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More on women in philosophy

Brian Leiter

Following up on Jo Wolff's piece, philosopher Mary Midgley (one of those mentioned by Wolff) writes to The Guardian:

As a survivor from the wartime group [at Oxford], I can only say: sorry, but the reason was indeed that there were fewer men about then. The trouble is not, of course, men as such – men have done good enough philosophy in the past. What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about. All this can go on until somebody from outside the circle finally explodes it by moving the conversation on to a quite different topic, after which the games are forgotten. Hobbes did this in the 1640s. Moore and Russell did it in the 1890s. And actually I think the time is about ripe for somebody to do it today. By contrast, in those wartime classes – which were small – men (conscientious objectors etc) were present as well as women, but they weren't keen on arguing.

It was clear that we were all more interested in understanding this deeply puzzling world than in putting each other down. That was how Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Mary Warnock and I, in our various ways, all came to think out alternatives to the brash, unreal style of philosophising – based essentially on logical positivism – that was current at the time. And these were the ideas that we later expressed in our own writings.

A number of interesting and/or curious claims here (I am particularly struck by the confident dismissal of logical positivism, and by the implication that Oxford no longer produces talented female philosophers), but I'm curious what readers think?  Signed comments will, of course, be preferred.

UPDATE:  A commenter calls our attention to this 2001 profile of Midgley, which is a bit ironic in this context:

Mary Midgley, aged 81, may be the most frightening philosopher in the country: the one before whom it is least pleasant to appear a fool. One moment she sits by her fire in Newcastle like a round-cheeked  tabby cat; the next she is deploying a savage Oxonian precision of language to dissect some error as a cat dissects a living mouse.

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29 responses to “More on women in philosophy”

  1. Tom Hurka

    Isn't a bit odd to suggest that Anscombe ("he shows a corrupt mind") and Foot weren't interested in putting rival views down? They often did so very vehemently.

    Reply
  2. undergrad pseudonym

    Isn't there a distinction between putting down rival views and putting down rivals? There was no particular target of Anscombe's "he shows a corrupt mind," just a certain philosophical view.

    Reply
  3. Mark van Roojen

    Tom, I think that Foot was certainly interested in calling into question various views she addressed. But I never got any sense from her writing that there was any real animus in it, or any showing off. I didn't really know her much in person, but she came to give a series of talks when I was in grad school seemed to be an engaging and kind philosophical personality. She took the grad students seriously and listened more than the average professional philosopher. She also was a nice model of a philosopher willing to give up on her own views. I got the sense from much of her writing that she often aimed her criticisms at views she found or had found attractive. So I do think it fair to say she wasn't interested in putting other people down.

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  4. Anon student

    I can't see how anyone could read Anscombe's 'Modern Moral Philosophy' and think she wasn't up for a scrap as much as any man.

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  5. Ori Simchen

    My own sense, fostered no doubt by time spent with such formidable figures as the late Ruth Barcan Marcus, is that the issue has more to do with bullshit-tolerance in the philosophy classroom than anything else. In philosophy we seem far more willing to tolerate the arrogant male undergrad or graduate student speaking with great confidence about he-knows-not-what. This just isn’t so in linguistics or psychology, which probably helps explain the migration of highly able young women from philosophy into those neighboring areas. Many leading semanticists, many of them women, may have been simply unimpressed by what they observed early on in their philosophy classes. My experience with philosophers and linguists does not corroborate the common diagnosis that in philosophy we are somehow more polemical or combative or mean. The main difference I have observed is our relative willingness as philosophers to suffer arrogant, male fools.

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  6. Anne Jacobson

    Tom, I think that MM was talking about how they interacted.

    As a student of Foot and Anscombe, and then an SCR colleague, I certainly did see episodes of fairly stark negativity both toward work and toward people. Elizabeth was more explicit, as I remember. I do remember Philippa taking her to task for her behavior at a meeting of the Oxford Phil Soc, when she turned her back on the person responding to her, and never looked at him. (She really disapproved of his words.) Still, after the memorial conference for Philippa, at which someone explained endorsement of a thesis on the grounds that it was useful for philosophy, I doubted that any of their students would have said that being useful for philosophy was good; or rather, it’s doubtful anyone would say it more than once. Modern moral philosophy and much more may well rest on a mistake.

