Introduction

Someone might wonder how there can be feminist epistemology - 'knowledge is simply knowledge, regardless of gender, and that's all there is to it'. There are philosophers of a relativistic mindset, some feminists among them, who would challenge the idea that knowledge is 'simply' knowledge, believing it to be both less and more than it seems. Those, for instance, who regard 'true' as an 'empty compliment' that we pay to propositions we want to endorse, or as part of a philosophical 'discourse of legitimation', will regard 'knowledge' too as a metaphysically empty stamp of approval. Metaphysically speaking, then, they believe knowledge to be less than it seems. But politically speaking, they believe it to be more than it seems; for once their view of knowledge is in place, it is only a small step to the suggestion that propositions approved as knowledge are likely to reflect the perspectives and even serve the interests of those whose social power shapes the practices of approval. Since being female has placed one historically at the less powerful end of gender relations, it would be easy then to see how there could be a role for feminism in the theory of knowledge. Feminism would have a ready-made task in counteracting and protecting against gender bias in the processes and institutions of approval.

The philosophical question of moral justification inquires how substantive moral assertions - claims that particular actions or practices are right or wrong, permissible or impermissible - may be confirmed or disconfirmed. This question has always been central in western moral philosophy and it holds special significance for feminism, which is defined by its moral opposition to male dominance. Feminists need some means of establishing that their critiques of those actions, practices and institutions that rationalize or maintain male dominance are not merely personal opinions but instead are objectively justified.

This chapter discusses some recent feminist contributions to the philosophical debate about moral justification. Part 1 traces feminist engagements with four major moral theorists of the twentieth century, and part 2 makes explicit several common themes running through those feminist critiques. Part 3 outlines some elements of an alternative feminist approach to moral justification, informed by the earlier critiques. Part 4 offers some feminist reflections on the project of providing a philosophical account of moral justification, suggesting that philosophers' claims to authority in defining moral justification may themselves constitute practice of dominance.

Introduction

The articulation of feminist perspectives on the history of western philosophy has been a significant development in feminist philosophy. Critique of the alleged 'maleness' of the philosophical tradition has been a central theme in this development. It has reflected more general divisions within feminist theory between approaches centred on the affirmation of 'sameness' and approaches emphasizing 'difference'. Where some have defended female character and capacities in relation to traditional ideals, others have challenged the supposed gender-neutrality of the ideals themselves.

Despite the contrasts between these approaches, a common tone was evident in the early stages of feminist history of philosophy: the history of philosophy was seen as a repository of misogynist ideas and ideals, towards which feminism took up a defensive posture. In more recent work inspired by feminism, a more positive mood is evident. Rather than defining itself through opposition to a 'male' tradition, feminist history of philosophy has emerged as a shifting set of strategies which bring sexual difference to bear on the reading of philosophical texts.

Introduction

Feminist philosophy of science is situated at the intersection between feminist interests in science and philosophical studies of science as these have developed in the last twenty years. Feminists have long regarded the sciences as a key resource for understanding the conditions that affect women's lives and, in this connection, they have pursued a number of highly productive programmes of research, especially in the social and life sciences. At the same time, however, feminists see the sciences as an important locus of gender inequality and as a key source of legitimation for this inequality; feminists both within and outside the sciences have developed close critical analyses of the androcentrism they find inherent in the institutions, practices and content of science. Both kinds of feminist engagement with science - constructive and critical - raise epistemological questions about ideals of objectivity, the status of evidence and the role of orienting (often unacknowledged) contextual values.

Feminist ethics

Ethics, or moral philosophy, as a field of intellectual inquiry developed in the west for well over two thousand years with minimal input from women. Women's voices have been virtually absent from western ethics until this century, as they have been from every field of intellectual endeavour. The absence of female voices has meant that the moral concerns of men have preoccupied traditional western ethics, the moral perspectives of men have shaped its methods and concepts, and male biases against women have gone virtually unchallenged within it. Feminist ethics explores the substantive effect of this imbalance on moral philosophy and seeks to rectify it.

Like other areas of feminist thought, feminist ethics is grounded in a commitment to ending the oppression, subordination, abuse and exploitation of women and girls, wherever these may arise. In the late 1960s, when feminist ethics began, it consisted mainly of applying the resources of traditional moral philosophy to the array of moral issues that were being brought to public attention by the women's movements then arising in many western societies.

