1.Jantzen (1998) uses the term “masculinist” to denote that which covertly privileges
men's position of privilege; I follow her in this usage throughout this chapter. Other
cognate terms used by both Jantzen and Anderson (1998) are “sexist,” “patriarchal,”
“phallocentric” (with specifically Lacanian psychoanalytic overtones, discussed intra),
and (in Anderson) “male-neutral”: a view or philosophical position posing as universal in
its validity, but actually assuming male privilege. My own term for the latter is “the
generic male.”
2.Here one might cite, to indicate the variety of current approaches, the special issue of
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 9: 4 (1994), devoted to feminist philosophy of
religion in all its guises, and writers such as Frankenberry (1987), Armour (1999), or
Hollywood (2002), who have no connections with analytic philosophy of religion.
3.See Jantzen (1998, 23–24; compare 32–40); and compare my brief discussion of this
theme in relation to analytic philosophy of religion's treatment of “two-nature”
christology, in Coakley (1997, 604–5).
4.This oft-cited view of Nagel is frequently misunderstood, as I suspect it is also by
Jantzen. Nagel's point (as I read him: see Nagel 1986, 27, 84–85) is not that there cannot
be a “God's-eye view” for God (a matter with which Nagel scarcely concerns himself),
but rather that Descartes used a sleight of hand to posit “God” as “the personification of
the fit between ourselves and the world for which there is no explanation but which is
necessary for thought to yield knowledge” (85). What readers often forget to mention is
that Nagel then goes on precisely to insist that we give some other account of the
possibility of “objective” knowledge.
5.One odd feature of Jantzen's argument against the appeal to “experience” is, in effect,
to read Schleiermacher through the lens of William James, and then to blame this
“Schleiermacherian” tradition for a philosophically naïve, but also “imperialist,” use of
“religious experience” as an epistemic category (Jantzen 1998, 116–19).
6.The usual butt is Swinburne's definition of God at the beginning of his first edition of
The Coherence of Theism (1977, 2); see also the discussion in Anderson (1998, 15).
7.Jantzen's reading of Denys as supremely “masculinist” fails to account either for
end p.521
the Dionysian insistence on the negation even of negations in proper speech about God,
or for his theory of “contemplation” as taking one “beyond the mind.” For a brilliant
recent discussion of the important difference between Denys's thought and postmodern
“deferral,” see Rubenstein (2003).
8.Here, in her discussion of Kristeva's essay “Stabat Mater,” Jantzen comes closest to
seeing a point of rapprochement between “reason” and the “semiotic” (Jantzen 1998,
200–203).
9.On this point (of the inextricability of “truth” claims and appeals to “justice”), see
Fricker (1994).
10.See, e.g., Phillips (1970, 1993); Hick (1973, 1976); Wainwright (1995).
11.See Anderson (1998, 61, n. 12), who is aware that “It is worth considering whether
Nagel's original account has been misconstrued by both value theorists and feminists.”
Compare n. 5, above.