisa Shapiro’s work on the correspondence

of Descartes and Elisabeth stands as an excellent example here. In a different vein,

Penelope Deutscher remarks on how certain “new narratives of the history of philosophy,”

have moved from “negative objections” (2000, p. 15) to “a therapeutic assessment of

[feminism’s] relationship to the history of philosophy”. Genevieve Lloyd and Moira

Gatens likewise express hopes for a “positive appropriation” of Spinoza’s “alternative

voice” for reconceptualizing current concepts (of the imaginary). They also describe their

sheer “fascination” with Spinoza, his “magnetism,” and the “hilariously funny” quality of

his writing. He is, Gatens insists, a “real pleasure” to read (pp. 41, 43). More recently,

Rae Langton refers to various chapters in the history of philosophy to show how “many

women have . . . found in philosophy a source of joyful challenge and liberation” (NY

Times, “The Disappearing Women,” 4 September 2013). In short, a number of feminist

philosophers are actively finding resources for intellectual imagination in the history of

philosophy, as well as finding episodes in the history to be worthy objects of love and

pleasure. This may not be a new sentiment, but it is a bit of a novelty to admit it in public.

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One of the first to do so was Annette Baier, and I think her example is part of what

encouraged the feminist love for the history of philosophy to dare speak its name.

To be sure, pleasures can be suspect, since oppression can operate through desire-

production just as effectively as through repression. But when committed feminists

commend the history of philosophy for its intellectual delights, I think those intellectual

pleasures should not be denied lightly. They deserve respect and so, I can now focus my

question further: what should we feminists who love the history of philosophy want from

it? And to that, I propose what might seem like an odd answer: feminist historians of

philosophy, at least at this point and time, should want good, nuanced histories of

reception – accounts that track the twists and turns taken by the meanings and

significance attributed to philosophical works over time. If feminist interpretation aims at

reading between the cracks, at a kind of critique, understanding reception shows us where

various fissures are. It also furthers meta-historical appreciation of the sheer fluidity, or if

you like, “instability,” of patterns of thought. Unless you are convinced that there must be

only One True Reading of the philosophies in our background, “instability” of this kind is

not a bad thing. It offers a chance not only to free ourselves from the shackles of the

oppressive past, but to imagine new and liberating configurations of thought. For

imagining is rarely done in a vacuum; the reinterpreting and redeploying of available

philosophical questions, concepts, metaphors and practices seems an indispensable

starting point – maybe a condition of intelligibility. What is crucial, though, is to receive

them critically – and for that too, a history of reception may be indispensable.

To illustrate what I have in mind, I want to turn – briefly – to some episodes in

the history of early modern DWOM-ish philosophy – an area that lacks the kind of

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detailed histories of reception we have for, e.g., Aristotelian philosophy, or perhaps for

Kant. I particularly want to contrast two philosophers whose recent reception by feminist

theorists seems to offer the starkest of stark contrasts: Descartes and Hume. Descartes (or

“Descartes”) has come in for particularly vehement criticism; Hume has received mixed

reviews, but more and more, is considered unusually feminist-friendly, a “friend from the

past,”5 the “reflective woman’s epistemologist” as well as “the women’s moral theorist,”6

and both “man of reason and woman’s philosopher.”7 This development owes a great

deal to Annette’s advocacy. But it may sometimes fall into traps, errors that a good

history of reception should correct. (This is when the gloves come off.)

First, though, it’s important to be clear what the object of feminist critical history

is. Now, as both his published and private writings attest, the historical Descartes

accorded many women an exemplary degree of respect, and engaged with them on terms

of remarkable intellectual equality. In the case of Elisabeth of Bohemia, he forged a

philosophic partnership that may have been unequalled until John Stuart Mill met Harriet

Taylor. (And as Lisa Shapiro has argued, one that exemplifies a distinctive practice of

philosophy.) He also took pains – such as publishing the Discourse in French – to make

his work accessible to women (and others without a Scholastic education). In contrast,

Hume indulges in plenty of remarks that are more galling than heartwarming,”8 They are

