MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY 12
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN
1344, Venice
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moves to Paris at 5
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father is court physician/astronomer to Charles V
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Charles V was highly pro-education, funded many translations into French
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she had very good education, then an equal husband who died young
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political philosophy and ethics, 100 years war, question of leadership
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a woman, maybe the first person to systematically attack sexism
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implicit bias example (car crash dummie example); sexism kills
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medieval sexism is explicit
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in all philosophy female nature is seen as vice-full, all accounts agree on this
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so female nature is rotten
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i.e. not predisposed, via justice, to virtue, but to vice, etc.
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Christine is an essentialist too, but an essentialist proto-feminist
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Genesis as a highly sexist account, Ovid too
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Aristotelian sexism… biological, but also ethical and political; he perpetually situates woman as an inferior version of man
Interlocking metaphysical, biological, ethical and political systems all enforcing female inferiority
- 14thC debate about the possibility of a virtious woman
- Burdain, a positivist, still denies woman’s capacity for virtue outside of the household
Christine:
“[God] put equally good and noble souls in the bodies of men and women … .
the superior being is he or she who is most virtuous. People’s superiority or
baseness does not depend on their gender but on the perfection of their
morals or virtues”
- her project is a virtious city for ALL
Her argument is a simple reductio ad absurdum:
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Learned men say women are viceful
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God is perfect
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God created something imperfect
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God is imperfect, etc. contradiction…
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three ladies: Reason, Rectitude, Justice
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they all show her a way out
4 Arguments against sexism:
1. Philosophers are wrong sometimes (philosophy is not faith!), and debates prove this.
2. Much criticism against women is from bad intentions (past lust, gross denunciation, frustration with women, etc.)
3. Examples that disprove individual arguments
4. Men are not immune to vice!
Really, all universal generalizations can be disproven by just one particular counterexample, so no point for her to generalize that all women are virtious
Cristine:
- men and women are complimentary
- equal and unequal
- unequal in natures; equal in essential capacities for virtue!, and it is our capacity/dispositions for virtue that defines our goodness
- so both can be good, and god has given each sex their own tasks
- in the end she champions women to be virtious
Prudence Allen: “Christie was the first to articulate a series of arguments about the nature and identity of woman, arguments that challenged traditional gender polarity theory and began to lay a groundwork for a philosophy of gender complementarity”