feminist philosophers have at their disposal.^14 The first, and least radical, is an extension
of the empiricist project for feminist ends: on this view, what is needed to liberate women
in the sphere of philosophy is simply the taking into account of empirical factors (about
women, their lives, their concerns, etc.) which have been falsely occluded in traditional
“male-neutral” phi
end p.506
losophy. Anderson declares herself less than fully satisfied with this first option, on the
grounds that it cannot take sufficiently critical account of the all-encompassing
epistemological perspective of male privilege from which women's issues have
classically been marginalized. And she has, in any case, as we have seen, already
expressed her reservation about covert sexisms in empiricist approaches. Hence, the
second, and somewhat more radical, epistemological option appeals to her more: that of
so-called standpoint epistemology. We have already mentioned Jantzen's (rather hasty)
dismissal of this approach, above; Anderson spends much more time and trouble (ch. 2),
explicating its possibilities. Following Sandra Harding's (1993) important development of
this option, Anderson takes the view that differing epistemological “standpoints” are
capable of revealing perspectives on truth, and indeed that perspectives from the
“margins” (whether from women, or blacks, or other oppressed people) are intrinsically
more likely to be revelatory of truth than those that are bolstered by the prejudice and
delusions of male privilege (Anderson 1998, 73). Thus, as Harding suggests, this
approach can ironically claim a stronger “objectivity,” epistemologically speaking, than
standard “male-neutral” theories of knowledge, whose blindnesses ironically “weaken”
their presumed objectivity, and whose implicit claim to occupy the God's-eye view
actually results in an epistemic disadvantage. (This argument, as Harding explains, has
its origins in Hegel's master/slave parable and in Marxist interpretation of it.) But what
primarily commends the standpoint approach to Anderson is that, like the empiricist
option, it does not give up on a shared domain of “truth” seeking alongside the male-
neutral. But, unlike the straightforward empiricist alternative, it attends to the specificity
of the standpoint of feminism(s), not simply to an additional collection of facts to be
accounted for. The crucial point is that objectivity and perspective can thereby be seen as
coincident: purported “perspectivelessness” (the “view from nowhere”) is, by contrast, a
chimera (78).
Anderson, however, is not entirely confident about the success of Harding's argument for
“strong objectivity,” chiding her at one point with a slippage into relativism that would
undermine that possibility (1998, 77); yet she also seeks, as we shall see, to set her own
standpoint epistemology in a more strongly Kantian framework than does Harding,
thereby appearing to weaken the possibility of an achieved “realism” from any one
particular standpoint (even a “marginalized” one). Frankly, these two divergent strands in
Anderson's thesis on standpoint do not find a satisfactory resolution in her book. The first
causes her to announce that her ultimate epistemological aim is to learn to “think from
the lives of others” (78, my emphasis) in order to offset the necessary restrictions even of
her own, feminist perspective; at this juncture the notion of standpoint seems to start to
dissolve in the cause of a more universal perspective. The second strand, however,
presses Anderson in the opposite direction, even to the point of admitting that standpoint