Introduction

The articulation of feminist perspectives on the history of western philosophy has been a significant development in feminist philosophy. Critique of the alleged 'maleness' of the philosophical tradition has been a central theme in this development. It has reflected more general divisions within feminist theory between approaches centred on the affirmation of 'sameness' and approaches emphasizing 'difference'. Where some have defended female character and capacities in relation to traditional ideals, others have challenged the supposed gender-neutrality of the ideals themselves.

Despite the contrasts between these approaches, a common tone was evident in the early stages of feminist history of philosophy: the history of philosophy was seen as a repository of misogynist ideas and ideals, towards which feminism took up a defensive posture. In more recent work inspired by feminism, a more positive mood is evident. Rather than defining itself through opposition to a 'male' tradition, feminist history of philosophy has emerged as a shifting set of strategies which bring sexual difference to bear on the reading of philosophical texts.

Introduction

Feminist philosophy of science is situated at the intersection between feminist interests in science and philosophical studies of science as these have developed in the last twenty years. Feminists have long regarded the sciences as a key resource for understanding the conditions that affect women's lives and, in this connection, they have pursued a number of highly productive programmes of research, especially in the social and life sciences. At the same time, however, feminists see the sciences as an important locus of gender inequality and as a key source of legitimation for this inequality; feminists both within and outside the sciences have developed close critical analyses of the androcentrism they find inherent in the institutions, practices and content of science. Both kinds of feminist engagement with science - constructive and critical - raise epistemological questions about ideals of objectivity, the status of evidence and the role of orienting (often unacknowledged) contextual values.

Feminist ethics

Ethics, or moral philosophy, as a field of intellectual inquiry developed in the west for well over two thousand years with minimal input from women. Women's voices have been virtually absent from western ethics until this century, as they have been from every field of intellectual endeavour. The absence of female voices has meant that the moral concerns of men have preoccupied traditional western ethics, the moral perspectives of men have shaped its methods and concepts, and male biases against women have gone virtually unchallenged within it. Feminist ethics explores the substantive effect of this imbalance on moral philosophy and seeks to rectify it.

Like other areas of feminist thought, feminist ethics is grounded in a commitment to ending the oppression, subordination, abuse and exploitation of women and girls, wherever these may arise. In the late 1960s, when feminist ethics began, it consisted mainly of applying the resources of traditional moral philosophy to the array of moral issues that were being brought to public attention by the women's movements then arising in many western societies.

Introduction

Philosophy leaves everything as it is, or so it has been said. Feminists do not leave everything as it is. We are always interfering, always fighting for something, always wanting things to be otherwise and better - even in philosophy itself. But if philosophy leaves everything as it is, shouldn't feminists leave philosophy as it is? If philosophy leaves everything as it is, then it cannot hurt women, and it cannot help women. To be sure, if philosophy leaves everything as it is, it leaves oppression as it is, but one should no more hope otherwise than one should hope for the stones to cry out for justice. Shouldn't feminists let philosophy be? Well, not everyone agrees with the one who said philosophy leaves everything as it is. Someone else began his meditations thus:

Introduction

A great deal of recent feminist work on philosophy of mind has been grounded on a central claim: that the key oppositions between body and mind, and between emotion and reason, are gendered. While the mind and its capacity to reason are associated with masculinity, the body, together with our emotional sensibilities, are associated with the feminine. Evidence for this view comes from at least two sources. First, overtly sexist philosophers have in the past claimed that women are by nature less capable reasoners than men and are more prone to ground their judgements on their emotional responses. These authors have been repeatedly opposed by defenders of women, whether male or female. Secondly, feminists have explored ways in which gendered oppositions are at work even in the writings of philosophers who do not explicitly differentiate the mental capacities of men and women or connect women with the bodily work of reproduction and domestic labour. By studying the metaphorical structures of philosophical texts, looking at what may appear to be digressions from the main line of argument, and paying attention to examples, they have identified persistent patterns of association running through the history of philosophy.

