Tag: canon

How is the Western philosophical canon sexist?*

My daughter Hannah clearly begins to realise that she is a female person. Half a year ago she turned two, and by now she has been pointing out that certain people are men and women for quite a while. At the moment she is using these concepts quite playfully: so while she might at one time say that she is a “girl” (certainly not a baby!), at other times she’ll also claim that she is a “good boy”. I don’t know what goes into the mastery of these concepts, but a fresh look at some canonical philosophers like Aristotle, Albert the Great and Hegel made me worry. So far, I mostly tended to think of condescending remarks about women as inconsistencies or aberrations that might be ‘typical of the time or context’. But what if they are not mere inconsistencies? What if they are part and parcel of their philosophical theories?

As is well known, Aristotle conceived of women as defective males. Calling something defective, has normative and teleological implications. Accordingly, the generation of women is not seen as the best or intended outcome. In other words, it seems that if natural processes always were to run perfectly, there wouldn’t be any women. This idea plays out in number of ways, but the upshot is that women count as performing less well in everything that matters in our lives. Moreover, these defects are related to metaphysical notions. Women are seen as connected to the material, while only men are truly capable to indulge in the life of the mind. If you know a little bit about Western philosophy, you’ll probably know that the mind or intellect is pervasively construed as superior to the material. Now if your theory also tells you that women are more bound to the material (and to things related to matter, such as emotion etc) than the intellectual, your theory implies that women are inferior to men. In this context, the idea of women as defective males might sound straightforward. But is sexism restricted to such contexts? I doubt it. As Christia Mercer puts it in an intriguing article: “It is almost impossible to exaggerate the influence these ancient ideas had on the history of Western thought.”

Not surprisingly, then, there was and is a lively debate among feminist historians of philosophy as to whether the Aristotelian notions of matter and form are inherently related to the notions of female and male respectively.  Thus, the question is whether the concepts of matter and form depend on the concepts of being female and male. If yes, Aristotelian hylomorphism would be inherently or intrinsically sexist. And what if not? Would Aristotle’s philosophy be absolved? – While this question seems important, I think it is too strongly put and might distract us from the issue at hand. The notion of an inherent relation strikes me as a red herring. As I see it, the relation between materiality and being female cannot be shown to be an inherent one, unless you have a very special metaphysical theory. But that doesn’t mean that the concepts are not intimately related in the actual historical theories. In other words, Aristotelian metaphysics is still sexist through and through, even if matter is not identified as inherently female.

As I said in the beginning, it might be tempting to just push the sexism aside as an inconsistent aberration. Corrected by contemporary insights, you might say that Aristotelian philosophy is great as long as you ignore some factual errors about women. Yet, I doubt we can separate the sexism that easily from Aristotelianism or other philosophies. I began to realise this when considering Albert the Great’s defense of the Aristotelian view of women. Albert the Great and other Aristotelian thinkers clearly defend the idea of women as defective males. What is striking is that they continue to maintain the idea even in the light of fairly obvious objections. One such objection is this: If women are defective males, then every women born is to be seen as going against the perfection of natural processes. If this is correct, then why are there so many women in the first place? As Evelina Miteva pointed out in a recent paper (at the IMC 2019), Albert explains the abundance of women by claiming that the generation of nobler and more complex beings (= men) requires the concurrence of many external conditions. In other words, the more perfect the intended product, the more can go wrong in the production. And since natural processes are often obstructed by a lack of required conditions, we can explain that so many women are born, even if their generation goes against natural design. Put simply, the reason that there are so many women is that so many things go wrong. If this is correct, then one might say that Albert is adamant to maintain the sexist ideas in Aristotle’s philosophy and show why they are consistent. Put more drastically, Aristotelianism can be defended by rendering women as subhuman.

While Albert the Great’s defence of Aristotelianism is clearly sexist, not everyone who endorses Aristotle can be justly taken as explicitly endorsing sexist beliefs. But sexism has not to be explicitly endorsed in order to gain ground. This is what makes sexism and other ideologies structural. Given the prominence of Aristotle, the sexist ideology might be sufficiently served already by not renouncing the doctrine of the defective male. The point is this: A canonical doctrine retains its sexist impact as long as the sexist elements are not explicitly excluded. Arguably, this kind of implicit sexism might be said to be even more pervasive. Basically, it resides in the conjunction of two claims: (1) that the intellect is more dignified than the material and (2) that women are more tied to the material (or emotional etc.) than to the intellectual realm. I honestly wonder when these claims have been explicitly challenged or renounced for the first time.

If it is true that these claims largely went unchallenged, then much of the history of Western philosophy coincides with a history of sexism. Arguably, this does not mean that all Western philosophers are sexists. Firstly, the positions of the philosophers I alluded to (and others) can be said to be much more subtle, and not reducible to the claims I ascribed to them. Secondly, some philosophers, when pressed, might expressly have rejected or do reject sexist beliefs. What can we say in the light of these facts? The point is perhaps not so much that all these philosophers endorse sexist beliefs. The point is rather that they continue to endorse ideas that come out of sexist convictions. As Crispin Sartwell recently claimed, the history of Western philosophy might even be seen as justifying white supremacy. While I am quite hesitant about a number of Sartwell’s historical claims, I still think his piece suggests an important lesson.** If one accepts the general line of argument in his piece, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the philosophers in question are all white supremacists. It just means that they build on ideas that might have served and can continue to serve as a pertinent justification. But even if they aren’t supremacists, this doesn’t mean that the justifying function of their ideas can be cast aside as a mere inconsistency (at least not without scrutiny).

Analogously, one might argue that not all Western philosophers are sexist. But this doesn’t mean that our canon is off the hook by declaring that the sexist parts can simply be cancelled out. Certain ideas continue to justify sexist assumptions, even if no one expressly were to endorse sexist ideas. Once you notice how authors such as Albert twist and turn the ideas to justify the sexism of Aristotle, you can’t unsee the connections that hold these ideas together. If we don’t expose and disown these connections, we continue to carry these assumptions along as canonical. Saying that they are merely inconsistent outliers (that can be ignored while the rest of the theory might be retained) just seems to ingrain them more deeply. – Why? – Because then the justifying connections between sexist and other claims remain unchallenged and continue to pervade our canon.

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* Earlier, the post was called “Is the Western philosophical canon sexist?” Désirée Weber convinced me to change the title to its current form.

