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As Women’s History month comes to a close, we wanted to share an important debate that Simon Blackburn, author of Ethics: A Very Short Introduction, participated in for IAITV. Joined by Scottish feminist linguist Deborah Cameron and feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, they look at what we can do to build a more feminist language.

Is our language inherently male? Some believe that the way we think and the words we use to describe our thoughts are masculine. Looking at our language from multiple points of views – lexically, philosophically, and historically – the debate asks if it’s possible for us to create a gender neutral language. If speech is fundamentally gendered, is there something else we can do to combat the way it is used so that it is no longer – at times – sexist?

What do you think can be done to build a more feminist language?

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Until recently he was Edna J. Doury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, and from 1969 to 1999 a Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is the author of Ethics: A Very Short Introduction.

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By Simon Blackburn

 
David Hume was born three hundred years ago, on 26^th April 1711.  He lived most of his life in Edinburgh, with only a few improbable interludes: one as tutor to a lunatic, one assisting in a comic-operatic military adventure, and one somewhat more successfully as Embassy Secretary, being a lion in the literary salons of Paris. Apart from these his life was devoted to philosophy, history, literature, and conversation. He is the greatest, and the best-loved, of British philosophers, as well as the emblem and presiding genius of the great flowering of arts and letters that took place in the Edinburgh of the eighteenth century—the Scottish Enlightenment. As with all philosophers, his reputation has gone through peaks and troughs, but today it probably stands higher than it ever has.

This may be surprising. Movements in twentieth-century philosophy were not, on the whole, kind to Hume. Analytical philosophy, initiated by Moore and Russell, took logic to be its scalpel and the careful dissection of language to be its principal task, yet Hume was neither a logician nor primarily interested in language. His empiricism, indeed, had echoes in the later work of the logical positivists. But he was widely regarded as having driven empiricism into a sceptical grave. Russell, for example, could assert in his History of Western Philosophy, that Hume ‘developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent, made it incredible’, and this was a widely-held view. On the Continent it has usually been assumed that Hume was simply a curtain-raiser to Kant, who allegedly instructed us how to avoid his sorry descent into scepticism, on the grounds that any world in which we could find ourselves must have a nice regular structure, discernible by the light of reason alone.

There is unquestionably a skeptical side to Hume’s philosophy. But there is another side as well, that is responsible for its current standing. Hume is indeed sceptical about the power of reason to determine what we believe. But he is not sceptical, for example, about whether the sun will rise tomorrow. He just has the calm understanding that our confidence in uniformities in nature, such as this one, is not the result of logic or of any exercise of pure rationality. It is just the way our minds happen to work—as indeed, do those of other animals.

Similarly when it comes to understanding the springs of action, Hume again dethrones reason, arguing that nothing that reason could discover would motivate us without engaging an inclination or ‘passion’. He entirely overturns the Platonic model of the soul in which reason is the charioteer, controlling and steering the unruly horses of desire. ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. We can correct mistakes about the world in which we act, and choose more efficient means to gain our ends. We may even be able to persuade ourselves and each other to alter our courses, for better or worse. But we can only do this by mobilizing other considerations we care about. These concerns, or in other words the directions of our desires, are themselves a bare gift of nature, again. Hume excelled in adding detail to this: his account of the evolution of what he called the ‘artificial’ virtues—respect for such things as reciprocity, institutions of justice, social conventions, law or government—is the grandfather of all later decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of cooperation. But it took over two centuries before this would be recognized. Only recently has Hume’s naturalism become the gold standard for everyone at the cutting edge of contemporary investigation, whether in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary psychology, anthrop

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By Mark C. Carnes

General Editor, ANB

The 150th anniversary of the Civil War will be commemorated in the usual ways. But a truly unique approach is provided by the online—and thus searchable—version of the American National Biography, a 27-million word collection of biographical essays on some 18,731 deceased Americans who played a significant role in the nation’s past.

Readers can of course acquire an understanding of the major figures, perhaps beginning with James M. McPherson’s long essays on Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and Russell F. Weigley’s on Robert E. Lee. But there are many hundreds of essays on figures associated with all aspects of the war.

Those interested in a particular battle, for instance, can use the ANB online. A full-text search of articles for “Gettysburg” yields 253 separate biographical essays, the great majority on soldiers who fought there.

But this search also unearths many new gems of information, such as the fact that William Corby, a Roman Catholic priest assigned to New York’s Irish Brigade, stood upon a boulder, raised his right hand, and offered a general absolution for the combatants just before the armies converged.

