Question Why does it seem that everything that I read in philosophy always uses "she" or "her" instead of "his" or "he"?

Accepted:
October 9, 2007

Comments

This is the effect of a successful political movement, one that sought to replace the use of "he" and "his", as "gender-neutral" pronouns, with the use of something else. The reason was that people thought that the use of "he" and "his", at least in certain contexts, made readers liable to assume that the pronoun referred to a person of the male persuasion, when it need not. One option is to use something that is truly gender-neutral, such as "he or she", but that is rather verbose. Some people therefore use "s/he", but that is ugly. I've taken to using "s'he", but I'm lonely. And there is a case to be made for "she" and "her", unaltered, as well, namely that it makes one conscious of something of which one might not otherwise have been conscious.

A suggestion: let's use the plural indefinite "they", like we all do when we're talking: "If anyone wanted the last piece of cake, they should have spoken up."

That's what I do, but I have to have fights with editors about it.

Hmm: that ("they" with no plural antecedent) is exactly what I will scold a student for doing, though that doesn't stop them!

To the questioner: My sense is that either you are reading a mis-representative sample of philosophical writing or you are exaggerating the use of 'she' and 'her' because you have internalized the normative use of 'he' and 'his' and so examples that resist that norm stand out and perhaps wrankle.

When I was an undergraduate in the mid 1980s, there was pressure to resist that norm -- but I don't have a sense that this resistance was completely successful in either philosophical or most non-philosophical writing. Certainly I don't see widespread use of gender-neutral pronouns and Louise's suggestion still sounds ungrammatical to my ear. In my own writing, I simply try use a mixed balance of gendered personal pronouns.

Although I try to use "he or she" or "she or he", and I do like "s/he" and even the allegedly ungrammatical "they" (though I read somewhere that it's not really ungrammatical), often the best solution is to rewrite the sentence to avoid the problem. The best advice on this appears on the American Philosophical Association's website:

Warren, Virginia L. (2001),"Guidelines for Non-Sexist Use of Language".

Hurray for singular "they". Apparently good writers have long used it--

This is not a new problem, or a new solution. 'A person can't helptheir birth', wrote Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1848), and evenShakespeare produced the line 'Every one to rest themselves betake' (inLucrece), which pedants would reject as logically ungrammatical.

Quote (and more on the subject) is here.

Question Why does it seem that everything that I read in philosophy always uses "she" or "her" instead of "his" or "he"? Accepted:October 9, 2007

Question Why does it seem that everything that I read in philosophy always uses "she" or "her" instead of "his" or "he"?

Accepted:
October 9, 2007