From an interview with Marty Nemko (HT: Dave Lull):
MN: In a number of papers, you propose what you call a humanist, individualist feminism very different from the kind of feminism now fashionable in the academy and elsewhere. Can you tell us more?
SH: My feminism is humanist because it stresses what all human beings have in common—that as Dorothy Sayers wrote, “Women are more like men than anything else on earth,” and it’s individualistic because it stresses that every woman has her own unique mélange of temperament, tastes, strengths, weaknesses, ideas, and opinions.
In contrast, today’s academic feminism, largely ignoring both what’s universal and what’s individual, stresses women-as-a-class. Sometimes it focuses on “women’s issues.” Sometimes it appeals to a supposed “woman’s point of view” or “women’s ways of knowing." Sometimes it goes as far as to decry science as an inherently masculinist enterprise.
I think this all has been bad for women, as well as bad for philosophy. It reinstates old, sexist stereotypes: “Feminist epistemology” will focus on emotion rather than reason, “feminist ethics” on caring rather than justice. It confuses inquiry with advocacy of “feminist values.” It encourages women into a pink-collar ghetto of feminist philosophy and makes it harder for those whose talent is for logic, history of philosophy, metaphysics, etc., to succeed.
Interviewers sometimes ask me, “How we can get more women into philosophy?” “That’s the wrong goal,” I reply. “The right goal is to make a person’s sex irrelevant to our assessment of the quality of his or her mind.” So I’m intrigued by recent empirical work suggesting that blinding the hiring process—as I urged decades ago—results in more diverse hires than diversity-training programs and the like.
I agree with the above.
Other Haack entries (some critical):
Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry
Philosophy Profession in Thrall of Dreadful Rankings
Susan Haack on the Fragmentation of Philosophy and the Road to Reintegration
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