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    Philosophy, its Color Line, and its Culture of Justification

    Over at Times Higher Education, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman has written an important piece calling the discipline on the carpet for its overall failure to critically engage its own whiteness.*

    There is a lot of remarkable stuff in the piece, which is organized around the paired questions of "who 'gets to do' philosophy?" and "who 'gets done' in philosophy?." It should be read in its entirety. As a teaser, however, let me just reproduce the following paragraph, which I'll discuss a bit below:  

    In a 2012 blog posting titled “What could leave philosophy?”, Brian Weatherson, professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, argues that “[f]or a few areas [of philosophy], it is easy to imagine them being in other departments, because they already overlap so substantially with work done in other departments”. Thus, instead of seeing overlap as an opportunity to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, Weatherson sees overlap as an opportunity to police, enforce and constrict the boundary around philosophy. This narrow-mindedness is an example of what Kristie Dotson, assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, has called philosophy’s “culture of justification” – not the legitimate demand that one justify the conclusion of one’s arguments, no, but the illegitimate demand that one justify that what one is doing counts as “philosophy”.

    If you haven't seen it, it's worth reading Weatherson's original post. As a friend pointed out on Facebook, it may not be clear that Weatherson has any intention of doing boundary-policing, rather than making a point about precisely the historical contingency of the boundaries of the discipline. But his title and his conclusion, that "ethics, epistemology and metaphysics" would be the hardest subfields to offload, can certainly be read as having the effect that Coleman is concerned about, marking a boundary between the indispensable core of the discipline and the parts it could stand to 'lose.'  

    And in the end, it is effects—even and perhaps especially unintended, unanticipated, or unrecognized effects—that are the chief stakes here.  The key to the paragraph is Coleman's invocation of Kristie Dotson's characterization of philosophy as structured by a 'culture of justificaiton.' This forms the context in which Weatherson's thought-experiment inevitably has to operate and produce its effects. Boundary-policing here occurs globally and at a systemic level. So that, within such a culture, one need hardly make any deliberate effort to find oneself engaged in boundary-policing activity. One need not mean or even want to police boundaries in order to effectively do so.

    Nor, and perhaps this is the even more important point, need one recognize oneself as drawing a boundary in order to be heard by another, on the opposite side of the boundary, as having done exactly that. If Weatherson's argument appears to Coleman as a case of boundary-policing, that needs to be taken seriously—even and especially by those for whom Coleman's reading is a surprising one. 

    *There are, of course, exceptions; but the more one looks, the more one sees that 'philosophy' as an academic discipline has a long, long way to go in terms of coming to grips with its systemic privileging of the products of a 'white,' 'European' intellect—which it most often fails to even recongize as marked by either of those qualifiers.  As John Drabinski clarifies in his own post on Coleman's article, part of what we need to get much better about recognizing and working to change is the way in which "philosophy in the U.S., England, and Europe is, at bottom, a racial project"—that is, one which continues to circulate almost exclusively "around white figures and traditions, thereby rendering questions of diversity a matter of who writes in philosophy, not who one reads or thinks about, or what histories are worth encountering, interrogating, and extending." The 'who writes' question is, of course, profoundly important—but as Drabinski points out, following Coleman, it does not come close to addressing the whole of the problem.

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    22 responses to “Philosophy, its Color Line, and its Culture of Justification”

    1. Matt Avatar
      Matt

      it may not be clear that Weatherson has any intention of doing boundary-policing, rather than making a point about precisely the historical contingency of the boundaries of the discipline. But his title and his conclusion, that “ethics, epistemology and metaphysics” would be the hardest subfields to offload, can certainly be read as having the effect that Coleman is concerned about, marking a boundary between the indispensable core of the discipline and the parts it could stand to ‘lose.’
      I’ve noted elsewhere that I thought this was not really an accurate reading of Weatherson, but given that he works in philosophy of language, logic, and decision theory (among others)- fields that all could plausibly end up “outside” philosophy, I really doubt that he was “policing boundaries”.

