So, who counts as a [fill in the blank]?
Intriguing article in Sunday's Observer which tries to get beyond the knee-jerk shock horror that there has been a demand at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) for the philosophy course to be a bit less dead and white - Are Soas students right to ‘decolonise’ their minds from western philosophers? - even if 'male' still seems to be the default, except for passing mentions of Hannah Arendt, one of which alludes to her as one of several influenced by Heidegger.
And I am all for being less Eurocentric, or at least considering the ways in which its being the occupation of dead white elite males affected the development of philosophy as it is taught in Institutionz of Highah Learninz, and what counts as 'philosophy' -
But I think there are questions there are who does it and what counts as part of the tradition and the canon -
- matters that I have given some thought to in other realms of endeavour, and, of course, bearing in mind the Russ cases as shown forth in How to Suppress Women's Writing of how, if a woman does achieve something, it Doesn't Really Count and it is off in its own separate (and inferior) category.
And thinking of the tendency to the construction of patriarchal genealogies of [intellectual/cultural fields] leaving out those women who were there when it was new and uninstitutionalised (Patricia Fara also pointed out the importance of non-elite male artisans and craftsmen to the Great Men of Science Making Big Important Discoveries: which is not even massively Back Then, see 'Norman Heatley was done out of the Nobel' because he was the lab assistant). This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2568622.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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