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As Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) 18th president, Crystal Williams believes that education, art and design, and staying committed to equity and justice are essential to transforming our society. At RISD, the Detroit-born activist is working to drive meaningful change centered on expanding inclusion, equity, and access. To back that up, Crystal has more than two decades of higher education experience as a professor of English as well as serving in roles that oversaw diversity, equity, and inclusion at Boston University, Bates College, and Reed College. The ultimate goal behind Crystal’s role at RISD is to enhance the learning environment by making sure it includes diverse experiences, viewpoints, and talents.
Photo: Jo Sittenfeld
However, Crystal’s talents go beyond the halls and classrooms of colleges and universities – she’s also an award-winning poet and essayist. So far, she’s published four collections of poems and is the recipient of several artistic fellowships, grants, and honors. Most recently Detroit as Barn, was named as a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Cleveland State Open Book Prize, and the Maine Book Award. Crystal’s third collection, Troubled Tongues, was awarded the 2009 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Award, the Idaho Poetry Prize, and the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize. Her first two books were Kin and Lunatic, published in 2000 and 2002. Crystal’s work regularly appears in leading journals and magazines nationwide.
Today, Crystal Williams is joining us for Friday Five!
Martha’s Vineyard \\\ Photo: Crystal Williams
Originally, I was going to write about a place that inspires me. But when I truly started to consider places I find inspiring, I realized that each of them elicits and enables silence and stillness, a refraction of silence (at least for me). So then, silence itself is the thing that inspires me. Silence inspires me to delve and investigate and allows me to situate myself in wonder and awe – in the amplitude and magnitude of who and what and how we are as a species, to sometimes take issue with personal fears or traumas or worse – the behaviors that ultimately impede personal and spiritual growth or insight.
For me, silence is a great gift. Perhaps the greatest. It is a balm. Through it, I connect to the world not as Crystal Williams of this particular body but as a congregation of embodied energy and spirit. In this way, it is the catalyst through which all good art, poetry, ideas, and leadership emerge. So it is among the most inspirational things in my life – and among the most rare, given my life.
Photo: Crystal Williams
I admire many poems. But Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me” (which is how it is commonly known although Clifton did not, in “Book of Light” originally title the poem), is the one that inspires me the most. It is a poem that speaks to resilience, fortitude, bravery, imagination, hope, and it names what being a Black woman in the United States can and often does elicit.
“won’t you celebrate with me
what I have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
….
…come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.”
Nancy Wilson, Carnegie Hall, 1987 \\\ Video still courtesy YouTube
There are moments in art when an artist transforms one thing into another, utterly broadening, deepening, and transmuting the original meaning. In this live version of “How Glad I Am,” her encore performance at the 1987 “Live at Carnegie Hall” performance, Wilson – a vocalist I listened to obsessively as a younger person – transforms a simple song between lovers into a rousing tribute from an artist to her audience. This performance is the most profoundly loving example I have witnessed of an artist speaking directly and forcefully to the mutuality between artists and audiences. And it’s become a kind of personal soundtrack when I’m walking through my life, especially my life as a poet and now as president. Often, when I’m among creatives, I hear Wilson’s gorgeous, gravely voice imploring: “you don’t know how glad I am [for you].”
RISD students \\\ Photo: Jo Sittenfeld
Listen, these young people at RISD and young creatives everywhere are our best-case scenario. They are our visionaries, if only we can amplify them, listen to them, and then get out of their way. They have all the love (and strategy and insight and knowledge) we need if we can help them wield it successfully. They have all the intelligence and ingenuity we need to help solve our challenges and advance what is good, right, and just among our species. Added to those attributes are other facts: they are funny and curious and eager to learn and gloriously unusual.
I watch them here at RISD in their multi-colored outfits, hair-dos, and platform shoes, giggling with each other in front of the snack machine or intensely applying their best thinking to each others’ work during critiques. I listen to them grappling with big ideas, considering, reconsidering, and redesigning our world as if on slant, eschewing the boxes into which we have crammed stale ideas that continue to guide our actions. And I watch them in their magnitude – in the more quotidian actions of their lives trudging up and down the severe hill outside with their humongous portfolios and unwieldy art projects, and think through it all, “Wow” and think “to be so young and so powerful and necessary” and think “thank God” and think “Thank you, young people, for saying yes to the impulse that brought you here.” Not only do they inspire me, they humble me and they – each one of them – feel like a balm, like hope incarnate.
