epistemology must embrace “incoherence,” given the apparent incommensurability to be
found between widely differing perspectives (86). To this core
end p.507
problem of coherence in Anderson's position we shall return shortly, but what she
nonetheless helpfully clarifies, in detailing her remaining commitment to standpoint
epistemology, is its important difference from the poststructuralist, psycholinguistic
epistemology of the French feminists and of Jantzen. For whereas this third feminist
epistemological option, as we have described at length above, invites one into the magic
epistemological circle of those who see the repressive power of the male symbolic realm,
it appears to provide no clear way of persuading the skeptical male-neutral philosopher
that he is suffering from its baleful influence in the first place. But nor, equally
worryingly, does it present the post-Lacanian feminist with any obvious mode of
epistemological reform for all; she is seemingly consigned to the margins, fated to resort
to minor, destabilizing semiotic interruptions, or at best, as Jantzen espouses, called to
reimagine a feminine divine to which only some, liberated natals will be drawn.
Having opted for standpoint epistemology as the most promising way to revitalize the
scope of philosophy of religion, and having retained thereby a specifically feminist
commitment to truth and objectivity (duly redefined), Anderson also spells out other
reasons why she is unwilling to abandon the modern Western project of “rationality”
(which is for Jantzen, of course, intrinsically and hopelessly tainted by sexism). For a
start, Kant figures largely in Anderson's appreciative feminist reappraisal of certain
Enlightenment strands of thought. Not only, as we have already mentioned, does
Anderson consider Kant's critique of the traditional arguments for the existence of God to
be definitive and successful (thus undermining, she believes, the attempts to revive them
in analytic philosophy of religion), but, along with many post-Kantians, she also
interprets Kant's epistemology as demonstrating a “lack of correspondence between
rationality and reality for any individual embodiment of reason” (1998, 11, my
emphasis), and she happily embraces this view as an aid to her critique of what see dubs
the “naïve realism” endemic to analytic philosophy of religion. In other words, Anderson
reads Kant's epistemology as one that first and foremost distances the knower from the
known, even though it also allows, as she proposes later, a form of “perspectival” realism
(76–94). Anderson is equally insistent that some of the classical Enlightenment
enunciations of personal and political goals—justice, universal love, liberty, rights—are
abandoned at the contemporary feminist's peril; so, although each of these key terms is
necessarily subject to feminist rethinking, she conceives of her project as a feminist
renegotiation of rationality, not as a tolling of its death knell.
That this defense of rationality is held (contra Jantzen's more extreme pessimism about
the phallocentric taint of all claims to rationality and truth), is in large part explained by
Anderson's different mixture of philosophical and feminist influences. As we now see, it
is a form of Kantianism that undergirds her standpoint epistemology (no one has
privileged or complete access to reality, but we all have some access), and she conjoins
that view with an important appeal to W. V. Quine's (1953) famous image of the
Neurathian ship, on which mariner-
end p.508