Héloise complex: strongly devoted to male mentors or protectors, whose intellectual
hegemony and institutional privilege they obligingly do not question (50–52).
Anderson's argument seems to be at its strongest when she is explicitly charting the
presence of a “myth” of female subordination in the texts of analytic philosophy of
religion. In her analysis of Richard Swinburne's earlier work, in particular, she is able to
give bountiful, even embarrassing, evidence of a philosophical imaginary of male
privilege and female subordination, which is shot through many of his illustrative
examples. When women do appear in his text (which is rarely), they feature as potentially
seductive sirens or as mutely submissive spouses. Only the hardened could dismiss this
“evidence” as mere psychological projection on the part of the critic; indeed, it is a sign
of the partial success of such criticism that Swinburne has in a number of ways modified
his position and mode of expression in recent revisions of his work.^16 But Anderson's
more sweeping criticisms of analytic philosophy of religion for its empiricist bias
(especially its appeals to “religious experience”), its purportedly naïve realism, and its
epistemic circularity seem more problematic, and do not accord well with the position
she herself takes up later in the book on standpoint theory. This matter needs some
spelling out, but it will lead on naturally to the final, constructive, section of this chapter.
Let us then turn a critical eye on Anderson's standpoint theory, which, as I hope to have
demonstrated, is the epistemological lynchpin in her whole feminist project and that
which most clearly distinguishes her project from that of Jantzen.
There are three main areas of difficulty in the standpoint position of Anderson in A
Feminist Philosophy of Religion, as I see it. The first relates to her use of
end p.513
Kant's work in support of her view that “perspectival” knowledge can achieve “strong
objectivity” and hence preserve a commitment to realism. As we have seen, Anderson
also believes that Kant shows us that the knower is irretrievably distanced from the object
of knowledge, and that there is no available God's-eye view from which this distancing
could be overcome. Quite apart from the question of whether this is a proper reading of
Kant's intentions in the first Critique (which is at the very least a moot point),^17
Anderson's dogmatism on this matter of epistemic distancing leaves her in a paradoxical
position as far as her equally strong commitment to realism is concerned. If we are all
distanced, impenetrably, from that which we seek to “know,” how can we also know that
our “perspectives” all participate in some way in that reality? And why would we seek to
enter empathetically into the perspective of another (especially a male-neutral other)
unless we did know this? Despite Anderson's stated endeavor to cut through the binary
between God-like epistemic “privilege” and epistemological relativism, there are times,
as we have seen, when she aligns herself, confusingly, with first one and then the other.
She wavers, in fact, on whether true epistemological relativism is implied by the
perspectivalism she is proposing; this leaves her position in the book puzzlingly
inconsistent. Her more recent work on feminist standpoint theory clears up some of the
confusion, but in a more consistently realist way: now we are abjured to enter
imaginatively into others' standpoints in order to achieve ever-widening perspectives on
the truth, and “less biased knowledge” (2001, 131). (The perspective of the margins is no
longer granted compensatory epistemic privilege, as it was, in Marxist mode, in the