Little Miss Metaphysics

The field of Philosophy -- that's no place for a woman, right? Viewing its history over the millennia, the most significant and celebrated philosophers have tended to be men: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, George Berkeley, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bertrand Russell, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Clarence Irving Lewis, Richard Mervyn Hare, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Rawls, Roderick M. Chisholm, Alvin Plantinga, Saul Kripke -- and the list goes on and on and on.

Of course, it is not hard to figure out why the contribution of women has been so comparatively minimal: throughout nearly the entirety of that history, social forces have either necessitated that women devote their energies to other tasks (many of them as important, and some of them FAR more important than philosophical speculation) or they have simply and unjustly prevented women from even entering the field of play. (And I suppose it is a safe bet than many of the women who were able to enter that field were met with little more than a patronizing smile before the boys went on to "more serious" matters -- real MANLY philosophizing.)

While those repressive and oppressive social forces surely live on, they have been for decades severely weakened -- and are hopefully now on the critical list, an emaciated dying behemoth. Female philosophers and philosophy students are all over the place; and the only reason why there are still so few famous, larger-than-life female philosophers is that -- let's face it -- philosophers nowadays, whether male or female, just do not tend to attain that kind of stature anymore. Excepting graduate students in philosophy, who is able to name any currently living philosopher and say something about his or her impact on the field?

With the increase in the number of women pursuing and attaining positions as academic philosophers has come an increase in the body of philosophical literature devoted to so-called "women's issues." And while I think it is good that these issues are being discussed more prominently, there is actually the potential that women's status in the field of academic philosophy can be undermined if it begins to seem that female philosophers are predominantly interested in those "women's issues": it can initiate and perpetuate the impression that, just as professional basketball separates into the NBA and the WNBA, so academic philosophy separates into "his" and "hers." And while I would not say that women should steer clear of an emphasis of "women's issues" -- especially since, so far, it does not seem that men are inclined to devote their careers to careful and competent treatment of those issues -- the status and stature of women in academic philosophy depends essentially upon women who are willing and able to mix it up with the men, in the fields of the men's' choosing.

And this, at long last, brings me to my purpose for posting this piece. I want to talk about one of my all-time philosophical heroes. SHE'S A WOMAN! And she was involved in professional academic philosophy LONG before this was considered "acceptable," having been the victim of some pretty overt and unapologetic discrimination by no less prestigious an institution than Harvard University. And none of her professional writing was "suffragist" in content. Having been afforded a hard-earned opportunity to be heard within the academic philosophical community, she seems to have figured that the best thing she could do to get the big boys to take a women seriously as a COLLEAGUE in the fullest sense of the word was, not to get on a soapbox and discuss the social injustices that women in academia must face, but rather to tuck in her chin, put up her dukes, and pop a few of the big boys right on the beezer -- INTELLECTUALLY speaking, of course. And that's what she did.

Her name was Mary Whiton Calkins. She was born in 1863. She died in 1930. Some two decades after the powers at Harvard overtly refused to confer degrees upon women, she managed successfully to complete all of the requirements for the Ph.D. in philosophy -- including an "unauthorized" but typically rigorous examination by the members of what has come to be called Harvard's "Golden Department" in Philosophy. This department included William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana -- all philosophical GIANTS, and still in their heyday. Royce himself wrote the Harvard "Corporation," notifying them of Calkins' SUPERIOR performance in this examination and recommending that she be awarded the Ph.D. The Corporation refused, overtly suggesting that her exceptional ability was simply irrelevant.

That was in 1894. Not long afterwards, the new and nearby Radcliffe College began a strange practice: Though the college itself only offered undergraduate courses, it would confer advanced degrees upon women who, as Calkins had, successfully completed the appropriate course of study at Harvard. In the hopes of giving this Radcliffe - Harvard "Women's Ph.D." An instant legitimacy, one of Calkins' Harvard mentors (psychology professor Hugo Munsterberg) urged Calkins to accept such a degree "retroactively." SHE REFUSED! She said the did her work at Harvard and would accept only a standard Harvard Ph.D. -- none of this expressly second-class nonsense!