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    2. Jamie Avatar
      Jamie

      During my undergrad years, I explicitly broached this issue with the professor and TA – both “white” – of my intro logic course. Their response was, quite literally, to laugh and say nothing. Some years later at the same institution, a rather famous analyst took a five-minute aside out of his lecture on free will and determinism in order to ridicule his acupuncturist for being committed to what he interpreted as absurd and obviously false medical theories. The class of mostly “white” students laughed at his jokes, which I, as a “Chinese” immigrant, did not find to be funny at all.
      Such incidents eventually led to me to transition to other fields less hostile to social difference, even though I do not identify closely with my putative ethnic identity. I love philosophy, but I despise philosophical ethnocentrism.

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    3. Leigh M. Johnson Avatar
      Leigh M. Johnson

      Just curious, Matt, why you might think why you think Weatherson’s fields (philosophy of language, logic, decision theory) might “plausibly end up outside philosophy”? (Especially logic!) But even more so, I’m curious why you might think that practitioners in those fields are automatically excused from the charge of “policing the boundaries” of philosophy?
      Just ftr, mine are genuine (even friendly) questions.

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    4. Patrick Mayer Avatar
      Patrick Mayer

      I can think of an answer for Matt, though it might not be his answer. Weatherson claimed that areas which overlap with other academic disciplines are most likely to end up out of the discipline. Philosophy of Language overlaps with linguistics, logic overlaps with math and computer science, and decision theory overlaps with psychology and economics. So by Weatherson’s own standard they could plausibly go.
      As to why that suggests he isn’t policing the borders, I think it is safe to assume that Weatherson is not trying to police himself out of the discipline. He has a really nice job at a really nice school, and I imagine he has little interest in going back to grad school to get a PhD in an allied field.
      I think the reading offered of Weatherson shows an objectionable lack of charity as the reading seems to presume that Weatherson is using the fact of overlap as a cover for some other reason to kick topics out of the field. This both doesn’t match the post (which is actually about what unifies philosophy as a discipline, where Weatherson’s answer is a tentative ‘nothing’) and ignores some basic historical facts about science and philosophy. As I would guess everyone, right down to undergraduates, knows, more than a few scientific disciplines emerged out of philosophy. Physics is the most widely used example, but you can make a case for chemistry, psychology, economics, computer science and others. Philosophy has a history of losing parts of itself as problems philosophers were dealing with became amenable to the use of experiments, formal methods and data gathering of the kind that philosophers usually don’t do. So overlap with other areas is a perfectly good reason to suspect that some area of philosophy could be absorbed by another discipline. Coleman didn’t need to go searching for some nefarious reason for Weatherson to say what he said.

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    5. M Lister Avatar
      M Lister

      Hi Leigh- I’m glad they are friendly questions! (I usually try to assume that, but the reassurance is welcome.) I’d say that philosophy of language, logic, and decisions theory might plausibly end up “out philosophy” because already a large part of the work done in those fields is done “outside” of philosophy, and that’s especially true of formal logic. (Much less so of “philosophical logic” or “philosophy of logic”, I gather.) If you look at recent issues of journals like the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic or The Journal of Symbolic Logic (to take two still well-known in philosophy), you’ll see that they are dominated by mathematicians. At many universities (I’d guess most, but that would be a guess) to take more than fairly elementary logic, you have to take classes in the math (or computer science) departments. (That was certainly true where I went to school.) My impression (and it’s no more than that) is that mathematicians tend to think that most “serious” logic is done in math and computer science departments these days. I could easily see that trend continuing. Decision theory is also done just as much, probably more, by people working economics and psychology (and computer science). It would be easy for me to see those departments essentially dominating the field, if they don’t already, so that new people wanting to do decision theory went to one of those departments rather than philosophy. (I think that’s largely true for more advanced logic, though not universal.) Philosophy of language is less obvious, but if you look at the more formal aspects of it, it’s nearly identical to work done by people working on formal semantics in linguistics (or computer science) departments. I’ve known a couple of linguists who would want to push that in the opposite direction- saying that the people doing formal semantics (or more abstract psycho-linguistics) are “really philosophers”, and there have been some people whose training was in linguistics who ended up primarily working in philosophy departments, but I can easily imagine the shift.
      I don’t think that people working in these fields are “automatically excused from the charge of ‘policing the boundaries’ of philosophy”, but it seems less likely to me. They are doing work that is clearly being done in very similar ways at very high levels by people in other departments. If anything, these people seem likely to be expanding the boundaries of philosophy, for fear of being left out! But, that was meant to be an empirical speculation, not an a priori claim. I do think that if you go back and read the relevant posts by Weatherson, it’s really not at all a plausible reading that he was trying to police the boundaries of philosophy, rather than just being curious about how and why certain things (economics, psychology) had “left” philosophy in the past, and what might do so in the future.

