FEMINIST REFLECTIONS on the HISTORY of PHILOSOPHY the New Synthese Historical Library Texts and Studies in the History of Philosophy

FEMINIST REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The New Synthese Historical Library Texts and Studies in the History of Philosophy

VOLUME 55

Managing Editor:

SIMO KNUUTTILA, University of Helsinki

Associate Editors:

DANIEL ELLIOT GARBER, University of Chicago RICHARD SORABJI, University of London

Editorial Consultants:

JAN A. AERTSEN, Thomas-Institut, Universität zu Köln ROGER ARIEW, Virginia Polytechnic Institute E. JENNIFER ASHWORTH, University of Waterloo MICHAEL AYERS, Wadham College, Oxford GAIL FINE, Cornell University R. J. HANKINSON, University of Texas JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University PAUL HOFFMAN, University of California, Riverside DAVID KONSTAN, Brown University RICHARD H. KRAUT, Northwestern University, Evanston ALAIN DE LIBERA, Université de Genève JOHN E. MURDOCH, Harvard University DAVID FATE NORTON, McGill University LUCA OBERTELLO, Università degli Studi di Genova ELEONORE STUMP, St. Louis University ALLEN WOOD, Stanford University

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume. FEMINIST REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Edited by

LILLI ALANEN University of Uppsala, Sweden

and

CHARLOTTE WITT University of New Hampshire, Durham, U.S.A.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS vii

CHARLOTTE WITT, PREFACE xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii

CHARLOTTE WITT, Feminist History of Philosophy 1

KRISTIN SAMPSON, Identity and Gender in Plato 17

CYNTHIA FREELAND, Schemes and Scenes of Reading the Timaeus 33

SIGRIDUR THORGEIRSDOTTIR, Nietzsche’s Feminization of Metaphysics and its Significance for Theories of Gender Difference 51

MARTINA REUTER, Psychologizing Cartesian Doubt: Feminist Reading Strategies and the “Unthought” of Philosophy 69

ROBIN MAY SCHOTT, Feminist Rationality Debates: Rereading Kant 101

CHARLOTTE WITT, Form, Normativity and Gender in Aristotle: A Feminist Perspective 117

SARA HEINÄMAA, The Soul-Body Union and Sexual Difference: From Descartes to Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir 137

ANNE J. JACOBSON, The Psychology of Philosophy: Interpreting Locke and Hume 153

DON GARRETT, Hume as a Man of Reason and Woman’s Philosopher 171

LILLI ALANEN, Descartes and Elisabeth: A Philosophical Dialogue? 193

LISA SHAPIRO, Some Thoughts on the Place of Women in Early Modern Philosophy 219 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

LILLI ALANEN is Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University. Her current research interests are in early modern philosophy, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy and psychology. She is co-editor of Commonality and Particularity in Ethics (1997), author of Descartes’s Concept of Mind (2003), and of numerous articles on early modern philosophy and other topics.

CYNTHIA FREELAND is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. Her research interests include ancient philosophy, feminist theory, and aesthetics. She is editor of Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (1998) and author of But Is It Art? (2001).

DON GARRETT is Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence at the University of Norther Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (1997) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (1996). He has served as co-editor of Hume Studies and is currently the North American editor of Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie.

SARA HEINÄMAA is a NOS-H researcher and senior lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. She is also professor of humanist women’s studies at the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Oslo. She has published several books on phenomenology and existentialist philosophy, explicating the problems of embodiment, perception, emotions, and sexual difference. Her main focus is in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, but she also works on Descartes, Husserl, Fink, and feminist philosophy, from Beauvoir to Irigaray. Her latest publication is Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (2003).

