Saturday's post finding that only 16% of Authors in Elite Philosophy Journals Are Women brought out the misogynist bros on Twitter, but also some remarks from well-meaning people along the lines of "maybe women (ethnic minorities, etc.) just aren't that interested in philosophy".
I haven't been following that issue closely, but it tends to be less initially worrisome when the overrepresentation is among groups with less cultural power than when it is among groups with more cultural power.
"We should especially welcome, rather than create an inhospitable or cool environment for, people with unusual or minority or culturally atypical or historically underrepresented experiences and worldviews."
Do you think it's possible to do this without compromising the standard of rigor required to publish in top journals? In a sense isn't the process of getting a PhD in philosophy learning *how* to argue with a high degree of rigor in the Western academic tradition? I'm trying to imagine what it would look like to have alternative worldviews included and it's hard for me not to imagine them getting ripped to pieces. I'm thinking back to discussions that rejected academic epistemology as racist and promoted 'other ways of knowing'...okay, do you thing, but how are you going to participate in academic philosophy if you reject the ground rules?
This is not an argument that women or minorities can't participate in academic philosophy, but rather that to the degree they do won't their voices be regularized into the tradition by dint of the study it takes to get them a seat at the table?
Thanks for the comment. I disagree. While it's certainly not the job of every academic journal to represent every approach to philosophy, generally speaking -- if the view I express in the OP is correct -- the problem is the converse, that is, that quality is less likely to be recognized if it doesn't speak in a familiar idiom, with familiar presuppositions.
I'll give myself away a bit here but I think it's a reasonable question: how do you judge quality if not in the context of a tradition? If the core of philosophy is making reasoned arguments from a set of axioms (which people may disagree with!), what do you do with people who just reject that as a mode of discourse? How do you judge their work? Vibes?
I don't think there's a single best way to judge. But even if we use the axiom-proof model, it's valuable to have people who start from different axioms, creating the equivalent of non-Euclidean geometries, Boolean algebras, and fuzzy logics, for example.
What do you think of the recent discussion over the lack of men in literary fiction?
(Bit of a gotcha but four potential positions (or more!) are possible.)
I haven't been following that issue closely, but it tends to be less initially worrisome when the overrepresentation is among groups with less cultural power than when it is among groups with more cultural power.
"We should especially welcome, rather than create an inhospitable or cool environment for, people with unusual or minority or culturally atypical or historically underrepresented experiences and worldviews."
Do you think it's possible to do this without compromising the standard of rigor required to publish in top journals? In a sense isn't the process of getting a PhD in philosophy learning *how* to argue with a high degree of rigor in the Western academic tradition? I'm trying to imagine what it would look like to have alternative worldviews included and it's hard for me not to imagine them getting ripped to pieces. I'm thinking back to discussions that rejected academic epistemology as racist and promoted 'other ways of knowing'...okay, do you thing, but how are you going to participate in academic philosophy if you reject the ground rules?
This is not an argument that women or minorities can't participate in academic philosophy, but rather that to the degree they do won't their voices be regularized into the tradition by dint of the study it takes to get them a seat at the table?
Thanks for the comment. I disagree. While it's certainly not the job of every academic journal to represent every approach to philosophy, generally speaking -- if the view I express in the OP is correct -- the problem is the converse, that is, that quality is less likely to be recognized if it doesn't speak in a familiar idiom, with familiar presuppositions.
I'll give myself away a bit here but I think it's a reasonable question: how do you judge quality if not in the context of a tradition? If the core of philosophy is making reasoned arguments from a set of axioms (which people may disagree with!), what do you do with people who just reject that as a mode of discourse? How do you judge their work? Vibes?
I don't think there's a single best way to judge. But even if we use the axiom-proof model, it's valuable to have people who start from different axioms, creating the equivalent of non-Euclidean geometries, Boolean algebras, and fuzzy logics, for example.