The Man Of Reason - Male and Female In Western Philosophy

by Genevieve Lloyd

This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibliographical essay assessing the book's place in the explosion of writing and gender since 1984.

Genres: Philosophy, Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Gender, Theory, Academic

160 pages, Paperback

First published November 13, 1984

About the author

Genevieve Lloyd (born at Cootamundra, New South Wales, 16 October 1941) is an Australian philosopher and feminist. She studied philosophy at the University of Sydney in the early 1960s and then at Somerville College, Oxford. Her D.Phil, awarded in 1973, was on 'Time and Tense'. From 1967 until 1987 she lectured at the Australian National University, during which period she developed her most influential ideas and wrote The Man of Reason, which was published in 1984. In 1987 she was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, being the first female professor of philosophy appointed in Australia.[1] On retirement, she was appointed Professor Emeritus.
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Reviews

[M&A Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب"عقل مذکر" از "ژنوید_لوید" فیلسوف فمینیست استرالیایی است. او در این کتاب به مدعای رایج در مجادلات فلسفی که عقل مردانه است، می پردازد. وی از نظریات فیلسوفانی چون هگل، کانت، اسپینوزا، سارتر و... استفاده می کند.
لوید معتقد است که مذکر و مردانه بودن عقل ریشه در تاریخ فلسفه غرب دارد. از افلاطون گرفته تا سارتر نگرشی زن ستیزانه در طول تاریخ در میان فیلسوفان مرد وجود داشته است. از نظر وی این که فیلسوفان در طول تاریخ مرد را صاحب عقل می دانند بدین دلیل می تواند باشد که خیلی فیلسوف زن در این ادوار حضور نداشته اند.
به نظرم بهترین بخش کتاب نظرات"سیمین دوبووار" درباره ی زن به منزله ی دیگری بود که توسط ژنولوید به نقد و تحلیل کشیده می شود.
خواندن کتاب کمی سخت بود ولی تاریخچه ی خوبی درباره ی نظریات فیلسوفان در ارتباط با مفهوم عقل مطرح کرد.
نظرات "بیکن" نیز درباره ارتباط زن و طبیعت نیز جالب بود. او می گوید که:"طبیعت استعاره ای از زن است". به نظر او طبیعت مرموز است و به همین دلیل قابلیت فراوانی برای شناخته شدن دارد.

[Mehrnaz · Rating 2 out of 5]

جوامع بشری را باید نابود کنیم، به جنگل‌ها بازگردیم و میان خرس‌ها زندگی کنیم.

[Laleh · Rating 2 out of 5]

کتاب سخت‌خوانی است. اگر استادم معرفی نمی‌کرد، هرگز نمی‌خواندمش.

[Leila Gharavi · Rating 2 out of 5]

بی‌پرده بگویم: غالب محتوا شامل تعابیر بدیهی نویسنده از تاریخ مفاهیم فلسفی، صورت و ماده در آثار ارسطو، فرضیات آگوستین قدیس، نیست روسو و ... است. به‌نظر می‌رسد لوید بعد از خواندن کتاب تاریخ فلسفه‌ی غرب، با توضیح واضحات و مرور اطلاعات تازه یافته‌اش می‌خواهد این حداقل دانش پایه‌ی حرفه‌اش را به رخ مخاطب بکشد! از این روست که بیش‌تر کتاب درمورد نیت‌خوانی فیلسوفان قدیمی است تا بسط فلسفه به حوزه‌ی جنسیت یا موشکافی حول آن.

برای فهم حرف تحلیل نویسنده، مرور فصل آخر کافی است. کل کتاب درواقع در حد مقاله‌ای ۱۰ صفحه‌ای است که نویسنده با نثر پرتکلف و فضل‌فروشی‌های بیهوده‌ آن را به فرم کتاب درآورده‌است.

[lottie pike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting topic + perspective on rationalism and epistemology!!