Some philosophical work about language and its use has been inspired by feminist agenda, some by malestream philosophical agenda. Reading work in these two areas - in feminist-philosophy of language and in philosophy of language, as I shall call them - one easily gets the impression that they are totally separate enterprises. Here I hope to show that the impression is partly due to habits of thought that pervade much analytical philosophy and have done damage in philosophy of language. My claim will be that an idea of communicative speech acts belongs in philosophy of language (section 2). I think that the absence of such an idea from malestream accounts of linguistic meaning might be explained by ways of thinking which are arguably characteristically masculine (section 3). Once communicative speech acts are in place, various feminist (and other political) themes can be explored (section 4).

Feminist-philosophy of language and philosophy of language

Language's relation to gender was at the centre of discussions from the beginning of feminism's second wave. Dale Spender, in a path-breaking book, claimed that 'males, as the dominant group, have produced language, thought and reality'.3 Some feminists refused to share Spender's pessimism, and questioned whether language could be the powerful controlling influence that Spender represented.4 But a view of language as a vehicle for the perpetuation of women's subordination was prevalent in the 1980s, even if it was often based upon less radical claims than Spender's. Writers gave attention to the sexism implicit in language that contains purportedly generic uses of masculine terms, especially the supposedly neutral 'man' and male pronouns.

This Companion represents a departure from the previously published volumes in its series. Each of those dealt with a single philosopher and with a male one in every case, whereas this one brings women in and treats a theme rather than an authority. So far as the departure allows, this book's principal aim is in line with that of other Companions: it consists of new papers by an international team of philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship; and these have been written with non-specialists in mind, so that the collection can serve as an introduction to the area. We have tried to design it to be helpful to any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about feminism's place in their subject.

The present Companion has a further aim. It is intended to foster appreciation of the potentially far-reaching impact of feminist thinking in philosophy. As departments of women's studies and gender studies have grown up in the last twenty years, there has come to be more and more published work falling under the head of feminist philosophy.

The question of difference has preoccupied feminists in one way or another for a decade and a half. And even where difference is not in the foreground of feminist thinking and writing, it remains in the background as a point of contention that can be used against any empirical or theoretical generalizations that may be advanced. To focus on difference would thus seem a suitable approach not only to a discussion of feminist political theory, but to feminist theory and philosophy more generally.

Feminists have reflected on three kinds of difference: first, their own difference as women in relation to men, usually taken as a socially constructed gender difference; secondly, social differences between women; and thirdly, theoretical differences between feminists. The second and third types of difference have been seen as threatening the very possibility of feminist theory. My thesis will be that the reason why difference has become so divisive and threatening to feminists is that there has been a conflation of the second and third types of difference, i.e. of social and theoretical differences.

The relationship between feminism and psychoanalytical theory has been stormy. Feminists of all stripes have criticized Freud and his followers for many different aspects of psychoanalytical thought and practice. While some of these criticisms are relatively local in scope, concerning features of psychoanalysis that can be regarded as inessential or transient, others are directed against more central theoretical commitments. The first category includes examples such as the sexist expectations manifested by Freud in his analyses of female patients: the case history documenting Freud's treatment of 'Dora', for example, has been discussed at length by feminist critics. More theoretical criticisms include the charges of false universalism, ahistoricism (in particular the reification of the nuclear family), heterosexism, biologism and phallocentrism. The aim, also, of psychoanalytical therapy has been criticized as reactionary, insofar as it is thought to divert patients from a political understanding of their discontents to the 'individualist' solution of personal adjustment to the status quo.

We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one we thought quite innocent.) - And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them.

When I do not see plurality stressed in the very structure of a theory, I know that I will have to do lots of acrobatics - like a contortionist or tight-rope walker - to have this theory speak to me without allowing the theory to distort me in my complexity.

Introduction

Despite the internal diversity of extant 'ancient philosophy', it has generally been agreed that the main intellectual legacy of classical Greece and Rome to the modern world is the idea of the value of truth and the capacity of human reason to discover it. This idea, powerfully expressed in the dialogues of Plato and in the more systematic teaching of Aristotle, has provided an implicit point of reference - usually, though not invariably, positive - for all subsequent 'philosophy' in the western world, and feminist thought has been no exception to the rule. What remains unresolved, however, is the proper ratio of positive to negative in the attitude of feminism to 'reason'. Since the eighteenth century at least, there has been an effort to rethink the rationalist ethical and political tradition for the benefit of women, and to detach its characteristic themes (legitimate social order; mutual recognition among citizens; co-operative pursuit of a common good) from the ideology of male supremacy. But the sexual egalitarianism which we inherit from the age of Enlightenment is complicated, today, by a rival impulse of solidarity with what the rationalist tradition symbolically excludes - that is, with reason's supposedly feminine 'other' or complement. It is this tension that sets the scene for our discussion.

