Julia Jorati is an associate professor of philosophy at the Ohio State University. She works on early modern philosophy and, within that, mostly on Leibniz’s metaphysics, moral psychology, and philosophy of action.
What are you doing in your own classroom to diversify the philosophical canon?
So far, I have only taken a few modest steps toward diversifying my course syllabi. For instance, when I teach survey courses in early modern philosophy, I make sure to include at least one or two female voices. Likewise, when I teach philosophy of religion and other intro-level courses, I assign a few non-Western authors and include a decent number of texts by female philosophers. These small changes are very easy to implement—anybody can do it!
In future, I plan to expand these first efforts. This summer I attended two summer programs that gave me a ton of new ideas for diversifying various courses. The first program was the “Intensive Seminar on Teaching New Narratives in Early Modern Philosophy,” organized by Lisa Shapiro and Marcy Lascano. We read and discussed a wide range of early modern texts that are not in the traditional canon, by women and men, and brainstormed ways of integrating such texts into our classes. It was fabulous and I cannot wait to implement some of those ideas this coming academic year. The other program was the NEH summer institute “Reviving Philosophy as a Way of Life,” directed by Stephen Angle, Stephen Grimm, and Meghan Sullivan. The primary aim of this institute was not to diversify the canon, but rather to rehabilitate a style of philosophy that views the discipline as first and foremost a guide to the good life. Yet, teaching classes in this way-of-life tradition can make it easy to have diverse syllabi. For example, we spent two days of the institute on texts from the Confucian and Buddhist traditions, which are paradigm examples of guides to the good life. I also noticed that several texts by female early modern philosophers would fit extremely well into a class on philosophy as a way of life; for instance Du Châtelet’s “Discourse on Happiness” and Elisabeth of Bohemia’s letters to Descartes. Likewise, there are texts by black existentialists that would be perfect for that kind of class. My plan is to incorporate some of these new ideas into a course on death and the meaning of life that I teach regularly.
What are the biggest challenges in teaching non-canonical texts?
One challenge is finding pieces that fit into the course, and then teaching that material in such a way that it does not feel like an add-on or an afterthought. I do not think it would be a good idea, for instance, to have a separate unit on women philosophers in a history of philosophy course; it seems important to integrate non-canonical texts well.
Yet, this challenge is much easier to address than many people think, especially if one is looking to add only a few non-canonical authors. At least for the classes that I teach, it is easy to find non-canonical authors who fit brilliantly into traditional course narratives and who enrich the course in ways that go far beyond increasing demographic diversity. Take “Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy” as an example. One traditional narrative in such courses is the widespread rejection of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics in early modern Europe, and the resulting attempts to explain natural changes without substantial forms and without teleology. Another traditional course narrative revolves around the relation between mind and body, or between human beings and the rest of the natural world. Several non-canonical philosophers fit wonderfully into either of these traditional narratives: Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish, Anton Wilhelm Amo, and Émilie du Châtelet, to name just a few prominent examples. And adding these authors has the additional benefit of allowing students to engage with fascinating alternatives to the metaphysical doctrines of the canonical authors. Hence, one does not need to change an early modern philosophy course radically in order to diversify the syllabus.
That said, it is also worthwhile to consider changing the course narrative—not only in order to diversify the syllabus, but also to represent the breadth of early modern philosophy more accurately and to provide a path into early modern philosophy for students who are less interested in metaphysics and epistemology. (This became much clearer to me during the “Intensive Seminar on Teaching New Narratives” this summer.) For instance, there are many excellent early modern texts on the philosophy of education and on political philosophy that do not usually get taught. Several early modern women (and men!) wrote important and highly philosophical pieces about women’s rights or about the need for radical reforms in education. I teach Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in my “Introduction to Eighteenth Century Philosophy” course, for instance, and some students who are otherwise extremely quiet participate enthusiastically in those discussions. Hence, there is something to be said for adopting a course narrative that allows for the inclusion of texts on education or political philosophy (or, in fact, texts on other non-standard topics). Alternatively, it might even make sense to jettison overarching narratives altogether and instead organize the course around a set of central questions. Some of those questions could be from political philosophy or philosophy of education, others from metaphysics and epistemology. One could organize the class in such a way that each of the questions is addressed by some non-canonical and some canonical texts.
A perhaps more serious challenge is the lack of textbooks or anthologies that are sufficiently diverse. Anthologies of early modern philosophy usually include only white male authors; at most, they contain a tiny excerpt from a female philosopher who raises an objection to one of the canonical figures. Disappointingly, the situation is only marginally better with respect to anthologies for philosophy of religion classes and for classes on the meaning of life. Of course one can simply supplement such textbooks with readings by women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups. Yet, I do not want to give my students the impression that these latter authors are only of secondary importance and do not deserve to be anthologized. As a result, I stopped using textbooks for these courses altogether and instead make all readings available electronically. That means, unfortunately, that students usually do not have hard copies of the assigned readings that they can consult in class. I really hope that textbook editors and publishers will address this problem very soon. For early modern philosophy, a solution is luckily in the works: Marcy Lascano and Lisa Shapiro are editing a new anthology that will feature a large number of non-canonical texts, in addition to canonical ones.
One final challenge is that some students may exhibit biases against non-canonical authors; they may assume that these authors do not deserve to be taken as seriously as the canonical ones. This is particularly common, in my limited experience, with more advanced students who did not encounter these authors in their previous classes. Admittedly, the way I introduce these figures may contribute to the problem. For instance, I once mentioned, when introducing Cavendish, that she received very little formal education and was largely self-taught. I took that to be relevant information because it sheds light on the social realities of women—even very privileged women—in that period. During the discussion, one student later called Cavendish’s metaphysics “wonderfully naïve” and said it was refreshing to read an author who was entirely unaware of all of the objections that could be raised against their views. More generally, some students seem less willing to give non-canonical figures the benefit of the doubt, or read them charitably. They are, for instance, less inclined to go along with counter-intuitive metaphysical claims in these non-canonical texts than in canonical ones.
What this shows, I think, is in part that it is important to have diverse syllabi in intro-level classes, in order to try to counteract the formation of stereotypes about who the serious philosophers are. It also seems to show that we need to be very deliberate about how we teach non-canonical texts. With Cavendish, for instance, I found that it helps to carefully bring out the motivations and context for her central metaphysical claims: she wants to answer a question that mechanistic philosophy has enormous trouble answering, namely the question of how matter, without substantial forms, can organize itself into complex and relatively stable organisms. Once students see the seriousness of this problem and explore some of the counter-intuitive canonical solutions, they are typically more willing to go along with Cavendish’s claim that matter must possess self-motion and knowledge.
What general advice do you have for other philosophers interested in diversifying their syllabi?
Diversifying a syllabus does not have to be a daunting task. One can start small, and it’s really not that hard. A wealth of extremely helpful resources is available on the web. For instance, the APA website has a huge collection of sample syllabi; to find readings, one can also consult the Diversity Reading List or, for female early modern philosophers, Project Vox.
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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: Portrait of Elisabeth of Bohemia by Gerard van Honthorst, Wikimedia Commons
