The question of difference has preoccupied feminists in one way or another for a decade and a half. And even where difference is not in the foreground of feminist thinking and writing, it remains in the background as a point of contention that can be used against any empirical or theoretical generalizations that may be advanced. To focus on difference would thus seem a suitable approach not only to a discussion of feminist political theory, but to feminist theory and philosophy more generally.

Feminists have reflected on three kinds of difference: first, their own difference as women in relation to men, usually taken as a socially constructed gender difference; secondly, social differences between women; and thirdly, theoretical differences between feminists. The second and third types of difference have been seen as threatening the very possibility of feminist theory. My thesis will be that the reason why difference has become so divisive and threatening to feminists is that there has been a conflation of the second and third types of difference, i.e. of social and theoretical differences.

The relationship between feminism and psychoanalytical theory has been stormy. Feminists of all stripes have criticized Freud and his followers for many different aspects of psychoanalytical thought and practice. While some of these criticisms are relatively local in scope, concerning features of psychoanalysis that can be regarded as inessential or transient, others are directed against more central theoretical commitments. The first category includes examples such as the sexist expectations manifested by Freud in his analyses of female patients: the case history documenting Freud's treatment of 'Dora', for example, has been discussed at length by feminist critics. More theoretical criticisms include the charges of false universalism, ahistoricism (in particular the reification of the nuclear family), heterosexism, biologism and phallocentrism. The aim, also, of psychoanalytical therapy has been criticized as reactionary, insofar as it is thought to divert patients from a political understanding of their discontents to the 'individualist' solution of personal adjustment to the status quo.

We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one we thought quite innocent.) - And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them.

When I do not see plurality stressed in the very structure of a theory, I know that I will have to do lots of acrobatics - like a contortionist or tight-rope walker - to have this theory speak to me without allowing the theory to distort me in my complexity.

Introduction

Despite the internal diversity of extant 'ancient philosophy', it has generally been agreed that the main intellectual legacy of classical Greece and Rome to the modern world is the idea of the value of truth and the capacity of human reason to discover it. This idea, powerfully expressed in the dialogues of Plato and in the more systematic teaching of Aristotle, has provided an implicit point of reference - usually, though not invariably, positive - for all subsequent 'philosophy' in the western world, and feminist thought has been no exception to the rule. What remains unresolved, however, is the proper ratio of positive to negative in the attitude of feminism to 'reason'. Since the eighteenth century at least, there has been an effort to rethink the rationalist ethical and political tradition for the benefit of women, and to detach its characteristic themes (legitimate social order; mutual recognition among citizens; co-operative pursuit of a common good) from the ideology of male supremacy. But the sexual egalitarianism which we inherit from the age of Enlightenment is complicated, today, by a rival impulse of solidarity with what the rationalist tradition symbolically excludes - that is, with reason's supposedly feminine 'other' or complement. It is this tension that sets the scene for our discussion.

Introduction: speech and writing

The relationship between the spoken and the written word is of two basic kinds; the written symbol may represent a concept directly, or it may represent the word which names the mental concept in an individual language. In the former case the symbol is called an ideograph, familiar examples of which are Arabic numerals; the numeral represents the same concept to speakers of different languages, but not the same word. The other type of relationship, in which the written form represents the spoken, is also of two kinds; one is phonemic, where each element or grapheme in the written form is intended to represent a sound, or phoneme, in the spoken (and occasionally, in Old English, an allophone). Illustrations of this relationship are common in modern English, e.g. sit, pan, lend. The second type is wholly or partially logographic (representing the word as a whole) where there may be only a partial ‘fit’ between phoneme and grapheme; the reader is expected to recognise the word as a whole even though the set of graphemes does not unequivocally indicate a specific set of phonemes. Many examples of logographs occur in Modern English, e.g. scene/seen, peal/peel, rain/reign, vale/veil. These pairs are known as homophones, words which sound alike but have different meanings and spellings. Homographs are two or more words with identical spelling but different pronunciations and meanings, e.g. wind ‘turn round’ and wind ‘movement of air’. Homonyms are sets of words with similar sounds and spellings, but different meanings, e.g. tender ‘part of a train’, tender ‘gentle’, tender ‘sore’, tender ‘offer’.

Introduction

Overview

Despite the long life and stability of core vocabulary, the rate of language change is no doubt greatest in the lexicon. Lexical words differ from phonemes and grammatical morphemes in that they can be freely added to the existing stock. As we shall see in more detail below, the Early Modern English period is marked by an unprecedented lexical growth. It is achieved both by extensive borrowing from other languages and by exploiting native resources by means of word-formation.

