There is an interesting discussion going on at the Sappho's Breathing site about whether the dominance in English-speaking philosophy of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind isn't connected to a male bias of the discipline. A number of well-known younger philosophers--including Jessica Wilson and Jason Stanley--have weighed in on the discussion. An anonymous poster "Rob" represents what I'd call "the knee-jerk" view of the topic, but otherwise the dialogue is quite substantial.
A few thoughts of my own:
(1) Far more serious than the old, and now largely meaningless, analytic/Continental divide in philosophy is what I'd dub the "technical/humanistic divide" in the discipline: very crudely, the divide between those doing, on one side, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language, mind & logic, and, on the other, those doing the theory of value and the history of philosophy. The UC Irvine Department split over roughly this divide a few years back. Departments like Harvard, Berkeley, and Chicago have cast their lot, roughly speaking, with the "humanistic" side of this divide; while departments like those at Rutgers and USC have largely cast their lot with the "technical" side. I can no longer keep track of how many philosophers have told me that the fault lines in their department run exactly along these lines.
(2) The technical/humanistic divide seems to me to track rather imperfectly any gendered divide, and the emphasis on gender seems to me to obscure a more serious intellectual fissure that has the potential to rip the discipline asunder.
(3) It would seem to me unfortunate, and demeaning to the field of philosophy, to let either the male/female or technical/humanistic issues obscure the fact that some subfields of philosophy--applied ethics most prominently among them--are philosophically feeble, notwithstanding, as in every field, the presence of some exemplary practitioners. This is not a matter of a technical/humanistic divide; the overwhelming majority of leading moral philosophers--male and female, "technical" and non-technical--share the view of applied ethics just mentioned, though few say so publically. So, too, history of philosophy is squarely on the "humanistic" side of the divide, yet it could hardly be controversial any longer among historians of philosophy to observe that the general quality of work on, say, Nietzsche is far inferior to the general quality of work on Kant or Plato. The genuine issues of gender bias in academic philosophy--from the sexual harassment of students, to the more subtle forms in which women can be professionally demeaned--should not obscure the fact that there is bad work in philosophy, and quite a bit more of it in some subfields than others.
Recent Comments