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    6. M Lister Avatar
      M Lister

      (It’s probably obvious, but “M Lister” and “Matt” are the same people here- I’d just forgotten that typepad software sometimes signs me in w/ my google name if I don’t take an active step to stop it.)

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    7. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      I’d just like to reiterate what I said in the OP, namely that what matters about Weatherson’s post for Coleman’s purposes is not Weatherson’s intentions—or even what Weatherson might have seen as being ‘in his own interest’ on the terms of his own analysis—but the effects of his discussion. My point in doing so was to say that it is important to listen, despite the discomfort it might involve, when people say our words are having effects that we may not have intended for them to have.
      More generally, it would be helpful if we didn’t lose track of Coleman’s important points because we got caught up in concerns about whether his invocation of Weatherson was entirely fair.

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    8. John Drabinski Avatar
      John Drabinski

      I’d reiterate what Ed said just above. Perhaps Weatherson’s post is different than Coleman represented, or perhaps we could underscore how his inclusion-exclusion discussion goes safely (for Anglo-American philosophy) along the boundaries between science, mathematics, and philosophy, or perhaps we could see his post as a not-the-best-choice-of-an-example example of what we all know goes on in professional philosophy in the U.S. We all know that what “counts” as philosophy is both water cooler chat AND something that shapes the profession widely.
      It’s always worth saying, I think, that philosophy is the one humanities discipline that hasn’t even gone through a Eurocentrism stage – European philosophy is “not philosophy,” and that shows in hiring practices and publication habits. If France and Germany don’t get included, what are the prospects for African-American, Caribbean, etc. traditions? I think some worry and concern is warranted. Weatherson’s intentions and character notwithstanding.
      It’s also worth saying that worry about a lack of charity to Weatherson doesn’t seem to be matched in the comments thus far with a worry about the lack of charity toward subaltern traditions in philosophy in the U.S. and elsewhere. After all, the latter lack of charity is profession-wide, not limited to a single short article by one philosopher in England. In that sense, and with all due respect, I think some perspective is really needed. Let’s keep our eyes on the exclusion and lack of charity that draws on, reflects, and reproduces one of the ugliest features of our society: anti-black racism. What about THOSE questions Coleman and Kazarian raise? I hope they’re registering with those posting defenses of Weatherson (who, it should be noted, is under no penalty here and is being used as an anecdote in the service of a bigger point).

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    9. John Schwenkler Avatar
      John Schwenkler

      … European philosophy is “not philosophy,” and that shows in hiring practices and publication habits. If France and Germany don’t get included, what are the prospects for African-American, Caribbean, etc. traditions?
      I think there are lots of very good questions to be raised about exclusion in analytic philosophy, but as a blanket statement about philosophy in the US this is just not true. Even leaving aside the considerable engagement with figures like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in “analytic” US departments, there are many contemporary French and German (and Spanish, and Italian, …) philosophers, writing on all kinds of issues, whose work is taken very seriously at (again, even “analytic”) departments in the US. (Or are these authors not “European” in the relevant sense? In that case the claim at issue seems self-fulfilling: what it is to be a European philosopher is to be someone from Europe whom most Americans don’t read.) Maybe there’s not as much of this international engagement as there should be (that’s my view, anyway), but it’s certainly there, and seems to be gaining steam.

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    10. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Isn’t part of the problem that what counts as philosophy is a philosophical question?
      Graham Priest has a paper where he argues that this kind of recursive self-application is actually what is distinctive of philosophy as philosophy. You certainly don’t find it anywhere else. Other people are too busy working in their field to worry about what counts as that field. Philosophers worry about what makes things things. So we worry about what makes biology biology. But then it would be hypocritical to not worry about what makes philosophy philosophy. How is this possible without boundary-policing?
      The problems discussed above might be inevitable, though I agree with the point of the post. And I want to reiterate that the argument doesn’t rise or fall with the felicity or fairness of using Weatherson’s comments.