Introduction

Metaphysics has never been without critics. Plato's efforts have repeatedly been a target of attack; Hume ranted against the metaphysicians of his day; and one of the founding missions of logical positivism was to show that metaphysical claims are meaningless. More recently, feminist theorists have joined the chorus. To reveal among academic feminists that one's specialization in philosophy is metaphysics is to invite responses of shock, confusion and sometimes dismissal. Once after I gave a presentation at an American Philosophical Association meeting on social construction, a noted senior feminist philosopher approached me and said, 'you are clearly very smart, and very feminist, so why are you wasting your time on this stuff?' Academic feminists, for the most part, view metaphysics as a dubious intellectual project, certainly irrelevant and probably worse; and often the further charge is levelled that it has pernicious political implications as well.

What follows is as much reconstruction provoked by Ockham as a study of Ockham. My main aim is to provide a framework to accommodate various things Ockham said but did not put together as neatly as we might wish.

What provokes this project is the apparent tension between obedience to divine will, which figures so prominently in Ockham's academic writings, and the nonsacral reasonableness so prominent in his political works. Granted, both divine command ethics and a demonstrative science of morals are found in the academic writings, and extensive references to God's will as well as astute Aristotelian political analysis are found in the political works. Ockham did not abandon God's will in favor of philosophical reason when he abandoned John XXII for the protection of Ludwig of Bavaria. Yet there is, I believe, something to the impression that Ockham, especially the earlier Ockham, held God's will to be a uniquely supreme, comprehensive, unrestricted moral principle, and also something to the impression that the later, political Ockham was distinctive in arguing for a secular political order operating according to a rationally ascertainable natural law but lacking any inherent religious orientation. At any rate, such impressions set the problem I want to grapple with in this chapter.

William of Ockham presents his ethical theory not systematically but in remarks and discussions scattered throughout his writings, a fact that has obscured the structure of his views. He worked within a tradition of moral philosophy that took the basic normative principles to be given in the Bible and the conceptual tools of moral theory to be given by Aristotle; with these materials he put forward an original, powerful, and subtle theory. Ockham holds the rightness or wrongness of an act to depend not on any feature or characteristic of the act itself or its consequences but on the agent's intentions and character (elaborated in Ockham's theory of the will and of the virtues respectively). The goodness or badness of the agent's will, in turn, depends on its conformity to the dictates of right reason in the first stage and to God's will in the final stage.

THE NATURE OF MORALITY

Morality deals with human acts that are in our control – more exactly, with acts that are subject to the power of the will according to the natural dictate of reason and other circumstances. The requirement that morality be a matter of reason and will rules out brute animals as moral agents2 while allowing angels and humans to qualify. But before one attempts to spell out the respective contributions of reason and will to moral action, a fundamental question needs to be addressed, Is morality a rational enterprise in the first place? Are there moral truths, and if so, can we know them?

In the year 1328 Ockham and certain leading members of the Franciscan order became convinced that the pope of the day, Pope John XXII, was a heretic and therefore no pope. From then until his death in 1347 Ockham wrote nothing more (or almost nothing) on logic, natural philosophy, or speculative philosophy but produced a large body of books and pamphlets, commonly called his “political” writings, advocating the deposition of John XXII and his successors, Benedict XII and Clement VI. The quarrel with these popes began when John XXII issued several documents attacking doctrines and practices of the Franciscan order on the subject of poverty, doctrines the Franciscans believed to be based on the Bible and the accepted teaching of the Church. To understand Ockham's political writings, therefore, we must first consider Franciscan ideas about poverty.

Ockham's treatment of the ten Aristotelian categories plays a crucial role in his innovative nominalist program. One of his main complaints against “the moderns,” as he is wont to call his opponents, is that they treat the categories as comprising ten mutually exclusive classes of distinct entities. Indeed, the unknown author of a work written against Ockham’s logic (characteristically entitled “A very useful and realist logic of Campsall the Englishman against Ockham”), writes: