Uncategorized 17 Nov 2009 09:37 pm
How one woman did not go into philosophy
I scan a few philosophy blogs once in a while, and every so often I see something pop up again: why are there so few women in philosophy? Wikipedia tells us that “U.S. Department of Education reports indicate that philosophy is one of the least proportionate, and possibly the least proportionate, fields in the humanities with respect to gender.” Huh. Well, I’ve made no particular study of the matter, but I can tell you exactly when I decided not to go into it.
I spent a couple of years out of college, and during that time I really got into some aspects of philosophy, especially the philosophy of science. I read Mayr’s Growth of Biological Thought and a little Kuhn, and those led me to Popper and Quine and Feyerabend (who drove me up the wall) and Ruse and Lewontin and Sober and I don’t know who-all. When circumstances allowed me to go back to school, I was psyched. This was gonna be great. I was gonna take “History and Philosophy of Science” right away. I was gonna read all sorts of awesome stuff and have all kinds of awesome arguments and watch out I was gonna kick some butt, oh yeah. I was looking forward to diving in and giving it everything I had, because I liked it with all my nerdy little heart.
So, that’s not how it went. There we were, the very first week, when the prof sat on a desk all friendly-like and threw out to the class this question: what do we need, philosophically, in order to do science? What do we have to assume is true? We sat there in awkward silence. I broke it by saying, haltingly, that we have to trust that the world exists and induction is valid.
I remember exactly what he said: “That’s just stupid.”
You are fucking kidding me was my thought. I may have been hesitant and unused to being a student again, but there was no way I was stupid, and neither was what I said. If you’re going to define the space of the problem, I thought, define the fucking space. It didn’t even occur to me until years later that “That’s just stupid” is not the way to talk to an undergraduate. What threw me was that he went for “stupid” without even bothering with an argument.
So then, shifting his entire body, he turned to a boy near me and got his answer, which was something like, “We have to, uh, be sure that we’re doing good experiments?” And the professor was all “YES!” and I was all, Dear professor, please choke and die.
I believe I switched to auditing the class, but I might as well have dropped out. Except for two very good presentations by my fellow students at the end (history of birth control and history of chiropractic) there was nothing much for me.
It’s like this: imagine there’s some guy you’ve seen around campus, and he’s awfully attractive and seems really smart and funny. And then you’re at a party and you finally have a chance to go up and introduce yourself, whereupon he calls you a bitch and throws up on your shoes. Maybe he’s just had a really, really bad day, but too bad: odds are very good that he is out of luck where you’re concerned, because you’ve got better things to do than determining whether he’s a chronic misogynist shoe-vomiter or just an occasional one. There are too many fish in the sea for that kind of thing. Whether or not he cares, he’s lost his shot.
So that was it. If that’s what passed for a philosophy course, I wasn’t having any. This wasn’t about my inability to handle vigorous argument. I already had a history of thriving on vigorous argument. No, this was about how willing I was to be all but spat on by my professor, and the answer is, not so much. I wasn’t about to invest my time in looking into whether that kind of thing was typical of the discipline or merely tolerated. Not when there were dozens of competing programs that would have been delighted to have me, spit-free. So right there and then, the philosophy department stopped being a contender for me.
Edited to add: What’s sad, looking back, is that I don’t think the jerk professor was even part of the philosophy department. I believe he was actually some kind of hanger-on to the biology department. If I’d realized how disconnected he was from the actual philosophy faculty, I might have given WWU Philosophy a chance. Or I might not have; he may not have been been part of the department, but he was an academic philosopher.
on 18 Nov 2009 at 5:00 am 1.Rechercher said …
In addition to being a misogynist, he sounds like a lousy teacher.
on 18 Nov 2009 at 8:29 am 2.Cam Sculpin said …
I can’t swear he’s a misogynist, but I’d sure swear to his being a lousy teacher.
on 18 Nov 2009 at 2:58 pm 3.tricstmr said …
What an ass.
As someone who didn’t go into philosophy of science, but did get my PhD. in the History of Science (actually, the history of technology…), I can tell you that what you said sounds a hell of a lot more like where a real philosopher would start. Obviously, the “scientist who thinks they are a philosopher” didn’t get that you cannot just assume the world, sensory data, etc in such endeavors.
In any case, as a Historian, let me tell you how much we hate philosophers of science. Or at least, let me tell you what frustrates the ever-living-fuck out of me when it comes to many philosophers of science–say like Feyerabend.
Mainly, it’s the fact that they like to talk about what science is in a way that entirely doesn’t have anything to do with how science is actually done, embodied, or exists in the actual world. I’ve read more than enough philosophy of science to come across countless examples of them saying “Science needs X and Y to exist.” And then some person points out, “Well, famous Scientist W–when he discovered fundamental theory Q didn’t do anything like Y, and only partially does X, but in a totally different way than you’ve described leading to a very different practice and result.”
And Philosopher comes back and says “Well, that’s just bunk. Science is this way, and those historical details aren’t important anyway.”
So.. this is a roundabout way of saying–Good, I’m glad your not in philosophy. Perhaps the overall reason is that women have a tendency to care more about stuff that is ACTUALLY IMPORTANT rather than just engaging in abstract mental masturbation that no one else really gives a damn about–whereas some men have no such qualms..
on 18 Nov 2009 at 5:39 pm 4.Devon said …
I had an undergraduate philosophy-shock experience too. I audited a lot of courses just for fun as an undergraduate, and one of them (and only one) was philosophy. Something like “philosophy of consciousness.” What a juicy and exciting topic!! So I even bought the textbooks. I tried to read them a bit, but they were as accessible and interesting as, say, a book on the legal history of import regulations.
So I went to class, and it was about the same. 50 minutes of lecture on the differences of X-istic Y-ism versus Z-istic X-ism. My hopes of seeing some glimmer of understanding, finding some insight into the world around me, were completely dashed. I never went to the class again.
Later I learned that philosophy is the most common undergraduate major for students of law school. This makes perfect sense. They’re both the study of terminology and definitions.
on 04 Dec 2009 at 2:41 pm 5.Liosis said …
Wow. Just, wow. I have had bad teachers but never that bad. Maybe because I go to Uvic, with has a ratio of 3 girls to every guy. If they tried that they might get lynched.
I think part of it might be that the other humanities are full of girls. Most of my classes are an equal split between the two. But it is the guys who usually talk more and seem to know what is going on.
The most shocking experience I had was walking into the philosophy library where all the undergrad hang out. There were five guys in there, and one looked up and said ‘what are you doing here?’
After a moment they realized what they had said, and made a bit of an apology. But that was when I realized that philosophy really is male dominated. It is something that bothers me about feminism. There is philosophy and then a weird divide between it and feminist philosophy. Feminist phil should be a subset of ethics as far as I can tell. But it seems like there are the Real philosophers who are the men and then there are the feminist philosophers. I think there is fault for this on both sides. Because the feminist philosophers will accuse other women in philosophy of buying into a patriarchial structure. It’s weird.
That comment, however, reminds me of a very amusing one I got in my medieval philosophy class. Instead of telling me I was wrong the teacher yelled, ‘Heretic! and informed me that in this context I would be burned at the stake and instead of being hung until dead.’ I kinda adored my teacher for that.