** Addendum: Speaking as a historian of philosophy, I find Sartwell’s piece wanting. Why do I find it interesting? I think it makes (but partly also exemplifies) crucial points about the use and abuse of ideas, and more generally I’m wondering whether there are limits to what we can do with an idea. — Currently, much of the so-called Enlightenment ideas are used on a newly populated battlefield: On the one hand, there are whig ‘historians’ like S. Pinker who argue that the Enlightenment is all about progress. On the other hand, there is someone like Sartwell making the contrary claim. – Professional historians like to discard both appropriations, for good reasons. But the appropriations won’t go away. On the contrary, they are very powerful.  –– Moreover, I also think we should be careful when assessing a piece of “public philosophy” by means of regular academic standards. Sartwell explicitly acknowledges the limits and polemical nature of his piece.

 

Diversifying scholarship. Or how the paper model kills history

Once upon a time a BA student handed in a proposal for a paper on Hume’s account of substance. The student proposed to show that Hume’s account was wrong, and that Aristotle’s account was superior to Hume’s. If memory serves, I talked the student out of this idea and suggested that he build his paper around an analysis of a brief passage in Hume’s Treatise. – The proposal was problematic for several reasons. But what I want to write about is not the student or his proposal. Rather I want to zoom in on our way of approaching historical texts (in philosophy). The anecdote about the proposal can help to show what the problem is. As I see it, the standard journal article has severe repercussions on the way we teach and practise scholarship in the history of philosophy. It narrows our way of reading texts and counters attempts at diversification of the canon. If we want to overcome these repercussions, it will help to reinstate other forms of writing, especially the form of the commentary.

So what’s wrong with journal articles? Let me begin by saying that there is nothing wrong with articles themselves. The problem is that articles are the decisive and almost only form of disseminating scholarship. The typical structure of a paper is governed by two elements: the claim, and arguments for that claim. So a historian typically articulates a claim about a text (or more often about claims in the secondary literature about a text) and provides arguments for embracing that claim. This way we produce a lot of fine scholarship and discussion. But if we make it the leading format, a number of things fall through the cracks.

An immediate consequence is that that the historical text has the status of evidence for the claim. So the focus is not on the historical material but the claim of the historian. If we teach students to write papers of this sort, we teach them to focus on their claims rather than on the material. You can see this in the student’s approach to Hume: the point was to evaluate Hume’s account. Rather than figuring out what was going on in Hume’s text and what it might be responding to, the focus is on making a claim about what is the supposed doctrine. The latter approach immediately abstracts away from the text and thus from the material of discussion. What’s wrong with that? Of course, such an abstract approach is fine if you’re already immersed in an on-going discussion or perhaps even a tradition of discussions about the text. In that case you’re mainly engaging with the secondary literature. But this abstract approach does not work for beginners. Why? Arguably, the text itself sets constraints that have to observed if the discussion is to make sense. What are these constraints? I’m not saying they are fixed once and for all. Quite the contrary! But they have to be established in relation to the text. So before you can say anything about substance in Hume, you have to see where and how the term is used and whether it makes sense to evaluate it in relation to Aristotle. (My hunch is that, in Treatise 1.1.6.1-2, Hume rejects the Aristotelian idea of substance altogether; thus saying that Aristotle’s notion is superior is like saying that apples are superior to bananas). The upshot is: before you can digest the secondary literature, you have to understand how the textual constraints are established that guide the discussions in the secondary literature.

What we might forget, then, if we teach on the basis of secondary literature, is how these constraints were established in the long tradition of textual scholarship. When we open an edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, we see the text through the lens of thick layers of scholarship. When we say that certain passages are “dark”, “difficult” or “important”, we don’t just speak our mind. Rather we echo many generations of diligent scholarship. We might hear that a certain passage is tricky before we even open the book. But rather than having students parrot that Kant writes “difficult prose”, we should teach them to find their way through that prose. That requires engagement with the text: line by line, word by word, translation by mistranslation. Let’s call this mode of reading linear reading as opposed to abstract reading. It is one thing to say what “synthetic apperception” is. It’s quite another thing to figure out how Kant moves from one sentence to the next. The close and often despair-inducing attention to the details of the text are necessary for establishing an interpretation. Of course, it is fine to resort to guidance, but we have to see the often tenuous connection between the text and the interpretation, let a lone the claim about a text. In other words, we have to see how abstract reading emerges from linear reading.

My point is not that we shouldn’t read (or teach what’s in the) secondary literature. My point is that secondary literature or abstract reading is based on a linear engagement with the text that is obscured by the paper model. The paper model suggests that you read a bit and then make a fairly abstract claim (about the text or, more often, about an interpretation of the text). But the paper model obscures hundreds of years or at least decennia of linear reading. What students have to learn (and what perhaps even we, as teachers, need to remind ourselves of) is how one sentence leads to the next. Only then does the abstract reading presented in the secondary literature become visible for what it is: as an outcome of a particular linear reading.

But how can we teach linear reading? My suggestion is quite simple: Rather than essay writing, students in the history of philosophy should begin by learning to write commentaries to texts. As I argued earlier, there is a fair amount of philosophical genres beyond the paper model. At least part of our education should consist in being confronted with a piece of text (no more than half a page) and learning to comment on that piece, perhaps translating it first, going through it line by line, pointing out claims as well as obscurities and raising questions that point to desirable explanations. This way, students will learn to approach the texts independently. While it might be easy to parrot that “Hegel is difficult to read”, it takes courage to say that a concrete piece of text is difficult to understand. In the latter case, the remark is not a judgment but the starting point of an analysis that might allow for a first tentative explanation (e.g. of why the difficulty arises).

Ultimately, my hope is that this approach, i.e. the linear commentary to concrete pieces of text, will lead (back) to a diversification of scholarship. Of course, it’s nice to read, for instance, the next paper on Hume claiming that he is an idealist or whatever. But it would help if that scholarship would (again) be complemented by commentaries to the texts. Nota bene: such scholarship is available even today. But we don’t teach it very much.