One of the most obvious differences between Old English and Present-Day English is the increase in borrowed lexis. According to one estimate, loan words take up a mere three per cent of the recorded vocabulary in Old English, but some seventy per cent or more in Present-Day English (Scheler 1977: 74). In Early Modern English their share varies between forty per cent and fifty per cent of the new vocabulary recorded (Wermser 1976: 40).

This large-scale borrowing no doubt reflects both the various foreign contacts of the period and the growing demands made on the evolving standard language. This is the period in the history of English when for the first time the vernacular extends to practically all contexts of speech and writing. Borrowed lexis supplies new names for new concepts, but also increases synonymy in the language, thus providing alternative ways of saying the same thing in different registers.

The means by which words are formed are increased by a number of new productive elements that owe their existence to borrowed lexis.

Introduction

Metaphysics has never been without critics. Plato's efforts have repeatedly been a target of attack; Hume ranted against the metaphysicians of his day; and one of the founding missions of logical positivism was to show that metaphysical claims are meaningless. More recently, feminist theorists have joined the chorus. To reveal among academic feminists that one's specialization in philosophy is metaphysics is to invite responses of shock, confusion and sometimes dismissal. Once after I gave a presentation at an American Philosophical Association meeting on social construction, a noted senior feminist philosopher approached me and said, 'you are clearly very smart, and very feminist, so why are you wasting your time on this stuff?' Academic feminists, for the most part, view metaphysics as a dubious intellectual project, certainly irrelevant and probably worse; and often the further charge is levelled that it has pernicious political implications as well.

News – an acronym for the four directions – is current and consequential information that covers all corners of the globe. According to standard definition and contemporary practice, news is timely, significant, proximate, controversial, current, and unexpected. It is reported weekly in newsmagazines, daily in newspapers, hourly on radio, and instantaneously online. Ubiquity ensures its influence: news orders political priorities, structures social concerns, cements loyalties, and promotes a sense of belonging to something beyond oneself. “Newspapers,” writes Benedict Anderson, provide “remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.” Or, as 1010 WINS, a New York all-news radio station promises, “You give us twenty-two minutes, we'll give you the world.”

Religion performs similar functions of defining and ordering identities and worldviews, which helps to explain why the two have a complicated, often fraught, relationship. In today's world, religion is news when it meets journalistic expectations of timeliness and relevance. But in other periods and places, religion was the news; that is, events were newsworthy because they had teleological significance. Centuries before Christians adopted the term “gospel,” or good news, to convey the novel and world-changing message of their faith, men and women used oral, pictorial, and architectural media to share news about the seen and unseen worlds. These reports can still be “read” in places such as the Lascaux cave paintings, the Giza pyramid complex, and the Parthenon.

The faith of Mexican Americans in the American Southwest in the nineteenth century had the inward convictions and outward Christian stamp of the generations of Spanish and mestizo (mixed-blood) missionaries and laity who brought Christianity to North America. But Mexican Americans were also heirs of a variety of Native American beliefs and practices that were as ancient and as deeply rooted as those introduced by the Europeans. These newcomers had not simply offered the gift of Christian salvation to los naturales (the indigenous peoples); they arrived on these shores as political and economic, as well as spiritual, conquerors with the expressed intention of ruling over the Indians, taking their lands and their labor, and replacing their faith traditions. But try as they might, the newcomers were unable to extirpate all the native traditions, and some settled on “baptizing” Indian religious expressions or simply learning to live with them. While not all the missionaries agreed on what indigenous rituals they could tolerate or accommodate, conversion of the native peoples involved an extensive process of give-and-take; and in the end, Spanish European Christianity was transformed in the New World. Still, the Catholic faith gradually became the core faith of the indigenous peoples of Central Mexico, facilitated by traditions amenable to Indian religiosity such as the effi cacy of grace through sacramental symbols and rituals, the intercession of the saints, a communal salvation (the communion of saints), and an incarnational theology that saw the presence of God in a truly human and cultural context.