5As Andrea Nye calls him, Feminism and Modern Philosophy (Routledge: 2004), p. 99. 6These titles come from the articles by Annette Baier, “Hume, the Reflective Women’s Epistemologist” and “Hume, the Women’s Moral Theorist?,” in Moral Prejudices (Harvard U. Press: 1994). The first is also reprinted in Feminist Interpretations of Hume, ed. A. Jaap Jacobsen (Penn State U. Press: 2000). 7From Don Garrett, “Hume as ‘Man of Reason’ and ‘Women’s Philosopher’,” in Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, ed. by C. Witt and L. Alanen (Kluwer: 2004). 8The worst may appear in such early essays as the “Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour.” Here Hume contrasts the “solid and serious” friendships (presumably between men)

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not as bad as his insistently offensive discussion of the different complexions of man in

the footnote to “Of National Characters,”9 but comments such as those about how “nature”

has given men the “superiority” over “feminine softness and modesty” in “Of the Rise

and Progress in the Arts and Sciences”10 can set one’s teeth on edge. Hume may be better

than some others of his time, but he is of his time. And even in his time, there were

alternative attitudes available, particularly to those acquainted with upper-class French

sexual mores, as Hume was.11 (For this, and other reasons, the kind of dismissive

comment that so-and-so is “typical of his time” seems a pretty feeble excuse.) If the

practice of feminist recovery from the history of philosophy were a matter of deciding

which DWOM would – in fact – make a decent colleague, Descartes ends up looking

pretty good – and his grouchy egalitarianism might well go down easier in faculty

meetings than Hume’s gallantry.12

But that is not the aim of feminist historical critiques – the point is not (simply) to

evaluate individual attitudes, psychology, or personal virtue, nor to identify would-be

friends, allies, or opponents. So, what are we trying to do? Well, this brings us back to

what historians of philosophy can learn from feminist philosophers: how to undertake

critique. “Critique” has many senses, but I take it that critique, in general, “aims to

with the “capricious passion” of chivalric love, which involves a “curious reversement of the order of nature” between the sexes, in making women “the superior.” 9Our appreciation of how offensive it was can increase with attention to reception, and particularly through witnessing its condemnation by such forward-looking contemporaries as Lord Monboddo, and most notably, James Beattie. 10This is so even though the essay argues for a much different and more important place for chivalry and gallantry than the earlier essay. 11Let me add that the sort of dismissive comment that so-and-so is “typical of his time” is but a feeble excuse without an account of context and reception, and one that often crumbles in the face of detailed knowledge of reception. 12But it would still be preferable to the attitudes of many other philosophers; I don’t think I’d much care to sit across the conference table from Rousseau, or Schopenhauer.

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uncover what lies at the limits of consciousness, or is in the service of false consciousness,

or is part of the structure of the unconscious” – in the case of history of philosophy, that

is what is at the limits of consciousness, or part of false consciousness, etc., of the texts

and practices that make it up.13 It’s a notion applicable first and foremost to texts and

practices, rather than individuals, and as such goes beyond any but the thinnest notion of

authorial intention14. For many feminist critiques have been concerned with how a

philosophy might stand in relation to a sexist ideology. And the measure of success for an

ideology-critique is not how well it captures anybody’s intentions – much less intentions

to advance the ideology. In being published, or simply publicized, thought becomes

public property. It is subject to the forces that shape, and often deform public spaces; it

can, in turn, become one of those forces. Those forces and their effects form the target for

critique.

Now critique, as I understand it, need not be solely negative: it can read between

the cracks, and against the grain, to come up with strategies of thought not recognized in

the texts, even ones that their authors would neither countenance, nor understand. But

doing so is a delicate matter. To illustrate, consider Annette’s article “Hume, the

Reflective Woman’s Epistemologist,” which opens with the remark that “recent feminist

work in epistemology has emphasized some themes that I find also in Hume’s writings on

epistemology” (Feminist Interpretations of Hume, p. 19). Now, Annette goes on to offer

reasons why Hume might be accorded the status of “an unwitting virtual woman” (p. 22).

But that first move remains worrisome: it risks giving Hume a free pass simply because 13See A. Schmitter, “The Passionate Intellect: Reading the Non-Opposition of Reason and Emotions in Descartes,” in Persons and Passions: Essays in Honor of Annette Baier (U. of Notre Dame Press: 2005). 14I do not think that critique can be a matter of individual psychologies, even if we could raise the DWOMs by some feat of intellectual séance.