Apart from learning how to read linearly and closely, such training is the precondition of what is often called the diversification of the canon. If we really want to expand the boundaries of the canon, the paper model will restrain us (too much) in what we find acceptable. Before we even open a page of Kant, our lens is shaped through layers of linear reading. But when we open the books of authors that are still fairly new to us, we have hardly any traditions of reading to fall back on. If we start writing the typical papers in advance of establishing constraints through careful linear reading, we are prone to just carry over the claims and habits familiar from familiar scholarship. I’m not saying that this is bound to happen, but diligent textual commentaries would provide a firmer grasp of the texts on their own terms. In this sense, diversification of the canon requires diversification of scholarship.

Against history of philosophy: shunning vs ignoring history in the analytic traditions

Does history matter to philosophy? Some time ago I claimed that, since certain facts about concepts are historical, all philosophy involves history to some degree (see here and here). But this kind of view has been and is attacked by many. The relation to history is a kind of philosophical Gretchenfrage. If you think that philosophy is a historical endeavour, you’ll be counted among the so-called continental philosophers. If you think that philosophy can be done independently of (its) history, you’ll be counted among the analytic philosophers. Today, I’ll focus on the latter, that is, on analytic philosophy. What is rarely noted is that the reasons against history are rather different and to some extent even contradictory. Roughly put, some think that history is irrelevant, while others think that it is so influential that it should be shunned. In keeping with this distinction, I would like to argue that the former group tends to ignore history, while the latter group tends to shun history. I believe that ignoring history is a relatively recent trend, while shunning history is foundational for what we call analytic philosophy. But how do these trends relate? Let’s begin with the current ignorance.

A few years ago, Mogens Laerke told me that he once encountered a philosopher who claimed that it wasn’t really worth going back any further in history than “to the early Ted Sider”. Indeed, it is quite common among current analytic philosophers to claim that history of philosophy is wholly irrelevant for doing philosophy. Some educational exposure might count as good for preventing us from reinventing the wheel or finding the odd interesting argument, but on the whole the real philosophical action takes place today. Various reasons are given for this attitude. Some claim that philosophy aims at finding the truth and that truth is non-historical. Others claim that you don’t need any historical understanding to do, say, biology or mathematics, and that, since philosophy is a similar endeavour, it‘s equally exempt from its history. I’ll look at these arguments some other day. But they have to rely on the separability of historical factors from what is called philosophy. As a result of this, this position denies any substantial impact of history on philosophy. Whatever the merit of this denial, it has enormous political consequences. While the reasons given are often dressed as a-political, they have serious repercussions on the shape of philosophy in academic institutions. In Germany, for instance, you’ll hardly find a department that has a unit or chair devoted to history of philosophy. Given the success of analytic practitioners through journal capture etc., history is a marginalised and merely instrumental part of philosophy.

Yet, despite the supposed irrelevance of history, many analytic philosophers do see themselves as continuous with a tradition that is taken to begin with Frege or Russell. To portray contemporary philosophical work as relevant, it is apparently not enough to trust in the truth-conduciveness of the current philosophical tools on display. Justifying current endeavours has to rely on some bits and bobs of history. For some colleagues, grant agencies and students it’s not sufficient to point to the early Ted Sider to highlight the relevance of a project. While pointing to early analytic philosophy is certainly not enough, at least some continuity in terminology, arguments and claims is required. But do early analytic philosophers share the current understanding of history? As I said in the beginning, I think that many early figures in that tradition endorse a rather different view. As late as 1947, Ryle writes in a review of Popper in Mind, the top journal of analytic philosophy:

“Nor is it news to philosophers that Nazi, Fascist and Communist doctrines are descendants of the Hegelian gospel. … Dr Popper is clearly right in saying that even if philosophers are at long last immunized, historians, sociologists, political propagandists and voters are still unconscious victims of this virus …”*

Let me single out two claims from this passage: (1) Hegelian philosophy shaped pervasive political ideologies. (2) Philosophy has become immune against such ideologies. The first claim endorses the idea that historical positions of the past are not only influential for adherent philosophers, but shape political ideologies. This is quite different from the assumption that history is irrelevant. But what about the second claim? The immunity claim seems to deny the influence of history. So on the face of it, the second claim seems to be similar to the idea that history is irrelevant. This would render the statements incongruent. But there is another reading: Only a certain kind of philosophy is immune from the philosophical past and the related ideologies. And this is non-Hegelian philosophy. The idea is, then, not that history is irrelevant, but, to the contrary, that history is quite relevant that thus certain portions of the past should be shunned. Analytic philosophy is construed as the safe haven, exempt from historical influences that still haunt other disciplines.

Ryle is not entirely clear about the factors that would allow for such immunity. But if claim (2) is to be coherent with (1), then this might mean that we are to focus on certain aspects of philosophy and that we should see ourselves in the tradition of past philosophers working on these aspects. If this correct, Ryle is not claiming that philosophy is separate from history and politics, but that it can be exempt from certain kinds of history and politics. As Akehurst argues**, this tradition was adamant to shun German and Britisch idealism as well as many figures that seemed to run counter to certain ideas. Whatever these precise ideas are, the assumption that (early) analytic philosophy is simply a-historical or a-political is a myth.

Whatever one thinks of Ryle’s claims, they are certainly expressive of a core belief in the tradition. At it’s heart we see a process of shunning with the goal of reshaping the canon. The idea of being selective about what one considers as the canon is of course no prerogative of analytic philosophy. However, what seems to stand out is the assumption of immunity. While the attempt to immunise oneself or to counter one’s biases is a process that includes the idea that one might be in the grip of ideologies, the idea that one is already immune seems to be an ideology itself.

Now how does this shunning relate to what I called today’s ignorance? For better or worse, I doubt that these stances are easily compatible. At the same time, it seems likely that the professed ignorance is an unreflected outcome of the shunning in earlier times. If this is correct, then the idea of non-historicity has been canonised. In any case, it is time reconsider the relation between analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy.***

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* Thanks to Richard Creek, Nick Denyer, Stefan Hessbrüggen, Michael Kremer, and Eric Schliesser for some amusing online discussion of this passage.

** See T. Akehurst, The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy: Britishness and the Spectre of Europe, London: Continuum 2010, esp. 58-60. I am grateful to Catarina Dutilh-Novaes for bringing this book to my attention. See also his brief blog post focussing on Russell.

*** Currently, Laura Georgescu and I are preparing a special issue on the Uses and Abuses of History in Analytic Philosophy for JHAP. Please contact us if you are interested in contributing!