LIFE AND WORK

Proclus was born in 412 in Byzantium in a Lycian family, still faithful to the old Hellenic religion in a society already dominated by Christianity. The talented young man did not opt for a career in the imperial administration as his father had done, but decided to devote his life to philosophy. After completing his studies in Alexandria, Proclus arrived in Athens in 430 where he joined the Platonic Academy and was first educated by the elderly Plutarch. Under Plutarch the Athenian Academy had turned to the new form of Platonic philosophy that was initiated by Plotinus and propagated by Porphyry. Under the influence of Iamblichus, this Platonic philosophy had become more and more linked to the old beliefs and rites of paganism, of which it offered a rational justification. This tendency increased when Syrianus became the new head of the Academy in 432.1 During more than fifteen years Proclus not only followed Syrianus’ courses, but was also initiated by him in theurgic rituals. Proclus was deeply influenced by his master and he often praises him lavishly (cf. In Parm. 1.618.2– 9). After Syrianus’ death (around 437), he became the head of the school and thus ‘successor (diadochos) of Plato’, a position he held for almost fifty years until his death in 485.

POSING THE QUESTION

The seventeenth century marks a significant moment in thought concerning the definition of God. This is the period in which the radical position of subjectivity is replaced by the impersonal recognition of transcendence as a point of departure of philosophical reflection – God is now a term in a demonstration, and no longer the assumed goal of a journey towards Him. And philosophy, until this time explicitly constituted by metaphysics (metaphysica, philosophia prima, then ontologia), has to transpose into the new domain of rationality certain problems and concepts previously treated only by revealed theology (theologia, sacra scientia). This twofold transformation is nicely illustrated by the problem of the essence of God: from Descartes on, metaphysical discussions of the characteristics and attributes of God consist in transposing and translating, so to speak, into purely philosophical terms theological debates on the divine names as they arise until the Scriptures, through the intermediation of the formulations given of them by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth century?) in his celebrated treatise De divinis nominibus.

These innovations can best be understood in their context, a set of themes from Thomas Aquinas. Despite the long gap between the thirteenth century and the seventeenth, Thomas's views remained decisive for several reasons. The first was the renewal of the ‘Thomistic’ school: notably through the works of Capreolus, Sylvestre de Ferrare, and especially Cardinal Thomas de Vio, called Cajetan (1469–1534). These Thomists widely influenced university and ecclesiastical life, in particular the work of the Council of Trent (1545–63), whose sessions were presided over by a copy of the Summa theologiae placed upon the altar.

A new conception of moral philosophy began to emerge in the seventeenth century. The discipline was no longer to rest on the foundation of authority, whether classical or Christian; it was to become, instead, a systematic science, grounded on logically rigorous deductions from self-evident principles. This rethinking of the epistemological status of moral philosophy took place against the background of a general reaction against ancient authority on the part of contemporary philosophers such as Descartes and Hobbes. Nevertheless, throughout the century, both in the universities and in the popular mind, the traditional forms of ethics, based on classical philosophy or Christian theology, dominated the scene. Ethical thought within the methodological boundaries set by the past – and the majority of works produced in the seventeenth century fall into this category – was not necessarily intellectually stagnant. While some traditional conceptions remained relatively static, others underwent considerable change, occasionally under the impact of the new ethical ideas put forward by the modernists.

The general pattern followed by traditional moral philosophy in the seventeenth century had been established during the Renaissance. Classical ethics was represented by the four major schools: Aristotelian, Stoic, Platonic, and Epicurean. Christian ethics, whose primary domain was the field of moral theology, was used as a yardstick against which the classical systems were measured; a few thinkers, however, rejected pagan thought completely and wanted to create an independent Christian moral philosophy. The ethical conceptions embodied in these traditions differed considerably in doctrinal content, at times coming into open conflict.

EXPLANATION AND CAUSE

A natural phenomenon is said to consist of the properties (physical, chemical, etc.), states, or behaviours of a body or system of bodies. Whereas a descriptive account of a phenomenon relates what these properties are, an explanation tells why they are as they are, or how the phenomenon in question came about. Humankind's concern with ‘why’ and its importance for scientific understanding goes back at least as far as Aristotle. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle distinguishes between ‘knowing the fact [to hoti]’ and ‘knowing the reason why [to dioti]’ and identifies true scientific understanding with ‘knowing both that the cause on account of which [ten aitian di' hen] the object is its cause, and that it is not possible for this to be otherwise’. Mediaeval Aristotelians referred to this kind of knowledge (scientia) as demonstratio propter quid.