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he values aspects of human life that many contemporary feminist theorists

(understandably) hold dear. 15 But it is not enough to claim, for example, that feminist

epistemologists favor an expanded view of “reason,” and so does Hume, or that feminist

moral philosophers seek to give emotion an important role in our practical deliberations,

and so does Hume.16 Mere similarities of endorsements, even similarities in patterns of

endorsements, are not enough to show Hume’s feminist bona fides.

Now, one might well argue that such similarities show that Hume rejects the

moves of “traditional” philosophy, which many feminists (not implausibly) take to be

woman- and feminist-unfriendly. But this ploy too is treacherous, particularly when it

rests on the often-expressed view that “traditional philosophy” is shot through with a set

of binary and hierarchically organized oppositions – oppositions that fundamentally take

the form one/other, or male/female. On this view, these oppositions inform broad swaths

of supposedly neutral thought, gendering it, thickening it with (pseudo-) content, and

valorizing concepts in suspect, yet hard-to-dislodge ways. This view underlies the vast

majority of screeds directed at Descartes: which take him either to stand centrally in a

long tradition gendering reason as male, and authorizing its dominance over other

(concomitantly feminized) powers and faculties, or yet worse, to instigate a “flight to

objectivity” that separates itself from the feminine and constitutes itself through division

and exclusion.17

15In particular, she finds important structural analogies between outsider positions that might give Hume the status of “an unwitting virtual woman” (p. 22). 16See Nye, and perhaps Korsmeyer (below). 17For a few examples, see G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy (Routledge: 1993), and S. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (SUNY Press: 1987).

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Now, attention to such gendered, and evaluatively-loaded oppositions has been

incredibly useful to feminist philosophy, starting (at least) with Simone de Beauvoir’s

analysis of how (sexist) subjectivity is constituted through its contrast with (and

dependence on) an unfree other.18 Attention to such oppositions has provided an

interpretive framework that fits many, many cases in the history of philosophy, ranging

from the explicitly dualistically structured (the Pythagoreans, or in some sense, Hegel) to

the much less obvious (Aristotle). What gives me pause is the sweeping view that some

relatively substantive dualism structures all “traditional” philosophy. This seems

indefensible on several counts: first, it presents an overly simplistic, monolithic view of

the history of philosophy. Second, it presents an overly simplistic, monolithic view of

dualisms. Last, and perhaps most problematically, it minimizes the stubborn resilience of

sexism.

Let me take these points in order. First, I doubt that the notion of “traditional

philosophy” is a useful one. Not only is it usually under-described, it seems incorrectly to

presuppose some relatively constant body of thought. On that supposition, exceptions

appear only as deviations from a largely uniform “tradition.” The historian of philosophy

in me finds that thought ludicrous. Of course, we should allow genuine innovations in

human thinking, but not by supposing that everybody has hitherto thought the same thing.

The history of philosophy encompasses a remarkable diversity of thought. That is much

of its wonder and challenge: it shows people thinking in ways we would not have

imagined on our own, and making sense of those ways of thinking in ways we would not

have imagined on our own. But thoughts that have been previously unthought, or at least 18The move is nicely analyzed in Haslanger, "Feminist Metaphysics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/feminism-metaphysics/>.

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unanticipated, are not easy to come by. Even deciding whether they are genuinely new is

not so easy. Of course, there are histories: conceptual trails to follow, genealogies to trace,

archeologies to uncover. Following the history is one, very important way of uncovering

and making sense of what we could not think of on our own. Historians of philosophy,

above all, should appreciate that concepts change, networks of concepts change, and the

structure of networks of concepts change – and change radically.

Another objectionable move is to lump all distinctions together as manifestations

of the same gendered binary oppositions. Part of the force of the critique of gendered

conceptual oppositions lies in understanding that concepts gain their contents in no small

part from their relations to a network of other concepts. As such, we cannot treat all

dualisms as just the same, while ignoring the networks in which they are found. There

may be linkages among them, but one/other is still not just the same as male/female;

male/female not just the same as mind/body; mind/body not just the same as

reason/emotion; reason/emotion not just the same as Cartesian/Humean . . . or left-

brain/right-brain, blue-state/red-state, cat-person/dog-person, etc., etc.19 To ignore these

differences is to fall into some empty and rigid faux-structuralism, and to avoid the hard

work of figuring out what concepts and networks of concepts are actually in play.

Even when we seem to find familiar concepts, they may not line up in the same

dismal way. Consider the old chestnut opposing a valorized reason to feminized emotion.

