subject, drawing as they do on ancient Greek and Hindu materials (the “myths of dissent”
of Antigone and Mirabai), seem hardly likely to catch the (admittedly narrow!)
imaginations of the existing guild of analytic philosophy of religion. Further, although it
is Anderson's explicit aim (1998, 155–56) to avoid promoting a “new religion on the
basis of an ideal and essential Woman” while ignoring “actual social problems,” there is
also a certain difficulty in making the leap at the end of her book from Antigone and
Mirabai to the downtrodden members of our own industrialized society in the
contemporary West. But Anderson herself modestly admits, in closing, that her
arguments and lines of thought represent only a beginning for new forms of feminist
philosophy of religion, and that “the categories presented here are not meant to be
definitive” (245). For this reason she would clearly welcome criticism and extension of
her feminist philosophical proposals, which will duly be attempted below.
But before we deliver some judgments on Anderson's project as a whole, and relate those
to some further thoughts of our own on the future relation between feminist thought and
analytic philosophy of religion, we must return briefly to the specific criticisms levied
against the discipline by Anderson at the opening of her book. These turn out to be
revealing, precisely in their difference of nuance from those of Jantzen. Although, as we
mentioned above, they share the presumption that analytic philosophy of religion is
predicated on the dominance of a “disembodied” male subject, in whose image its
patriarchal God is idolatrously constructed, Anderson has some more specific criticisms
that bear scrutiny. Her main ire is reserved for the empiricist basis of many of the
justificatory arguments for theism (1998, 13), which she regards as a front for a
discriminatory, male-neutral posture of privilege, covertly erasing the concerns and
interests of women. But she also charges the discipline of analytic philosophy of religion
with a widespread “naïve realism” (37, 68–69), which not only favors “literal” speech
about God over other modes of expression, but also makes spurious claims to “unme
end p.512
diated experience” of the divine, purportedly escaping the Kantian epistemological grid.
Indeed, Anderson's chief criticism of analytic philosophy of religion, it seems, is not one
that is intrinsically tied to feminist concerns; rather, it is that there is a vicious circularity
at the heart of analytic philosophy of religion's claims to “justify” belief in God at all.
Whether through evidentialism (Swinburne, par excellence), through examination of
“doxastic practices” (Alston), or through the “proper basicality” of Reformed
epistemology (Wolterstorff, Plantinga), all these philosophers, claims Anderson, are
really appealing to an “experience” into which their Christian belief has already been
smuggled (ch. 1). The resultant “scandal of circular reasoning” simultaneously occludes
what has been pushed to the margins by privileged, white male philosophers: the
concerns of women, blacks, the poor, and the non-western world disappear in a miasma
of talk of “justification” and “warrant” (58). Further, the whole enterprise is sustained by
a barely perceptible philosophical imaginary, which assumes female desire while also
repressing it; when women do appear in the texts of analytic philosophers of religion, it is
often as “passive items formen's seduction” (43). Anderson additionally charges that
when women philosophers occasionally manage, per impossibile, to succeed
professionally in this particular guild, they are often notable examples of Le Doeuff's