The concept of free speech is an abstraction worth defending, certainly. But what does free speech mean when nearly everyone who has actually gained any kind of a degree understands fully that the freedom to academic expression is contingent upon any number of factors, including race, class origins, gender, and ethnicity, to name just a few? …
At his blog, Jeff Ketland has posted the names of individuals at Oxford he claims constitute ‘a lynch mob’ against him. The people he identifies are mostly grad students. Ketland claims all the people he identifies were part of a malicious smear campaign which:
harassed a family, including even a 4-year old child, out of their home; and then the smear campaigners authored a harassing letter repeated false allegations while making offensive extra-judicial demands and got it signed by 135 people.
In memory of this outburst of vigilante harassment in Oxford, the Oxford lynch mob members are listed here, denoted LM1, LM2, etc.
The people identified are in fact simply the signatories of this open letter which expressed concern about the university’s handling of the situation. Whether or not some of these individuals also harassed Ketland, it’s definitely not the case that they all did. (I know some of them personally, and that’s simply not the kind of behavior they would engage in.) And it’s definitely not the case that the letter itself constitutes harassment or a ‘smear campaign’.
Ketland’s post seems to constitute a worrying form of retaliation.
Is feminist philosophy too unrigorous?
Another common complaint is that feminist philosophy – whatever its shared assumptions or agenda – is simply not suitably rigorous. I suspect that a lot of people who make this criticism haven’t read enough feminist philosophy. Does some of it lack rigor? Sure. Is some of it really messy and unclear? Absolutely. But that’s true of every part of philosophy. The very best of feminist philosophy, though, is a model of clarity and systematic thinking. But perhaps the claim isn’t that all feminist philosophy isn’t rigorous. Maybe, instead, the thought is that feminist philosophy is in general less rigorous than non-feminist work, especially work in ‘the core’.
To be clear, by ‘rigorous’ I don’t mean formal. Sometimes I think people use the term ‘rigorous’ such that work which incorporates more technical jargon and formalism is automatically more rigorous. If that’s what you mean by ‘rigorous’, then sure – feminist philosophy is less rigorous than, say, the bulk of philosophy of language or philosophical logic. But then, so is the vast majority of non-feminist philosophy. And I don’t think being rigorous matters to philosophical quality, if that’s what you mean by ‘rigorous’. By ‘rigorous’ I mean clear and carefully argued. Work that’s formal can lack philosophical rigor (in this sense), and work that’s philosophically rigorous can lack any trace of formalism.
So is feminist philosophy less rigorous (in this sense) than a lot of mainstream philosophy, especially ‘the core’? The truth is that I don’t know, and I don’t think my judgements on the matter are likely to be that reliable. (I don’t think yours are either.) If feminist philosophy were in fact somewhat less rigorous, though, it wouldn’t tell us anything very useful about the merits of feminist philosophy as an area of philosophical enquiry. There are perfectly good reasons why feminist philosophy might be somewhat less rigorous than other areas which don’t bear at all on whether feminist philosophy is ‘good philosophy’. But there are also perfectly good reasons to be suspicious of our comparative judgements in these cases.
For one thing, feminist philosophy (at least as it’s currently practiced in English-speaking philosophy) is a relatively new discipline. It wouldn’t be surprising, given this, if a lot of the work in feminist philosophy was slightly more exploratory in nature than work in fields that have had much longer to define the terms and parameters of their debates. Part of what we’re doing right now in feminist philosophy is ground clearing, just trying to figure out the dialectical terrain. That kind of work can seem – and might be – less clear than work that’s situated within a well-defined and thoroughly explored debate. But that doesn’t make the newer discipline inferior, or the work that’s done in it less philosophically impressive. (Indeed, given the relative newness of the discipline it seems particularly impressive just how clear and rigorous some of the work in it is.)
But feminist philosophy is not only a relatively new field, it’s also a relatively marginalized field within professional philosophy. And it wouldn’t be surprising if this marginalization had bad knock-on consequences for the discipline. (Just as it’s no surprise that many of the most prominent feminist philosophers made their names – and earned their first jobs and their tenure – doing something other than feminist philosophy.) Feminist philosophy isn’t ‘core’. It isn’t widely represented in top philosophy departments. It’s hard to publish on it in top generalist journals, get invited to speak on it in cushy venues, or dialogue with a large group of interested philosophers about it. It’s certainly possible that the net effect of this situation is a drain on resources and talent from feminist philosophy – a drain that might have some negative affects the overall quality of the field. Again, I don’t want to assert that this is in fact the case. But if it was, it wouldn’t make me worry that feminist philosophy was somehow an inferior discipline. It would just make me want to address the ways in which feminist philosophy isn’t taken seriously. And I’d still think feminist philosophy as it currently stands is worthwhile and important, given how much great work there is in the field.
But I also think it’s important to realize that our judgements about rigor and clarity aren’t free of bias. The standards we employ when we say feminist philosophy ‘lacks rigor’ may not be standards we apply universally. Within particular philosophical conversations, people often say things that can sound opaque to the uninitiated. When metaphysicians talk about fundamentality and the ‘flow’ of time, or when epistemologists talk about warrant and internalism vs. externalism about knowledge, or when philosophers or perception talk about the content of experience and what it’s like in Eden, or when ethicists talk about exclusionary reasons and normative power, it can be really difficult – from the outside – to get a good sense of what’s going on. Nevertheless, metaphysics, epistemology, perception, and ethics all are doing just fine in contemporary philosophy. What I want to suggest is that judgements about what’s clear or rigorous aren’t made in a vacuum. And given what we know about gender bias, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we tend to judge a group, the majority of whom are women, talking about gender more harshly than we judge your average philosopher.
More generally, something that seems perfectly clear to participants in a debate may seem obscure – even unintelligible – to those not immersed in that debate. With a lot of debates in philosophy, though, we seem give the participants the benefit of the doubt. Sure, it may not make much sense to me. But there seems to be a good conversation going on there, and the people engaged in it all seem smart and like they know what they’re talking about. So they’re probably on to something, even if what they’re on to isn’t my thing. (You may, instead, be the kind of philosopher who thinks most philosophy outside your area is bullshit. If so, you’re an equal opportunity hater. Congratulations. . .? But you should at least grant that there isn’t a special problem with the badness of feminist philosophy, amongst all the other badness you are forced to put up with.)
With feminist philosophy, though, people seem very quick – unusually quick – to move from ‘That sounds kind of obscure to me’ to ‘Feminist philosophy isn’t clear or rigorous!’ to ‘Feminist philosophy is crap!!!!’. And that inferential slide is a bad one.
Tl:dr – Feminist philosophy might, at present, be less rigorous than other fields for reasons orthogonal to the merit of feminist philosophy as a discipline. But we also might judge feminist philosophy more harshly than we judge other fields.
Equals an all-male list of invited speakers for a philosophy of math conference.
(For more information about the GCC, see here.)
Feminist Philosophers 