    What all the philosophers who worked with Philippa and Elizabeth around the time I did got was, as far as I could see, a strong sense that the best approach was to try to help each other work out the best version we all together could construct. In my experience, this is fairly rare and quite wonderful. I found much the same spirit in a group of women philosophers who met with some regularity in Princeton in the 80’s.

    MM seems to suggest this is a gendered trait. I’d be hesitant to say that. However, a recent issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Proceedings of the Royal Society on female aggression supports the gendered hypothesis. When men fight or take flight, women tend and defend.

    I’m hoping to get a post up about the Proceedings for feministphilosophers.wordpress.com soon.

    Reply
  7. Molly Gardner

    I took Midgley to be saying, not that the problem was with combativeness per se, but that the problem was with what it was people were being combative about. The contrast seems to be between arguing about simple, made-up puzzles for the sake of winning and arguing about the "deeply puzzling" real world for the sake of understanding it.

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  8. Jane Brownstein

    That seems to be a more charitable reading, Molly. Thanks!

    In case anyone's forgotten the results of the _factual_ investigation of Adelberg and Thompson on the reasons women tend to leave philosophy (http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/06/17/192523112/name-ten-women-in-philosophy-bet-you-can-t), linked to on this blog awhile ago:

    "Contrary to some speculation in the field, female students did not perceive classroom discussions as overly aggressive, and they were no more likely to say that students in the class failed to treat each other with respect. In an email, Thompson told me: 'I was really surprised that both women and men do not perceive the philosophical discussions in their introductory course to be excessively combative'"

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  9. Becko Copenhaver

    I want to second Ori's suggestion that some of what may have driven some folks (including women) out has to do with experiences in undergraduate classrooms – in particular, a certain indulgence we give to a particular kind of student. As someone who teaches a 2-3 load at a small liberal arts college, most of my time is spent thinking about the classroom. The sort of student Ori mentions (and, please, Ori, correct me if I am misinterpreting you) is a real thorn in a teacher's side. On the one hand, he (and yes, it is most often a male) is participating: something one wants to encourage. On the other hand, he is indiscriminate with his remarks, doesn't listen to others, and his questions or remarks have more to do with demonstrating knowledge (to you) than it does with engaging others or the issue at hand.

    I think lots of students, men and women, are turned off by this sort of behavior, and turned off by the degree to which any classroom encourages it. Insofar as the philosophical classroom encourages it more, it's a reasonable hypothesis about why so many really great students do not choose to stay in our discipline. Who wants to be around these folks? Notice that by "this behavior" neither I nor Ori are talking about combativeness – we're talking about self-indulgence (again, correct me if I'm wrong, Ori).

    As a teacher, it's hard to know how to deal with it. At the very least, don't take up classroom time dealing with the issue. In my experience, call the student (or students) into one's office as early as possible. Say that you value their contributions. Say that you are always willing to talk philosophy in office hours one-on-one. Say that your job is to teach everyone, not them, and that sometimes you will hold up a stop-sign hand when they start speaking or raise their hand and that this is your useful sign to them that their contribution is not particularly needed at that point. After you have satisfied the talkers, you can institute the "three hand rule:" I won't call on anyone until I see three hands.

    But practical suggestions aside, the point remains. So long as we're wildly speculating, here's a wild speculation: maybe we have been indulging a certain sort of student and driving away exactly the sort of student that we would otherwise much prefer to have.

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  10. va

    "These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about. All this can go on until somebody from outside the circle finally explodes it by moving the conversation on to a quite different topic, after which the games are forgotten."

    this sounds like another version of the boring criticism some opponents of analytic philosophy usually come up with. games? everybody with a sound mind knows that these people were not playing games! i especially love the last part of the above excerpt. so who came from outside the circle and moved the 'conversation' to another topic? and the games were forgotten?
    as joan rivers would say: OH, PLEASE!

    Reply
  11. Anonymous philosopher

    Suppose that I described to you a philosopher as "fiercely combative" — indeed, "the most frightening philosopher in the country: the one before whom it is least pleasant to appear a fool", and one that will not hesitate to deploy "a savage Oxonian precision of language to dissect some error as a cat dissects a living mouse".