As Harvard did not get around to conferring the Ph.D. upon women until 1963 -- some 33 years after Calkins' death -- Calkins herself never held an advanced degree. And as she believed (much to the disappointment of feminists) that a woman could not have both a career and a family, she never married. Thus, she was ever after referred to respectfully in academic publications as "Miss Calkins."

"Miss Calkins" went on to a distinguished career as both a philosopher and a psychologist at Wellesley College. She was the first woman ever elected president of both APA's -- the American Philosophical Association and the American Psychological Association.

Impressive as all of this is -- her tenacious adherence to principle and the stature she attained in her professions -- she is a hero of mine for quite other reasons. Most notably, I've long regarded her as THE clearest writer of academic prose I've ever read. Even when she wrote on subjects that defy easy intellectual digestion, her pieces exhibit such a clear and obvious structure that they seem, in a sense, self-outlining. As someone who, during his grad student days, had a tendency to present things obscurely, and had been advised to find a clear writer to emulate, I've found the work of Mary Calkins to be like medicine. She is, and has long been, my model.

Moreover, I've also found admirable Calkins' willing to fight the fights that her closest philosophical comrade, Josiah Royce, either would not or could not fight himself. Royce and Calkins both embraced Absolute Idealism, the doctrine according to which all of reality is pervaded by mind -- even "inanimate" matter being an aspect of a super-personal individual ("the Absolute"). This doctrine is now more or less just a dusty old museum-piece, and it was hemorrhaging badly in Calkins' day, due to the manifold attacks of the Pragmatists, the Realists, the Logical Atomists, and probably a few other philosophical camps in their ascendancy. One envisions Royce, once an unassailable giant, playing the death-scene in King Kong -- the mass of strength being slowly cut down by a myriad of minute enemies, suffering hundreds of wounds for every one he is able to inflict in his own defense, his final demise being evident long before it becomes actual. Eventually, Royce's voice became silent, and who was it that was scrapping with those pesky assailants? Little Miss Metaphysics herself -- Mary Whiton Calkins!

If you find yourself wanting to read some of Mary Calkins' best philosophical writings -- I mean the ones that will best clue you in to the whole of her philosophical position -- here are some bits that I recommend:

• In the fifth and final edition (1925) of her best known philosophical book, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, is an 86-page chapter (Chapter XI) entitled "Twentieth Century Philosophy." This is probably the best, most thorough piece. But make sure you get the 1925 edition, as this chapter is a complete revision of the final chapter in previous editions of the book. Of course, the book is long out-of-print, so you'll have to borrow it from a well-stocked library, or else seek it through used-book dealers. Perhaps the second-hand dealers selling through Amazon and / or Barnes & Noble might have some copies. The book was published by The Macmillan Company (New York, NY).
• There's a 32-page essay entitled "The Personalist Conception of Nature" in the March 1919 edition (Volume XXVIII, number 2) of The Philosophical Review, at pp. 115-146.
• If you're looking for the neatest, shortest piece -- and also one of those REMARKABLE crisp pieces of academic prose -- then check out the first volume of Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, edited by George P. Adams and William P. Montague. It was published in 1930, by Russell & Russell, Inc. (New York, NY). Calkins' 19-page essay, "The Philosophical Credo of an Absolutistic Personalist," is at pp. 199-217 of that volume.

I learned what I know about Mary Calkins' life, struggles, and accomplishments from sources like these:

• Appendix 4 in Bruce Kuklick's The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1977) is entitled "Women Philosophers at Harvard," and is at pp. 590-594 of that work.
• The journal Hypatia published the 1895 letter from Harvard's "Golden Department," recommending Mary Calkins for the Ph.D. in Philosophy. It, along with information about Mary Calkins written by Charlene Haddock Seigfried, is at pp. 230-233 of volume 8, no. 2 of that journal (Spring 1993).