The flight to objectivity : essays on Cartesianism and culture /

This is a psychocultural study of Descartes' Meditations as a defensive response to anxiety over separation from the organic female universe of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, an aggressive intellectual ``flight from the feminine'' into the modern scientific mechanical male universe of purity, clarity, and objectivity. Bordo (Le Moyne) draws on recent developmental psychology and gender studies to examine the masculinizing notions of the mind as a mirror, of knowledge as location and perspective, and of reason as freedom from and transcendence of the body. Her reading of Descartes is disputable at many points (such as the ``Cartesian circle''), but she makes a number of illuminating suggestions (e.g., that a clear and distinct idea is one that we cannot say ``No'' to, or that genuine reason is an activity independent of any bodily mechanism). The book is an appropriate addition to collections in epistemology and feminism, along with Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (CH, Jun '80), Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (1980), Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (CH, Jun '85), Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason (CH, May '85) and Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (CH, Dec '86). Appropriate for advanced students.-M. Andic, University of Massachusetts at Boston