Which non-living philosopher do you identify with most? This question was posed to professional philosophers on the 2020 PhilPapers survey of philosophers (“For which nonliving philosophers X would you describe yourself or your work as X-ian, or the equivalent?”). Of the top sixty responses reported, four (6.7%) were women: Anscombe (23rd), Beauvoir (34th), Arendt (38th), and Wollstonecraft (48th). For those surprised by this, the 2020 survey was the second time PhilPapers ran this survey. In the 2009 results, they listed the top twenty responses, and zero of these were women. There were several philosophers of color in the responses to the 2020 survey, but they ranked 40th and beyond, and none were in the top twenty reported by the 2009 survey. (It is worth noting, though, that the surveys are limited to the English-speaking world.)
This is the canon of our profession. How can we expect students from underrepresented backgrounds to feel like they belong? Many of us know that the profession faces issues of underrepresentation, but to have the canon reified by professional philosophers so starkly is, nonetheless, unsettling.
Plenty of research has already documented how women and other marginalized groups are underrepresented at every stage of the philosophical pipeline, from undergraduate courses to journal publications. More recently, attention has turned to philosophical subfields, where the disparities are even more striking. Formal areas like logic and philosophy of science are particularly male-dominated. In the 2020 PhilPapers survey, just 1.8% of those specializing in the “Philosophy of Physical Science” and 4.9% in “Logic and Philosophy of Logic” identified as women, far below the already-low proportion of women faculty overall.
This imbalance isn’t accidental. Writing about her experiences as a philosopher of physics, Laura Ruetsche reflects on the perceived relationship between feminism and “formal” or “technical” fields in philosophy. She discusses the presumed incompatibility or, even more strongly, hostility between feminism and these technical fields. Though Ruetsche goes on to refute this incompatibility, it is not inconceivable that undergraduate women perceive it early in their philosophical educations. After all, consider the message being sent by the PhilPapers survey mentioned above. This message is also echoed in our syllabi: an informal review of twenty-five philosophy of science course reading lists by Morgan Thompson found that none included works by black philosophers, and few included works by female-identifying philosophers.
So, how do we respond? One strategy is to focus on recruitment—getting more underrepresented students into philosophy. Another approach is to look inward—at the students already in our classrooms. Indeed, philosophers Melissa Jacquart, Rebecca Scott, Kevin Hermberg, and Stephen Bloch-Schulman advocate for shifting the focus from recruitment to inclusive pedagogy: promoting a growth mindset, sharing authority, increasing transparency, and promoting continuous self-reflection.
We wanted to apply this approach to teaching technical philosophy. We turned to feminist– and trauma-informed pedagogies to design interventions and explore whether we could reshape how students perceive formal philosophy and their own capabilities. We then performed these interventions in two introductory logic courses in very different institutional contexts.
We’re aware that some of these interventions may be difficult to implement depending on your institutional or career context. Indeed, at one institution, we were able to implement the interventions quite freely because one of us was the lead instructor. In the other institution, another one of our team was a TA for the course. We had support from the lead instructor, and so we were still able to implement some interventions, but we had less control over the course structure overall. We hope, though, to give you some ideas of what can be done and some evidence for the efficacy of these approaches.
One of our interventions was having frequent and low-stakes assessments. This assessment form leads to better student outcomes and is thought to foster safety and trust through clear expectations and timely feedback. More concretely, we had weekly problem sets, used software like Carnap.io so that students could get immediate feedback on simple problems, and dropped some of the lowest scores in various assignment categories.
Another of our interventions was to encourage agency in learning by running reflective exercises and allowing students to choose some of the topics they wanted to study. Normalizing mistakes through reflection and vulnerability fosters a sense of belonging, which underrepresented groups report feeling less of. Some of the reflections involved submitting answers to which problems they felt most (un)comfortable with or completing assignment “wrappers” that prompted them to reflect on what they’ve been doing well and what they could be doing better. Allowing students to choose topics to dive deeper into (e.g., fuzzy logic, modal logic, logic gates) or problems to answer in higher-stakes assessments promotes empowerment and helps dismantle barriers to their flourishing and sense of belonging.