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    11. John Drabinski Avatar
      John Drabinski

      Jon, these are good questions. I’d make a few replies of my own, not sure if Ed and his post co-sign, but here they are…and I know that they both speak to and well-beyond your very focused comment, so please forgive the leeway.
      + I’m not sure how Priest concludes that, given how “what is art/literature/history?” is at the center of those disciplines. Mention Adam Hochschild to an historian and you’ll get the response your mid-century art historian had about Warhol or that your 1970s lit professor had about Toni Cade Bambara…you learn what they think the discipline means. And it’s probably really, really important to remember that this policing gets heightened and tense when people of color, women, lbgtq writers all start staking claims to doing history, art, and literature. We philosophers are maybe taking baby steps into that moment right now (I hope we are). It’s helpful, if you ask me, to look at how this went down in other disciplines. Philosophy isn’t special, except that we’re way way behind the times. It used to be a radical suggestion that African-American’s wrote serious literature. Nowadays, no serious literature department goes forward without African-American lit specialists.
      + In this moment, we have to ask a question of ourselves: why are we so concerned with being boundary police? What is lost by, say, reading Martin Delany as a philosopher, and what is gained by excluding him? In the mirror, what do we make of the white faces getting all red and pink over the idea of letting some brown people in the canon-club? I’m serious. We are of the world and live in it, so asking such stuff honestly, however hard it might be, is absolutely necessary. Suddenly the policing of borders seems less like self-respecting philosophers doing hard work and more like an academic version of the cops in suburban Detroit patrolling Eight Mile Rd.
      + For me, the answer to the question of what is philosophy is revealing of a person’s – or here, a community’s (the profession’s) – cultural politics. Those politics are racialized in that moment (we come from the world, so come to our profession damaged by racial prejudice), so we philosophers are confronted with ourselves: who do we want to be and how do we want to be those people? I argue for and insist upon radical plurality and openness, not only as a political principle (though that is more than plenty), but also because I know that very, very few philosophers actually read subaltern traditions, yet have very, very strong views on whether or not that stuff is philosophy. I say just say no to that hubris. More philosophy, more better. Let’s not look like and be the crackers we appear to be!

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    12. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      Jon, I think you’ve put your finger on something really important with this, but (you knew there was a but, right?) having said that, I think I have to disagree.
      I would say, rather, that ‘what counts as philosophy’ is precisely not a philosophical question per se, but rather a political and an institutional question that frequently gets confused with a philosophical question in contexts where something like ‘boundary-policing’ has significant ramifications. I haven’t done the work to track this down, but I would be willing to bet that if you went through the history of philosophy and looked at instances where the question or one of its cognates (and I would not necessarily include ‘what is philosophy?’ among those, as I’ll explain in a moment) is assigned significant importance, you would tend to find periods where philosophy according to a certain construction has been significantly institutionalized and wants, effectively, to defend it’s ‘turf.’ Of course, those sorts of moments will also produce contesting claims, but those only really make sense in the context of a system of more or less authoritative exclusions. And I think this gets us back to Coleman pretty quickly.
      Having said that, let me make a couple of other points. First, I haven’t read Priest’s piece, but I find the idea that philosophy is somehow alone in asking these kinds of questions very surprising. It seems like they’re a pretty commonplace feature of institutionalized disciplinary arrangements. I suspect you can find fights about this stuff in a great many academic departments at almost any university you like. I would also say that analogous debates are pretty common in and around science, especially with respect to its political ramifications, and in art.
      This leads to a second point, this time about the difference between ‘what is philosophy?’ questions and ‘what counts as philosophy?’ questions. The latter, it seems to me, are susceptible to a philosophical as opposed to an institutional answer. As an example, I’d simply point to Deleuze and Guattari’s by now well known definition of philosophy as “the creation of concepts.” It’s not difficult, even without being acquainted with the nuances of their discussion, to see how that formulation neatly disconnects the activity of ‘philosophy’ from any restricted institutional ‘counting’ procedure whatsoever. So I think there’s definitely a way of talking about ‘what’ philosophy is, or even to think seriously about ‘how’ we can do philosophy that doesn’t inevitably devolve into boundary policing. And I think it’s very important to recognize that difference.