History of contemporary thought and the silence in Europe. A response to Eric Schliesser

What should go into a history of contemporary ideas or philosophy? Of course this is a question that is tricky to answer for all sorts of reasons. What makes it difficult is that we then tend to think of mostly canonical figures and begin to wonder which of those will be remembered in hundred years. I think we can put an interesting spin on that question if we approach it in a more historical way. How did our current thoughts evolve? Who are the people who really influenced us? There will not only be people whose work we happen to read, but those who directly interact and interacted with us. Our teachers, fellow students, friends and opponents. You might not think of them as geniuses, but we should drop that category anyway. These are likely people who really made a difference to the way you think. So let’s scratch our heads a bit and wonder who gave us ideas directly. In any case, they should figure in the history of our thought.

You might object that these figures would not necessarily be recognised as influential at large. However, I doubt that this is a good criterion: our history is not chiefly determined by who we take to be generally influential, but more often than not by those people we speak to. If not, why would historians bother to figure out real interlocutors in letters etc.? This means that encounters between a few people might make quite a difference. You might also object that a history of contemporary philosophy is not about you. But why not? Why should it not include you at least? What I like about this approach is that it also serves as a helpful corrective to outworn assumptions about who is canonical. Because even if certain figures are canonical, our interpretations of canonical figures are strongly shaped by our direct interlocutors.

Thinking about my own ideas in this way is a humbling experience. There is quite a number of people inside and outside my department to whom I owe many of my ideas. But this approach also reveals some of the conditions, political and other, that allow for such influence. One such condition I am painfully reminded of when observing the current political changes in Europe. No, I do not mean Brexit! Although I find these developments very sad and threatening indeed, most of the work done by friends and colleagues in Britain will reach me independently of those developments.

But Central and Eastern Europe is a different case. As it happens, the work that affected my own research most in the recent years is on the history of natural philosophy. It’s more than a guess when I say that I am not alone in this. Amongst other things, it made me rethink our current and historical ideas of the self. Given that quite a number of researchers who work on this happen to come from Central and Eastern Europe, much of this work probably wouldn’t have reached me, had it not been for the revolutions in 1989. This means that my thinking (and most likely that of others, too) would have been entirely different in many respects, had we not seen the Wall come down and communist regimes overthrown.

Why do I bring this up now? A brief exchange following up on an interesting post by Eric Schliesser* made it obvious that many Western Europeans, by and large, seem to assume that the revolutions from 1989 have had no influence on their thought. As he puts it, “the intellectual class kind of was conceptually unaffected” by them. And indeed, if we look at the way we cite and acknowledge the work of others, we regularly forget to credit many, if not most, of our interlocutors from less prestigious places. In this sense, people in what we call the Western world might be inclined to think that 1989 was not of significance in the history of thought. I think this is a mistake. A mistake arising from the canonical way of thinking about the work that influences us. Instead of acknowledging the work of individuals who actually influence us, we continue citing the next big shot whom we take to be influential in general. By excluding the direct impact of our actual interlocutors, we make real impact largely invisible. Intellectually, the West behaves as if it were still living in the Cold War times. But the fact that we continue to ignore or shun the larger patterns of real impact since 1989 does not entail that it is not there. Any claim to the contrary would, without further evidence at least, amount to an argument from ignorance.

The point I want to make is simple: we depend on other people for our thought. We need to acknowledge this if we want to understand how we come to think what we think. The fact that universities are currently set up like businesses might make us believe that the work people do can (almost) equally be done by other people. But this is simply not true. People influencing our thought are always particular people; they cannot be exchanged salva veritate. If we care about what we think, we should naturally care about the origin of our thought. We owe it to particular people, even if we sometimes forget the particular conversations in which our ideas were triggered, encouraged or refuted.

Now if this is correct, then it’s all the more surprising that we let go of the conditions enabling much of this exchange in Europe so easily. How is it possible, for instance, that most European academics remain quiet in the face of recent developments in Hungary? We witnessed how the CEU was being forced to move to Vienna in an unprecedented manner, and now the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is targeted.**

While the international press reports every single remark (no matter how silly) that is made in relation to Brexit, and while I see many academics comment on this or that aspect (often for very good reasons), the silence after the recent events in Hungary is almost deafening. Of course, Hungary is not alone in this. Academic freedom is now targeted in many places inside and outside Europe. If we continue to let it happen, the academic community in Europe and elsewhere will disintegrate very soon. But of course we can continue to praise our entrepreneurial spirit in the business park of academia and believe that people’s work is interchangeable salva veritate; we can continue talking to ourselves, listen diligently to our echoes, and make soliloquies a great genre again.

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* See also this earlier and very pertinent post by Eric Schliesser.

** See also this article. And this call for support.

“Is it ok if I still work on Descartes?” The canon does not have to be canonical

Browsing through the web today, I found the following passage on the webpage of one of the few leading journals in the history of philosophy:

“Ever since the founding of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, its articles (and its submissions) have been dominated by papers on a small, select coterie of philosophers. Not surprisingly, these are Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant.”

“Not surprisingly” can be said in many ways, but the place and phrasing of the passage suggest some sort of pride on part of the author. But the “coterie” is so small that it still makes me chuckle. Given that this is one of the general top journals for the whole of the history of philosophy, this narrowness should be worrying. Posting this on facebook lead to some obvious entertainment. However, I also recognised some mild expression of shame from those who work on canonical figures. And I sometimes caught myself wondering whether I should continue to work on figures such as Ockham, Locke, Spinoza and Hume. Should we feel ashamed of working on the canon? In the light of such questions, I would like to briefly talk about a different worry: that of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. More precisely, I worry that attempts at diversifying the canon can harm good work on and alongside the canon. Let me explain.

Currently, we are witnessing an enormous amount of initiatives to diversify the canon, both with regard to the inclusion of women as well as of non-western traditions. The initiatives and projects I know are truly awe-inspiring. Not only do they open up new areas of research, they also affect the range of what is taught, even in survey courses. This is a great success for teaching and research in philosophy and its history. On the one hand, we learn more and more about crucial developments in the history of philosophy on a global level. On the other hand, this increase of knowledge also seems to set a moral record straight. In view of attempts to make our profession more inclusive in hiring, it’s obvious that we should also look beyond the narrow “coterie” when it comes to the content of research and teaching.

