admits at one point that the claims of truth cannot be evaded altogether (1998, 127); it is
to be doubted whether her substitution of “justice” can altogether escape continuing (if
somewhat covert) “truth” claims as well.^9 Similarly, it is hard to see how her ethical
commitments to natality and flourishing can ultimately evade the taint of some sort of
belief; Jantzen's attempt to overcome “intellect” with ethics thus looks suspiciously like
another unsublated binary. This is why, finally, her position on feminist “standpoint
epistemology,” already discussed, also seems open to question: if all perspectives are
“partial” (126–27), how can one appropriately reckon one more partial than another?
Does not the Foucauldian charge of self-interest merely boomerang back on the feminist
critic? To this crucial point we shall return in our discussion of Anderson's work, whose
position on standpoint epistemology is importantly different from Jantzen's.
Finally, we must mention the awkwardness of the part played by the “enemy”—analytic
philosophy of religion—in Jantzen's work. As we mentioned at the outset, Jantzen is
ostensibly set on a mediating exercise to bring analytic philosophy of religion to its
senses, as it were, and to instruct it in the insights of continental and feminist philosophy.
But in fact, for the most part, the discipline does indeed play the part of whipping boy in
Jantzen's text, and, being larded with blame, is therefore hardly able to contribute
anything to the future way forward in philosophy of religion that Jantzen announces.
One of the effects of this scapegoating ploy is that Jantzen finds it difficult to
acknowledge that “analytic philosophy of religion” is by now itself a highly diverse
discourse; her “identikit” caricature of the disembodied “man of reason,” repres
end p.504
sive of feeling, anxiety, and gender consciousness, may well fit some authors in the field,
but really cannot any longer be applied to all. Indeed, there is an increasing consciousness
of post-Kantian continental philosophy in the guild of Anglo-American analytic
philosophy of religion, which one would expect Jantzen to applaud. Moreover, her
vehemence against Protestant thought, more generally, only occasionally stops to
acknowledge that “Reformed epistemology” has of late disavowed itself of many of the
features of evidentialism and foundationalism that Jantzen particularly abhors. And as for
the varieties of Thomism that are now represented in the field, Jantzen has little to say of
them at all. Her own rejection of analogy and apophaticism tends to make her read
Thomists, negatively, as covert evidentialists or honorary Protestants, and her irritation at
the discipline of philosophy of religion as a whole allows only grudging acknowledgment
that Wittgensteinians like D. Z. Phillips, liberals like John Hick, or scholars like William
Wainwright, who have investigated the significance of “affectivity” for rational
judgment, might occasionally be saying something rather akin to her own
pronouncements.^10 In sum, Jantzen's rhetorical strategy of “castigation by lumping”
where analytic philosophy of religion is concerned makes her occasional suggestions that
the way forward lies in an expansion of rationality, rather than its rejection (1998, 69),
look half-hearted and undeveloped. More commonly, one senses that Jantzen wants no
more truck with the “male” discipline at all, and may thereby have permanently relegated
herself to the semiotic margins of the currently constituted academic discussion.
However, it is precisely at this point of strategic, political decision vis-à-vis the academic
status quo that Pamela Sue Anderson's work is of relevance and interest. Sharing, as we