Some years ago I was given Steve Pyke's Philosophers (Reference Pyke1993), a collection of portraits of famous philosophers. The book fascinates me for different reasons. For one, it allows philosophers, as well as everyone else, to stare at the famous members of the discipline. The book is perhaps best described as the philosophical equivalent of Heat Magazine, even when it does not feature any gossip, but personal statements about each philosopher's thought. The book also fascinates because of its apparent irrelevance. Philosophers are known for their thoughts and it should not matter what they look like. They spend their days reading, teaching, writing and talking philosophy. Theirs is a life of the mind. In fact, the book confirms this impression by offering almost exclusively headshots against empty black or white backgrounds, next to a thought.
The pictures are now almost thirty years old and some of the people portrayed have since died. At the time most worked in universities, the majority in English-speaking countries. Yet, it is obvious that the photographer tried to include not just the usual suspects. The philosophers portrayed are from different cultural backgrounds and effort has been made to include a good deal of women. They number roughly one woman to five men, which is not a bad ratio in a field that is still dominated by men. Even today too many conferences or edited volumes feature fewer women.
The obvious effort makes clear that the question ‘What does a philosopher look like?’ is not wholly irrelevant. It turns out that philosophers are after all judged on appearance. An increasing body of research into implicit bias and stereotype threat in philosophy has shown their detrimental effect on female students and academics, on those of non-traditional backgrounds, etc. They can experience a less positive evaluation, even from those who are explicitly committed to egalitarian ideals (implicit bias), or they perform less well when stereotypes are invoked (stereotype threat). These findings have often been inspired by and are building on research done in other disciplines.
To counter the damage of bias and stereotype threat the blog ‘Looks Philosophical: This is What a Philosopher Looks Like’ was created. It invites philosophers to submit a picture of themselves in order to challenge the stereotype of a philosopher as ‘dead white guys. With beards. Who look a bit grumpy’. Many responded and the site now features philosophers of all backgrounds and genders, all very much alive and often smiling. Most pictures show the philosophers with their children, their dogs, on vacation, or engaged in different forms of outdoor activities. Very few pictures are taken at work and often even these include a child or a dog.
The message is clear. Philosophers look like you and me and everyone else. Its history may not be as diverse and thus explain the stereotype of the philosopher, as the blog puts it, as ‘an older, upper-class white man – probably one who smokes a pipe and wears tweed jackets with elbow patches’. Until all too recently philosophy, so the explanation goes, like most intellectual activities, was only open to a select group who had the means, as well as the desirable gender, religion, etc., to receive sufficient education and to have enough spare time, money and a room of their own to engage in philosophy. Now that many more people have access to higher education, the stereotype needs to be challenged.
Thus, with the help of other sciences, the situation is being rectified. Statistics systematizes the data to show the problems and social sciences in particular provide the means to name, analyse and counter those problems. Largely absent from the discussion is the question whether the discipline itself needs to change. Changes proposed are characteristic of good practice anywhere, but rarely specific to philosophy. The assumption seems to be that the discipline itself, how it understands itself, how philosophers understand themselves, can remain unaffected.
This assumption can be illustrated by considering the history of modern philosophy and in particular recent attempts to include more women in this history. To put it bluntly: no matter how many thinkers have been added to the canon, there are only very few overviews of (early) modern philosophy that do not commence with René Descartes. Thus, the addition of philosophers hardly affects how the history is told.
There are of course good reasons to begin with Descartes. His famous doubting experiment in The Meditations offers a break in methodology (it is an experiment, a concept of modern science) and it rigorously tries to re-evaluate every element of existing knowledge by doubting everything. It is also possible to trace still dominant elements in contemporary thought back to Descartes, such as for instance the distinction between mind and body. Thus, even when on closer reading it becomes obvious that the experiment is not as radical as it claims to be, the break with the past remains. Yet, starting every single overview with Descartes means that the understanding of this period is dominated by the question of knowledge rather than, for instance, ethics or the good life, or education. Such domination ends up marginalizing those philosophers who do not focus on issues of epistemology. With Descartes as ‘the father of modern philosophy’, other (‘family’) history remains in the fringe at best.
This insight presented itself again when I was reviewing The Philosopher Queens (Reference Buxton and Whiting2020), a collection of short introductions to twenty women philosophers. The approach taken by the editors, Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting, resembles that of the blog ‘Looks Philosophical’, mentioned above. The main purpose of the volume is to showcase the presence of women in the history of philosophy. In The Philosopher Queens they are introduced with a portrait, short biographies and an overview of ideas. The volume shows its commitment to diversity by including women from different periods and different traditions.
