Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions (review)

I recall coming to the field of philosophy through such texts as Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy, Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers, and Robert Paul Wolff's About Philosophy. On the cover of Wolff's text are the faces of many canonical male philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz and others. In short, all are male and all are white. From reading these texts, one is led to believe that Western philosophy is an all white male domain of inquiry, a transhistorical conversational narrative whose discussants pay strict and abiding allegiance to the dictates of "infallible" Reason. However, as I much later came to understand, this narrative is highly suspect. Russell, Durant, and Wolff failed to call into question their gender and racial situatedness and how these functioned as mediational and constitutional factors in terms of which they understood their own philosophical projects, reflections, and conclusions.

Janet A. Kourany's Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions (1998) is a remarkable collection of essays that highlight the significance and power of womanist philosophical voices. But more than a text allowing for gender diversity and democratic philosophical representation, Philosophy in a Feminist Voice effectively critiques and deconstructs the hegemony of the male philosophical voice. Moreover, more than just critique, Kourany's text provides critical philosophical reconstructions, by distinguished women philosophers, of most of philosophy's major subfields: history of philosophy (Eileen O'Neill), philosophy of persons (Louise M. Antony), ethics (Virginia Held), political philosophy (Susan Moller Okin), aesthetics (Carolyn Korsmeyer), philosophy of religion (Nancy Frankenberry), epistemology (Lorraine Code), philosophy of science (Kourany), and philosophy of language (Andrea Nye). A consideration of the views of all nine contributors in each subfield is not possible because of space limitations.

In framing the text, Kourany is quite clear that "philosophy as we know it today in the West is largely the product of the work of misogynist men of the past, men who were either unresponsive to the needs and interests of women, or whose ideas were downright antithetical to those needs and interests" (1998, ix). She contends that this collection of critical essays will "promote informed dialogue between so-called feminist philosophers and mainstream philosophers, and thereby bring about much-needed change in philosophy" (1998, ix). Hence, undergirding Philosophy in a Feminist Voice is an emphasis placed on fostering feminist philosophical agency and praxis.

When one surveys the constructed textual histories of Western philosophy, histories where masculinity is deeply inscribed on every page, there is very little evidence of philosophical agency exhibited by women. In "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," O'Neill's suspicions have pervasive implications. She writes that "no justification exists for the wholesale exclusion of women philosophers from the history of our discipline. Perhaps all of this should make us suspicious about our histories; about the implicit claim that our criteria of selection justify our inclusion of philosophers as major, minor, or well-forgotten figures; about our ranking of issues and argumentative strategies as central, groundbreaking, useful, or misguided" (Kourany 1998, 39).

O'Neill presents a bibliographic and doxographic overview of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women philosophers from England, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, and Russia. The reader is inundated with names that have seemed to disappear: Hypatia, Margaret Cavendish, Marie de Gournay, Anna Maria van Schurman, Marguerite de la Sablière, Émilie du Châtelet, Queen Christina of Sweden, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Judith Drake, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Catherine Macaulay, Lady Mary Shepherd, Gabrielle Suchon, Anne Conway, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and others. All of these women, within a master narrative that constructed them as inferior and incapable of rational thought and thereby unfit for philosophy, addressed philosophical issues and concerns discussed and debated during their day. Much of their work was published...