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    13. John Drabinski Avatar
      John Drabinski

      (forgive my errors…typed on phone)

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    14. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      This isn’t a substantive disagreement, because I’m not sure that your substantive claims rise or fall with Priest being wrong.
      This being said, the Dantoesque (I’m not sure it’s his) is just mistaken on this point. Artists qua artists don’t spend that much time asking what art is. People theorizing about art do. I teach philosophy of art every other year or so, and I think it is helpful to the artists, but it’s a philosophy class not an art class.
      During the heydey of theory a lot of philosophy got done in non-philosophy departments. I think this was pretty glorious and hope for it’s return. But the major figures used philosophers like Derrida and Foucault precisely because they took the questions they were addressing to be philosophical questions. And you aren’t going to see anything comparable to the heydey of theory in the natural sciences. They are too busy getting grants and whatnot.

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    15. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Yeah, I’m probably laboring under a misguided essentialism.
      There are all sorts of big questions about how normativity enters the scene too that I think are distinct from questions about essentialism. At the end of the day I probably want to understand philosophy as a essential human activity that is autonomous from the political in a way that might strike you as rebarbative (for that matter I’d want to understand people and their knowledge as autonomous from the political in a way that might strike you as rebarbative).
      I like the Deleuze/Guattari conception of philosophy, but I still can’t imagine having a concept unless it’s possible for the concept to be misapplied (some people associate this claim with Wittgenstein). But I do like how this gives a view of main point of philosophy distinct from being the world’s boundary policers.

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    16. Patrick Mayer Avatar
      Patrick Mayer

