Starting next year, graduate students teaching introductory-level courses in philosophy at Georgia State, who teach about half of all such sections offered, will use syllabuses that include at least 20 percent women philosophers. That's at least double the number included on most syllabuses for the course at the university. The effort is an extension of preliminary research by Eddy Nahmias, professor of philosophy, and several of his graduate students, Toni Adleberg and Morgan Thompson, into why male and female students enroll in introductory-level courses in similar numbers but women drop out of the discipline in much greater numbers.There's a real problem with this approach, which is that an introduction course needs to focus on the most important issues in philosophy -- but women authors are not represented among the historically great philosophers. There are some notable 20th century female philosophers (I mentioned Elizabeth Anscombe recently, and we've often talked about Hannah Arendt here), but the 20th century is one of the driest and least important periods in the entire discipline of philosophy (for reasons entirely not the fault of the women, who were often among the most interesting voices). Even in the 20th century, you have to stretch beyond the very top voices to include any women at all (let alone to compose a fifth of your readings from their work). The problem only increases as you move to earlier and more vibrant periods in philosophy.
For an introductory course, then, you can achieve this mark only by harming the students: by denying them the chance to encounter the really great questions, and the most compelling arguments, in order to fill a fifth of their time with lesser-but-importantly-female voices. Generally watering down the content of a course is popular with students, as it is easier for them, but it's harmful to them in the long run.
It would be easier to achieve this mark in higher-level courses, once the introductions are finished. There are a number of interesting women writing today, including L. A. Paul, whose work in metaphysics I totally disagree with but nevertheless respect; and Kathrin Koslicki, whose similar work is really very good, although I think she's wrong about some key questions. You could construct a very interesting course on these metaphysical questions that had even 50% female-generated readings, if it were important to you to do so; indeed, you could do a course that was wholly about contemporary female writers in metaphysics or any other sub-discipline of philosophy.
I'm not sure why you would, though, since the important thing about what they've written is whether or not they are right about it, not whether or not they are female. They're worth reading, if they are, because they have interesting arguments.
Not that they aren't also interesting as people. Koslicki is a skier, and Paul has a black belt. Interesting to be sure, but Socrates was a veteran and Kant was a hypochondriac. That's not the reason you'd include them in a course. It may make it easier for students to connect with them at some level. If the students can't finally connect with them at the particular level of intellect, it won't matter how otherwise drawn to them they may be.
I would think the way to draw women into philosophy would be to engage them with the great problems, and get them excited about wrestling with them. (It might not hurt to suggest, which is actually true, that any university will be especially considerate of a female philosopher who wants a job -- you can be sure the academy is aware of the disparity, and will bend over backwards to help ensure their numbers reflect a devotion to doing something about it.) Engaging them is what will really qualify them to do the work, as it is only someone genuinely engaged with the questions who will perform at the level at which real contributions are made -- the kind of contributions that would justify your inclusion in a class reading list.
That's also the way you'd do best by your female students as students, which is the right way for you to relate to them if you are a professor or a teaching assistant. It is, perhaps, the only way you ought to engage them.
8 comments:
I want more than that. I want to read only the philosophical works of blonde, blue-eyed women. Otherwise the work isn't relevant to me, and I will refuse to study it.
Same goes for electrical engineering, but in that case I insist that the authors hail from Texas and have a taste for salted licorice.
If my demands aren't met, both disciplines will have to struggle to get along without me.
We'll miss you. :)
It's somewhat akin to asking me to structure a course on ancient philosophy while including X% of thinkers from outside the Greco-Roman tradition. I could do it, but every additional percent added to X would decrease the value of the course -- whether you, the student, were a Greek or Italian or anyone else.
Well, at least they're better off than journalism students.
I think an education in philosophy is a very good education, provided it's coupled with something more practical. The danger for philosophers is that they will become entirely untied from practical things, like the facts of history or the realities of chemistry or physics.
On the other hand, the advantage of a study of philosophy over the study of any of those practical things alone is this: you can come to a deeper understanding of what is really behind the phenomena you witness.
I'll put that another way. We're very taken with science, in much the same way that the Ancient Greeks were very taken with crafts (techne is the old word, and you can see the link with our own idea that science is deeply linked with technology). We share a reason with them: we like science, and they liked craft, because it's the branch of knowledge that currently gives us the most control over practical physical realities.
So we tend to think that knowledge more or less equals science, and maybe there isn't really any knowledge that isn't scientific knowledge (Arendt makes this argument, actually). The Greeks believed that knowledge really ought to be a lot like a kind of techne, where you can demonstrate what you know by making something. (The Greek understanding maybe undoes the modern one: is craft knowledge scientific? Not really -- a lot of it is art rather than science. But is it then not knowledge? Well, if the test is the ability to control reality, a blacksmith really can reliably make things that do what he wants.)
So now you know something about knowledge. You needed to have the practical experience of crafts and of science to draw the comparison; but the new knowledge, the knowledge about knowledge, is from philosophy. It's deeper, and it helps us avoid mistakes -- mistakes like Arendt's, in treating knowledge as purely limited to the scientific.
...philosophical works of blonde, blue-eyed women. Otherwise the work isn't relevant to me....
And here I thought you were a green-eyed brunette. Now I don't know what to think....
...the advantage of a study of philosophy over the study of any of those practical things alone is this: you can come to a deeper understanding of what is really behind the phenomena you witness.
A related advantage is that, properly done, philosophy training can teach--and practice--rigorous thinking. I'd seriously consider setting philosophy courses as a prerequisite to math or physics or chemistry or engineering of any sort.