Photo: Crystal Williams
My folks married in 1967 against all odds. They were of different ethnicities – he Black, she white. Different places – he from the Jim Crow South, she from Detroit, Michigan. Different eras – he born in 1907, she in 1936. Different careers – he a jazz musician and automotive foundry worker, she a public school teacher. And different educational backgrounds – he, we think, not a high school graduate, she a college graduate. And yet, they found each other over the keys of a piano and decided, against society’s cruel eye and hard palm, to love each other and to love me. I now understand the courage it took for all of that to be true, for them to make a way, for them to walk through the world in 1967 as a couple and with me as their child. That courage inspires me. Those decisions inspire me. They inspire me. Everyday. All day.
Kin by Crystal Williams, 2000 \\\ Williams utilizes memory and music as she lyrically weaves her way through American culture, pointing to the ways in which alienation, loss, and sensed “otherness” are corollaries of recent phenomena.
Lunatic: Poems by Crystal Williams, 2002 \\\ Williams confronts large-scale social and cultural events such as September 11, the death of Amadou Diallo, and the Chicago Race Riots in addition to exploring the often paralyzing terrain of loss, desire, and displacement. Among its most common themes is personal responsibility.
Troubled Tongues by Crystal Williams, 2009 \\\ In each of the three sections of this book is a prose poem meant to be read aloud in which a character, interacting with other characters, is named for a quality. They are Beauty, Happiness, and Patience.
Detroit as Barn: Poems by Crystal Williams, 2014
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Is there a "right" way to speak, or is language policing more revealing about the anxiety of the scolder than the expression of the speaker?
The post The Power Imbalances of Language Policing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
“Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the U.S. Supreme Court declared in a ruling today.
The New York Times reports:
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution. However, he added, universities can consider how race has affected an applicant’s life. Students, he wrote, “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”
Citing the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger, and referencing Justice Powell’s decision in the 1978 case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Roberts wrote:
The Grutter majority’s analysis tracked Justice Powell’s in many respects, including its insistence on limits on how universities may consider race in their admissions programs. Those limits, Grutter explained, were intended to guard against two dangers that all race-based government action portends. The first is the risk that the use of race will devolve into “illegitimate . . . stereotyp[ing].” Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S. 469, 493 (plurality opinion). Admissions programs could thus not operate on the “belief that minority students always (or even consistently) express some characteristic minority viewpoint on any issue.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 333 (internal quotation marks omitted). The second risk is that race would be used not as a plus, but as a negative—to discriminate against those racial groups that were not the beneficiaries of the race-based preference. A university’s use of race, accordingly, could not occur in a manner that “unduly harm[ed] nonminority applicants.” Id., at 341.
To manage these concerns, Grutter imposed one final limit on racebased admissions programs: At some point, the Court held, they must end. Id., at 342. Recognizing that “[e]nshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences would offend” the Constitution’s unambiguous guarantee of equal protection, the Court expressed its expectation that, in 25 years, “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Id., at 343. Pp. 19– 21.
(e) Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to racebased college admissions in sight. But the Court has permitted racebased college admissions only within the confines of narrow restrictions: such admissions programs must comply with strict scrutiny, may never use race as a stereotype or negative, and must—at some point—end. Respondents’ admissions systems fail each of these criteria and must therefore be invalidated under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 21–34.