ANNE JAAP JACOBSON is Professor of Philosophy and Engineering at the University of Houston, where she is also associate director of the Center for Neuro-Engineering and Cognitive Science. She works on cognitive science, feminist theory and the history of philosophy.

vii viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS MARTINA REUTER works as a researcher at the Academy of Finland, and teaches philosophy and women studies at the universities of Helsinki and Uppsala. She received her Ph.d. at the University of Helsinki in 2000 with a dissertation on feminist critiques of Descartes philosophy and has published articles on Descartes, feminism and phenomenology. Her current research concerns the role of the passions, reason and the will in Mary Wollstonecraft’s philosophical thought.

KRISTIN SAMPSON is a research fellow at the University of Bergen. She is involved in the project “The Gonias of Plato. Metaphors of birth in the Timaeus and the Parmenides.” She received her Cand. Philol. in Philosophy in 1994 with the thesis Selvets logikk i Platons Faidon. En kritikk av motsetningsparet kropp-sjel, dødelig-udødelig og kvinnelig mannlig. Her research interests include ancient philosophy and feminst philosophy.

ROBIN MAY SCHOTT is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities during 2003-4. She is Associate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, where she directs the NOS-H project, “Sexuality, Death and the Feminine”. She is the author of Discovering Feminist Philosophy; Knowledge, Ethics, Politics (2003) and of Cognition and Eros; A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (1988/93). She is the editor of the special issue of Hypatia on Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil (winter and spring 2003), of Feminist Interpretatations of Immanuel Kant (1997) and co-editor of Forplantning, Køn og Teknologi (1995). Her current research deals with the problem of evil in relation to the phenomenon of war rape.

LISA SHAPIRO is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University outside of Vancouver. Her research interests include early modern philosophy, with particular interests in philosophy of mind and theories of the passions, as well as feminist philosophy. She is working on a new translation of Elisabeth of Bohemia’s correspondence with Descartes.

SIGRIDUR THORGEIRSDOTTIR is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. She has published on topics in the philosophy of Nietzsche, feminist philosophy and social philosophy. Her book Vis creativa. Kunst und Wahrheit in der Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches was published in 1996. She has co-edited an anthology on family and justice and another one on the work of Simone de Beauvoir that were published in Iceland. Her collection of papers in feminist philosophy came out in 2001. Currently she is working on themes at the intersection of feminist philosophy and bioethics. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix CHARLOTTE WITT is Professor of Philosophy, and Chair, at the Unversity of New Hampshire. Her research interests are in ancient philosophy, metaphysics and feminist theory. She is the author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle (1989) and co-editor of A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (1992, edition, 2001). PREFACE

Charlotte Witt (University of New Hampshire, U.S.A.)

Feminist history of philosophy has come of age as a distinct approach to the history of philosophy. It is now possible to reflect upon the different kinds scholarship called ‘feminist history of philosophy’ and to raise important questions about its method(s) and purpose(s). It is also possible to enrich our understanding of the complexity of historical interpretation inspired by the work of feminist historians. It is even possible for a new generation of feminist historians to think critically about the work of an earlier generation. The papers in this volume contribute to the task of thinking about the different kinds of contributions made by feminist work in the history of philosophy, and the extent to which feminist interpretations of historical texts constitute a distinctive method of reading the history of philosophy. Some of the papers in this volume were first presented at a conference titled “Reconsidering the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of the History of Philosophy ” held at the University of Uppsala. Although the papers were diverse in philosophical orientation and historical period, the discussion returned again and again to the question of method: Is there a distinctively feminist approach to reading the history of philosophy? What makes it a feminist approach? Is it a matter of the questions that are brought to a philosophical text, or is the question of how to interpret the meaning of a historical text also at issue? In what ways have feminist interpretations contributed to our understanding of canonical figures in the history of philosophy, or altered our understanding of that history? We decided to continue the conversation by inviting feminist historians of philosophy to think further about these questions in relation to their own work in the history of philosophy, and in relation to the work of others.

