"Bad Philosophy" or "Derivative Philosophy": labels that keep women out of the canon

Connell, Sophia and Janssen-Lauret, F. (2023) "Bad Philosophy" or "Derivative Philosophy": labels that keep women out of the canon. Metaphilosophy , ISSN 1467-9973.

Abstract

Efforts to include women in the canon have long been beset by reactionary gatekeeping, typified by the charge, 'That's Not Philosophy'. That charge does not apply to early-to-mid-analytic female philosophers – Welby, Ladd-Franklin, Bryant, Jones, de Laguna, Stebbing, Ambrose, Macdonald – with job titles like 'Lecturer in Logic' or 'Professor of Philosophy', and publications in Mind, Journal of Philosophy, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. It is hopeless to dismiss their work as 'Not Philosophy'. Then why aren't they in the canon of analytic philosophy? Comparable reactionary gatekeeping affects them, we argue, but typified by the labels 'Bad Philosophy' or 'Derivative Philosophy'. Virtue and vice epistemology help explain both why these women were neglected and why their own approaches are often epistemically virtuous. Both their contemporaries and historians are deficient in scholarly virtues in labelling these women's work 'bad', or derived from male mentors or partners, with no or specious justification. Their disparaged qualities - intellectual humility, modesty, critical self-reflection, crediting others, disclosing biases - are frequently outright epistemic virtues.

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