      I agree that the general issues of fairness raised in the short piece are more important than whether Weatherson is treated unfairly. I originally had things to say about the big issues, but it was late and I was not confident I would express myself well so I restricted my comment to what I thought was most obvious, that the claims made about Weatherson were unfair. And perhaps not everyone cares much about that, but perhaps he does. Perhaps all of us who don’t think the way to go about this is to denounce individuals engaged in blog speculation care about it. And as for whether “what matters about Weatherson’s post for Coleman’s purposes is not Weatherson’s intentions—or even what Weatherson might have seen as being ‘in his own interest’ on the terms of his own analysis—but the effects of his discussion,” I suppose I think that if Coleman didn’t think it mattered he wouldn’t have said “Thus, instead of seeing overlap as an opportunity to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, Weatherson sees overlap as an opportunity to police, enforce and constrict the boundary around philosophy.” Does this unfair claim about Weatherson invalidate all else that was said? Should it be focused on to the exclusion of all else? No. Does the importance of the issue raised mean that uncharitable and unfair claims ought to be ignored? No. We can both talk about the big issues and demand fair standards of interpretation be employed when talking about colleagues.
      So on to the bigger issues. Does claiming that everything but ethics, epistemology and metaphysics might be (though I don’t recall him saying should be) absorbed by other fields lead to a problem of racial injustice? I do not think so. Kazarian says it leads to the problem of “marking a boundary between the indispensable core of the discipline and the parts it could stand to ‘lose.’” I don’t see that this is a problem at all, and certainly not a problem for issues of race in the profession. There is no alternative to marking boundaries to the discipline, precisely because there are other disciplines and some things they do better than us. At a certain point a philosopher of mind needs to either start working in a cogsci lab or give up on some of his questions. The training philosophers receive is not, by itself, sufficient to make philosophical work about the nature of the neuronal underpinings of the mind at all worth doing. Now lots of philosophers of mind do take the time to get familiar with the actual science in this area, so I am not claiming philosophers shouldn’t talk about it. I just want to point out that for some issues it does not matter how many classic works in the philosophy of mind you have read, nor how competent you are with formal logic, you can’t do anything useful unless you augment your philosophy training with something else. (McGinn comes to mind here as someone who wanted to do almost entirely armchair work on issues [I am thinking of the disgust stuff, but probably also the work on the evolution of the hand that he was working on] that were squarely in the realm of an empirical discipline with which he seemed to have little familiarity. This kind of stuff should be excised from the profession)
      Border policing is only bad if there is a compelling reason to draw the borders differently. That is where the discussion should be. Drawing boundaries in general is fine. It is a way of taking account of the limitations of your own field and the training that goes along with it (it also takes account of the simple facts about how university catalogs are organized and university budgets determined). Weatherson leaves the core of philosophy in those fields which study normativity (ethics and epistemology, and yeah I just completely ignored Quine there) and raise questions about the nature of reality that have not yet been fruitfully addressed by empirical work (metaphysics). I endorse this conception of the core of the discipline, because it is the only one I know of on which it is obvious why philosophy ought to exist. It leaves a distinctive subject matter for us. If we were studying all and only questions dealt with by the natural sciences then I would think it was time to close up shop and move on to becoming the ‘history and theory’ people in various other disciplines.
      I do see that claiming the core of the field is these topics could exclude a lot of topics from philosophy that are of interest to people of color. So economic inequality, racial discrimination, implicit bias and other topics are all topics where empirical work is possible, where, I think, sociologists, psychologists and economists are just going to do a better job for the most part. Now ethicists will have something to say about all of these things (about why they are wrong and what responsibility we have for them for example), but I don’t think philosophy ought to ask about why or how these things happen. We aren’t qualified to answer those questions. Or at least I am not. I was not trained to do social science at the PhD level (I have a BA in political science). You need courses on stats, courses on experimental design, courses on qualitative research methods, etc. I think most philosophers are like me in being unqualified with respect to this kind of work. But the real point is that if questions about why and how racist institutions and economic inequalities are propagated get excluded from philosophy that won’t necessarily be bad for those issues. If a kind of expertise is required that philosophers do not have in virtue of their training as philosophers, then the issue will be dealt with better in another discipline. If the question wouldn’t be better handled by some other discipline then there is no reason to have philosophers stop studying it. The question we should be asking is not whether we should draw boundaries around what is or is not philosophy, but rather whether there is some reason to think we are going to make mistakes when answering this question, and whether if philosophy decides that some topic or question ought to be handled by other disciplines in academia those other disciplines will actually pick up the job or leave the question completely unaddressed.
      With regards to the first question, whether we will be prone to make mistakes, I think there is some reason for worry, but I won’t make the case the way Drabinski and Coleman did. Drabinski complained about the fact that black existentialist authors are excluded from the standard existentialism course. I don’t know enough about existentialism to engage with him on that question. But (and here I am going to use some terms that I know are infelicitous but also such that I think most people will know what I am talking about) it seems to me that Analytic Philosophy has the more significant problem with attracting non-white undergrads, grad students and professors. If I am right about the numbers (I was very unscientific about this, but looking at the Continentaly departments that came to mind and comparing them to top Leiter schools seemed to back up my guess about the numbers) then, if the explanation for low non-white participation is failure to engage with issues and authors that we should expect to be of interest to non-whites, then we should focus for the time being on Analytic Philosophy departments (there are also a lot more departments of this kind in the states). Even apart from my guesses about the numbers it seems that issues having to do with colonialism find a home in Continental Philosophy, as do issues that arise in the experience of minorities in the US. That doesn’t seem to me to be the case in Analytic Philosophy (at least not to the same extent). The example that comes to mind is that the work of John Rawls has been applied again and again to issues of economic injustice, but there has not been nearly as much work on applying Rawlsian liberalism to issues of racial injustice (this despite the fact that the US failed to meet Rawls’ standards when it came to institutional racism much more than it did when it came to treatment of the poor. The 50s and 60s were the golden age of decreasing inequality and increasing social mobility, and while it saw improvements in civil rights it still was mostly the era of Jim Crow). This is odd. I don’t know whether Rawls fails to provide a good framework in which to think about these issues, or whether this is a blindspot of the people who worked within the Rawlsian tradition (after all income inequality hurts white people with whom many people in philosophy would be more likely to identify). This is just one example, but it seems to me much worse that one intellectual tradition massively underfocuses on major issues of racial injustice than that another continues to be taught by reference to the generation that founded it, who were all white. Maybe I am wrong about this though.
      I also want to say that the choice of Frederick Douglass as an example of someone who has inappropriately been treated as not a philosopher is not a good one. Douglass’ primary work is an autobiography (more than one I have been told), and that is a peculiar place to look for philosophy. Also, I was under the impression that studying memoirs and biographies was an actual subfield in literature departments. While I do not doubt that arguments and theories can be found in an autobiography, I do doubt that philosophers are the ones to find them. A better example, to my mind, would have been WEB Dubois. It seems to me a theory about the harms of the color line is presented in the Souls of Black Folk. In fact it seems to me that Dubois is doing much the same kind of thing as Rousseau, who is squarely in the canon. It strikes me as far more objectionable that Dubois is not often read by philosophers than that Douglass isn’t (I only was exposed to Dubois through a history course). At the very least I would like an argument as to why Douglass should be taught in philosophy courses rather than just in American Studies, History, English, African-American studies, etc.
      On a side note, it is simply not true that philosophy doesn’t consider European philosophy to be philosophy. There was philosophy going on in Europe prior to Heidegger, and every competent philosophy department in the English speaking world studies those figures. Continental European authors provide 100% of the standard Ancient Philosophy course, the overwhelming majority of the standard Medieval philosophy course, and at least half of the standard Modern Philosophy course. The coverage of 1800s is dominated by authors from the continent (Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. From England only JS Mill rises to the level of fame of those authors.) I honestly don’t know what Drabinski is talking about with the claim that there is no Eurocentrism in philosophy. There is almost nothing but Eurocentrism.

