383. Feminist Philosophy and Critical Thinking

No, despite the understandable alarm in the Wall Street Journal (Jillian Jay Melchior, 5-9-17), critical thinking is not about to come to an end.  Because that thinking, as established now in Western academics, will always be more critical than any thinking that would end it.  You can't get any more critical than Socrates was and as long as we have people who take him as their model those people are going to beat the pants off of any challengers.

Not that they themselves will know their pants are off.  Feminist philosopher Nora Berenstein, who found that its "discursive transmisogynistic violence" made a particular critical analysis unacceptable, seems quite unaware that her pants are even in danger.  (See the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5-6-17)

The critical analysis she was attacking was made by Rebecca Tuvel, who, in the philosophy journal (feminist) Hypatia, pointed out that the treatment of transracials was, in liberal theory, inconsistent with the treatment of transgenders.  The outcry by feminist philosophers was so powerful it brought an apology from the editor and partial retraction of the article.  Yet Tuvel's was a standard analytical move, asking for a change in practice or a revision of the theory.  Or at least for deeper questioning and more analysis.  You need (again in standard practice) to do that before you step into the larger academic arena or you'll lose your pants, lose them to somebody more deeply critical than you are, somebody who has submitted his or her propositions to tougher tests.  These will be tests from every angle, even (sometimes especially) an enemy's angle.  That's the Socratic game.

If you look at the Socratic game as the academic game, as most of our predecessors in universities did, you can see that it's got minor leagues and major leagues.  In the minor leagues you get concessions for your handicaps —your youth, your provincialism, your state of training.  That's why the move up to the majors is so painful.  No more easy, bush-league ball.  And that, as I see it, is what Berenstein and the 500 or more academics who protested publication of Tuvel's article want to keep playing.  Which they can do, in journals of feminist philosophy, if they keep articles like Tuvel's out.  Just games among friends.

I have a message for those protesters which, coming from a male, can easily be dismissed.  But I'll deliver it anyway.  "These are the big leagues.  This is the way the game is played.  I know you can play it.  (I've seen women in mathematics and the sciences play men's asses off.)  So come on, get in the game, mix it up.  Don't worry about your pants.  Everybody loses them once in while.  That's the risk you take if you're ever going to win the pennant, that pennant, the Pennant of Fully Tested and Therefore Most Reliable Knowledge."