Now the moral dimension of diversification might embarrass those who continue to do teaching and research on canonical figures. “Is it ok”, one might wonder, “to teach Descartes rather than Elisabeth of Bohemia?” Of course, we might reply that it depends on one’s agenda. Yet, as much as diversification is a good thing, it will put pressure on those who choose otherwise. Given constraints of time and space, diversification might be perceived as adding to the competition. Will publishers and editors begin to favour the cool new work on non-canonical figures? Will I have to justify my canonical syllabus? While I wouldn’t worry too much about such issues, we know that our profession is rather competitive and it wouldn’t be the first time that good ideas are abused for nasty ends. – This is why it’s vital to see the whole idea of diversification as one to enrich and complement our knowledge. Rather than seeing canonical figures being pushed to the side, we should embrace the new lines of research and teaching as a way of learning new things also about canonical figures. In keeping with this spirit, I’d like to highlight two points that I find crucial in thinking about the canon and its diversification:

  • Firstly, there are non-canonical interpretations of the canon. The very idea of a canon suggests that we already know most things about certain figures and traditions. But we need to remind ourselves that the common doxography does by no means exhaust what there is to be known about authors such as Plato or Kant. Rather we need to see that most authors and debates are still unknown. On the one hand, we gather new historical knowledge about these figures. On the other hand, each generation of scholars has to make up their minds anew. Thus, even if we work on on the most canonical figures ever, we can challenge the common doxography and develop new knowledge.
  • Secondly, the diversification should also concern neglected figures alongside the canon. Have you noticed that the Middle Ages are represented by three authors? Yes, Aquinas, Aquinas, and Aquinas! Almost every study dipping into medieval discussions mentions Aquinas, while his teacher Albert the Great is hardly known outside specialist circles. But when we talk of diversification, we usually don’t think of Albert the Great, Adam of Wodeham, Kenelm Digby or Bernard Bolzano. These authors are neglected, unduly so, but they normally aren’t captured by attempts at diversification either. They run alongside the canonical figures and weigh on our conscience, but they have not much of a moral lobby. Yet, as I see it, it’s equally important that the work on them be continued and that they are studied in relation to other canonical and non-canonical figures.

In other words, the canon does not have to be canonical. The upshot is that we need as much work on canonical as on non-canonical figures in all senses of the word. We hardly know anything about either set of figures. And we constantly need to renew our understanding. Competition between these two areas of research and teaching strikes me as nonsensical. There is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with working on canonical figures.

Against allusions

What is the worst feature of my writing? I can’t say what it is these days; you tell me please! But looking back at what I worked hardest to overcome in writing I’d say it’s using allusions. I would write things such as “in the wake of the debate on semantic externalism” or “given the disputes over divine omnipotence bla bla” without explaining what precise debate I actually meant or what kind of semantic externalism or notions of the divine I had in mind. This way, I would refer to a context without explicating it. I guess such allusions were supposed to do two things: on the one hand, I used them to abbreviate the reference to a certain context or theory etc., on the other hand, I was hoping to display my knowledge of that context. To peers, it was meant to signal awareness of the appropriate references without actually getting too involved and, most importantly, without messing up. If you don’t explicate or explain, you can’t mess things up all that much. In short, I used allusions to make the right moves. So what’s wrong with making the right moves?

Let me begin by saying something general about allusions. Allusions, also known as “hand waving”, are meant to refer to something without explicitly stating it. Thus, they are good for remaining vague or ambiguous and can serve various ends in common conversation or literature. Most importantly, their successful use presupposes sufficient knowledge on part of the listener or reader who has to have the means to disambiguate a word or phrase. Funnily enough, such presuppositions are often accompanied by phrases insinuating the contrary. Typical phrases are: “as we all know”, “as is well known”, “famously”, “obviously”, “clearly”, “it goes without saying” etc.

Such presuppositions flourish and work greatly among friends. Here, they form a code that often doesn’t require any of the listed phrases or other markers. They rather work like friendly nods or winks. But while they might be entertaining among friends, they often exclude other listeners in scholarly contexts. Now you might hasten to think that those excluded simply don’t ‘get it’, because they lack the required knowledge. But that’s not true. Disambiguation requires knowledge, yes, but it also and crucially requires confidence (since you always might make a fool of yourself after all) and an interest in the matter. If you’re unsure whether you’re really interested, allusions used among scholars often closely resemble the tone of a couple of old blokes dominating a dinner party with old insider jokes. Who wants to sound like that in writing?

Apart from sounding like a bad party guest, there is a deeper problem with allusions in scholarly contexts. They rely on the status quo of canonical knowledge. Since the presuppositions remain unspoken, the listener has go by what he or she takes to be a commonly acceptable disambiguation. Of course, we have to take some things as given and we cannot explicate everything, but when it comes to important steps in our arguments or evidence, reliance on allusions is an appeal to the authority of the status quo rather than the signalling of scholarly virtue.

I began to notice this particularly in essays by students who were writing their essays mainly for their professors. Assuming that professors know (almost) everything, nothing seems to need unpacking. But since almost all concepts in philosophy are essentially contested, such allusions often don’t work. As long as I don’t know which precise version of an idea I’m supposed to assume, I might be just as lost as if I didn’t know the next thing about it. Thus the common advice to write for beginners or fellow students. Explain and unpack at least all the things you’re committed to argue for or use as evidence for a claim. Otherwise at least I often won’t get what’s going on.

The problem with that advice is that it remains unclear how much explanation is actually appropriate. Of course, we can’t do without presuppositions. And we cannot and should not write only for beginners. If allusions are a vice, endless explanations might fare no better. Aiming at avoiding every possible misunderstanding can result in an equally dull or unintelligible prose. So I guess we have to unpack some things and merely allude to others. But which ones do we explain in detail? It’s important to see that every paper or book has (or should have) a focus: this is the claim you ultimately want to argue for. At the same time, there will be many assumptions that you shouldn’t commit yourself to showing. I attempt to explain only those things that are part of the focus. That said, it sometimes really is tricky to figure out what that focus actually is. Unpacking allusions might help with finding it, though.