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    17. Bharath Vallabha Avatar
      Bharath Vallabha

      There are two ways in which Weatherson’s post is frustrating. First, he considers many different subdisciplines, suggesting at least a preliminary attempt at exhaustiveness, and yet there is no mention of African-American philosophy, Asian philosophy, etc. Perhaps he doesn’t know much about these fields, but that is itself disturbing, that a tenured professor can say he doesn’t even have some cursory knowledge of these fields, and can ignore them when making generalizations about the nature of philosophy or philosophy departments.
      Second, the only “minority” perspective he mentions is feminist philosophy, but says this could be done in the Women’s Studies program. So perhaps African-American philosophy can be done in the African-American studies department. But this is wrong re both feminism and African-American philosophy. Maybe philosophy of physics can move entirely to the physics department, but this is because electrons don’t do philosophy. African-American philosophy is not only meta-reflection on the study of African-Americans, but also, and mainly, a continuation of the African-American traditions of understanding the world as a whole (including mind, language, ethics, etc.).
      As stated in the OP, this is not about any particular philosopher’s intentions or character. A main way minorities are marginalized in the philosophy profession is by being asked, implicitly: “are you speaking simply as a person or as a minority?” The idea is if one is speaking as a person, then they should just engage with philosophy as it is without worries of gender, race, culture, etc., because all of that contaminates philosophy with particularity. And if one is speaking as a minority, then one is interested in a sub-discipline of philosophy, which could even be studied in non-philosophy departments. I imagine any philosopher of physics or biology or linguistics who has been told they are not really doing philosophy, or pure philosophy, understands the pressure of this kind of a forced dichotomy. That pressure is even more magnified, and almost unbearable, when it is applied in relation to concepts as central to oneself as gender, race, etc.

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    18. Jeremy Avatar
      Jeremy

      “I also want to say that the choice of Frederick Douglass as an example of someone who has inappropriately been treated as not a philosopher is not a good one. Douglass’ primary work is an autobiography (more than one I have been told), and that is a peculiar place to look for philosophy. Also, I was under the impression that studying memoirs and biographies was an actual subfield in literature departments…. At the very least I would like an argument as to why Douglass should be taught in philosophy courses rather than just in American Studies, History, English, African-American studies, etc.”
      This is a remarkable argument. Perhaps I’m being obtuse here, but it seems as if you are both (1) admitting to not having read Douglass in any depth, and yet, nonetheless, (2) denying that he may be appropriately treated as a philosopher. I hope that you were being ironic in disclaiming knowledge about Douglass’s autobiographies, that you have actually read some of Douglass, and that you’re basing your judgment of him as a philosopher on this reading. And I hope that you’re not shifting the burden onto others to explain to you why Douglass should be taught in philosophy courses, when you might just as easily have looked up the SEP entry yourself.

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    19. Daniel Brunson Avatar
      Daniel Brunson

      Even if it were true that Africana philosophy could be done solely in African-American Studies departments, that supposes that any given university has such a department, and likewise for Gender Studies.
      That might work for top research universities, but wouldn’t work at most schools. How many places have a full Disability Studies department, for instance?

