Response to Reason, Gender, and Morality in the History of Philosophy

Hande Lara Sever

                  Response  to Reason, Gender, and Morality in the History of Philosophy

Lloyd’s article is explicitly concerned with the matter of binary oppositions and she concentrates on the construction of gender difference, specifically reason versus emotion. She states that women are either regarded as less rational than men or as in having a distinctive style reasoning method which should be valued equally. She argues that the latter remark, the main objective of difference feminism, is a natural reaction to the development philosophical thought on Reason and is problematic. She elaborates on this by retelling the history of philosophical though on Reason and analyzing how women are positioned through it.

First, she concentrates on Philo, Augustine, Aquinas and states their opinions on binary oppositions. She states that Philo relates binary oppositions to the story of Genesis and associates reason with masculinity. Thus, argues that women can have access to reason if they lose their inferior traits that are ruled by emotions. Augustine opposes to this idea as a result of his belief in Christian spiritual equality. Thus he thinks women and men have equal access to Reason but does not challenge the structure because he thinks that women should follow the path of Reason with her subordination to men. For Aquinas intellectual nature is found both in men and women but women’s meaning is bound up with the reproduction of human nature which reinforces women’s exclusion from the actual manifestations of Reason. By retelling Philo, Augustine and Aquinas’s arguments on Reason she explains how women’s access to the realm of Reason is constructed through early philosophy. Afterwards she states that “male bias” in philosophical though goes deeper than Philo, Agustine and Aquinas’s arguments and she moves on to Descartes’ Method. She states that in seventeenth century Reason started to be considered as a skill rather than a distinctive feature of human nature. She proves this through analyzing Descartes’ Method. She stresses Descartes’ Method’s egalitarian aspects as it being written in vernacular and promising to make knowledge accessible to everyone. She argues that in practice his approach failed as a result of social constructs. She states that women couldn’t gain access to the collective endeavor of new science and were assigned responsibility of the sensuous world which reinforced the construction of feminine.

Lloyd concludes her article by stating that binary oppositions are constructed and is a product of male bias in the history of philosophical thought. Thus she thinks that any affirmation of the strengths of female difference that lacks the knowledge of history is destined to repeat the pitfalls of Western though regarding women.