People often think it is easy to major in philosophy, but they are wrong. They assume it is a lot of nonsense and phil students get to sit around all day and discuss whether they exist or not, and if they do, is it right to steal someone else's North Face jacket if nobody is around to see them slipping out of the frat with it.
However, as someone who has taken fourteen philosophy classes, I can tell you it is not all fun and games. Philosophy is the art of thinking clearly and with precision, and any error in this regard is easy to spot. As a subject, philosophy is the culmination of a liberal arts education, giving you the mental tools to negotiate life's problems, choices, and riddles in a consistent and defensible manner.
It is ironic, then, that Kenji Hosokawa's column yesterday, "On Women and Philosophy" is such a clear example of faulty reasoning.
It will help to briefly outline what he says, and it can be done here without distortion. Hosokawa rightly asserts that there are far fewer intellectual women than men these days. If you look in any upper-level philosophy class, the proportion of women is outrageously small. In general, he asserts that there are fewer women out there who are engaged in solving the problems of philosophy than men. This is true: even while universities have tried to achieve gender parity in their philosophy departments, there are still large gaps.
As an explanation, he readily rejects biological differences between men and women, which is fortunate. Instead, he concludes that women do not have the freedom to be good philosophers because they will become pregnant one day, and this stifles their freedom, makes women dependent on husbands, and can easily deter them from pursuing careers in intellectualism in the first place.
He also says that philosophy has been invariably progressive, becoming more and more sophisticated over time, and that older philosophies were written by affluent men who had the time to sit around and ruminate. He goes on to say that the present state of philosophy values freedom more so than anything else, but women ironically do not have the freedom to become philosophers because of the specter of pregnancy.
He ends by saying that babies can be produced outside of wombs, and that if we do this and then raise them institutionally until they become self-sufficient, then women can finally be free.
For starters, it is in the nature of the design of women to have children and for parents to raise them, and taking them away from women to be raised elsewhere just might alienate women from their true nature, a philosophical no-no. When you don't do what you have the urge to do and what you were designed to do, it's not freedom, it's alienation. I won't even go into the idea that raising children institutionally might be morally problematic, but as much as a woman might want to be free of raising children, having them raised by "Babyraisers, Inc." sounds equally injurious to society.
By calling philosophy "invariably progressive," Hosokawa has made the great mistake of assuming that we already know the answers to the problems of philosophy, and that we need only to progress to them. The Spartans raised children in the way he suggests, so he can't think that philosophy must be that progressive. Unfortunately, we don't know the final answers, but we only know what it is rational to accept given what we can be sure of and logically extrapolating from there.
This serious mistake shows itself in Hosokawa's assumption that the goal of mankind is to progress to the point where people have the freedom to do whatever they want. That's his envisioned end to the progress of philosophy and society.
Just perhaps, however, the end of philosophy is to explain how people can live in a way that fulfills their natures, and leads them to see that discovering their true self and being comfortable and satisfied with acting in a way consistent with their identity is okay and something to be proud of. Philosophy is not for philosophers, but for everyone. However, that's what you get when you argue that people should not have to be encumbered by the natural act of having children so they can philosophize.
If you haven't fallen asleep yet, there are more conventional problems with the argument. For starters, while philosophy was a pastime usually reserved for men, so was everything else in society up until not too long ago. Medicine, law, writing, soldiering, and most trades were male-dominated. Indeed, women were just not considered "good enough" to do any of these things. To single out philosophy and ignore a consistent, widespread disparity due to societal perceptions is not being very rigorous. To then pin this on pregnancy first and foremost is ridiculous.
Hosokawa would have been much more successful if he wondered why there aren't that many female construction workers building homes for us. That's a job that requires labor and that can't be done while you're pregnant or raising children. Philosophy, on the other hand, takes no tools, and requires no labor. You can do it anywhere: in bed, in the shower, or with kids in the house (if they're quiet). One philosophy professor here has two young children, and she is still at the forefront of her field. To say that she could not philosophize because of her children is very specious. Now if she wanted to be a bricklayer...
Finally, most of the women Hosokawa has spoken with are probably our age. The women of Dartmouth have not failed to pursue philosophy because in many years they might have kids. Nobody has thought "Oh, I won't read about Kant and Nietzche because I'll have kids one days and if the stuff really interests me then I won't be able to be a professor."
In the end, what he says makes no sense. One bad thing about philosophy is that does tend to take simple things and complicate them, and that has been done here. Simply, women are not as intellectual as they could be because of sexism in our society- it is for the same reason that so few of them are mathematicians or physicists. Pregnancy is not even an issue at this point.
Any woman who wants to can be a philosopher-mother with little trouble or with only a brief postponement of her career. Women's freedom has not been abrogated because of their natural propensity to be childbearers. It has only been abrogated by people like Hosokawa who see this part of their nature as a liability instead of something that must be recognized and facilitated as an immutable and valuable part of who they are.