L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, xi-xv. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. xii PREFACE In “Feminist History of Philosophy” Charlotte Witt surveys the wide range of purposes, methods and accomplishments that constitute feminist history of philosophy today. She shows that feminist historians of philosophy have contributed to the history of philosophy in at least three distinct ways, and she poses the question of what unifies these apparently diverse contributions. Her thesis is that much of the diversity in feminist readings of the history of philosophy can be traced to ongoing debates over the method(s) and purpose(s) of contemporary feminist philosophy. One issue highlighted by feminist work in the history of philosophy concerns the important role played by metaphor and images in philosophical writing. Several contributors to this volume discuss how gender images and metaphors figure and operate in philosophical theory. In “Identity and Gender in Plato” Kristin Sampson explores the way in which gender and the feminine work in Plato’s later dialogues to illuminate his views on the relationship between eternal ideas and the realm of sense perception, and his discussion of the One and the Other. In “Schemes and Scenes of Reading the TIMAEUS” Cynthia Freeland reflects critically upon the interpretations of leading feminist thinkers like Irigaray and Butler, arguing that their readings of the text are too partial and simplistic. Freeland offers a careful analysis of many of Plato’s metaphors, which provides a more adequate context for the interpretation of gender metaphors in the Timaeus. Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, in “Nietzsche’s Feminization of Metaphysics and its Significance for Theories of Gender Difference” reflects upon feminist critics and feminist advocates of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, providing a complex and nuanced discussion of both his overt misogyny, and the central role of the feminine and female figures in his later writing. Feminist historians of philosophy have also paid particular attention to traditional characterizations of reason and objectivity inspired, in part, by Genevieve Lloyd’s feminist classic The Man of Reason and Susan Bordo’s The Flight to Objectivity.1 Several of our contributors address feminist interpretations of reason in the philosophical tradition, focusing both on the complex question of the value of certain conceptions of reason for feminist thinking, and on the hermeneutic assumptions underlying the now classic approaches of Lloyd and Bordo. In “Psychologizing Cartesian Doubt: Feminist Reading Strategies and the ‘Unthought of Philosophy’” Martina Reuter critically examines Bordo’s strategy of reading Descartes’ philosophy, which tries to uncover the psychocultural assumptions and motivations that are unarticulated presuppositions of the text. Robin Schott’s “Feminist Rationality Debates: Rereading Kant” emphasizes the importance of methodological issues within feminist history of philosophy PREFACE xiii such as the question of whether or not a philosophical text is autonomous from the historical and social (and perhaps psychological) conditions of its production. Schott presents three feminist interpretations of Kant on reason, which differ as a consequence of the philosophical orientations of its author, but are united by a feminist commitment to emancipation. Feminist philosophers have also influenced the history of philosophy by appropriating its ideas for contemporary feminist purposes. Charlotte Witt provides an interpretation of Aristotle’s hylomorphic metaphysics, which explains the intrinsic normativity of Aristotle’s theory of nature and the way in which gender and sexual difference become associated with natural norms. Her paper “Form, Normativity and Gender in Aristotle: A Feminist Perspective” argues further that the idea that nature is intrinsically normative might be of use to feminist philosophers thinking about ecology and value. In her paper “The Soul-Body Union and Sexual Difference: From Descartes to Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir” Sara Heinämaa finds surprising resources in Descartes’ metaphysics for feminist thinking about sexual difference, and she traces this interpretation of Descartes to Merleau- Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Anne J. Jacobson’s “The Psychology of Philosophy: Interpreting Locke and Hume” urges that we interpret historical texts as bearing the marks of their origins as the products of human activity rather than as precursors of a contemporary philosophical theory or view. Read in this way, she argues further, certain texts of Locke and Hume are of great interest to feminist philosophers. In “Hume as a Man of Reason and Woman’s Philosopher” Don Garrett critically assesses several feminist interpretations of Hume’s concept of reason, and then explains why attributing a purely instrumental view of reason to Hume is the best interpretation both of Hume’s texts, and for feminist purposes. Feminist historians of philosophy have also made a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of