    I might recollect an occasion on which this philosopher declared to a debate audience that an opponent was drunk. (The opponent was entirely sober, lamenting afterward that this philosopher "does go as close to playing dirty as you can get".)

    Finally, rather than trust my own words, I might point you to this philosopher's own: "I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say – and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict – a negative approach, as they say, but one that doesn't seem to run out".

    Having read this description, you might immediately draw two conclusions: (i) This philosopher perfectly exemplifies the vices that Midgey is complaining about and that other commentators on this thread lament: arrogance and animosity, keenness at winning arguments at all costs rather than understanding the real world for its own sake, petty language-chopping, etc. (ii) This philosopher must of course be **male**. I mean, come on — we've all been annoyed by a male freshman philosophy student before, right? You know how **they** are.

    You would be correct in drawing the first conclusion. But you would be incorrect in drawing the second: the description above comes from *The Guardian*'s own profile of Midgley from January 2001.

    This is just to remind ourselves that bad behavior in philosophical settings is not displayed exclusively (or, I would argue, predominantly) by just one gender, much less because one is in the grip of a style of philosophizing "based essentially on logical positivism" (whatever that means). Nor is it any less inexcusable if practiced by a member of one gender as opposed to another. Nor, finally, will it go away simply by reducing the ratio of men in the classroom — whether it be by sending them to war, or with the less draconian measures being enacted by Ph.D. programs or tenure-track search committees these days.

    Reply
  12. John Schwenkler

    In re: Becko's comment, The Onion nailed this phenomenon many years ago: http://www.theonion.com/articles/guy-in-philosophy-class-needs-to-shut-the-fuck-up,1804/

    Reply
  13. Anonymous Junior Faculty

    Re: the Guardian story — She wasn't telling a "debate audience" that John Cornwell was drunk; she was telling a group of people at a bar — just breaking his balls a little bit, as they say in Goodfellas. Also, here is how Cornwell describes Midgely in the article:

    "Mary is an excellent thing, of course. Whenever you look for a debate, she is the natural against the ultra-Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins or Dan Dennett. But although she often professes to be talking about science, she does draw an equivalence between scientism [applying scientific method inappropriately] and science. I think a lot of the stuff she does is very good knockabout, which pleases people who don't like science, and she tends to lump together an enormous amount in her criticisms."

    Am I the only one who found this description difficult to parse? Perhaps this guy's natural manner of expression gives the appearance of drunkenness.

    Reply
  14. Tamler Sommers

    I want to second Molly Gardner's point, I think people are misunderstanding Midgley's position. She has no issue with men being "fiercely combative" in philosophy. This isn't about civility or guys not being able to shut the fuck up. This issue is that there's a real world out there to discover, but philosophers (especially men) would rather direct their energies to outcompeting their peers in the phil. equivalent of sudoku puzzles. I think there's a good deal of truth to that. But maybe if 'va' makes a couple more Joan Rivers references I'll change my mind…

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  15. ABD

    If Midgley has no problem with men being "fiercely combative," then why does she purport to have rejected a "brash, unreal style of philosophising" that involves "clever young men" competing in "winning arguments." That sounds like an objection to a manner of doing philosophy, not to, as Gardner suggests, "what it was people were being combative about."

    But even if her objection is as Gardner suggests, why does Midgley get to determine which puzzles are worth arguing about and which are not?

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  16. Tamler Sommers

    ABD writes: "If Midgley has no problem with men being "fiercely combative," then why does she purport to have rejected a "brash, unreal style of philosophising" that involves "clever young men" competing in "winning arguments."

    (A) Being brash and competing to win an argument doesn't mean you're fiercely combative in any pejorative sense. (B) The "unreal" part is crucial here. My guess is that Midgley has no problem with people brashly trying to win arguments about real problems. (Or what she believes are real problems.) Her personality and writings are fairly combative, as people have pointed out. It's harder to straight-up "win" when you're arguing about the real world though.

    "But even if her objection is as Gardner suggests, why does Midgley get to determine which puzzles are worth arguing about and which are not?"

    She doesn't get to 'determine' this. But she gets to express an educated opinion about it in a letter to the editor, right?

