Sages and Cranks: The Difficulty of Identifying First-Rate Philosophers

Two remarks give the impetus for discussion in this paper. W.V.O. Quine comments that: Philosophy has long suffered, as hard sciences have not, from a wavering consensus on questions of professional competence. Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference. (Quine 1981:192) Sally Haslanger, on the other hand, suggests that others have more confidence in the possibility of identifying at least those who are not first-rate philosophers: In graduate school I was told by one of my teachers that he had " never seen a first rate woman philosopher and never expected to because women were incapable of having seminal ideas. " (Haslanger 2008:211) Statistics from around the Anglophone world tell us that women and other groups are not represented in philosophy in proportion to their numbers in the wider population (Ref Stats chapter, this Vol). Attempts to explain this must negotiate difficult questions, including questions about whether there is discrimination at work and if so how it operates; questions about why women are underrepresented (including fraught questions about what women are like, how they reason and so on); and questions about why philosophy in particular has the gender profile that it does. It is the last of these that I find myself preoccupied with when I attempt to