(1) Respondents fail to operate their race-based admissions programs in a manner that is “sufficiently measurable to permit judicial [review]” under the rubric of strict scrutiny. Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin, 579 U. S. 365, 381. First, the interests that respondents view as compelling cannot be subjected to meaningful judicial review. Those interests include training future leaders, acquiring new knowledge based on diverse outlooks, promoting a robust marketplace of ideas, and preparing engaged and productive citizens. While these are commendable goals, they are not sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny. It is unclear how courts are supposed to measure any of these goals, or if they could, to know when they have been reached so that racial preferences can end. The elusiveness of respondents’ asserted goals is further illustrated by comparing them to recognized compelling interests. For example, courts can discern whether the temporary racial segregation of inmates will prevent harm to those in the prison, see Johnson v. California, 543 U. S. 499, 512–513, but the question whether a particular mix of minority students produces “engaged and productive citizens” or effectively “train[s] future leaders” is standardless.
Second, respondents’ admissions programs fail to articulate a meaningful connection between the means they employ and the goals they pursue. To achieve the educational benefits of diversity, respondents measure the racial composition of their classes using racial categories that are plainly overbroad (expressing, for example, no concern whether South Asian or East Asian students are adequately represented as “Asian”); arbitrary or undefined (the use of the category “Hispanic”); or underinclusive (no category at all for Middle Eastern students). The unclear connection between the goals that respondents seek and the means they employ preclude courts from meaningfully scrutinizing respondents’ admissions programs.
The universities’ main response to these criticisms is “trust us.” They assert that universities are owed deference when using race to benefit some applicants but not others. While this Court has recognized a “tradition of giving a degree of deference to a university’s academic decisions,” it has made clear that deference must exist “within constitutionally prescribed limits.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 328. Respondents have failed to present an exceedingly persuasive justification for separating students on the basis of race that is measurable and concrete enough to permit judicial review, as the Equal Protection Clause requires. Pp. 22–26.
(2) Respondents’ race-based admissions systems also fail to comply with the Equal Protection Clause’s twin commands that race may never be used as a “negative” and that it may not operate as a stereotype. The First Circuit found that Harvard’s consideration of race has resulted in fewer admissions of Asian-American students. Respondents’ assertion that race is never a negative factor in their admissions programs cannot withstand scrutiny. College admissions are zerosum, and a benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former at the expense of the latter.
Respondents admissions programs are infirm for a second reason as well: They require stereotyping—the very thing Grutter foreswore. When a university admits students “on the basis of race, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that [students] of a particular race, because of their race, think alike.” Miller v. Johnson, 515 U. S. 900, 911–912. Such stereotyping is contrary to the “core purpose” of the Equal Protection Clause. Palmore, 466 U. S., at 432. Pp. 26– 29.
(3) Respondents’ admissions programs also lack a “logical end point” as Grutter required. 539 U. S., at 342. Respondents suggest that the end of race-based admissions programs will occur once meaningful representation and diversity are achieved on college campuses. Such measures of success amount to little more than comparing the racial breakdown of the incoming class and comparing it to some other metric, such as the racial makeup of the previous incoming class or the population in general, to see whether some proportional goal has been reached. The problem with this approach is well established: “[O]utright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.” Fisher, 570 U. S., at 311. Respondents’ second proffered end point—when students receive the educational benefits of diversity—fares no better. As explained, it is unclear how a court is supposed to determine if or when such goals would be adequately met. Third, respondents suggest the 25-year expectation in Grutter means that race-based preferences must be allowed to continue until at least 2028. The Court’s statement in Grutter, however, reflected only that Court’s expectation that racebased preferences would, by 2028, be unnecessary in the context of racial diversity on college campuses. Finally, respondents argue that the frequent reviews they conduct to determine whether racial preferences are still necessary obviates the need for an end point. But Grutter never suggested that periodic review can make unconstitutional conduct constitutional. Pp. 29–34.
(f) Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
In her dissent, which Justices Kagan and Jackson joined, Justice Sotomayor writes:
Although progress has been slow and imperfect, race-conscious college admissions policies have advanced the Constitution’s guarantee of equality and have promoted Brown’s vision of a Nation with more inclusive schools. Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits. In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter. The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society. Because the Court’s opinion is not grounded in law or fact and contravenes the vision of equality embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, I dissent.
The whole decision is here. It is expected to affect educational admissions policies and practices across the country.
The post Supreme Court Declares Harvard’s and UNC’s Affirmative Action Programs Unconstitutional first appeared on Daily Nous.
