Several weeks ago, I finished teaching the course Philosophical Foundations of Feminism for the second time. I teach at the University of Rochester, a school that aims to blend the best of a research university and a liberal arts college for its undergraduates. While we are a private R1 with PhD programs in many areas including philosophy, we also have a relatively small and selective undergraduate class – only about 6,000 students. Philosophical Foundations of Feminism is an introductory course cross-listed with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, which I inherited from a recently-retired faculty member. The course is taken by students from a range of majors but not required for any major, has no prerequisites, and meets for 75 minutes twice a week for 16 weeks. I decided when I taught it for the first time that my aim was going to be to use it to try to diversify the philosophical community at the University of Rochester in two ways: by bringing in a broader set of women, non-binary, and otherwise underrepresented students, and by encouraging the students we already have to take more seriously the wonderful and important insights of feminist philosophy. I hoped that, by the end of the semester, students would see both that all of the more traditional core areas of philosophy have vitally useful tools to offer to feminism, and that none of the traditional areas of philosophy could be done well without taking seriously the insights of feminist scholars.
The course was divided into four sections – metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social/political philosophy – with each section structured as follows. First, we would begin the section focused entirely on the traditional area of philosophy, focusing on understanding what kinds of questions are asked in that area. Then, I would move into asking the students to brainstorm the kinds of questions that feminist philosophers working in that area might be interested in. Here, we’d work together to try to get a good idea of the range of questions that feminist metaphysicians (epistemologists, ethicists, etc.) might ask, and then we’d work as a group to try to imagine the range of answers that there might be to the questions that the students were most interested in. Then, for the bulk of the section, we’d turn to reading feminist work in that area of philosophy, usually by focusing on one or two problems and trying to help students to see a range of different ways of legitimately answering the same philosophical question. In metaphysics, we focused primarily on the metaphysics of gender (for instance, Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”, Haslanger’s “Gender and Race: (What) Are they? (What) Do we want them to be?”, Dembroff’s “Beyond Binary”); in epistemology we focused on epistemic injustice with special attention to race and sexual assault (for instance, Fricker’s “Hermenutical Injustice”, Yap’s “Credibility Excess and the Social Imaginary in Cases of Sexual Assault”, Crenshaw’s “Race, Gender, and Sexual Harassment”); in ethics we focused on the ethics of care and the ethics of abortion (for instance, Held’s “The Ethics of Care as a Moral Theory”, Little’s “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate”); and in social and political philosophy we focused on the gendered division of labor and on the possibility of internalized oppression (for instance, Gheaus’s “Gender and Distributive Justice”, Lieblow’s “Internalized Oppression and its Varied Moral Harms”). Finally, at the end of the section, students would do presentations in groups to teach their fellow students about an issue in that section’s topic area that we had not focused on in class. These topics could be drawn from any source they wanted – from the original brainstorming session, from interests they’d developed as the semester progressed, from a connection that they saw to a previous unit of the class, or from somewhere else entirely.
I think that I’ve been relatively successful in meeting the goals I set for the course. I begin all of my courses by asking my students to write a short paper setting their individual goals for the course, and I end all of my courses by asking my students to write a short paper reflecting on those goals – on whether they think that they met their original goals, and whether they would have set any other goals at the beginning of the class, knowing what they know now. In these final reflection pieces, I’ve seen students with no prior philosophy background say that philosophical concepts and tools like hermeneutical injustice or social constructivism about gender have become essential for the ways that they understand their own feminist commitments; I’ve seen philosophy majors say that they had previously seen their philosophical interests and feminist commitments as entirely separate, but now felt that they could use each in the service of the other; I’ve seen other philosophy majors say that they had modified their core philosophical commitments in light of the course, for instance moving from a previous commitment to deontology to incorporate elements of an ethics of care; I’ve seen students who had previously been intimidated or turned off by philosophy say that they now felt confident reading dense philosophical texts and grappling with hard philosophical problems.
The class also seems to have been effective for bringing more – and more diverse – students into the rest of the philosophy program. The course attracts many students who would not otherwise have been interested in taking a philosophy course, and I think that the course manages to give them a much more attractive and welcoming impression of philosophy both by giving them distinctively philosophical tools for solving the problems that they already care about, and by using teaching methods that encourage them to see themselves as having valuable and original philosophical contributions to make. (Through teaching the course I’ve also connected with faculty and advisors in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, which has given me a chance to change their perceptions of philosophy, hopefully also making them more likely to encourage their students to take the course in the first place.) I’ve only taught the course twice, but so far it seems to be making a difference: I’ve seen quite a few of the students from the first time I offered the class two years ago in subsequent philosophy classes and had some of the same students tell me they intend to declare a philosophy cluster (akin to a minor); and the enrollment for the course has grown from its historical level of 7-10, enrolling 27 students the second time I taught it.
There are, of course, things I’ve changed, and things that I plan to change in the future. The first time I offered the course, the very first reading I assigned was the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on metaphysics! Pro tip: despite its virtues, the Stanford Encyclopedia is not a good way to help people with no previous experience with philosophy to believe that they and their interests have a place in philosophy. The second time I offered the course, I switched to introducing each section by giving the students a set of philosophy games to play (The ship of Theseus; What is a sandwich?, If you and a peer splitting a check do your calculations differently, what should believe about how much you owe?). They’d discuss these problems in small groups, then discuss their proposed answers with the large group, and work together as a large group to develop an account of what metaphysics (ethics, epistemology, etc.) is based on the type and range of problems they had been given. They without a doubt found this method more interesting and engaging, but I think that it also helped even those with no background in philosophy to see that they had the ability to competently discuss and develop philosophical ideas. I think that this is generally good pedagogy, but there is a case to be made that it is also itself a form of feminist pedagogy. Given the way in which philosophy as a discipline prizes brilliance as a rare and innate feature of individuals, and tends to find it less often in women and people of color, helping a diverse set of students to recognize the capacity for careful and creative analytic thought in themselves and in each other before they ever read a word of professionally-written philosophy is quietly revolutionary.
I’m also still working to figure out how to structure the group presentations so that they both give students freedom to discuss the issues they care about most, and offer a set of guidelines structured enough to ensure that they’re doing genuinely philosophical work. This has been a hard balance to strike for me, but I’m optimistic about the changes I’m planning to make for the next time I offer the course. At the beginning of the semester, I ask the students to work together to develop a definition of feminist philosophy, in which I ask them to reflect individually on what feminism is, what philosophy is, and what is distinctive about the intersection of the two. In the future, in preparation for the first set of group presentations, I’d like to return to this discussion, asking them to think explicitly about how the issues covered in that section of the course might be approached from other disciplines like sociology, psychology, or economics. I’ll then ask them to bear this framework in mind in developing their presentations, foregrounding the philosophical elements of the issue, and noting when other disciplinary approaches might help us to make philosophical headway.
Ultimately, I’ve found this course to be a real delight to teach. It’s been wonderful to see students realize that philosophy is a really valuable tool for understanding who they are, what they care about, and how they should act in the world. And seeing these students grow as philosophers makes me excited for the future of the discipline.
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Rosa Terlazzo
Rosa Terlazzo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester. She works broadly in social and political philosophy, with a special research focus on adaptive preferences, children's interests, and non-ideal theory, and teaching focuses on structural injustice and non-ideal theory.
