Philosophy Matters: A Review of Recent Work in Feminist Philosophy

Abstract

he story of philosophy has multiple plots. There is now a generation of mature thinkers, a considerable body of work, fully developed subareas, and even a bit of recognition. Jiirgen Habermas has had to respond to Nancy Fraser, Jacques Derrida to Judith Butler, and John Rawls to Susan Moller Okin. However, as major feminists reach their stride, they tend to leave philosophy departments for more hospitable pastures and are not pursued. Feminist philosophy in the analytic tradition is underread by philosophers but also by theorists in other fields. Feminist philosophy in the continental tradition, if one can judge by the Humanities Citation Index, is read more by nonphilosophers than philosophers and thus read too often without benefit of the relevant textual history. Yet philosophers, along with feminists in other disciplines, have shared in critiques of disciplinary chauvinism and narrowness and experimented with transdisciplinary styles. Sometimes it seems that the more relevant moniker today is feminist theory, not feminist philosophy. Is it really so important, then, which departments assign our work? I find myself resisting the dispersion of philosophical inquiry among other disciplines, out of concern that it will become an exile. I recently had an argument with a colleague in the social sciences who informed me that Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight (1993) is mostly a work of sociology. No! I insisted, most of her arguments are philosophical and are criticisms of philosophical conceptual traditions that inform current cultural practice. It is our chauvinist male philosophy colleagues who are too quick to label work sociology, a title that bequeaths a low status among philosophers. Part of the reason philosophy is not included in mainstream texts and courses is that it differs on metaphilosophical ground from much mainstream philosophy and, as a result, has reconfigured the problematics in the various areas of study, as well as redrawn the relationships among the areas themselves. For example, feminists are refiguring the relationship