Introduction: the scope of this chapter

The rise of a national Standard language in the period 1476–1776 (see Görlach this volume) had its literary counterpart in the formation of a national literature, embodied in the works of those whom influential opinion identified as the nation's ‘best authors’. Indeed, the codifying of language and the canonising of literature were not merely simultaneous but symbiotic processes, with the ‘best authors' being quarried for instructive examples as much by grammarians and language teachers as by rhetoricans and literary critics. Dr Johnson, for instance, advised prospective readers of his Dictionary that ‘the syntax of this language … can be only learned by the distinct consideration of particular words as they are used by the best authors' (Johnson 1747: 19). And Johnson's was not an innovative attitude. He was simply ratifying an alliance between Literary English and Standard English that was already being negotiated almost two centuries earlier. For when Puttenham advises sixteenth-century poets to write in ‘the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx. myles, and not much aboue’ ([1589]: 145), his sixty-mile radius draws the boundary not of a homogeneous regional dialect, but rather of an emerging establishment variety, centred on the Court and London and circumferenced by the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and the main seat of ecclesiastic power at Canterbury.

The tradition represented by Puttenham and Johnson has proved a powerful one, gaining in strength as it became institutionalised in the syllabuses of nineteenth-century schools and twentieth-century universities. But in the academic debates of more recent years, its restrictive definition of literature has come under attack.

The setting

This volume treats the history of English from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century; the dates are at least partly symbolic, framing the establishment of Caxton's first press in England and the American Declaration of Independence, the notional birth of the first (non-insular) extraterritorial English. The preceding volume covered a slightly longer time-span (four centuries as opposed to three), but in our period the changes in the cultural ambience in which English existed and which its speakers expressed were arguably more profound, perhaps greater even than those from the murky ‘beginnings’ of volume I to the Norman Conquest; even perhaps than those in the millennium from the fifth to the fifteenth century.

Taking conventional period names as a rough index of change, the three centuries covered here include ‘the waning of the Middle Ages’ (Huizinga 1927), the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the beginnings of the Romantic period. The transformation of the European world-picture in this time is enormous. Fifteenth-century Europe was still essentially medieval, living in a geocentric and finite cosmos, the fixed stars bounding the universe beyond the crystalline planetary spheres. No celestial objects invisible to the naked eye were known, nor, at the other extreme, any organisms or structures smaller than the naked eye could see. In the natural world, maggots generated spontaneously from rotten meat, the heart was the seat of the emotions, and the arteries carried air.

Less than two centuries on, much of this had become what C. S. Lewis (1964) aptly called ‘the discarded image’.

General background

Homogeneity versus heterogeneity

No language in the world is homogeneous, or ever will be. Whereas earlier forms of English were characterised by extreme variation on all levels and Middle English is in fact best described as a loose conglomerate of unstable varieties, we usually lack any more detailed insight into what functions this variation had for the individual speaker. The social correlates so well known from modern sociolinguistics, such as age, sex, education, religion, can normally not be applied to the existing texts, nor can even the geographical range of recorded forms be determined with any degree of certainty. Finally, if modern dialect or other non-standard features are contrasted with (as the term non-standard implies) an accepted standard form of a language, this method would necessarily fail with Middle English even if we knew more about it than we do and, in view of the state of surviving documents, ever will. It is safe to assume that for its speakers the linguistic heterogeneity of Middle English was ordered in some way, but it was so only for continually shifting speech communities, whose number and individual geographical spread we know very little about. The scene changed dramatically in the fifteenth century: the emergence of a new standard language began to re-institute a linguistic norm for written supraregional English. This development was a natural consequence of the acceptance of English in public domains, and was speeded up by the change-over to English as the Chancery language in 1430.

Introduction

In the course of the Middle English period, a number of major changes took place in the structure of English. The most important of these were the reduction of the system of inflectional endings, the reorganisation of the patterns of word order and the trend toward the use of analytic constructions instead of synthetic ones. These developments were related, and their roots can be found in Old English.

The effects of these changes on English syntax can be clearly seen in the first two centuries of the Modern period, from about 1500 to about 1700. At that time, the structure of the language was gradually established so that eighteenth-century standard written English closely resembles the present-day language. The language of most sixteenth-century authors still reflects the heritage of Middle English, whilst it is possible to read long passages from eighteenth-century novels or essays and find only minor deviations from present-day constructions.