[Cemresu · Rating 5 out of 5]

felsefe tarihine bakışımı tamamen değiştirdi, mutlaka tekrar tekrar okuyacağım. inanılmaz.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading the introductions, I was ready to dislike this book, but was instead positively surprised. Genevieve Lloyd takes a look back in philosophical history how the ideals of Reason has been tied up to the masculine rather than feminine, and begins thus at Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Philo, and then further through Augustine, Aquinas, Bacon, Hume, Rousseau, Hegel and Kant, to end with Sartre and de Beauvoir. To do this, she has to adhere to the limitations of method - meaning she has to look past the cultural and then extrapolate the specifics from the philosophers sometimes maybe in too loose ways, and then tie it up to the narrative - so It's good to be aware. I'm not saying this is bad, but it does give us only a narrow glimpse into a vertical that then gives food towards more feminist theory afterwards(and that can and will go bad), maybe on slightly wrong grounds. Lloyd seems to be fairly objective throughout, and that means that the philosophical history rings true and accurate without too much of her subjective interpretations. In the conclusion she seems aware of all this, and that is why a historical text like this can work if one wants to do a further study into the matters. Somehow this book was much more interesting than Mary Beards more cultural look into the power struggle of females(maybe because this is more comprehensive), but they handle the issue in different ways. The issue seems to me like a fading away distinction(meaning, that today we have no problems seeing that reason is sexless), also in this book, which makes it more of a book to show how a idea has evolved rather how a idea is. A problem is that the philosophers ideas to which Lloyd most approve of in this context, if that can be detected, fare with so many bad ideas in general that one should be aware of judging them based on this kind of narrow history(sadly, it seems that feminists usually seems to be attracted that way). All in all, it is a solid book if the connection between Reason and Man is something that attracts you, even though you may cringe on the thought of applying gender to a concept.

[Gebo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though it's limited in its scope, this book was a great read. It allowed me to really get into the right frame of mind in order to understand the difference between intuition, reason, and imagination and that was very helpful to my work. Likewise, I hadn't thought of, but hadn't seen Mind/Body dualism from Plato to now spelled out in such detail--though, that's FAAAAR from Lloyd's project, it just popped out at me throughout because of my own work...

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the days of Plato musing on the sexes to the Simon de Beauvoir’s more modern interpretations of feminism, Man of Reason covers how western philosophy has been ingraining sexism and even associating femininity as something that needs to be conquered in the pursuit of reason into world views from day one. Genevieve Lloyd does a great job of explaining how early Greek philosophers saw men as pure beings of reason, and women as beings of “nature”, and how the philosophy runs with and changes this over the course of hundreds of years.

I think the early Greek philosophy explanations and the coverage of Beauvoir that leads into the ending statements of the book are very well done, and are easy for a layman like me to understand, and helped me learn more of the historical ins and outs of where these views have come from. The thesis is strong, and Lloyd backs it all up well. I think the book gets a bit bogged down around the Bacon era explanations and doesn’t pick up until 3/4ths of the way through, but overall its an incredibly solid, short read that has helped me understand a bit more about where some of the outlandish views on women that some philosophers have had come from. She draws the line for you to follow, and makes it easy to do it.

[Jan D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy read and without a strong arc – it goes through the history of philosophy from ancient greek to Beauvoir. Still a very interesting analysis of how, through the times, philosophers associated have female traits with less desirable attributes.
I read it since it was cited in “Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine” which similarly analyses the role gendered traits play in (symbolic) artificial intelligence.

[nAeEMak نعیمک]

اولین چالشی که کتاب با تو مطرح می‌کند خود «تفکر» یا «منطق» است. منطق و عقل از چیزهای هستند که ما همیشه آن‌ها را برتر از چیزهای دیگر می‌دانیم و سعی می‌کنیم در زندگی منطقی باشیم یا در مخالفت‌هایمان با بحثی منطقی حرف‌هایمان را بزنیم. بعد از کتاب تو به خود منطق هم شک می‌کنی.
کتاب به آرای فلاسفه از ارسطو و افلاطون می‌پردازد و تا سیمون دوبووار می‌رسد در این سیر به دیدگاه‌هایی آن‌ها می‌پردازد که انگار فسلفه (راهی برای درست فکر کردن) بیشتر شکلی مردانه داشته و زن‌ها را در پستو دیده. اگر به عقل پرداخته آن را هم‌سنگ با مردانگی (برتری) دیده و زن شاید هیچ وقت نتواند به عقل درست و حسابی برسد. آیا کتاب به همین تلخی است؟ می‌شود گفت بله. البته طبیعی هم هست.فمنیسیم و برابری جنسیتی موضوعی بسیار تازه است و این که حتی فلاسفه به این برابری فکر نکردند یا در جاهایی به آن اعتقاد نداشتند چیز عجیبی نیست.
کتاب نقدی است بر آرای فلاسفه و آن چیزی که ما رسیده و این نکته را می‌گوید که حالا وقت نگاهی دوباره است به آن چیزی که همیشه خواندیم و به اسم «فلسفه» با آن برخورد کردیم. نگاهی دوباره به مفاهیمی که ظاهراً عقل‌محور هستند اما شاید نگاهی نابرابرانه در آن‌ها باشید. و مهم‌تر از همه به ما نشان می‌دهد که می‌‌شود به بدهیهی‌ترین چیزها هم نگاهی دوباره کرد و زاویه‌ای نو در آن‌ها کشف کرد.