For early modern philosophy, this is a glaring anachronism, since the preferred term is

never “emotion,” but “passion,” “affection,” or “sentiment.” And vocabulary counts. To 19For instance, Carolyn Korsmeyer claims that Plato shows “a hierarchy of values that rank the eternal, abstract, intellectual world of ideal forms over the transient, particular, sensuous world of physical objects. This hierarchy supports the dualism between mind and body that is deeply correlated with gender asymmetry” (“Feminist Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Without further explanation, this strikes me as hasty and anachronistic.

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be sure, “passion” and “affection” carry explicit ontological resonances with passivity,

modification, and receptivity, and many early moderns exploit that connection. Yet the

concepts are often gendered quite differently from what we might expect. Consider

Hobbes, who sometimes (oddly) opposes reason to passion, commending reason through

contrast to the “unreliable and idiosyncratic” nature of passion.20 But not only is passion

the mover and shaker in human affairs for Hobbes, his paradigm example of a passion

(particularly in the early work) is “glory:” “that passion which proceedeth from the

imagination or conception of our own power, above the power of him that contendeth

with us” (Elements of Law 9.1). Now, either this passion is not gendered female, or other

parts of the network are going to be pretty different from what we expect (or both). To

take another early example, Sir Kenelm Digby also harps on the conflict between reason

and the passions, using vivid and highly personified descriptions. But his favored vehicle

of description is a military metaphor – a sea-battle, in fact. He uses the metaphor to

bolster the normative pretensions of reason by opposing the “legitimate” and

“governmental” forces of reason against the “rebel” forces of passion. Again this is not a

metaphor that lends itself to the appropriate form of gendering (the rebels are not

identified with Amazons, witches, or Mad Meg). Moving ahead quite a bit, Mary

Wollstonecraft comments explicitly on then-current gendered associations of “passion”

and “sentiment,” lamenting that the upbringing of women, puts them “more under the

influence of sentiments than passions” (Wollstonecraft 1792: 49, cf. 152). Sentiment, she

states flatly, is merely “a softer phrase for sensuality” (Wollstonecraft 1792: 41, 61).

20Carolyn Korsmeyer claims this as how emotion is “standardly regarded,” in “Perceptions, Pleasures, Parts: Considering Aesthetics,” in Philosophy in a Feminist Voice (Princeton: 1998), p. 147.

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Passions, however, are signs of an enlarged imagination and force of character, although

we do need to struggle with them to form our characters. In this case, we find less a

dualism than a ménage-a-trois of concepts. I offer this grab-bag of examples to show that

even when we find some sort of opposition between reason and emotion, it’s not just your

grandparent’s form of gendering.

Lastly, the tendency to think that pernicious gendering is a matter of an

intrinsically stable, consistent and constant dualist structure makes it seem that

overturning that structure would purge philosophy of the conceptual roots of sexism. But

that’s too easy. Concepts change, networks of concepts change, and the structure of

networks of concepts change. Yet sexism remains. Even the old dualist chestnuts may

remain, albeit forming and reforming to adapt to changes in content. For in fact, those

perniciously gendered conceptual oppositions float remarkably free of any particular

content. Perhaps a thought revolution could invert the values attached to reason and

emotion. But that might merely shift the gendering of the concepts, not the valorizations

attached to the genderings. That’s part of the stubborn staying power of conceptual

gendering: it doesn’t offer itself as a fixed target, and is not bound to respect either

consistency or facts. Yet it remains remarkably resilient, laying double- and triple-bind

traps for both the wary and unwary. Pernicious gendering may even float free of the

structure of oppositions. I’m unconvinced that such pernicious gendering of concepts

itself is always a matter of “dualizing,” as if the problem were having two related

concepts, rather than three, or seven, or whatever. The problem is not the number two;

it’s oppression, inequality, injustice, and unfreedom.