But underlying the original...problem...is the lack of women writers in philosophy, as you've mentioned. It seems to me that one way to attack this shortage would be more, and more rigorous, training in writing and in writing essays, from the early years--say first or second grade. As the kids learn to construct sentences, they might as well also learn to string sentences together into coherent thoughts.
But that would take years to correct the problem, and it isn't amenable to sound bite solutions that get the next Federal grant.
Eric Hines
Grim wrote "the 20th century is one of the driest and least important periods in the entire discipline of philosophy".
(Grim also commented "the danger for philosophers is that they will become entirely untied from practical things, like the facts of history or the realities of chemistry or physics." It will become evident that I agree this is a danger.)
Driest, quite possibly. Plato is livelier than many writers I'll refer to below. But least important? Maybe philosophers generally believe this for good reasons. But in the one slice of philosophy that I happen to have studied the most (several months of undergraduate coursework taught by a philosopher, then several books worth of my own reading), this opinion makes little sense except as a matter of definition by philosophers who seem to be dogmatically stuck on one side of Snow's "two cultures." That seems to me to be a bad reason.
For centuries philosophers have thought about how much we can learn about the real world through inductive reasoning, and why. The philosophers recognize that this conversation runs up through 20th century philosophers like Popper and Lakatos and Kuhn. But this conversation then hybridizes with ideas related to Shannon's information theory and later insights of people like Solomonoff and Kolmogorov. After that it continues through rigorous quantitative analysis on the limits of machine learning, and practical work to turn basic abstractions like Solomonoff/Kolmogorov complexity into engineering practicalities like Minimum Description Length analysis or Support Vector machines. Along the way, the techies fixed some fundamental problems: in particular, after Popper it is natural to ask whether a theory is "falsifiable" but that's a false dichotomy which causes gnarly problems. Popper and others advanced ideas to quantify it, but it really cries out for a numerical definition with the properties of Shannon's informational entropy.
I spent some time studying Vapnik's _The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory_, which describes and analyzes these techniques in enough detail to allow the reader to implement a computer program which independently learns to recognize handwriten digits from examples. As in similar technical books, the author cites back to Popper. But from reading philosophers one might think the connection doesn't exist. (See e.g. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/ . Shannon? Solomonoff? Who?) Throwing away all the beautiful just-right definitions (like Shannon's informational entropy developed for quantitative analysis of engineering issues such as codes and telephone cables, which turns out to be just right even for other problems like comparing informational content of different experiments) that make it practical to carry philosophy of science all the way through to implementing real practical learning machines is a marvelous way to make twentieth century philosophy look unimportant.
I'm a great advocate of Popper's notion of scientific falsifiability. That's a good concept, very solid in my opinion, and extremely helpful in avoiding some crucial problems bedeviling our contemporary world. It is a strong hedge against yielding the authority of science to pseudoscience, for example.
In terms of an introductory course to philosophy, for general students -- even those taking it as an elective -- Popper's theory probably deserves inclusion precisely because of that value. His critique of social science's embrace of probability would be even more useful to people in other majors (like, say, sociology or anthropology). Philosophers would be doing a them great service by including it.
However, when I say that the 20th century was among the least important centuries, I don't mean to suggest that nothing important or interesting was said. I mean to suggest that, compared to the century that produced Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, or the century that produced Ibn Rushd and Maimonides, or the century that produced Aquinas and Eckhart and Ockham, and so many others, or the century that produced Hume and Kant and Hegel and Jefferson...
Let me put it another way. If you were to survey the 20th century's most-included philosophers in introductory courses, I suspect the list would look like this:
Sartre, Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, maybe Husserl, perhaps Kripke, probably Derrida... you might get Popper, but you won't get (in an introductory course) the offshoots from him.
Now all of these guys had interesting ideas. Popper's are probably the only ideas that would actually help most intro students who don't go on to study philosophy in more depth. Derrida might be useful to some of the ones who go into criticism. Contrasted with some of the earlier thinkers, it was a pretty dry period.
Bob
...And then there's the really DEEP question of which fast-food place they'll be working at with their philosophy degree.
Grim
Well, at least they're better off than journalism students.I think an education in philosophy is a very good education, provided it's coupled with something more practical.
In philosophy courses, a student is more likely required to actually THINK than merely regurgitate whatever the professor considers to be the politically correct dogma of the day.
Back in the day, I knew the owner of a company that sold irrigation equipment. He was a philosophy major.
Today I know a philosophy major who is now a school teacher.
I doubt that either of these individuals found a philosophy major to be a detriment in their jobs.
I doubt that women need to be encouraged to "do the work", or that they aren't flocking to philosophy because they don't know how to write.
My DIL earned a PhD in philosophy a few years ago and is working as a prof. Though she's a self-described feminist, I'm pretty sure she'd be annoyed by the suggestion that women won't study philosophy unless they get to read female philosophers. She graduated from St. John's, hardly known for liberally salting the Western Canon with obscure female scholars :p
Maybe the field just seems too abstract to many women. I like math, but only the applied kind. The abstract stuff my brother got his doctorate in interests me not one whit.
I don't object to any discipline wanting more balance (and trying out whatever they think might work to even things up), so long as it's not forced upon them. They ought to be free to experiment.
That said, philosophy doesn't have a very good reputation for being female friendly. I doubt any profession that was 80% female would be male friendly, either. People are social animals. Either way, it's up to them to decide what their own goals are.
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