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    20. Michael Kremer Avatar
      Michael Kremer

      Reply to Patrick Mayer at #16:
      Surely not all philosophy consists of arguments and theories. And there are certainly autobiographical texts with a good deal of philosophical content. The first 10 books of Augustine’s Confessions come to mind. (The last three books contain plenty of philosophy as well; but they are not in any sense autobiographical so I do not include them here.)

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    21. Patrick Mayer Avatar
      Patrick Mayer

      To Jeremy: I was surprised upon reading your response to my comment, because I thought it meant that I had cast doubt on whether Frederick Douglass is a philosopher, which I had not meant to do. Luckily upon looking again at my comment I realized that I didn’t do that. I cast doubt on the usefulness of making him the example of an author unfairly excluded. His most well known writings, the ones that you can reasonably expect a lot of people to have read, are autobiographies, which are not the kind of literature typical of philosophy. I have read one of them. I have been told by people who know more than I do about his work that I read the least good one, the one he wrote as a very young man (at the time I did not know there were multiple autobiographies). Because of that I don’t feel confident saying he isn’t a philosopher. Which is why I didn’t. I said he wasn’t a good choice as an example. In the interests of fairness I will say that I can see why you would think that I was claiming Douglass wasn’t a philosopher. I said that philosophers would not do the best job of teaching an autobiography. But that is just the claim that he might be more fruitfully taught in other departments, not that he wasn’t a philosopher. And I expect the burden of making a case for something to be with the person making the case. In this situation that was Dr. Coleman, who wrote an article featuring Frederick Douglass’ work as part of his overall argument. The burden didn’t need to be shifted, it needed to be taken up. Or my suggestion could be taken up and we could use someone else as an example of philosophy making a mistake. I can’t imagine anyone who read Dubois needing an argument that it counted as social and political philosophy, so I suggested him. I will also thank you, I didn’t know that SEP had an entry for Douglass. I will read it. I think it is bizarre that there is one for Douglass but not Dubois (or perhaps I just think it is absurd there isn’t one for Dubois), but maybe I am just finding out my intuitions about what is obviously philosophical (not intuitions about what is philosophical, intuitions about what is obviously so) are not widely shared.
      To Daniel Brunson: I think that is a good point. I worry though that at any university that does not have an African Studies department that it will not also not offer the bare minimum coverage of standard philosophical texts that hopefully no one wants to be excluded from the undergraduate curriculum (my university is like that). In these cases I do not know what do to, besides admitting that somewhere the education our students receive will have to be lacking. If there are large schools that don’t offer African American studies either as a major or an interdisciplinary program, then the real problem is that absence and we can do turf wars after everyone who deserves it gets some turf. But to reiterate what I suppose I didn’t make clear, I am not actually recommending that Douglass not be treated as a philosopher. I do think that someone with a background in African American studies would do a better job teaching him though. At the very least you need to have a lot of history under your belt. It is great when philosophers do, but it is guaranteed that people in some other disciplines will.
      To Michael Kremer: Yeah philosophy consists of more than arguments and theories. And that is a good thing. I think teaching in philosophy should be focused on teaching how to argue and what the different theories and arguments are though. Maybe my ambitions are set too low. And yes autobiographies can have philosophical content. But they mostly don’t and they are certainly atypical ways of writing philosophy (they have that in common with dialogues, but I don’t mean to kick Plato out of the discipline either). And that makes Douglass not an immediately obvious candidate for doing philosophical work, which is all I meant to say.

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    22. Sam Clark Avatar
      Sam Clark

      “Douglass’ primary work is an autobiography (more than one I have been told), and that is a peculiar place to look for philosophy. Also, I was under the impression that studying memoirs and biographies was an actual subfield in literature departments. While I do not doubt that arguments and theories can be found in an autobiography, I do doubt that philosophers are the ones to find them.”
      This is self-advertising, but I can’t resist it: I’ve been arguing for a while now (e.g. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9329.2012.00541.x/abstract;jsessionid=3443732CA761126308DD98D62EF7B6E6.f02t03 and http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11158-012-9207-1) that autobiography can be an important and distinctive kind of ethical argument. And I’ve successfully used Douglass’s Narrative as a way into arguments about the value of freedom in teaching, too.

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