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Descartes has, I think, suffered the most damage from assumptions of the

hegemenic nature of “traditional” dualism. Now many of us have disputed his bad

reputation on both textual and contextual grounds. But that strategy may fall flat, for

many of the critics argue that it is not Descartes, the individual (or individual set of texts),

it is the way that his philosophy has been taken up by “tradition” that is the object of

critique. For instance, Genevieve Lloyd admits that the “prevailing thought patterns,” she

takes to be “thoroughly formed through Cartesian philosophy,” are probably less the

work of the historical Descartes” than the result of how his thought was “filtered into the

culture.” (pp. 41-2)21 I’ve criticized this move elsewhere on the grounds that it supposes

an odd, almost magical view of the causality of tradition. Here, though, I want to take a

different tack by exploring other ways Cartesian philosophy might be taken up in a

tradition, particularly as a resource for egalitarian ideals.22 So, as proof of the feminist

possibilities of Cartesianism, I offer an actual text: François Poullain de la Barre’s 1673

work, De l'Égalité des Deux Sexes: Discours physique et moral où l'on voit l'importance

de se défaire des préjugés [On the Equality of both Sexes: A Physical and Moral

Discourse, which shows the importance of ridding oneself of Prejudices].23 In this work,

Poullain draws on all sorts of Cartesian themes for anti-misogynistic and egalitarian ends,

particularly by exploiting the ideal of general epistemic accessibility informing Cartesian

21 Susan Bordo and James Wenders make similar points. 22The later seventeenth-century phenomenon of les Cartesiennes (intellectual and feminist salonistes) offer another particularly dramatic example of these possibilities. Although it offers a very mixed evaluation of it, Erica Harth’s Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Cornell U. Press: 1992) covers the history of the late 17th century reception of Cartesianism among women and feminist men. 23 Poullain de la Barre’s later works pose hermeneutic puzzles.

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notions of proper method.24 The centerpiece of his case is that women have all the

abilities that the possession of a mind can confer, for “the mind needs only discernment

and judgment in all its undertakings” (p. 96). And by relying on the simplicity and unity

that Cartesian substance dualism ascribes to our mental acts, Poullain argues (famously)

that the “mind has no sex.”

Here, the dualist division between the qualities of mind and body furthers

Poullain’s case, since he concedes (at least to begin) that men are “the stronger and

physically superior sex” (p. 56):25 But “since the mind merely gives its consent, and does

so in exactly the same way in everyone, we can conclude that it has no sex” (p. 82). What

allows for proper consent is simply discernment and judgment, and for this reason,

“anyone who has these qualities in one discipline can easily apply them to another” (p.

96). On this basis, Poullain offers a rapid-fire recital of the impeccable qualifications of

women for various occupations: barristers (p. 66), judges (99), theologians, doctors, and

teachers (pp. 67, 96), any and all ecclesiastical positions (p. 97), and supreme political

authority (p. 98). Poullain does not go so far as to recommend that women be common

footsoldiers; rather he insists “they can be generals in the army (p. 98). Even more of the

treatise is devoted to urging women’s fitness for intellectual labors, including the study of

metaphysics, physics, logic, and mathematics (pp. 83-6). Poullain does single out a few

disciplines for seeming to pose particular difficulties for women: namely, “learning

languages, [and] moral philosophy.” (Irony!) But he argues that their seeming difficulty

24This is a feature of what Amelie Rorty has dubbed “epistemic egalitarianism” – that is the Cartesian view that a measure of evident reasonings is their accessibility to attentive minds without specialized knowledge. 25In fact, Poullain does not concede full physical superiority to men. In the first place, his DIY anthropology makes the effects of pregnancy that physical differences that matter most. Later in the work, he contends that physical strength is relatively unimportant in humans, and far from the only physical measure of worth.

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arises only because these fields have been treated as the special province of experts. Were

they, instead, related “to that one general science” underlying all sciences (p. 85), they

would be accessible to all, and the better for it.

Poullain also pulls in Cartesian theories of error to explain how sexism became

rampant. “The common people and most scholars,” he maintains, do not apply the

Cartesian “rule of truth,” and so they fall into “the common prejudice” (2002, pp. 50-1).

