Carol Hay
Professor
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Kantian Rational Reconstruction
A central task for anyone interested in using canonical philosophy to shed light on the contemporary political landscape is to consider whether the explicitly sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, colonialist, and ableist statements historical theorists too often make can be uncoupled from the core of the theories themselves. Focusing on the work of Kant, I identify two strategies of rational reconstruction employed by his feminist interpreters: (1) apologist strategies that argue that we’re justified in ignoring the problematic statements in Kant’s “peripheral” works and taking his gender-neutral references to “persons” and “humanity” at face value; and (2) radical strategies that read the entire Kantian canon as of a piece, refuse any neat separation between ideal and nonideal, assume that the problematic claims in the nonideal infect the ideal and attempt to determine precisely how—and only then, after having done all this, look to see if there is anything left of value. Chronicling the shift in thought over the course of my career from the former to the latter interpretative strategy, I argue that feminism has as much to teach Kantianism as the other way around.