It is thus obvious that a description of English syntax from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century should pay constant attention to change. It is equally obvious that the description will mainly focus on the first two Early Modern centuries. Sixteenth-century texts are characterised by a richness of variant forms and constructions, inherited from Middle English and, to a lesser extent, influenced by Latin. In seventeenth-century writing, the abundance of variants was gradually reduced.

Thus it is no wonder that an account of Early Modern syntactic developments easily creates an impression of a movement from greater variability and lack of organisation towards a more regulated and orderly state.

Introduction

Overview and prospect

The period 1476–1776 covers the end of Middle English, what is generally known as Early Modern English, and the early stages of indisputably ‘modern’, if somewhat old-fashioned, English. At the beginning, the language looks more Middle than Modern, and sounds partly both; at the end it looks and sounds quite, if not fully, modern. I illustrate with two short texts and some comment:

Introduction

Philosophy leaves everything as it is, or so it has been said. Feminists do not leave everything as it is. We are always interfering, always fighting for something, always wanting things to be otherwise and better - even in philosophy itself. But if philosophy leaves everything as it is, shouldn't feminists leave philosophy as it is? If philosophy leaves everything as it is, then it cannot hurt women, and it cannot help women. To be sure, if philosophy leaves everything as it is, it leaves oppression as it is, but one should no more hope otherwise than one should hope for the stones to cry out for justice. Shouldn't feminists let philosophy be? Well, not everyone agrees with the one who said philosophy leaves everything as it is. Someone else began his meditations thus:

Introduction

A great deal of recent feminist work on philosophy of mind has been grounded on a central claim: that the key oppositions between body and mind, and between emotion and reason, are gendered. While the mind and its capacity to reason are associated with masculinity, the body, together with our emotional sensibilities, are associated with the feminine. Evidence for this view comes from at least two sources. First, overtly sexist philosophers have in the past claimed that women are by nature less capable reasoners than men and are more prone to ground their judgements on their emotional responses. These authors have been repeatedly opposed by defenders of women, whether male or female. Secondly, feminists have explored ways in which gendered oppositions are at work even in the writings of philosophers who do not explicitly differentiate the mental capacities of men and women or connect women with the bodily work of reproduction and domestic labour. By studying the metaphorical structures of philosophical texts, looking at what may appear to be digressions from the main line of argument, and paying attention to examples, they have identified persistent patterns of association running through the history of philosophy.

Some philosophical work about language and its use has been inspired by feminist agenda, some by malestream philosophical agenda. Reading work in these two areas - in feminist-philosophy of language and in philosophy of language, as I shall call them - one easily gets the impression that they are totally separate enterprises. Here I hope to show that the impression is partly due to habits of thought that pervade much analytical philosophy and have done damage in philosophy of language. My claim will be that an idea of communicative speech acts belongs in philosophy of language (section 2). I think that the absence of such an idea from malestream accounts of linguistic meaning might be explained by ways of thinking which are arguably characteristically masculine (section 3). Once communicative speech acts are in place, various feminist (and other political) themes can be explored (section 4).

Feminist-philosophy of language and philosophy of language

Language's relation to gender was at the centre of discussions from the beginning of feminism's second wave. Dale Spender, in a path-breaking book, claimed that 'males, as the dominant group, have produced language, thought and reality'.3 Some feminists refused to share Spender's pessimism, and questioned whether language could be the powerful controlling influence that Spender represented.4 But a view of language as a vehicle for the perpetuation of women's subordination was prevalent in the 1980s, even if it was often based upon less radical claims than Spender's. Writers gave attention to the sexism implicit in language that contains purportedly generic uses of masculine terms, especially the supposedly neutral 'man' and male pronouns.

This Companion represents a departure from the previously published volumes in its series. Each of those dealt with a single philosopher and with a male one in every case, whereas this one brings women in and treats a theme rather than an authority. So far as the departure allows, this book's principal aim is in line with that of other Companions: it consists of new papers by an international team of philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship; and these have been written with non-specialists in mind, so that the collection can serve as an introduction to the area. We have tried to design it to be helpful to any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about feminism's place in their subject.

The present Companion has a further aim. It is intended to foster appreciation of the potentially far-reaching impact of feminist thinking in philosophy. As departments of women's studies and gender studies have grown up in the last twenty years, there has come to be more and more published work falling under the head of feminist philosophy.