    BL COMMENT: And this is the FINAL round on this particular sub-debate. Back to the main topic!

    Reply
  17. Tim Maudlin

    It seems that one can distinguish at least three issues concerning philosophical interactions here: aim, topic, and style.

    The first two are extremely important, the last (I think) much less so.

    As to aim, when there is some sort of philosophical dispute one can have the aim of trying to get to the correct answer (insofar as possible) or the aim of just "winning" the argument. For example, suppose one puts forward an argument to some conclusion, and an interlocutor points out correctly that it turns on an ambiguity of meaning of a term. If your aim is just to get things right, then your reaction should be gratitude, even enjoyment. You had been making a mistake, maybe one hard to spot, and now that is cleared up. You concede the point and move on. If the aim is "winning", then this is a terrible situation, since it looks like the "opponent" "wins". You deny that any mistake was made, change the subject, try to obfuscate, look for a purely rhetorical zinger. These are just different attitudes to what the whole purpose of the exercise is.

    As to topic, was what you were discussing important or unimportant? Sometimes, when the aim has become "winning", the topics of dispute gravitate to those where there are more clearly "winners" and "losers", and the point of the whole thing can get lost. When ABD asks why MIdgley "gets to determine" which "puzzles" are worth arguing about, the answer is surely that she has as much right as anyone else to make, and defend, a judgment on that point.

    Finally, as to style: how does one make arguments? My own view is simple: make them as clearly and forcefully as you can, make it as vivid and explicit as possible. That way, if you have made a mistake it is easiest to spot, and if no one can spot one you can be more confident. If this is being "combative", then it is a good thing, or at least an acceptable thing. Of course, if your criticism of someone else's view is on target, this can be more uncomfortable than hedging around. Perhaps the issue for some people is this one of psychological comfort. But that doesn't seem to have been Midgley's concern.

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  18. Anne Jacobson

    I was surprised recently to see Hilary Putnam’s review of Gareth Evans’ posthumous book and to see his remark, “One thing a review cannot convey is the relentless technicality of the book. … It is a book addressed to Evans’s fellow specialists, and only to them. Philosophy, as Evans pictures it, is as esoteric as quantum mechanics.” I think he is making a point that is at least congenial to MM's. I wonder if the standards of the esoteric haven't shifted a great deal.

    In my experience of the women who were came up to Oxford during WWII (Anscombe and Foot) they were very clear that there were extremely important foundational questions one should not lose sight of. And in any philosophical inquiry, one should ask whether we ought to be thinking this sort of way at all. Of course, some of this was Wittgensteinian. "Philosophical theory is not liberating." But whatever it's origin, it is a remarkable approach that may be being lost.

    John Campbell had a lot of what amounted to private tutorials with Philippa well after his formal education, and he recounted their effect in his talk at her memorial service. It is really worth a read, and it does suggest her approach is not today very common. I'll put the url in a following message.

    Tamler, Thanks for the good sense.

    Reply
  19. Anne Jacobson

    Campbell on Foot:
    http://www.some.ox.ac.uk/CMS/files/John_Campbell_Philippa_Talk.pdf

    The beginning paras from Campbell:

    I first had a sustained philosophical discussion with Philippa Foot in 1990. She had just retired from UCLA and come back to Walton Street; I had just been visiting at UCLA and had just come back to teaching in Oxford. She said that there were some points in a paper of mine she’d like to talk about, and would I like to meet up? That first session was quite an experience. It was like being in a gale. I felt like a passenger on the Titanic, one of the lucky ones who’d managed to get hold of a deckchair. I held on to the sides of my chair while the whole buffeted ship, rocking wildly, slowly but unexorably went down. Around the two-hour mark I announced that I was going to take a walk round the block, just to clear my head and remind myself that ordinary life was till going on. And then I returned, to bale furiously as water flooded the boat.
    Somewhat to my surprise, that first session was declared a great success, and we carried on with our meetings. In fact we had a three- to four-hour discussion more or less every fortnight from 1990 until I left Oxford in 2003, so that’s 13 years, with very few gaps. The tone continued to be rumbustious: I remember once being pressed and pressed on some mistake I was allegedly making, until, right in the corner, I finally thought of the devastating riposte that proved I had been right all along. Philippa burst out laughing and said, ‘You know, I think that is the most perfect example of philosophical nonsense!’

