The current climate of soul-searching about race and racism has led to a wave of reactions among faculty at many universities. Numerous departments of philosophy, anthropology, political science, women’s studies, and other disciplines have issued statements acknowledging their complicity in racism in the distant and recent past, as well as outlining steps they intend to take to begin to redress past wrongs.
Some of these anti-racist statements and initiatives seem to be more concrete and meaningful than others. There is a danger that a considerable number of them may just be a matter of mere posturing and virtue signaling, and may not lead to real structural change. They can seem a bit too much like the recent efforts on the part of many corporations to disavow their racist histories or retract their logos, which are driven more by the profit motive than a genuine attempt at reform or effecting structural change.
But one somewhat meaningful effort being undertaken by many departments — though one hopes that it was being pursued to some degree before this current crisis — is a reexamination of curricular offerings. In philosophy at least, there have been various initiatives of this kind for a number of years now, both on the part of individual departments and on the part of organizations like Minorities and Philosophy and the American Philosophical Association. This has involved introducing new course offerings that are outside the comfort zone of most philosophy departments, as well as injecting new material into existing courses to broaden the range of authors, traditions, topics, and questions covered in these courses.
Many of these efforts have resulted in innovative and creative approaches to teaching philosophy and have resulted in revisions to the standard pedagogical canon. But if these moves are to go beyond tokenism, efforts to diversify our syllabi need to broaden the scope of what philosophy is thought to be, at least in North America and the Anglophone world. One way to make sense of these curricular efforts is to divide them into three broad categories, in ascending order of their potential to reshape our discipline. Since course syllabi are often compared to restaurant menus, I will extend the analogy – perhaps beyond breaking point – in differentiating the respective approaches.
The first, and most common approach, can be labelled the “dessert menu” method. On this way of reforming course syllabi, one adds a unit or two, usually at the end of the course, introducing new topics or questions, particularly pertaining to race and gender. In a philosophy of science course, for example, one might include a unit on feminist philosophy of science and another on “scientific racism.” These topics are often tackled after one has covered the standard ones, such as the problem of induction, explanation, natural laws, and so on. To students, they may seem like afterthoughts. Since they occur at the end of the semester, there is less chance that they will be asked to write papers about them and they may not even be covered in the final exam — that is, if the instructor actually manages to get to them.
A more proactive approach consists in coming up with a “pairing menu,” whereby canonical texts or authors are juxtaposed with non-canonical ones, much as appropriate wines are matched with dishes at the finer dining establishments. On this model, one includes less celebrated authors and topics alongside the more famous ones. This approach is meant to suggest to students that there are different ways of doing philosophy, or that people of different genders, races, and cultural backgrounds can do philosophy. In the best-case scenario, the non-canonical text challenges the assumptions of the canonical one and provides a different approach to the issue.
An example would be to teach epistemology by comparing traditional approaches to the subject with newer work in feminist epistemology, ethno-epistemology, social epistemology, and other developing methods. Instead of concentrating solely on the time-worn positions (e.g. internalism vs. externalism), or focusing mainly on the usual controversies and problems (e.g. Gettier cases), this approach aims to put the contemporary analytic obsession with defining knowledge in context. By the end of the course, students may even come to regard the English verb ‘to know’ as a parochial product of a particular time and culture rather than as a stand-in for a universal concept.
But a more radical approach to course revision, which I’ll call the “vegan menu,” replaces the standard fare with a whole different set of ingredients. This method uses course revision as an opportunity to subvert the customary set of topics and questions. On this way of doing things, one replaces the usual menu entirely or in large part and rethinks the conventional way of addressing the topic.
Take philosophy of language. In a standard course, one starts with the distinction between sense and reference, examines the case of proper names, definite descriptions, and natural kind terms, and reads canonical texts by Frege, Russell, Strawson, Kripke, and others. At the end, if one has room for dessert, one might include a unit on slurs or hate speech, perhaps after a brief examination of semantics and pragmatics.
Adopting a vegan menu involves reconsidering this whole approach. The course might begin by investigating the difference between different types of language, such as harmful, hateful, offensive, oppressive, marginalizing, and subordinating speech. There is no shortage of contemporary work to draw on for this purpose: Dotson, Maitra, Saul, Langton, Haslanger, and others. This would lead to a consideration of the semantic-pragmatic distinction, which would then give way to an investigation of semantics and linguistic meaning, perhaps leading to an examination of the difference between sense and reference (or not—after all, many philosophers don’t think it’s a valid distinction).
I can anticipate significant resistance to going vegan so I’ll consider a couple of objections. The first would lament the loss of the canon, especially since veganism would lead to giving up what every educated philosopher allegedly needs to know. At the undergraduate level, this background is deemed necessary for being admitted to graduate school, and at the graduate level, it’s thought to be a requirement for securing an academic job.
The problem with this objection is that we often pride ourselves on saying that philosophy is not in the business of transmitting a set of theses or claims, but rather introducing a way of thinking, a mode of reasoning, a way of approaching problems. If that’s so, it can’t be the case that there is a standard collection of texts or topics that everyone must be “exposed” to. Moreover, most of us realize, at least when we reflect on it, that there is no universally or even widely accepted body of mandatory knowledge in philosophy. Years ago, while serving on a faculty-wide curriculum committee, my colleagues from other departments were incredulous to hear that there was no standard syllabus for an introduction to philosophy course, as there were for introductory courses in, say, chemistry and statistics. I had to download a dozen or so different syllabi from highly-ranked universities to show members of the committee that they were as different as can be. By contrast, introductions to chemistry at these same universities all covered more or less the same topics; about half of them even used the same textbook.
Another objection would have it that the vegan approach would prevent students from understanding how the discipline and its various branches have developed, and would conceal the ways in which philosophers have reacted and responded to one another. There are various problems with this objection. The first is that our standard textbook presentation of many branches of philosophy are revisionist or “Whiggish” histories that obscure the way in which the discipline actually developed. The second is that some of these presentations are ahistorical, presenting historical texts alongside contemporary articles, as though there was no question as to whether they were even engaged in the same project. A third problem with the objection is that there are often hidden influences in the history of philosophy that are effectively concealed by the usual menus. Finally, there are always alternative ways of retelling the history and no single way in which a discipline and its branches have developed.
A course is not just a syllabus, much less a reading list. The content of the course also depends on the way the topics are addressed, the nature of class discussions, the type of assignments, and many other things besides. Still, one can tell a great deal about a course by looking at its list of texts and authors, and revising it can have far-reaching effects on the way the course is taught, and eventually on the shape of the discipline as a whole. In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess that I’ve never gone vegan. At best, I’ve adopted a dessert menu in some courses and a pairing menu in others. But it seems like a good time to reconsider my diet.
Acknowledgment: For inspiration and very informative discussions, I’m grateful to members of the Diversity Committee of the Philosophy Department at York University, especially Alice MacLachlan and Shyam Ranganathan.
Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center, where he has recently moved from York University in Toronto. He works primarily on philosophy of science, especially cognitive and social science. He is the author of Natural Categories and Human Kinds (Cambridge 2013) and is working on a book titled Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences.