our discipline by trying to set the record straight. In A History of Women Philosophers Mary Ellen Waithe has documented at least 16 women philosophers in the classical world, 17 women philosophers from 500-1600, and over 30 from 1600- 1900.2 Yet, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published in 1967, which contains articles on over 900 philosophers, does not include an entry for either Elizabeth of Bohemia or Damaris, Lady Masham. In the 1995 Supplement, they are mentioned in an entry, ambiguously titled “Women in the History of Philosophy”. By 1998, each merits her own entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In this area the achievement of feminist historians of philosophy is clear and important. Yet, there remain difficult questions about how to integrate women philosophers into the philosophy curriculum, and into the on-going historical conversation. xiv PREFACE Ironically enough, the slow process of inclusion of women into the history of philosophy has met with resistance, and this resistance has suggested important questions about the nature of philosophy both today and in the past. The question: What does a woman thinker have to do or to be to count as a philosopher? requires us to reflect upon both what philosophy is and what it has been in the past. In “Descartes and Elizabeth: A Philosophical Dialogue?” Lilli Alanen makes the case for considering Elizabeth of Bohemia a genuine philosopher, who engaged in a very significant philosophical correspondence with Descartes. Criticizing Daniel Garber’s characterization of Elizabeth as a “learned maid” and not a philosopher, Alanen discusses what philosophy is and how Elizabeth’s correspondence with Descartes satisfies any reasonable conception of philosophical exchange. Lisa Shapiro’s “Some Thoughts on Early Modern Philosophy ” reflects upon the remarkable flowering of interest and work on women philosophers of this period. Shapiro, like Alanen, addresses the problem of how to integrate these newly “discovered” women philosophers into the historical narrative of philosophy. She proposes a conversational model of philosophy and the history of philosophy, on the grounds that all good conversations benefit from inclusion of viewpoint and alternatives, and suffer from their exclusion. What are we doing when we read historical texts as feminists? The papers in this collection supply a wide range of answers to this question. Feminists read philosophical texts with a special interest in the roles played by metaphors of gender or feminine figures. And feminist attention to metaphors and figures raises the methodological question of the role of metaphor in both historical and contemporary philosophical writing. Feminist historians of philosophy raise questions about the autonomy of philosophical writing. Should a text be viewed as produced by human activity within a specific set of social and historical (and perhaps psychological) conditions? Or should a philosophical text be interpreted as far a possible as autonomous, and as having an internal logic and context? Is feminist history of philosophy defined by any one of these interpretative assumptions, or is it wrong to consider the feminist approach a distinctive method at all? Perhaps what unifies feminist approaches to the history of philosophy is not any particular methodological assumption about interpreting historical texts, but rather a commitment to emancipatory projects, and to finding a philosophical vocabulary that can contribute to those projects? The papers in this collection raise these important methodological questions concerning feminist history of philosophy, while at the same time making significant contributions to the genre itself. PREFACE xv NOTES

1 The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy by Genevieve Lloyd (University of Minnesota Press, 1985). The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (State University of New York Press, 1987). 2 A History of Women Philosophers, Vol. 1-4 , edited by Mary Ellen Waithe (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994).

REFERENCES

Bordo, Susan. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. New York: State University of New Yourk Press, 1987. Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Waithe, Mary Ellen. A History of Women Philosophers, Vol. 1-4. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to thank Professor Krister Segerberg for his help in organizing the conference that led to this volume, and for his support of our book project. Charlotte Witt is additionally grateful to Professor Segerberg for inviting her to give a talk on feminist history of philosophy at the University of Uppsala, which was an important event in the process that led to this volume. We would also like to thank the participants at the Reconsidering the Canon: Feminist Work on the History of Philosophy Conference at Uppsala University for their thoughtful papers and lively discussion. We are both deeply grateful to Rysiek Sliwinski for his work editing and preparing this manuscript for publication.

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