Correspondence: The sexes

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

Interesting view of feminist philosophy, which seems to promise improvement, not only in the climate for women, but also in philosophical thinking itself: “Feminism and the Future of Philosophy” [Gary Gutting, NY Times, September 18]. Excerpt:

“There is a deep well of rage inside of me. Rage about how I as an individual have been treated in philosophy; rage about how others I know have been treated; and rage about the conditions that I’m sure affect many women and minorities in philosophy, and have caused many others to leave.” Those words, written a decade ago by Sally Haslanger, a distinguished professor of philosophy at M.I.T., well express the moral energy behind the feminist ferment currently shaking American philosophy....
    In ethics, as Rosemarie Tong and Nancy Williams note in their Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on feminist ethics, “proponents of feminist care ethics … stress that traditional moral theories … are deficient to the degree they lack, ignore, trivialize, or demean values and virtues culturally associated with women.”
    So, for example, societies have often directed women toward subordinating their interests to others (husbands or children, for example). As a result, women tend to be particularly sensitive to “care” as an ethical value, and feminist philosophers (like Nel Nodding and Virginia Held) have developed various “ethics of care” that supplement or displace “masculine” ethical values such as autonomy and self-fulfillment. Even an other-directed principle such as “Act for the greatest happiness of all” takes on a deeper meaning when understood not as a duty toward generic humanity but as a call to personal engagement with those in need. [read more]

Concerns of race, class, and gender weave through all of faculty members’ scholarship and classroom instruction, and this is no coincidence: “Seven new humanities faculty: their courses and their passions for teaching” [Kendall Teare, Yale News, September 13]. Excerpt:

These scholars were chosen expressly so they can apply...analytical lenses in their teaching and research, energizing their disciplines — and by extension their students and the university as a whole — with challenging, fresh perspectives.
    “I always try to get students to grasp this one fundamental thing: Nothing is ever as simple as it seems; there’s always something else going on.” said Rizvana Bradley, assistant professor in the Departments of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies....
    “I love challenging students’ assumptions,” asserted Deborah Coen, professor in the Department of History and in History of Science & Medicine. “My field is ideal for that. I often get science students coming into my classroom who believe very strongly that their laboratory work is not tainted by cultural forces or assumptions about social relations. I like to get them to think more critically and to give them the skills to know where to look to find the points where culture enters the laboratory....”
    “Teaching, for me, is always a collective endeavor,” said Aimee Cox, assistant professor in the Departments of African American Studies and Anthropology. “I am very much interested and inspired by dialogue. I always see the engagement in a classroom, even in a big lecture, as a conversation, which is very exciting.” [read more]

Howard Jacobson, whose new book is a fairy tale inspired by the 45th president, calls writers to arms: “Pussy, the First Trump-Era Novel, Is a Brutal Satire” [Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, May 9]. Excerpt:

For the British author Howard Jacobson, there was only one word that would function as the title of his newest book, a fantastical satire about a truculent, egomaniacal, moronic, and entirely charmless child who ascends to a position of enormous power. Pussy is the story of Fracassus, the second child and heir apparent to the “walled Republic of Urbs-Ludus.” His father, the Grand Duke, is one of the winners of a political hierarchy in which developers occupy the highest ranks of society, their towering skyscrapers obliterating daylight for the masses who live at ground level. Over the course of the book, Fracassus’s parents and tutors attempt to groom him for adulthood, despite the fact that he’s virulently opposed to learning anything new, and convinced of his own perfection.
    Jacobson began work on Pussy, a distinctly Swiftian kind of parody, within mere hours of the news that Donald Trump had been elected President of the United States. In the wake of Brexit, Jacobson had been brooding over the idea of writing about the failures of democracy, and such a decisive victory for populism in the U.S. compelled him to write what he describes as “an odd little fable” digesting the news.... [read more]

1883 portrait of Charles Darwin,
by John Collier,
National Portrait Gallery, London

The author of the reviewed book proposes that we humans have evolved along an aesthetic route, and that, given our powers of thought, conscience, and agency, we can accelerate that aesthetic and social evolution: “Survival of the Prettiest” [David Dobbs, NY Times, September 18]. Excerpt:

For readers, Charles Darwin, born in 1809, apparently never gets old. Books by Darwin number 25. Books about Darwin, according to the global library catalog WorldCat, number about 7,500, with production ever rising. This cascade started with 22 books about Darwin published in 1860, the year after his “On the Origin of Species” appeared, averaged about 30 a year for almost a century, ballooned to almost 50 a year after World War II, and reached 100-plus in the 1980s. Currently we get about 160 a year — a Darwin tome every 2.3 days....
    Darwin’s sexual selection theory thus failed to win the sort of victory that his theory of natural selection did. Ever since, the adaptationist, “fitness first” view of sexual selection as a subset of natural selection has dominated, driving the interpretation of most significant traits. Fancy feathers or (in humans) symmetrical faces have been cast not as instruments of sexual selection, but as “honest signals” of some greater underlying fitness....
    And so things largely remained until now. This summer, however, almost 150 years after Darwin published his sexual selection theory to mixed reception, Richard Prum, a mild-mannered ornithologist and museum curator from Yale, has published a book intended to win Darwin’s sex theory a more climactic victory. With The Evolution of Beauty (Doubleday, $30), Prum, drawing on decades of study, hundreds of papers, and a lively, literate, and mischievous mind, means to prove an enriched version of Darwin’s sexual selection theory and rescue evolutionary biology from its “tedious and limiting adaptationist insistence on the ubiquitous power of natural selection.” He feels this insistence has given humankind an impoverished, even corrupted view of evolution in general, and in particular of how evolution has shaped sexual relations and human culture.... [read more]

Grateful for correspondence, Moristotle