Question I have a problem with Hegel's theory which said: the difference between men and women are like the difference between animals and plants, men are like animals and women are like plants because women are more sensitive than men and they are dependent on their feelings so they cannot make a good decision as a government member. I know this theory is for Hegel's period but why a famous philosopher like him said some thing nonsense, why did not he worth for women? Why most of the philosophers are man??

Accepted:
May 30, 2006

Comments

If you think that's bad, you should try reading Hume, particularly, "On Modesty". Hume there explains why it's morally required for women but not men to have but one sexual partner!

Hegel, Hume, and the rest were human beings, and their opinions are just as likely to be infected by prejudice, ignorance, and self-interest as are those of any of us mortals. (One might say the same kind of thing, by the way, about Saint Paul and the other authors of scripture, all of whom were also numbered among us mortals.) Of course, it's part of being a reflective person to struggle to uncover such sources of bias. Hegel and Hume failed in this particular instance. I expect that says more about how deeply rooted sexism was in their cultures than it does about them personally. And, of course, their cultures were the antecedents of our own, so there's something to be learned here about our own culture, too.

As for the question why most philosophers are men, I'm sure you can guess the answer to that question. Although the field is much more diverse now than it was, philosophy, like most academic disciplines, was utterly dominated by men until not very long ago. It will take some time until the imbalance is corrected, and for lots of different reasons. Some of these involve continuing bias within the profession. (I've certainly known colleagues in my time who were essentially incapable of working with women.) There are also larger societal issues that are relevant, and I strongly suspect that the kinds of choices people make about what they want to do with their lives play a role, as well.

But, as I said, things are much better than they once were. At the moment, women in philosophy are concentrated in moral philosophy and history of philosophy, and many of the leading young people in these areas are women. I don't know what the numbers are in these sub-fields—someone's probably got them—but I suspect a very large percentage of recent graduates are women, and I wouldn't be shocked to hear that we were approaching something close to parity. Women are less numerous in metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of language and mind, philosophy of science and mathematics, and so on. Not that there aren't good women in these areas: There are (and some of them are even on our panel). But women are less numerous in these areas, by and large, and one would have to work harder to identify women who were, say, under forty and regarded as likely to be leaders of their generation of philosophers of mind, say, than one would to identify such women in history of modern or ethics. Why that is is itself a nice question. Whatever the answer, it's presumably not too different from the answer to the question why the hard sciences themselves continue to be dominated by men.