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Shamsi Brinn (UX Manager at arXiv) and Bill Kasdorf (Principal of Kasdorf & Associates, LLC) discuss the recent Accessibility Forum hosted by arXiv. Over 2,000 people registered for the Forum; over 350 attended the live event; and hundreds more are accessing the recently published videos.
The post Guest Post — Making Research Accessible: The arXiv Accessibility Forum Moved the Action Upstream appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, an aspiring philosopher asks:
I am a prospective PhD student from the Global South. I have a BA and MA Philosophy from a the national university of my country (although virtually unknown outside). I aspire to study in the top UK and US philosophy departments became the philosophers I wanted to work with are there. I wanted to get some advice on what can I do to possibly compete (or at least equalize the playing field) with PhD applicants from top Philosophy departments in the UK or US (say top 25 in Leiter’s PGR). I only have one publication so far (published in Synthese), but I am assuming that my degree and recommendation letters wouldn’t be viewed as at par with those from my Western counterparts, and I am worried that this automatically disadvantages me. What do you think are my chances getting in the top Philosophy programs? What should be the things that I should highlight in my application that could help my case? Thank you and I appreciate your thoughts.
Fair questions, and I'm curious to hear from readers, particularly those who have experience in PhD admissions. Obviously, all things being equal, having a publication in Synthese should be a clear advantage, but aside from this, I'm not sure.
What do readers think? Any tips for the OP?
In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
Here’s a follow-up question to our recent discussions of perception, personal politics, and the job market:
Let’s say I work on a historical philosophical subject that is not evidently political (even though I secretly think it is), and that I also teach philosophy of religion semi-regularly. Let’s say I’m also a member (non-TT) of a department that has issued pro-BLM and pro-Roe-v.-Wade statements with which I wholeheartedly agree. If I link to those statements on my personal website, how would that be perceived? Again, my support is genuine, but I also hope to show search committee members where I stand in a politically ambiguous subfield.
Interesting question. For those of you new to the discussion being referred to, a number of people indicated here that they have a bias against people who work in philosophy of religion.
Bearing this in mind, what do you all think? Should someone like the OP (above) try to broadcast their progressive political views to combat any such bias?
Reading up on Derek Parfit’s theory of personal identity as part of my research on non-essential accounts of self in literature, philosophy and neuroscience, I was astounded to come across a New Yorker feature on the philosopher which describes his inability to visualise imagery as an anomaly:
“He has few memories of his past, and he almost never thinks about it, although his memory for other things is very good. He attributes this to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.) He has always believed that this is why he never thinks about his childhood. He imagines other people, in quiet moments, playing their memories in their heads like wonderful old movies, whereas his few memories are stored as propositions, as sentences, with none of the vividness of a picture.”
Surely, Parfit’s experience would be representative of the norm, I thought – i.e. to only be able to see things that are actually there, physically present and immediately visible in the external surroundings? I certainly never had this seeming super-power of creating images myself and had always assumed that my subjective experience corresponded to the average.
As I was soon to find out, however, the absence of a visual component to Parfit’s imagination is part of a neurological condition which affects an estimated 2-5% of the population, including myself, namely aphantasia.
Recent studies into aphantasia (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34296179/) connect it to a number of characteristics and personality traits, including introversion and autistic spectrum features, difficulty with recognition, including face-recognition, impoverished autobiographical memory and less event detail in general memory, difficulty with atemporal and future-directed imagination, including difficulties with projecting oneself into mentally constructed scenes and the future, reduced mind-wandering tendency, elevated levels of IQ and mathematical and scientific occupations.
In addition to these, I think aphantasia is likely connected to a certain philosophical belief or position, namely the non-essentialist view of the self that is found in both the reductionist account of personal identity in Western philosophy and the no-self doctrine in Eastern contemplative traditions. I offer a more extensive argument for this connection here: https://psyche.co/ideas/aphantasia-can-be-a-gift-to-philosophers-and-critics-like-me.
In Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit formulates the view that personal identity is reducible to physical and psychological continuity of mental states, and that there is no ‘further fact’, diachronic entity, or essence that determines identity. The belief that persons are separate entities with continuously existing selves, he argues, is to a great degree an illusion. The New Yorker profile only fleetingly connects Parfit’s philosophy to his aphantasia, but to me it seems an obviously relevant piece of explanation. Our philosophical views are based on our intuitions; our perceptual experience of the world guides our ideas about it.
As modern neuroscience is giving us deeper insight into the wide neuro- and perceptual diversity of people, it is also giving us new explanations of differences in people’s experience of reality and, accordingly, their philosophical intuitions and beliefs. According to the predictive processing theory of brain function, the reality we experience as objective and independently existing, is to a large degree created by our brain, a projection based on our brain’s best guesses about the external reality and as such a form of controlled hallucination. And as Anil Seth has recently pointed out, since we all have different brains, we will naturally make different guesses about the external reality we encounter and thus have different perceptual experiences of reality. “Just as it serves us well to occasionally question our social and political beliefs, it’s useful to know that others can literally see things differently to us, and that these differences may evolve into different beliefs and behaviours.”
The growing insight into perceptual diversity, then, gives way to an increased possibility of biographically understanding and explaining philosophers’ theories and as such allows for a new form of ‘neuro-biographical’ reading of philosophy.
It seems plausible that the flipside of a reduced sense of the past and future is an increased connection to and absorption in the present and a weaker identification with a continuous personal narrative and a coherent and substantial self. Parfit’s diminished sense of continuity of identity and substantiality of his own self – which he himself explicitly links to his aphantasia – may well have led him towards or at least strengthened his anti-essential views of personhood.
Likewise, my own aphantasia could at least in part explain my intellectual preference for and easy identification with non-essential conceptions of self in both Western philosophy and Buddhism. The question is, then, whether the condition of aphantasia gives people like Parfit and me a shortcut to enlightenment and clearer philosophical insight into and intuitive understanding of the human condition and nature of reality. Or, does it obscure the truth by barring us from dimensions that are integral to the most common human experience and installing intuitions that do not correspond to the norm?
As neuroscience and neurotechnology continue to develop and give us better understanding of the variations and differences in the neurological constitution of brains, it will be interesting to see to how far the awareness of perceptual differences and specificity can reach in the explanation of differences in philosophical intuitions and beliefs – and to what extent it can disqualify philosophical positions and theories. The notion of perceptual diversity offers a valuable route for philosophers to exercise self-criticism, scrutinise their theories and intuitions and investigate the underlying perceptions and experiences. At the same time, it troubles some of the fundamental concepts on which the discipline of philosophy relies, paving the way for further relativisation and destabilisation of the already undermined notion of objective truth and rationality and potentially removing us further from consensus.
Written by Muriel Leuenberger
The more philosophers I have come to know, the more I realize how deeply personal philosophy is. Philosophical positions often emerge from personal experience and character – even the seemingly most technical, detached, and abstract ones. As Iris Murdoch wrote: “To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth.” Philosophy is an expression of how one sees the world, a clarification, development, and defense of “an outlook that defines who someone is” to add the words of Kieran Setiya.
This personal dimension of philosophy becomes evident in the new philosophical positions and topics that emerge when people with different personal experiences and points of view start to do philosophy. The most prominent example is how women in philosophy, particularly in the last 50 years, have contributed new perspectives – a brush of fresh air in old, stuffy rooms. Philosophy’s allegedly objective view from nowhere was rather the view from a particularly male perspective. Care ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of pregnancy are just some areas where the inclusion of women in philosophy with their own outlook and priorities has advanced the discipline.[i]
The relational turn that can be observed in the philosophy of identity can be seen as a recent addition to this list. Relational identity is the idea that who you are is not just defined by your own properties and characteristics but also by how others define you. Others define us through concepts and norms we acquire in a social context that shape how we see ourselves and the world, they define us through our relations with them as friends, siblings, or members of an ethnic group or a book club, and they have the power to constrain our scope of action or provide opportunities. The latter can be a particularly incisive way of being defined by others. For example, by banning women in Afghanistan from universities the Taliban is defining who they can be. They can no longer become a doctor who dedicates their life to and finds meaning in caring for their patients. Insofar as we are defined by our actions, we can be defined by others who exercise control over what we can do in our lives.