Why would we want to call people “great thinkers” and cite harassers? A response to Julian Baggini

If you have ever been at a rock or pop concert, you might recognise the following phenomenon: The band on the stage begins playing an intro. Pulsing synths and roaring drums build up to a yet unrecognisable tune. Then the band breaks into the well-known chorus of their greatest hit and the audience applauds frenetically. People become enthusiastic if they recognise something. Thus, part of the “greatness” is owing to the act of recognising it. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s just that people celebrate their own recognition at least as much as the tune performed. I think much the same is true of our talk of “great thinkers”. We applaud recognised patterns. But only applauding the right kinds of patterns and thinkers secures our belonging to the ingroup. Since academic applause signals and regulates who belongs to a group, such applause has a moral dimension, especially in educational institutions. Yes, you guess right, I want to argue that we need to rethink whom and what we call great.

When we admire someone’s smartness or argument, an enormous part of our admiration is owing to our recognition of preferred patterns. This is why calling someone a “great thinker” is to a large extent self-congratulatory. It signals and reinforces canonical status. What’s important is that this works in three directions: it affirms that status of the figure, it affirms it for me, and it signals this affirmation to others. Thus, it signals where I (want to) belong and demonstrates which nuances of style and content are of the right sort. The more power I have, the more I might be able to reinforce such status. People speaking with the backing of an educational institution can help building canonical continuity. Now the word “great” is conveniently vague. But should we applaud bigots?

“Admiring the great thinkers of the past has become morally hazardous.” Thus opens Julian Baggini’s piece on “Why sexist and racist philosophers might still be admirable”. Baggini’s essay is quite thoughtful and I advise you to read it. That said, I fear it contains a rather problematic inconsistency. Arguing in favour of excusing Hume for his racism, Baggini makes an important point: “Our thinking is shaped by our environment in profound ways that we often aren’t even aware of. Those who refuse to accept that they are as much limited by these forces as anyone else have delusions of intellectual grandeur.” – I agree that our thinking is indeed very much shaped by our (social) surroundings. But while Baggini makes this point to exculpate Hume,* he clearly forgets all about it when he returns to calling Hume one of the “greatest minds”. If Hume’s racism can be excused by his embeddedness in a racist social environment, then surely much of his philosophical “genius” cannot be exempt from being explained through this embeddedness either. In other words, if Hume is not (wholly) responsible for his racism, then he cannot be (wholly) responsible for his philosophy either. So why call only him the “great mind”?

Now Baggini has a second argument for leaving Hume’s grandeur untouched. Moral outrage is wasted on the dead because, unlike the living, they can neither “face justice” nor “show remorse”. While it’s true that the dead cannot face justice, it doesn’t automatically follow that we should not “blame individuals for things they did in less enlightened times using the standards of today”. I guess we do the latter all the time. Even some court systems punish past crimes. Past Nazi crimes are still put on trial, even if the system under which they were committed had different standards and is a thing of a past (or so we hope). Moreover, even if the dead cannot face justice themselves, it does make a difference how we remember and relate to the dead. Let me make two observations that I find crucial in this respect:

(1) Sometimes we uncover “unduly neglected” figures. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, has been pushed to the side as an atheist for a long time. Margaret Cavendish is another case of a thinker whose work has been unduly neglected. When we start reading such figures again and begin to affirm their status, we declare that we see them as part of our ingroup and ancestry. Accordingly, we try and amend an intellectual injustice. Someone has been wronged by not having been recognised. And although we cannot literally change the past, in reclaiming such figures we change our intellectual past, insofar as we change the patterns that our ingroup is willing to recognise. Now if we can decide to help changing our past in that way, moral concerns apply. It seems we have a duty to recognise figures that have been shunned, unduly by our standards.**

(2) Conversely, if we do not acknowledge what we find wrong in past thinkers, we are in danger of becoming complicit in endorsing and amplifying the impact of certain wrongs or ideologies. But we have the choice of changing our past in these cases, too. This becomes even more pressing in cases where there is an institutional continuity between us and the bigots of the past. As Markus Wild points out in his post, Heidegger’s influence continues to haunt us, if those exposing his Nazism are attacked. Leaving this unacknowledged in the context of university teaching might mean becoming complicit in amplifying the pertinent ideology. That said, the fact that we do research on such figures or discuss their doctrines does not automatically mean that we endorse their views. As Charlotte Knowles makes clear, it is important how we relate or appropriate the doctrines of others. It’s one thing to appropriate someone’s ideas; it’s another thing to call that person “great” or a “genius”.

Now, how do these considerations fare with regard to current authors? Should we adjust, for instance, our citation practices in the light of cases of harassment or crimes? – I find this question rather difficult and think we should be open to all sorts of considerations.*** However, I want to make two points:

Firstly, if someone’s work has shaped a certain field, it would be both scholarly and morally wrong to lie about this fact. But the crucial question, in this case, is not whether we should shun someone’s work. The question we have to ask is rather why our community recurrently endorses people who abuse their power. If Baggini has a point, then the moral wrongs that are committed in our academic culture are most likely not just the wrongs of individual scapegoats who happen to be found out. So if we want to change that, it’s not sufficient to change our citation practice. I guess the place to start is to stop endowing individuals with the status of “great thinkers” and begin to acknowledge that thinking is embedded in social practices and requires many kinds of recognition.

Secondly, trying to take the perspective of a victim, I would feel betrayed if representatives of educational institutions would simply continue to endorse such voices and thus enlarge the impact of perpetrators who have harmed others in that institution. And victimhood doesn’t just mean “victim of overt harassment”. As I said earlier, there are intellectual victims of trends or systems that shun voices for various reasons, only to be slowly recovered by later generations who wish to amend the canon and change their past accordingly.

So the question to ask is not only whether we should change our citation practices. Rather we should wonder how many thinkers have not yet been heard because our ingroup keeps applauding one and the same “great mind”.

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* Please note, however, that Hume’s racism was already criticised by Adam Smith and James Beattie, as Eric Schliesser notes in his intriguing discussion of Baggini’s historicism (from 26 November 2018).

** Barnaby Hutchins provides a more elaborate discussion of this issue: “The point is that a neutral approach to doing history of philosophy doesn’t seem to be a possibility, at least not if we care about, e.g., historical accuracy or innovation. Our approaches need to be responsive to the structural biases that pervade our practices; they need to be responsive to the constant threat of falling into this chauvinism. So it’s risky, at best, to take an indiscriminately positive approach towards canonical and non-canonical alike. We have an ethical duty (broadly construed) to apply a corrective generosity to the interpretation of non-canonical figures. And we also have an ethical duty to apply a corrective scepticism to the canon. Precisely because the structures of philosophy are always implicitly pulling us in favour of canonical philosophers, we need to be, at least to some extent, deliberately antagonistic towards them.”