Poullain offers a kind of DIY anthropology to trace the causal history by which

unsupported opinions about women’s inability came to prevail, which through custom

and habit, hardened into a “prejudice” that now seems like common sense (p. 79). In this

context, Poullain uses the Cartesian pejorative “prejudice” in something like its modern

social-political sense. He also, I think, comes surprisingly close to our notion of implicit

bias, at least insofar as implicit bias comprises commitments, expectations and

preferences that were never consciously adopted, yet stubbornly resist uprooting. Poullain

first imagines how things might be had we grown up with a completely different set of

practices and history: “If,” he says, “women had a hand in creating states and setting up

their various institutions, then we would be as used to seeing them in office as they are to

seeing us, and we would be no more surprised to see them in the seat of justice than to

meet them in a shop” (p. 54) But this is not our experience at all, and the sheer familiarity

and absence of surprise afforded by repeated experience ossifies into a habit of “thought,”

furthered by motives of self-satisfaction and self-justification. Thus Poullain argues that

the “reasoning [about the superiority of men] derives from the opinion we have of the

fair-mindedness of our sex and from a false idea we have of custom: if something is well

established, then we think it must be right.” As these passages show, Poullain tends to use

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seemingly cognitive verbs, such as “reasoning” and “thinking.” But I don’t think we

should make too much of this linguistic quirk. For he also insists that “reason has always

been the weakest element in our decisions, and all stories seem to have been made up for

the sole purpose of demonstrating what we see in any lifetime. . . . (p. 56). It is our

habitual and implicit patterns of commitments that drive our conscious attempts at

justification, not the other way around. I don’t want to overstate the case here, but these

considerations may blunt some of Langton’s recent claim that “Bias is harder to notice

than Descartes expected.” At least one Cartesian noticed it, and diagnosed it using

Cartesian tools.

Now Poullain’s title shows that he is deeply immersed in the century-long debate

of the “querelle des femmes.”26 But rather than trying simply to score points in a contest

of sexual superiority revolving around the “nature” of women, Poullain shifts the terms of

the debate. He directs his reader to issues of prejudice and the formation of tastes, talents

and interests, offering an anti-essentializing philosophy of women’s education, while

wading into epistemology, epistemics, ontology and philosophy of mind. Although he

admits that “the constitution of the body” plays some role, he insists that it is particularly

“education, religious observance, and the effects of our environment . . . [that] are the

natural and perceptible causes of all the many differences between people” (p. 82). And

to the degree that women exhibit characteristic faults (the theme of the misogynistic

contributions to the querelle), those “flaws are caused by their education,” for which

Poullain uses his epistemic diagnoses to prescribe reforms.

26 Interesting and important as the querelle was, many contributions to it seem like dead-ends, trying to score points in a contest between the natures of men and women. In contrast, Poullain begins by confessing that “The subject of women is a very delicate one” and that “When people read my title,” they will probably be led astray” (p. 50).

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I don’t think I can stress enough how important the turn to issues in the

philosophy of women’s education, as well as the claim that the mind has no sex, was for

women and feminist thinking over the next 150 years.27 And the debt to Descartes was

widely acknowledged. Although she does not adopt Poullain’s Cartesianism of mind and

method, Mary Astell devotes her Serious Proposal to the Ladies to reformist plans for

institutions of women’s education – and gave the reading of Descartes an important place

therein. Indeed, so many women did read Descartes (e.g., Margaret Cavendish, Emilie du

Chatelet, et al.), and responded with philosophical works of their own, that Descartes

became a material cause for a wide variety of philosophical works by women. Few to my

knowledge go as far as Poullain, but still Cartesian thought served as a force for gender

equality and dignity.

My point in this rapid survey is not that this is the real, only and final truth about

Descartes’s significance. I do not deny that – in some contexts – mind-body dualism can

be closely allied with oppressively gendered concepts. What I deny is that such alliances

are intrinsic, eternal and unbreakable – whether in Descartes’s texts “themselves,” or in

the way those texts can be assimilated in reception. And as is true of any rich body of

philosophical thought, Descartes’s philosophy is not exhausted by his dualism. This is a

feature also take up by Poullain, who uses Cartesian physiology to address body-based

arguments for men’s intellectual superiority. He admits that some bodily systems are

indeed important to our cognitive functioning – those found in our heads. He then argues

that the physical constitution of women’s heads are the equal of men’s in all important

respects – except that women have more acute senses, which helps in the pursuit of

natural philosophy. At almost exactly the same time, Malebranche relies on similar 27As Desmond Clarke points out in his SEP article, Poullain’s work was plagiarized repeatedly!