Philosophy has typically been pursued by people whose life was in some sense open to them. They had a range of opportunities – doing philosophy was one of them – and did not face strongly limiting constraints and expectations, as in the example of an Afghan woman today. Academia and with it philosophy have become more accessible in many parts of the world. This means that more people are doing philosophy who either experienced more limiting constraints posed by others or who are aware that only very recent changes or the fact that they are born in a certain country spared them from a life of far-reaching constraints. People who have experienced or can readily empathize with how others can define one’s identity have entered the debate on identity. This development makes the emergence and rising popularity of relational identity views comprehensible.
I want to highlight a further, related reason for how the personal dimension of philosophy creates new trends besides the commonly mentioned shift in who is doing philosophy. The growing literature on philosophy concerned with topics and positions relevant to and based on the experience of a more diverse range of people can also be traced back to a diversification in whose testimony is being heard and taken seriously. As Miranda Fricker argued, marginalized groups are often faced with testimonial injustice – their testimonies are considered less credible due to prejudices related to their identity. For most of the history of philosophy, testimonies of experiences and viewpoints of women, non-western, non-binary, and non-white people were not heard, not taken as seriously or relevant, and not readily accessible. Globalization, digitalization, and a cultural shift towards more openness and equality are gradually changing this (although we still have a long way to go). The increased accessibility and ascribed credibility of testimonies of diverse experiences can inspire new topics and positions in philosophers who do not share those experiences but have come to learn about and empathize with them.
Philosophy clearly profits from taking other perspectives into account. We can get a richer picture of reality, a broader understanding of the moral landscape, raise interesting metaphysical questions, and new philosophical positions can come into sight that challenge established old doctrines. The deeply personal character of philosophy makes the inclusion of and attention to different voices all the more pressing.
[i] Vintiadis, Elly (2021, August). The view from her. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-something-special-about-the-way-women-do-philosophy
An interview project “devoted to exploring the philosophical richness of lesser-studied languages from across the world” has published four interviews so far, with more on the way.
The project, “Philosophising In…” is the idea of Jonathan Egid (King’s College London), who says:
Despite recent acknowledgement of the global nature of philosophical thought, an overwhelming majority of work focuses on philosophy written in either classical languages (Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, Mandarin) or contemporary European languages (German, French, English etc.). Although covering a hugely diverse body of literary philosophy, this focus nevertheless reflects the thought of only a small portion of humanity. This series aims to rectify this narrowness by examining the philosophical ideas of peoples the world over, especially those expressed in the languages, of Africa, Asia and the Americas.
The aim of these interviews is not only to draw attention to the rich philosophical resources of lesser-studied languages and to promote them as media of philosophy, but also to expand the horizons of contemporary philosophy by paying close attention to how concepts translate across languages—sometimes seamlessly, ‘like birds over borders’, sometimes with great difficulty. Paying attention to the differences and similarities between the philosophical word-concepts across languages allows us to take stock of how much of our philosophy is conditioned by the grammatical peculiarities of a particular language or set of languages, and how much have a wider application. The project thus aims to foster a philosophical multilingualism in the conviction that philosophy can only lose out by narrowing its focus to a single language or language family.
The detailed interviews are with philosophers who are experts in the language under consideration, and cover, among other things, distinctive philosophical ideas of that linguistic culture. At the end of each interview there is a brief lexicon of philosophical terms in the language.
The most recent interviews are with Workineh Kelbessa (Addis Ababa University), emphasizing philosophy in the language of Afaan Oromo, and Yury Arzhanov (Paris Lodron University Salzburg), focusing on philosophy in the language of Syriac.
Egid says he is very open to suggestions for further languages to include.
You can access the interviews here.
Robert Harington talks to Annie Callanan, Chief Executive of Taylor & Francis, in this new series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.
The post Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Annie Callanan appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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