Reading through the different essays one notices similarities between the thinkers presented. Access to education is an issue for many of them and so an important topic in their thinking and writing. They often lacked formal education and were dependent on fathers or husbands, or they were self-taught. Also, they often find themselves forced to argue that they are creatures capable of rational thought before they can apply that thought to anything else. They address issues that feature prominently in the lives of women, such as marriage and chastity. They write in formats and languages that are accessible to them, but may not be those of the dominant discourse. And not all their work has been preserved. Writing has gone missing or it is difficult to attribute it to a single author.
Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) offers a good example of some of those characteristics as well as the difficulty of fitting this work into the standard history. The work begins with Christine de Pizan's succinct and clever dismissal of a popular misogynistic work of her time. This dismissal establishes her at the same time as an independent intellectual, whose judgements are not led by those of others. In her fictive account she describes picking up the small book late one afternoon for some light reading, as she had been studying more serious work all day. It is swiftly put aside when dinner is announced. She does not pick it up again until the next day, when it dismays her deeply, until she realizes that divinity is on her side. After all, like all human beings, she was created by the most worthy of all artisans, God. Thus the introduction continues, showing in every twist and turn the author to be a woman of reason and understanding and independent judgement – and the small misogynist book is of no consequence. It is light reading, of lesser significance than dinner.
After the introduction, the work involves the construction of the city of ladies, with the help of the Ladies Reason, Rectitude and Justice. Women of every background add their virtues to aid the construction. Fierce queens show that women have the capacity to rule over whatever is under their authority, be that a country or a larger household or farm. Scientific women testify to the ability of their gender to come up with novel understandings. Just as in Plato's Republic, the good city resembles the good soul. Yet, the work differs from the Republic in that there are many different ways of being virtuous. Moreover, in the city of ladies, there is no space for men.
How does Christine de Pizan fit into the history of philosophy? Because her work predates the birth of Descartes by almost 200 years, it is unlikely that she will ever make it into modern philosophy. Yet, some elements of her work, such as her attempts to think for herself against authority, characterize her as a modern thinker. Placing her in medieval or renaissance philosophy runs the risk of overlooking these modern elements of her thought. Indeed, it runs the risk of overlooking her altogether. Most degrees of philosophy, for instance, omit that period.
Christine de Pizan did not make it into The Philosopher Queens. As it was necessary to make a selection, this is true of many more thinkers. The editors had to make a choice. Yet, I suspect there may be more specific reasons why the author of the The Book of the City of Ladies was excluded. In line with most contemporary practice the collection features no thinkers from medieval Europe. What is more, the work does not make for easy reading for contemporary sensibilities. One may find her religious views alien or object to the exclusion of men. Her final recommendations for women in – what we would now call – abusive relationships are deeply problematic.
In this respect Christine de Pizan is no worse than some of the thinkers whose names are never missing from any overview. Aristotle's characterization of women as misbegotten men, for instance, has had adherents well into the twentieth century. The question is what to do with such comments. I don't think it is useful or accurate to dismiss them as unavoidable prejudices of their times. To do so would be strangely misplaced for a thinker like Christine de Pizan, who did not just notice many of the prejudices of her time, but also had the courage and wit to challenge them. Neither would I argue to give up on the thinker altogether. Instead, I prefer the methodology as evidenced in the work of the French thinker Michèle le Doeuff, who holds that one should investigate the place of such comments in the thinker's larger oeuvre.
Without any such investigation, it appears that the faults of the established thinkers are more readily forgiven. The canon is firmly established and changes only very slowly. The chances for new thinkers to be accepted into it are slim. This is even more true of those who are critical of the tradition. It is for that reason significant that thinkers like Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are not even mentioned in a longer list in The Philosopher Queens – let alone included with an overview.
If it is difficult for women philosophers to be accepted into the canon of the history of philosophy, it is almost unheard of for their inclusion to change the way the history of philosophy is told. And yet there are good reasons for change. If enlightenment is the courage to use one's own reason, as Immanuel Kant argues in his ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Christine de Pizan qualifies as an enlightenment thinker and a very courageous one at that. Therefore, should the history of modern philosophy not begin with her? Or would it be better to rethink the sharp division between medieval and modern history? What is more, could such changes not also affect contemporary practice, where concepts like gender or judgement become as important as free will or causality? Finally, in the above discussion I only considered Western philosophers, but these questions become even more interesting and more urgent when one starts considering thinkers from different traditions.
If philosophy concerns itself with radical questioning and the foundations of thought, it cannot shy away from questions like these. The women whose work is being discovered and discussed exemplify the courage needed to engage with them now, whatever the difficulties such engagement brings. To do so is not just a matter of inclusivity, but of good scholarship. Philosophy needs to be challenged by diverse voices, including the uncomfortable voice of the relative outsider. To exclude them would be unphilosophical.