In the light of these considerations, I now doubt my earlier conclusion that “attempts at diversifying our teaching should not be supported by arguments from supposedly different moral status”.

*** See Peter Furlong’s post for some recent discussion.

Heidegger: Uses and Abuse(s)

Following his post ‘‘Heidegger was a Nazi’ What now?’, Martin Lenz invited me to join the discussion.

There has been a lot written about whether we can separate out Heidegger’s philosophical work from his politics, in particular whether Being and Time – which is often seen as his most significant contribution – can be ‘saved’. There is a lot of excellent scholarship in this area (see for example the work of Mahon O’Brien), but this is not my particular field of expertise. Nevertheless, while I do not feel I can speak directly to the historical question, I would say that, personally, when I first encountered Being and Time as an undergraduate, I didn’t read it and think ‘this guy is definitely a Nazi’. However, once you have this knowledge it obviously makes you reflect on the writing, and there are certain points in the text (the issue of destiny etc), which can be read as problematic in light of his Nazism. Although I do wonder to what extent these things are read into the text in light of knowledge of his politics. I would also add that these more problematic aspects are, to my mind, not the key contributions of Being and Time and that what I take to be the more important concepts and ideas can be employed in other contexts without being ‘infected’ by his politics. In this vein, one must also note the influence of Heideggerean ideas, not only on the French tradition, but also for example on Arendt’s work. If Heidegger’s oeuvre is infected by his politics, does this mean that any work, or any thinker, that draws on his ideas is similarly infected? I think not.

Knowledge of Heideggerean ideas can help to enhance our understanding of other key thinkers, as I argue in my paper Beauvoir and Women’s Complicity in their own Unfreedom. Reading the notion of complicity in The Second Sex in light of the notions of falling and fleeing in Being and Time helps to bring about new ways of thinking about complicity that are not available if we just understand the notion of complicity with regard to the Sartrean idea of bad faith, or in light of the Republican tradition.

With regard to the broader debate about philosophers with, to put it mildly, ‘dodgy politics’, I think it is very striking that Frege, for example (who Martin does note in his original blog post), is so often not mentioned in this context and that these debates appear to be had almost exclusively in relation to Heidegger and not other thinkers who would also serve to make the same point. I would not in any way want to defend Heidegger’s politics, but I do think appeal to his politics is often used as a way to dismiss his work because people have other reasons for not wanting to engage with it, and this is an easy way to dismiss him. I’ve had people dismiss questions I’ve asked at conferences because (after a couple of follow up questions) it’s become apparent that I might be using Heideggerean ideas as a touch stone. In the formal discussion they’ve said ‘oh I don’t know anything about him’ and then shut down the discussion, even though knowledge of Heidegger wasn’t necessary to engage with the point. I don’t think if the same point was made using, for example, Kantian ideas or something inspired by Descartes anyone would dream of dismissing this in the same way. I’ve also had senior people tell me ‘you shouldn’t work on Heidegger, you’ll never get a job’. I think this attitude is unhelpful. Yes, his political views are abhorrent, but given his influence on other key thinkers and traditions I don’t think we can just dismiss his work.

I also think there seems to be an underlying assumption that anyone who works on Heidegger just uncritically accepts his ideas and worships him as a god, which is perhaps true of some (bad) Heidegger scholarship. But my own work, which draws on Heideggerean resources to make points in feminist philosophy, does not treat him in this way. One seems to encounter the attitude in a lot of people who are critical of Heidegger scholarship that anyone who works on him has been inducted into a kind of cult and completely lacks agency, that they can’t separate out the potentially fruitful ideas from those that may be politically compromised. Or that if a particular concept or idea does have some problematic elements, the scholar in question just wouldn’t be able to see it or critique it.

Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche all say some pretty problematic things about women, but this hasn’t stopped feminist philosophers from using their ideas and it doesn’t make the feminist scholarship that arises from this work somehow compromised, tainted, or anti-women. I think the point should be about how we engage with these thinkers and what we can do with them, rather than just dismissing them out of hand (often by people without a sufficient understanding of their work).

Charlotte Knowles, University of Groningen.

 

“Nevermore”. A response to Martin Lenz

Thank you for your thoughts, Martin! As you know, I’ve been teaching Heidegger, I wrote some pieces about Heidegger, 5 years ago I started to follow the advice of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven: nevermore! Here are some reasons. I try to relate them to your argument, in addition I try to push my point in the opposite direction.

I think there is a sort of a priori answer to the question whether someone’s philosophical thought is marked by their political views: If the person expresses in a philosophically relevant and public context an idea expressive of a political idea and if this expression is significantly related to concepts, lines of thoughts or arguments central to the person in question, then his philosophical thought is marked by his political view. If the political view expressed is hideous, then the philosophical thought expressing the hideous idea is also hideous. Heidegger expressed such political ideas in philosophically relevant and public context before, during, and after the Third Reich using concepts etc. central to his thought. I think that Heidegger’s thought is strongly tainted by a hideous political idea (in a way Frege’s or even Nietzsche’s thought isn’t).

My first argument has been about the “logical” notion of thought, not the “psychological” one. However, there is another question beyond that dichotomy: a philosopher is not just a bearer or producer of psychological or logical contents, many philosophers are philosophers by profession, which means that they occupy positions in universities, have certain duties and rights as philosophy professor, deliver certain services to the philosophical community, act as philosophers etc. Heidegger is in this sense very much continuous with us philosophy professors etc. working in universities, in a way Plato, Seneca, Descartes, Spinoza or Kierkegaard aren’t. As professor (and rector) of the University of Freiburg Heidegger acted several times out of a hideous political ideology. The most drastic case is Heidegger’s “Gutachten” about his Munich colleague Richard Hönigswald in 1933. According to Heidegger, Hönigswald’s philosophy has «den Blick abgelenkt vom Menschen in seiner geschichtlichen Verwurzelung und in seiner volkhaften Überlieferung seiner Herkunft aus Boden und Blut. Damit zusammen ging eine bewusste Zurückdrängung jedes metaphysischen Fragens…». While the first part of the quote dismisses Hönigswald’s thought as not being geschichtlich and völkisch, the second part establishes a direct connection to Heidegger’s Antrittsvorlesung “Was ist Metaphyisk?”.