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features of Cartesian physiology to maintain that the relations between brain mechanics,

the architecture of the imagination and passions constitute a cognitive impairment for

women (largely because of our soft and delicate brain fibers). Again, my point here is not

that there is One True Reading of Cartesian brain anatomy that settles its value in sexual

politics. (How could there be?) There are multiple possibilities for the assimilation of

such Cartesian themes – and we can hardly even imagine what might matter without

looking to the history. What I have been rehearsing are concrete paths marked by the

history of reception. They don’t disappear in the face of subsequent reception of

Cartesian reason – although neither does the perniciously gendered nature of that

subsequent reception disappear in the face of a happy recovered history. Neither exhausts

the possibilities. As a public entity and force, the trajectories of a body of thought are

open to continual revision and deviation by dynamic social forces; as a public entity and

force, it’s never complete.

I want to end this brief for reception history by turning to a thesis advanced by

Eileen O’Neill. O’Neill documents a thriving and widely-recognized industry of

philosophical work by women in the early modern period, followed by near-

disappearance during the 19th and 20th centuries. Although she maintains that it took a

perfect storm of causes for the disappearance to be as thorough as it became, O’Neill

particularly argues that changes in the self-conception of philosophy’s style and

substance, in the aftermath of the French Revolution and into the 19th century, pushed out

work by and on women philosophers. The topics typical of women’s work, the styles of

writing with which they were associated, and even the schools of thought many women

happened to endorse were casualties of an increasingly constricted understanding of what

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constitutes “real” philosophy,” which O’Neill calls the “purification of philosophy.” She

particularly focuses on the exclusion of religiously motivated works, even when they

treated topics we would readily recognize as philosophic. But many once-flourishing

subfields were also marginalized in this project of purification: “anthropology” (in the

sense studied by Kant), and philosophy of education are two. They also happen to be

areas covered by the reception I’ve been discussing.

What’s the lesson from this? Well, I don’t think we could or should simply re-

incorporate whatever once fell under the rubric of philosophy into our current philosophy

departments. That would be unworkable, and there are much more suitable places to

study, say, the parts of animals (thank you very much). But understanding how various

areas came to prominence in philosophy, while others were eliminated, and yet others

transformed into something new, seems to me to be part of philosophy. Philosophy may

investigates how “things” in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the

broadest possible sense of the term, but just as typical is its reflective nature. (A point

Annette often stressed.) And so tracing how philosophy itself came to hang together (in

the broadest possible sense of the term) should be a pretty central philosophical concern,

particularly when it used to hang differently. A history of reception can provide that; it

can provide a narrative of disciplinary formation. I take it that a feminist philosophy

should want welcome such a narrative, particularly because it can enable a bit of

reflective self-determination over what we want philosophy to be.28

28My claims throughout this discussion have been informed by a particular understanding of the goals of the history of philosophy and what makes the history of philosophy a bit of philosophy itself. I’m a bit uncomfortable with one popular answer to that latter question, one that holds that the history of philosophy aims at a “rational reconstruction” of a philosopher’s arguments in light of contemporary concerns, rather than the recovery

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of what people actually thought. For what distinguishes the part of philosophy that is the history of philosophy is that it starts with various texts as both raw material and constraint. Rational reconstruction, as described, does little to explain why it is important to turn to texts and history. At worst, it may make the history of philosophy seem a quaint exercise in finding proper names on which to hang already familiar philosophical questions and positions (not that I think the many distinguished proponents of rational reconstruction are engaged merely in such quaint exercise). Instead, I propose that the history of philosophy is indispensable because, on the one hand, our thought – like a biological species – is shaped through and through by its historical lineage. It can only be built out of the materials to hand, but it puts those materials to new, and often unforeseen and unforeseeable uses. For this reason, the history and nature of our thought cannot simply be extrapolated from its current state, but require a bit of intellectual paleontology, for which texts are the fossilized remains. On the other hand, the history of philosophy comprises episodes in the history of thought where a particular “species” of thought is as thoroughly adapted to its environment as human thought is ever likely to be. At least, that is a working assumption for approaching philosophical texts, a kind of hermeneutical principle of charity that will allow them to serve as reservoirs for ways of making sense of things that go beyond what we may have readily available. At the risk of sounding oxymoronic, then, I take the history of philosophy to provide a series of regulative ideals – humanly accessible and textually embodied regulative ideals – for philosophical perspectives in which both the answers and the specific questions are up for grabs. They are regulative in the sense of providing models for ways of making sense of things, ideal in that they are never exhausted and never achieved, but like all humans we sometimes need to criticize them, and sometimes to rebel against them.