Mick Hartley

A new article by Kathleen Stock lends support to the idea that a significant factor in the death of academic philosophy was the attempt to make it a more welcoming discipline for women and for ethnic minorities. The old order was one of predominantly male theorists battling it out in heated seminars, with much clashing of egos and merciless trashing of philosophical positions through argument and counter-argument. It was, as Stock admits, quite terrifying for young philosophers scrabbling to make their way in their chosen field – but it was also, in retrospect, rather good for the actual business of doing philosophy.

Then came a 2011 report entitled “Women in Philosophy in the UK”: a joint initiative from the British Philosophical Association (BPA) and the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) which aimed to demonstrate how women were under-represented in the higher echelons of academic philosophy, and what to do about it. Gradually a new approach came to dominate, with positive comments and over-egged politeness replacing the old aggressive cut-and-thrust. And it wasn't an improvement. Virtue-signalling took over from truth-seeking.

Well, you need to read Stock's piece to get the full picture. Here's her conclusion.

To date, to my knowledge, neither the British Philosophical Association nor the Society for Women in Philosophy have ever commented publicly on the circumstances of my resignation from my post at Sussex University. But in October 2021, at around the same time I was facing the prospect of men letting off flares at my campus workplace, angry with me for holding views about the importance of naming biological sex, they published another report on “Women in Philosophy”. This one followed up on their original one after ten years and summarised what they thought had changed. Utterly predictably, one of the things that had changed was that by now they weren’t talking about women anymore.

This new report, written by the original two authors, pretends not to notice that the old one was aimed at improving the lot of females in philosophy. It now says that the focus is “gender”, and talks of “woman” and “man” as “identities”, so making a nonsense of the idea that its aim is somehow continuous with that of the previous project. A “methodological note” describes a “newly included nonbinary gender category” in the associated survey of philosophers, but complains with regret that the number of non-binary people recorded in the survey is probably inaccurate, because departments have “inadequate reporting processes for students to change the gender on their records”.

Also predictably, the new report also declares that “philosophy is unwelcoming to trans philosophers”. By “philosophy”, they mean me, and a handful of others still hanging in there within the university system, argumentatively defending age-old, culturally ubiquitous, and still perfectly functional understandings of “woman” and “man” in terms of “adult human female” and “adult human male”. To try to demonstrate their lurid assertion about the environment for trans people, the authors link the reader to an article in the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which non-binary author Robin Dembroff writes:

“The situation in philosophy is, to be blunt, a massive, complex, and thorny transgender trashfire. This trashfire manifests most explicitly in the context of social media, blogs, interpersonal interactions, and the occasional journal publication, and it has serious repercussions. (To name one, a number of high-profile court briefings opposing trans rights in both the United States and the United Kingdom cite blog posts by philosophers such as Kathleen Stock … as evidence that trans persons are dangerous and deluded.)”

Now as a matter of fact, none of this is true, and the footnote supplied by Dembroff to supposedly demonstrate the truth of the last parenthesis doesn’t even come close to doing so. But the energy drains out of me when I think about seriously trying to get the report’s authors, or Dembroff — or anyone at all working in feminist philosophy in a University these days — to correct the public record. For I know by now that in their line of business, stating the truth isn’t remotely the point.

The UnHerd article, from which I'm quoting, is adapted from the original published on Kathleen Stock’s Substack.

Interestingly, modern philosophy also gave up on truth when it embraced French-derived Critical Theory. That, I suppose, is another story.