Finally, Heidegger’s thought has been influential for more hideous political ideas. It has been an inspiration for the Ayatollah regime in Iran (mediated by his French translator Henri Corbin), it is an inspiration for the alt right, Donatella di Cesare (author of a book on Heidegger and the Shoa) has been threatened by Italian facists. Honoring Heidegger with seminars at the university gives further force to this kind of reception.

Shall we, thus, not study Heidegger’s thought? Of course. Janek Wasserman’s “Black Vienna. The Radical Right in the Red City 1918-1938” (2014) contains an interesting chapter on Othmar Spann: “For many years, the Spannkreis served as a linchpin of Viennese culture and Central European radical conservative politics. The most influential intellectual group in interwar Vienna was also its most conservative. It was also the most political impactful. Red Vienna was therefore not a Marxist fortress.” (105). We can study Heidegger, his networks, his thought, his influence and reception as part of our history and historically if we study him not as an exceptional philosophical genius (he wasn’t), but as a chapter in the history of ideas, especially the history of hideous political ideas in the 20thCentury.

Markus Wild (University of Basel) and his dog Titus Hunderich

“Heidegger was a Nazi.” What now?

“B was a bigot” is a phrase that raises various questions. We can say it of various figures, both dead and alive. But this kind of phrase is used for various purposes. In what follows, I’d like consider some implications of this phrase and its cognates. – Let me begin with what might seem a bit of a detour. Growing up in Germany, I learned that we are still carrying responsibility for the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime. Although some prominent figures declared otherwise even in the Eighties, I think this is true. Of course, one might think that one cannot have done things before one was born, but that does not mean that one is cut off from one’s past. Thinking historically means, amongst other things, to think of yourself as determined by continuities that run right through you from the past into the options that make your future horizon. The upshot is: we don’t start from scratch. It is with such thoughts that I look at the debates revolving around Heidegger and other bigots. Is their thought tainted by their views? Should we study and teach them? These are important questions that will continue to be asked and answered. Adding to numerous discussions, I’d like to offer three and a half considerations.*

(1) The question whether someone’s philosophical thought is tainted or even pervaded by their political views should be treated as an open question. There is no a priori consideration in favour of one answer. That said, “someone’s thought” is ambiguous. If we ask whether Heidegger’s or Frege’s (yes, Frege’s!) thought was pervaded by their anti-semitism, the notion is ambiguous between “thought” taken as an item in psychological and logical relations. The psychological aspects that explain why I reason the way I do, often do not show up in the way a thought is presented or received. – Someone’s bigotry might motivate their thinking and yet remain hidden. But even if something remains hidden, it does not mean that it carries no systematic weight. There is an old idea, pervasive in the analytic tradition, that logical and political questions are distinct. But the idea that logic and politics are distinct realms is itself a political idea. All such issues have to be studied philosophically and historically for each individual thinker. How, for instance, can Spinoza say what he says about humans and then say what he says about women? This seems glaringly inconsistent and deserves study rather than brushing off. However, careful study should involve historically crucial ties beyond the question of someone’s thought. There are social, political and institutional continuities (and discontinuities) that stabilise certain views while disqualifying others.

(2) Should we study bigots? If the forgoing is acceptable, then it follows that we shouldn’t discourage the study of bigots. Quite the contrary! This doesn’t mean that I recommend the study of bigots in particular; there are enough understudied figures that you might turn to instead. It just means that their bigotry doesn’t disqualify them as topics of study and that if you’re wondering whether you should, that might in itself be a good reason to get started. This point is of course somewhat delicate, since history of philosophy is not only studied by disinterested antiquarians, but also for reasons of justifying why we endorse certain views or because we hope to find good or true accounts of phenomena. – Do we endorse someone’s political views by showing continuities between their thoughts and ours? Again, that depends and should be treated as an open question. But I don’t think that shunning the past is a helpful strategy. After all, the past provides the premises we work from, whether we like it or not. Rather we should look carefully at possible implications. But the fact that we appropriate certain ideas does not entail that we are committed to such implications. As I said in my last post, we can adopt thoughts, while changing and improving them. That fact that Heidegger was a Nazi does not turn his students or later exegetes into Nazis. However, once we know about the bigotry we should acknowledge as much in research and teaching.

(3) What about ourselves? Part of the reason for making the second remark was that I sometimes hear people say: “A was a bigot; so we shouldn’t teach A. Let’s rather teach B.” While I agree that there are huge numbers of understudied figures that might be taught instead of the same old classics, I don’t think that this line of argument helps. As I see it, it often comes out of the problematic idea that, ideally, we should study and teach only such figures that we consider morally pure. This is a doubtful demand not only because we might end up with very little material. It is also problematic because it suggests that we can change our past at will.** Therefore, attempts at diversifying our teaching should not be supported by arguments from supposedly different moral status; rather we should see that globalisation requires us to eventually acknowledge the impact of various histories and their entanglements. – We don’t teach Heidegger because we chose to ignore his moral status. We teach his and other works because our own thought is related to these works. This has an important consequence for our own moral status. Having the histories we do, our own moral status is tainted. In keeping with my introductory musings, I’d like to say that we are responsible for our past. The historical continuities that we like and wish to embrace are as much our responsibilities as those that we wish to disown. Structurally oppressive features of the past are not disrupted just because we change our teaching schedule.

I guess the general idea behind these considerations is this: The assumption that one can cut off oneself from one’s (philosophical) past is an illusion. As philosophers in institutional contexts we cannot deny that we might be both beneficiaries of dubious heritage as well as suffering from burdens passed down. In other words, some of the bigotry will carry over. Again, this doesn’t mean that we are helpless continuants of past determinants, but it means that it is better to study our past and our involvements with it carefully rather than deny them and pretend to be starting from scratch.

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* See especially the pieces by Peter Adamson and Eric Schliesser.

** Additional comment (25 Nov 2018): However, there is a sense in which we can change our intellectual past, namely reassessing the canon and including neglected figures, on the one hand, while relativising the impact of others. – I have to admit that now doubt the conclusion that “attempts at diversifying our teaching should not be supported by arguments from supposedly different moral status”.