Women, too, surface in this search. Eliza Farnham, the author of Life in Prairie Land (1846) and a crusader for prison reform and women’s causes, tended the wounded at Gettysburg, where she contracted tuberculosis; she died the next year at age 49. Eliza Turner, an early feminist, abolitionist, and poet, also cared for the wounded at Gettysburg. She later wrote an important woman suffrage tract. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who became the dressmaker, dresser, and confidante of Mary Lincoln, attended the Gettysburg commemoration with the first lady.

Scholars—and history buffs—can look at the Civil War from another fresh perspective through ANB searches by geographical location. For example a full-text search for “Frankfort, Kentucky,” limited to subjects between 1800 and 1840, generates nearly three dozen responses. Among the many interesting essays are those on the following:

Leonidas Polk, a graduate of West Point who became an Episcopal bishop and the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. At the outset of the Civil War he volunteered to command Confederate forces and Jefferson Davis named him major general for the upper Mississippi region. In September 1862, during an offensive to seize Kentucky, Polk disobeyed an order to attack, forcing Braxton Bragg to abandon Frankfort.

John Marshall Harlan, who raised and commanded the Tenth Kentucky Volunteers. His efforts helped keep Kentucky in the Union, winning for him the support of national Republicans; in 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes nominated Harlan to the Supreme Court.

Luke Pryor Blackburn, a physician who became governor of Kentucky. He had served as the public health officer for Natchez, Mississippi, during the yellow fever epidemics of 1848 and 1854. During the Civil War the Confederacy sent Blackburn to Canada to collect arms and hospital supplies to be shipped through the Union blockade. In Canada Blackburn devised a scheme to spread yellow fever through Northern cities. To that end he traveled to Bermuda during the epidemic of 1864, collected the bedding of dying fever victims, and shipped it in trunks to cities in the North. (The plan failed: Blackburn did not understand that mosquitoes were the agent of transmission of yellow fever.) Charged with conspiracy to commit murder, Blackburn was acquitted by a Canadian court. He returned to the United States, settled in Kentucky, won a measure

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below, he looks at the new recommendation that women only undergo routine mammograms after the age of 50. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Last week, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a government-appointed group of 16 outside experts recommended that women should undergo routine mammograms only after the age of 50 and not 40, against the advice of the American Cancer Society and consistent with the recommendations of the American College of Physicians.

Medicine is not a precise science, so the task force could be right but it could also be wrong. Researchers and scientists make probabilistic claims from the data to offer recommendations, in this case, to the Department of Health and Human Services.

To prevent one additional breast cancer death, 1,000 women would have to get mammograms starting at age 40 rather than 50. But doing this would allegedly result in roughly 500 of the 1,000 women getting false positive results at least once, and 33 of them getting unnecessary biopsies, according to Jeanne Mandelblatt of Georgetown University.

According to researchers on the side of the Task Force, the adage that prevention is better than cure loses its intuitive force when one scrutinizes the risks associated with preventive care such as radiation or hormone therapy on abnormalities that may never have become cancerous tumors as well as the anxiety they provoke.

Now, other experts looking at the same data disagree on its interpretation. “We respect the task force, but we do not agree with their conclusions,” says Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. “We are concerned the same evidence we think supports beginning at age 40 is being interpreted by others as not supporting mammography.”

Scientists looking at the evidence can disagree, but when they do, they point to the data in order to support their conclusions. Most politicians, on the other hand, do not look at the data and they can in good faith either accept or reject the experts’ recommendations since the experts do disagree. Only a few, however, grab one set of these recommendations, and then leap a few light years ahead, with uncanny certitude, to a conclusion solar systems away from the data on which the recommendations were originally offered.

“This is how rationing begins. This is the little toe in the edge of the water,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “This is when you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician.”

This is when you put a politician between the people and responsible government. They will offer answers, explanations, and analogies with more certititude than the scientists who perused the data, and if their golden tongues wagged with enough vigor, people will believe them because it is easier to acquire information via gossip than it is to collect it ourselves.

Our indifference to doing our civic homework would not be a problem but for the fact that demagogues are able to synthesize our indifference with their certainty to create political slogans but not political solutions. Resolution and confidence are virtues only when the answers are always obvious and unambiguous. But in the world of statistics in which researchers on both sides of the mammogram debate inhabit, and in the world of politics where the meaning of public opinion and the general will fluctuates, unsubstantiated certitude is the one cancer on democacy we should be screening for, every day.