[Matthew Sobolik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lloyd argues that the concept of reason in western philosophy has been fundamentally gendered male, and that this gendering is not simply a matter of a bad metaphor, but adversely affects ontology and ethics. While I largely agree with Lloyd's thesis, the book is hampered by its length. One hundred pages is not sufficient room to sketch out the entire history of the concept of reason in western thought. Because of this there is very little analysis until the last short concluding chapter, so the book function mainly as a brief, surface level synopsis of western philosophy.

[Hilal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Önsöz ve Sonsöz bölümleri nasıl olduysa kitabın kendisinden daha anlaşılamaz şekilde yazılmış bir kitap. Batı felsefesindeki temel isimlerin akıl ve cinsiyet üzerine olan düşüncelerini toplamış. Eğer filozofların kendi bakış açıları bilinmiyorsa biraz yanlı veya eksik gelebilir bence bu kitap, bu yüzden öncesinde felsefeye giriş babında minik kitaplar okunabileceğini tavsiye etmek isterim. Dünya genelinde yapılsa çok daha güzel bir kitap olabilirmiş bence, ama zaten Batı felsefesi diye sınırlandırılmış en başta, bu yüzden bunu genel bir fikir olarak düşünüyorum.

[Aja · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a good writer!!!!! Ideas from this book are so clearly conveyed that they will stay with you as facts of life for eternity. You also might as well buy this book to accompany Strunk and White

[Taha Mahdavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Attempting to identify or affirm anything distinctively "feminine" has its hazards in a context of actual inequality.

[Cansu Sarı · Rating 5 out of 5]

Felsefe-Sosyoloji okuması yapmamış olanlar icin bir tık ağır kaçabilir.

[Syahirah Jani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviously philosophy isn't my strongest suit, but this isn't my first attempt to understand the point of philosophy. And I think Lloyd has delivered her points well. This book has reviewed and dissected popular traditional opinions, whereby Reasons are closely associated with sexual preferences (maleness and femaleness) in Western philosophy. From traditional opinions (as ancient as Plato and Phythagoras) refers reason as maleness, (clearly stating the preference here!) while femaleness is closely related to Passion (a passive, submissive and indeterminate form) to the likes of Augustine, Aquina and Philo whose opinions deemed misogynistic (as femaleness associated with lower power or irrationality). I also love how she compared the opinions of Hume and Descartes, as both opinions claimed that reasons has nothing to do with sexuality, somehow proves the male chauvinism in their ideals of reasons from the social point of view. Lloyd also managed to point out on how femaleness excluded from the ideals of Reasons, from the symbolic association of femaleness, body to nature, to their identification as objects to be transcended and deemed connived. All in all, the ideals of Reason should be looked as a whole and sexes are EQUAL in possession of Reasons.

As a side note, I hate the phrase,"think like a man, act like a lady", this phrase proves the whole point that this book against of, the preferences over the male ideals. I would like to quote De Beavoir's ideal for women (although as bias as it/I may sound) "women should themselves break away from the 'immanence' in which they have been thus contained, to achieve their own transcendence - the state of self transcendence and self-justification."

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contrary to some descriptions of the book, Lloyd doesn't aim to advance any kind of sexual relativism. Instead, her focus is on the contents of our ideals of Reason, e.g. a Cartesian ideal of meditation alone without any attention to the world. The focus is on how these ideals either (i) were understood to be a man's path to reason, with woman understood as either never undertaking to pursue reason (e.g. Rousseau), or undertaking some path that was of no interest to the author, (ii) were impossible for a woman to achieve because of the more general subjection of women (e.g. Descartes and Elizabeth of Bohemia), or (iii) were suited for men rather than women (e.g. Sartre's transcendence) in some other way. Lloyd uses a complete understanding of what we take Reason to be, pointing out the connections of these views with how we ought to act as reasoning agents, and with moral (& political) epistemology.

The book I think succeeds on all points, contrary to what I expected, the exposition is very faithful to the original authors. The exposition is so complete that some points I found myself hoping for more discussion of the philosophers' views in relation to the theme of the book (esp. in the Hume section, it felt like the discussion of the implications of Hume's views of morality for the theme were so short that I didn't understand Lloyd's point).

[Nil · Rating 3 out of 5]

felsefe ve onun öne sürdüğü akıl erkektir.