Lisa Shapiro On Diversifying the Canon

The challenge of revitalizing the curriculum in the history of philosophy is twofold: there is a lack of resources and the labor is often undertaken in isolation. In my own area of early modern philosophy, we’ve been stuck with the same seven key figures for well over 100 years now, and so many specialists, let alone the non-specialists who often appeal to the period, have engaged substantively with little else than the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. The leading standard anthology aims to contextualize those figures within the history of science, and so to introduce a range of key interlocutors, but the history of science is only a part of the context. So much more of philosophical consequence happens in the period. Within the early modern period, European thinkers wrestle with questions of the nature of cognitive development and of conceiving of knowledge in a world flush with new information and experiences. And yet we omit almost all of 18th century French thought – figures like Diderot, Voltaire, Condillac, La Mettrie – who offer very contemporary sounding answers to questions about perception, cognition and knowledge. It is also a time of social change, in which women argue forcefully for their own rational agency and capacity for self-determination, as well as for strategies to ensure that all women can realize that capacity. For thinkers like Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell and Gabrielle Suchon, philosophy of mind is intertwined with social and political philosophy. The way in which their philosophies arise out of attention to social inequality can be seen as resonating with today’s discussions of non-ideal theory. Anne Conway and Cavendish also develop metaphysical systems that aim to address important questions about the causal order while remaining consistent with their ethical commitments. We have also overlooked an array of central concepts – education and love, to take two examples. Discussions of education in the period offer interesting insights into the nature of first personal authority and the limits of individualism. Those about love not only concern the nature of happiness, they also begin developing an alternative to natural laws as the source moral norms. Some of these discussions even intersect with emerging thinking about race and the wrongs of slavery, and the moral issues around the colonialism of the period. There are so many philosophical topics that we could be exploring with our students if we were to just move away from the canonical seven!  

There is already a lot of good will. Those whose research is already engaging with some of these texts and the questions they raise are already bringing new texts and themes into the classroom, bringing the digital texts they use in research onto the syllabi. However, both early modern specialists whose research has been canon-focused and those many non-specialists teaching early modern survey courses need not only an easily accessible set of texts but also a way into them. The fact is we rely on the way others have read philosophers to understand them ourselves, and the secondary literature on non-canonical figures is currently limited (though changing quickly). In the meantime, novices need some kind of guide.

Marcy Lascano and I are in the process of editing a new anthology of primary sources in early modern philosophy which will include both canonical and non-canonical figures and texts for Broadview Press. The anthology will include suggestions for thematically driven modules that can be easily incorporated into syllabi, along with some background information. At the end of June at Simon Fraser University, with support from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, we hosted an intensive seminar with a group of 21 faculty and graduate students, who teach in different environments and have different research, with the goal of clarifying the principles through which to make difficult choices about selections. The discussions were fantastic and a tremendously helpful and energizing. The most inspiring part of the week for me was the development of a real community of practice for teaching early modern philosophy in new ways. Going forward, not only will participants have peers across North America (and beyond) to consult, but also we plan to expand the community by organizing sessions at APAs and at the Canadian Philosophical Association meetings to share both current research in the history of philosophy and how we bring that research into the classroom, even at the introductory undergraduate level, enlivening philosophy by attending to diverse figures and themes.

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This series of the APA Blog is dedicated to understanding what our fellow philosophers are doing in and out of the classroom to diversify the canon. If you would like to nominate yourself or someone else to write a post for this series, please contact us via the nomination form here.

Header image: Gabrielle Suchon, Wikimedia Commons

Lisa Shapiro

Lisa Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean at Simon Fraser University and PI of the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant New Narratives in the History of Philosophy. She is the editor and translator of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes(Chicago, 2007), as well as co-editor of Emotions and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 2013) and editor of Pleasure: A History (Oxford, 2018) in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series.