Explanation, so understood, has historically and conceptually been linked with the notion of causation. To explain is to explain causally, and the kind of account sought in scientific understanding is usually a causal narrative. The content of the explanation of a phenomenon should provide, at the very least, an aetiology which both identifies the cause(s) of the phenomenon and, ideally, makes clear how that cause is productive of the phenomenon. Again, Aristotle is the earliest systematic source for this view. In the Physics, he insists that ‘knowledge is the object of our inquiry, and people do not think they know a thing until they have grasped the “why” [to dia ti] of it, which is to grasp its primary cause [ten prote aitia]’.

BEGINNINGS

The first known individual of Jewish origin to arrive in the New World was Luis de Torres, the interpreter who accompanied Christopher Columbus in 1492. Baptized shortly before the expedition sailed, de Torres settled in Cuba. Although many have claimed that Christopher Columbus himself was of Jewish origin, the Encyclopedia Judaica properly concludes that “it is equally impossible to exclude or to confirm” this hypothesis. Columbus concealed much about his origins.

Whether or not Columbus himself was Jewish, his discovery made an enormous impact on Jews and Jewish history. Just before his voyage commenced, Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had expelled “all Jews and Jewesses of whatever age they may be” from their “kingdoms and seignories,” warning them never to return. Five years later, in 1497, Jews were likewise expelled from Portugal. Only those who converted to Catholicism – voluntarily or forcibly – were allowed to remain on the Iberian Peninsula. Because the Holy Inquisition targeted these conversos if it suspected them of practicing Judaism in secret, hundreds of them traveled to the New World to seek haven. In time, the New World would likewise provide haven for millions of persecuted Jews from other places.

Enough sixteenth-century New World conversos practiced Jewish rituals clandestinely that the Inquisition soon took notice. Beginning in 1569, it began pursuing “Judaizing heretics” – real and imagined – in the Americas. Some Catholics of Jewish origin continued to practice selected Jewish rituals secretly, notwithstanding the rising danger of discovery.

LIFE

The few facts we have about Simplicius’ life come from his own works and a few other sources. He came from Cilicia (south-eastern Anatolia) as Agathias tells us (Hist. 2.30). He was educated by Ammonius in Alexandria (fl. 490 ce, cf. In Cael 26.18–19) and Damascius (fl. 520 ce) in Athens (In phys. 601.19). Among influential figures on his philosophical outlook are Porphyry, the learned pupil and biographer of Plotinus (245–320), Iamblichus (fl. 300 ce, referred to as ‘the divine Iamblichus’, In phys. 60.7; 639.23 etc.), and Proclus (‘the teacher of my teachers’, In phys. 611.11–12, cf. 795.4–5). The expulsion of Platonists from Athens in 532 ce after Justinian’s ban on pagan teaching ended school activities in 529 ce (Malalas Chronicle 18.47), the cross-references between the extant works, and the lack of evidence after 540 ce suggests that his life-span comes roughly to 480–560 ce. Allusive comments in a discussion of the role of the philosopher in the city in his commentary on Epictetus (In Epict. 32.65.30– 9 D. with reference to Plato Rep. 496d) make it probable that he wrote that commentary before the others while still in Athens, as does his mention of the oppressive situation in Athens (ibid. epilogue). His personal note on friendship (In Epict. 87.39–44/354 Hadot) indicates that he experienced help from friends who looked after his family while he was away, but we cannot establish the nature and date of this event.

France's claim to have discovered Brazil is doubtless a legend, but it seems that the French did indeed explore the Brazilian coastline before 1500. Nevertheless, Captain Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, who spent six months in Brazil in 1503, brought home the son of a Tupinamba chief, called Essomericq, whom he had baptized and to whom he bequested his fortune. Essomericq, who married into the Gonneville family, founded a line and died in 1583. A century and a half later, one of his heirs, Jean-Pierre Paulmier de Courtonne, canon of Lisieux, became an ardent promoter of a mission to the “savages” he claimed to be his ancestry, publishing his Mémoires touchant l'établissement d'une mission Chrétienne dans le troisième Monde, ou la Terre Australe, par un ecclésiastique originaire de cette même terre. It is to be noted how easily the Brazilian convert integrated into French society and how entitled his heir felt to boast about his mixed origins.

Throughout the sixteenth century, stories of assimilation followed the same pattern and paved the way for the charter of the Company of the Hundred Associates – created in 1627 by Cardinal Richelieu for the colonization of Canada – which stipulated that baptized Amerindians would become naturels français and enjoy the same privileges as those born in the mother country. Although showing a propensity toward relative racial openness on the part of the French, this policy equated becoming Catholic with becoming French.