I’ve been reading Sandra Harding’s Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?. In there, she uses the term “Archimedean” in the following context:
So, she seems to be using “Archimedean” as a synonym for value-free, disinterested, and impartial. My question is, how did the term Archimedean come to mean this in (at least) feminist writing?
Being a student of mathematics, I’m familiar with Archimedes as a famous Greek mathematician, as an inventor of several machines used to defend his city when it was under siege by the Romans, and as the guy who ran down the street naked shouting “Eureka!” when he discovered that solids displace an equal volume of liquid when submerged.
However, I’m not aware of any philosophical works by Archimedes. Perhaps he wrote a line somewhere encouraging that one take an objective position while trying to solve a problem, or something like that. But of all the philosophers in history who’ve extolled the virtues of being value-free, disinterested, and impartial when seeking truth, why does Archimedes get his name attached to this position?
Well, seeing as he calculated pie, which is also slang for a woman’s va__OWW. Allright already, just quit hitting me
Anyway, I think she was using the term to mean “balanced” and took it from the Archimedes’ Balance, a device used in measuring density. It was a device he made sometime after his famous Eureka moment that used bouyancy (instead of his earlier displacement method) to measure density and thus the “truth” of gold. You can even find the things in some science supply catalogs today.
This is just a guess, of course, and it wouldn’t be the first time I wondered, “Miz Harding, what are you thinking?”
Stop being a metaphoraphobe you patriarchal oppressor. Feminists are allowed to use clunky, inaccurate metaphors… just like men!
… or maybe it’s an amazingly subtle reference to the process of making a measured and analytical determination of the intellectual content of two competing paradigms in order to determine if the review committee has been stonewalling approving your thesis because they are scared of the power of your bold ideas… The bastards!
It should be noted that while Archimedes may have felt personally disinterested in political matters he still managed to become involved in political questions. When the Romans attacked Syracuse some of the defenses were designed by him.
Granted this may not have affected his more theoretical stuff, bit he certainly was involved in things besides pure science.
Thank you, Lamia, for your informed opinion. If I may ask a follow-up question, are you aware of any feminist critique specifically aimed at Archimedes?
Nope. Archimedes’ offer to shift the world with a lever given a place to stand has been used by Myra Jehlen (and possibly others) as the basis for a metaphor about feminist efforts to “shift the world”, but that’s just borrowing a familiar idea and not in any way a critique.
I suspect that Harding just thought Archimedes was a good example of a classical scientist who treated problem solving in a particular way.
Sorry for resurrecting such an old thread, but I’ve recently come across the answer to my OP.
According to Wikipedia and other sources, an “Archimedean point” is a vantage point from which one can survey an entire situation and come to a completely objective understanding of what is happening. From what I gather, this term is used in postmodernism (including postmodern feminism) when discussing the idea that one can abstract oneself completely from society and attain objective and absolutely true knowledge about an object of inquiry, free from influence by one’s own enculturated beliefs, expectations, or vested interests arising from the object’s relationship with oneself.
The term is also used in theology when discussing a God that exists outside of space and time, and who perceives all of history “simultaneously”. The vantage point from which such a God sees the world is called an Archimedean point.
The original “Archimedean point” was the one from which Archimedes claimed that he could move the Earth with a lever. Lamia already mentioned that this idea of being able to “move the world” was used as a metaphor for bringing about social change. Evidently the story has a second life as a metaphor for simply being outside the world.
Correct. (Missed this thread the first time around).
I forget who did the early/original short theory piece in women’s studies (it predated “poststructuralist” feminism, btw), but in addition to “Archimedean”, it made use of “parallax”, from astronomy. In astronomy, when you’re studing things that are very distant from us, it doesn’t matter where the earth is in its orbit, whereas for things that are closer to us, that difference can make nearby things shift against the backdrop of things farther away, and for really close objects can make their apparent position change radically, and astronomers call that phenomenon “parallax”. (And a parsec is the distance at which an object has a parallax of one second of arc).
In social studies, of which feminist studies is a type, there is no pure “Archimedean” vantage point to describe things objectively, because for any vantage point that a human can occupy, human affairs are going to have a “parallax” effect when you compare how those same human affairs look when viewed from a different human’s vantage point.
Some aspects of human affairs are like far-distant galaxies — where, for all practical purposes, we’re going to see things the same way, the “parallax” is so small that we can ignore it. Problem is, it isn’t always easy to know which things are like that and which ones are social subjects where there is a lot of “parallax” but where we’ve only consulted with folks who are standing in more or less the same place we are.
The central axiom of femnist studies is that conventional studies as taught in academia have for centuries been masculinist studies, i.e., the only vantage points given consideration were those of men. For some things, including women’s perspective won’t bring anything new (i.e., the “parallax of gender” is small enough to be ignorable) but for other things, subject matter can look completely different. And the job of women’s studies is to look afresh at everything, to see which subject matter looks different when not viewed from a masculine perspective, and then to integrate women’s viewpoint. Feminist studies is a term that goes a bit farther, being more overtly concerned with women’s studies as a tactic for women’s liberation.