To foster a sense of collaboration, we turned Friday course meetings into “Logic Labs” where students worked on course-related activities in groups. In discussion sections, we emphasized active learning and aimed to view the classroom holistically, as one big teaching community.
Our last intervention included spaces for underrepresented voices and non-classical traditions in logic. Logical pluralists and feminist logicians draw on feminist epistemologies to challenge dominant forms of knowledge and knowing. In a pedagogical context, discussing non-classical logics and other ways of defusing the idea that there is one “right” logic complements the elevation of women logicians, like Ruth Barcan Marcus. Both courses also ran activities exploring the relationship between logic and abstraction, inspired by Eugenia Cheng’s “The Art of Logic in an Illogical World.”
To evaluate the efficacy of these interventions, we measured student perceptions of logic along several dimensions both before and after the course. This was done using a one-group pretest-posttest design. Our survey instruments were inspired by the Mathematics Attitudes and Perceptions Survey and the Mathematics Self-Efficacy and Anxiety Questionnaire, which we adapted for our particular context.
Did the interventions work? We found that the interventions succeeded in making our courses more inclusive, particularly for women. But our results also highlighted the importance of being attuned to the ways social identity and context intersect and interact. In particular, we found that Asian students’ experiences do not track those of other underserved populations.
Aligning with current research, female students entered both logic courses with significantly lower perceptions of their aptitude/self-efficacy than male students. Women felt less comfortable approaching new logic problems, less confident asking questions, and less sure they could develop the skills necessary to succeed in the course. But by the end of each course, these significant differences disappeared. Thus, our interventions successfully ameliorated gender-based differences in perceptions of self-efficacy.
As mentioned, our results highlighted the importance and interaction of social identity and context. We found that Asian students’ perceptions of self-efficacy changed, but in the opposite direction from what we expected. Asian-identifying students came into the course with high degrees of self-efficacy, but by the end of the course, self-efficacy among Asian-identifying students was significantly lower than that among White/Caucasian students.
Lastly, we observed a few interesting changes along other dimensions. In one of the courses, perceptions of the objectivity of logic decreased among male students, students not belonging to an underserved population, and Asian-identifying students. However, in the other course, perceptions of the objectivity of logic decreased among female students. It is unclear what was behind these differences, and we feel this is worth further investigation.
By outlining the benefits of the types of interventions we implemented, we hope to empower readers to explore ways in which feminist and trauma-informed pedagogies might be used to reshape student perceptions of formal philosophy and their own capabilities. We want to emphasize that instructors need not start by completely overhauling a course; rather, they can make small, incremental changes. We also invite instructors of similar courses to try surveying their students with our survey questions.
For anyone interested, we invite you to read more about the details of our frameworks, our interventions, and our study here.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Francisco Calderón
Francisco Calderón is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he also completed a certificate in Science, Technology, and Society. Most of his work focuses on the philosophy and history of physics, specifically on the quantum field theories that make up the standard model of particle physics.
Thomas Colclough
Thomas Colclough is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Center for Knowledge, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He completed his PhD in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. He works in the philosophy of mathematics, and also on projects in educational development and STEM education.
Helen Meskhidze
Helen Meskhidze is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Black Hole Initiative. She completed her PhD in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her work focuses on foundations issues in philosophy of physics as well as epistemological issues in philosophy of astrophysics. She has also worked on several projects in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
This essay is a continuation of the McDonaldization of philosophy. Identity philosophy and current trends or attitudes are divisive and destructive of the philosophical enterprise. Philosophy should unify all mankind toward the solution of the most significant issues or concerns. Philosophy is not sociology although a philosophy of sociology is important. Concerns such as free will, God or ideal justice are the same for all men and women regardless of social divisions. Philosophy must not contribute to the bifurcation of humanity. What is current may be false and most modern intellectual trends fall into this category.