Diversifying the Canon: Interview with Alison Peterman

Alison Peterman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester.  She received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2012. She works on Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shepherd, Spinoza, Newton, and others, on issues in natural philosophy and philosophy of cognition.

What are you doing in your own classroom to diversify the philosophical canon?

I teach courses in early modern philosophy, and I have included women in my survey course and in upper-level courses for several years.  Until recently, however, I yielded to the temptation to keep a lot of “the big six” in my course, which left limited time for new figures like Mary Shepherd, Margaret Cavendish and Émilie du Châtelet.  But I can’t really do that anymore because I keep discovering more and more wonderful philosophy in the period that I want to teach, and so I’ve devoted time this summer to completely overhauling my survey course.  We will still cover my most beloved bits of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume, but I’ll go a bit more quickly and emphasize somewhat different themes in order to connect them to a wider variety of other figures. I could not be more excited to teach the new version.

In my Introduction to Philosophy course, I have made an effort to include non-European philosophers, nonwhite philosophers, and women.  But again, I have recently come to think I can do better by just thinking more creatively, and with fresh eyes, about what topics are interesting, central to philosophy, and relevant for newcomers to philosophy.  

What are the biggest challenges and rewards in diversifying your teaching?

Diversifying my teaching has had so many rewards, but I’ll just mention two.  

First, representation matters.  I was more surprised than I should have been when women students approached me after I taught Shepherd and du Châtelet and told me how much they appreciated reading women philosophers.  A frequent request I received in course feedback was for even “more women!”  And representation matters not just in who is writing but in who is being written for.  A lot of these women are writing to women, or they are at the very least aware that their audiences may include women.  You can feel that, as a reader. I also witnessed this when I taught Intro in a prison last year: even in contemporary work, there are a lot of offhand remarks about incarcerated people, which was really alienating to my students, who were otherwise enjoying the material.

Second, diversifying gets you fresh voices.  That gets you reading more interesting philosophy, and that makes you a better philosopher. 

Diversifying my teaching has been challenging because I have had to teach things that I don’t know as well as Hume’s Enquiry or the Meditations.  That means it takes more work, and that I am sometimes less comfortable presenting the material in front of the classroom.  I dealt with this while teaching Mary Shepherd last semester by using her work as an object lesson in doing history of philosophy, which worked really well.  Instead of providing carefully wrought interpretation, as I did for previous readings, I presented students with philosophical questions and some of Shepherd’s texts, and asked them how to build the best answers to those questions out of the texts.  I wouldn’t want to do all the noncanonical figures this way, but it’s a good way to introduce someone you haven’t taught before into your syllabus.

Inexpertise presents special problems when it concerns whole traditions, or when it involves texts by people with experiences and identities that are very different from mine.  I worry about being insensitive, or appropriationist, or just totally inadequate. Robert Sanchez talked really helpfully about this in a previous “Diversifying the Canon” post.  I try to deal with this through epistemic humility, by reading work by experts, and by soliciting advice from experts. For example, I’ve been thinking of bringing important early modern Chinese philosophers into my course, and Huaping Lu-Adler has been a generous resource.

Maybe my biggest challenge right now, though, is trying to fit all this great stuff into one semester!

What advice to you have for other philosophers interested in diversifying their syllabi?

I started by thinking a lot about what philosophy was to me, what I think is interesting and important about it, and what I really want my students to get out of my teaching.  In doing that I realized – unsurprisingly, but hindsight is 20/20 – that it did not always match up with the “standard topics” in an early modern survey or an Intro to Philosophy course.  I found that very freeing (and scary, as freedom is). Then I just started reading around more, especially work from people that would increase representation on my syllabi.

Most importantly, though, I have been drawing greedily from the wisdom of many, many other people.   So I would advise talking to other people who are diversifying their syllabi, talking to a Cavendish scholar about what extracts to teach, reading the work of scholars writing on the topics you want to teach, or going to their APA talks.  Use other people’s syllabi as inspiration – there are plenty on the APA’s website, along with excellent sites like Project Vox and New Narratives. There have been amazing people out there doing incredible work rediscovering these figures.  I actually just got back from a truly inspirational workshop organized by two such luminaries: Marcy Lascano and Lisa Shapiro. They are in the process of creating a new early modern anthology that will include oodles of fantastic philosophy from noncanonical figures.  I learned so much from the other early modern scholars there, too, and I’ve gotten some amazing ideas and teaching strategies from Julie Walsh and Colin Chamberlain. One thing that is cool about canon-busting is that it also makes scholarship less solitary. No one person can master all of this material, so developing inclusive and diverse teaching resources is necessarily an inclusive project.

Finally, it has helped me to have a realistic but optimistic approach to reading new figures.  On the one hand, there is so much philosophy available, thanks to translators, editors and scholars, that if you read this or that emerging figure and it’s not to your taste, try someone else!  On the other, if a new-to-you philosopher is hard to read or has shaky arguments or surprising views, think about what it would be like to read Spinoza or Berkeley for the first time, without the benefit of centuries of scholarship.  Incidentally, a lot of these thinkers, although forgotten until recently, were widely read, influential, and very much taken to be “good philosophers” in their time – people like Du Châtelet, Anton Wilhelm Amo, and Anne Conway, for example.

What’s your favorite piece to teach and why?

This is a hard one, and I am really anticipating having a lot of new favorites from my new syllabus.  But I have been teaching du Châtelet’s Discourse on Happiness for a few years, on the advice of Marcy Lascano; it is very, very fun and the students really enjoy it.  I used to teach a class that was very heavy on M&E, so a text about happiness, pleasure, and love was a fun break.  But I have learned a lot more about how to integrate topics like that with topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action.  For next time, I am especially excited about reading Sor Juana’s Response to Sor Filotea and Zera Yacob’s Hatata alongside the Meditations. They all have elements of intellectual autobiography and deal with the relationship between knowledge and autonomy.

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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 interview nomination form here.

Header image: Painting by Alexander Nasmyth, 1788. Mary Shepherd (born Primrose) second from the right.