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  20. James Ladyman

    In his article Jo Wolff says, by way of expressing what he worries is a dominant ideology in philosophy, '[y]our job is to take the most mean-minded interpretation you can of the other person's view and show its absurdity.'. But surely it is standard to be as charitable as possible to a position in the course of criticising it. Don't we teach students to think hard about why a sensible person might believe a position they find implausible, in order to understand both its definition and the arguments in its favour, even if they then go on to argue against it. Accordingly negative dialectics can be positive even for the target of criticism who can then go on to refine their position and its justification in the light of scrutiny.

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  21. Heidi Howkins Lockwood

    Tim, your distinction between the aim, topic, and style of philosophical arguments is perceptive, but your confident assertion of the "simple" view that the right way to make arguments is to "make them as clearly and forcefully as you can, make it as vivid and explicit as possible," rests on an assumption that the clarity of an argument is an objective, audience-independent fact. It is not at all clear to me that this is the case. Surely whether we are successful in clearly and forcefully conveying an argument will depend, at least in part, on the extent to which we are aware of relevant conversational, social, and "philosophical" norms.

    And so, anonymous philosopher at 11 (et al.): If we keep in mind the fact that MM (and all of the Oxford wartime women) were, like many women who succeed in philosophy, particularly adept at adapting to different sets of philosophical norms — to, for example, flipping from mutually supportive efforts to "understand this deeply puzzling world," to competently playing the "brash, unreal" games of their male counterparts — I don't see any contradiction whatsoever in taking MM's comments seriously while also accepting the Guardian's profile of her as a philosopher capable of "deploying a savage Oxonian precision of language." We should not infer from the fact that one is capable of playing the game well, that one endorses the game.

    I also want to join Ori, Becko, and John in suggesting that we ought to be re-examining our tendencies to indulge (and, in some cases, even reward) the student described in the Onion article as "the guy in the philosophy class who needs to shut the fuck up." As anyone who cares enough about teaching to have reflected on this knows, it's not always an easy task. Sometimes simply talking to the student helps; often it doesn't. Becko suggested a brilliant three-hand rule. Another technique I've used with smaller (15-20 student) intro-to-mid-level undergrad classes is a conversation format based on the "Harkness Table" technique, originally developed at Phillips Exeter Academy. Here's one (of many) descriptions of the technique available online: http://www.lsrhs.net/sites/herbertc/files/2011/04/PSYCH-SOC-Harkness-Discuss1.pdf. And here's an example of a self-evaluation tool (regular and rapid formal feedback is an important piece of a successful Harkness table): https://sites.google.com/site/jodisschooldocs/harkness/harkness-discussion-self-evaluation. (This technique is still used at Phillips Exeter, by the way, in all classes — even math and science. I observed a calculus class when my daughter was a senior there, and was duly impressed when the group of 12 students managed to collaboratively arrive at a result known as Rolle's Theorem — without a textbook, and without the help of the teacher, who only jumped in once the students had arrived at the result, to let them know that they had stumbled on a well-known result with a standard name.)

    I'd be very interested in additional ideas from readers about how to disrupt hegemonic power in the classroom in general — and, in particular, how to prevent over-confident students (male or female) from unintentionally creating a non-collaborative and exclusive climate, both in and out of the classroom.

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  22. Mauricio Suarez

    I fear the point that both Wolff and Midgley are making will now get lost in a rhetorical discussion regarding the virtues of critical analysis. Their point is that there is a productive place and space to carry out critical scrutiny, and it requires maturity on all sides to know it. Otherwise the debate descends to the level of school playground diatribe. Unfortunately Wolff is right that often the practice in philosophy is sadly about winning in this childish sense (also pointed out above by Tim Maudlin with whom I agree): Participants will sacrifice any concern for the 'developmental' or 'programmatic' aspects of philosophical work in order to score a point (e.g. gain a competitive promotion). We've all seen this happen myriad times, and it is worth reminding people that it IS deeply unethical. Not so much because those at whose criticism is directed may be young and not in a position to assert themselves but because it has all the chances to abort a budding project when it is vulnerable and has not fully developed itself. And this can not possibly be a service to anyone except narrowly the 'winner'. It certainly does not serve the aim of truth: One does not always get at it by 'combating falsehood wherever it may appear at any cost'. (And, while I do not concur with the implication of Midgley's comments re: Oxford – I had some very good female u/g students there who went on to do excellent PhD work – it does strike me that the above has obvious implications for the under-representation of women in the profession).

