Writing What Comes Naturally?

Abstract

As a young philosopher, I was taught to keep my life out of my scholarly work. Who you are was not supposed to make its appearance in what you wrote. Shortly after I was promoted to full professor, however, and for reasons that will appear later, much of my philosophical work became explicitly autobiographical. I wrote about raising my children, about being from a working-class background, about experiencing a temporary disability, about being middle-aged, about being a writer, about teaching as a feminist, and about being a feminist scholar. I put my life?or at least my version of parts of my life?on the page for other philosophers, especially feminist philosophers, to hear and to read about. It's not the only way I do philosophy, but it is one of the ways. I feel I've learned much from it, and readers tell me it has been useful to them. But is autobiographical philosophy something I'd recommend to other feminist philosophers? What are the pleasures and the perils of autobiographical phi losophy? I'm going to explore these questions by trying both to write about autobiographical philosophy and simultaneously to do some autobiographical philosophy. And I'm going to proceed by first talking about bad reasons for doing autobiographical philosophy and then talking about some good reasons for engaging in autobiographical philosophy. The first bad reason for using autobiography while doing philosophy would be the belief that I'm representative?an exemplar of some broader population, whether it be persons of my sex, my race, my class, my age, or my sexuality. I probably am not. As an academic, I belong to a tiny fraction of the population. I'm more educated and more privileged than most; and because I am neither a graduate student nor an itinerant adjunct academic, I am also wealthier than most.