When reason does not see you: feminism at the intersection of history and philosophy

TY - CHAP

T1 - When reason does not see you: feminism at the intersection of history and philosophy

AU - Dawson, Hannah

PY - 2021/8/26

Y1 - 2021/8/26

N2 - Philosophy, particularly in the analytic form that still dominates the discipline in anglophone universities, is avowedly ahistorical, sometimes anti-historical. Abstracted from time and place, it applies the clear eye of universalised reason to certain perennial concepts and fundamental problems. History, by contrast, at least in its current, broadly cultural incarnation, insists on the contingency and practical embeddedness of ideas, and on the concomitant plurality, partiality, and opacity of human understanding. I argue that feminism develops a historicist critique of philosophy from within philosophy. Feminist thinkers bring to bear both history and historicist sensibilities to reveal concepts as constructs of power rather than given in nature, and reason as fractured, weaponised, and thickly situated in political structures. They thereby take aim at both philosophy and – relatedly – patriarchy. But feminists are not immune from the lure of conceptual analysis, from wanting to fix, to get right, the terms of their campaign – nor indeed from wanting themselves to claim a transcendent vantage point of truth. This chapter is about the gulf between history and philosophy, and the feminist bridge between them.

AB - Philosophy, particularly in the analytic form that still dominates the discipline in anglophone universities, is avowedly ahistorical, sometimes anti-historical. Abstracted from time and place, it applies the clear eye of universalised reason to certain perennial concepts and fundamental problems. History, by contrast, at least in its current, broadly cultural incarnation, insists on the contingency and practical embeddedness of ideas, and on the concomitant plurality, partiality, and opacity of human understanding. I argue that feminism develops a historicist critique of philosophy from within philosophy. Feminist thinkers bring to bear both history and historicist sensibilities to reveal concepts as constructs of power rather than given in nature, and reason as fractured, weaponised, and thickly situated in political structures. They thereby take aim at both philosophy and – relatedly – patriarchy. But feminists are not immune from the lure of conceptual analysis, from wanting to fix, to get right, the terms of their campaign – nor indeed from wanting themselves to claim a transcendent vantage point of truth. This chapter is about the gulf between history and philosophy, and the feminist bridge between them.

M3 - Chapter

BT - History and the Humanities and Social Sciences

A2 - Bourke, Richard

A2 - Skinner, Quentin

PB - Cambridge University Press

CY - Cambridge

ER -