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  23. linda.barclay@monash.edu

    I thought Midgley was simply suggesting that to improve the position of women in philosophy we simply need to reduce the number of men in the discipline, by means of a war if necessary.

    Is that so controversial?

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  24. jrs

    It seems to me that MM is venting against a style of philosophy that she doesn't like, rather than seriously trying to explain the datum in question (i.e., that five great women philosophers emerged from Oxford post WW2, and that "few new ones are doing so today"). I don't have the stats in front of me, but I suspect the typical philosophy graduate student body is 15-35% female. One thing MM could mean by saying that there are few eminent female philosophers emerging from Oxford today is that they simply make up a minority of the eminent philosophers of their generation. So understood, the datum is at least largely explained the lower proportion of female graduate students. And my understanding is that the low numbers of female philosophy grad students is primarily the result of women being underrepresented among undergraduate philosophy majors. But as some of the commenters above have suggested, it seems unlikely that undergraduate philosophy classes are overly combative. It also seems unlikely to me that they're overly focused on games that only specialists understand; just think of the typical introductory logic, ethics, political philosophy, ancient philosophy, modern philosophy, philosophy of science, etc. curricula, or the standard intermediate philosophy of mind, language, epistemology, etc. courses.

    If MM means instead that the number of new, eminent, female philosophers is lower than we should expect even after we take into account the number of female graduate students, I guess I'd have to see some evidence that female philosophers are less interested than their male counterparts in specialized "games" (the examples of Anscombe and Foot don't convince me of this), and that there is insufficient opportunity for them to pursue their interests in understanding the puzzling world around them. Do most departments lack enough faculty to work with people on worldly topics? Are other graduate students dismissive of or uninterested in more worldly philosophical concerns? (That wasn't my experience as a grad student.)

    So whether our profession is overly combative or focuses too much on games are interesting questions, but I'm skeptical that they're really central to understanding the underrepresentation on women. I take it the real explanations of that fact will have to do with wider social forces and possibly also with undergraduate syllabi and instruction.

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  25. Anne Jacobson

    I can't seem to make the link work. Could you fix it?

    I know about A and T's work, but I can't remember how many studies they've done or on whom they've done them. I would have thought that aggression in the classroom varies a lot. I don't remember seeing much undergrad or grad aggression in classes by Kripke or Lewis. That does not mean there isn't a lot of aggression in Princeton's philosophy department. Rather, context may limit a students' willingness to take risks. (I should say that my memory is from classes many years ago.)

    Could you fix the url, if indeed the fault is with it?

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  26. Anne Jacobson

    I'm not sure we would be right to understand MM to use "game" literally, particularly when that's taken to suggest youthful silliness.

    I have been wondering whether what she means might be connected to a once common distinction between 'philosophical questions' and 'literature questions.' E.g., "Are colors objective?" looks like a philosophical question, but "Is X's criticism of Y on the objectivity of color sound" looks like a literature question. [Is Lewis' reply to Kripke on trans-world identity sound" may look like a literature question, but it probably should be counted as a philosophical one.

    Read in terms of this distinction, MM might be understood as saying that when the men returned, they turned philosophical discussions into combative discussions of each others work.

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  27. Mauricio Suarez

    Very nice distinction which certainly seems apposite. Could you Anne Jacobson please forward some references? I'd be most grateful.

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  28. Jane Brownstein

    To Becko:

    Over my past three years of teaching, I recall quite vividly that I had six of these students who wouldn't shut up and kept attacking everyone, even after being talked to in private. Five were female, and one was male. I even had students come to me privately and complain about two of the five females (nobody complained about the male, even though he was a very annoying (to me) Randroid).

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  29. Anon

    "Mary is an excellent thing." Sorry, but the use of the word "thing" in this description would seem to be particularly derogatory.

    Reply

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