Shapiro Wins C$2.78 Million Grant for New Narratives in the History of Philosophy
Lisa Shapiro, professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University, has won a C$2.78 million (approximately $2.04 million) grant to support her project, “Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy.”
The Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) will provide funding for the project for seven years.
Professor Shapiro writes:
The overall goal of the 7-year project is to change the standards of practice in philosophy to enable the discipline to become inclusive and diverse by retrieving philosophical works of women and individuals from other marginalized groups across historical periods from 1400 through 1940 and sustaining the presence of these figures and their works in the history of philosophy. It builds on an earlier Partnership Development project (focused on the early modern period) to cover more philosophers over a much broader historical period that includes the medieval period, the Renaissance, early modern period (17th and 18th centuries), and the 19th and early 20th centuries (up to 1940).
We’ve identified four philosophical themes that will provide the scaffolding for the new narratives. Three are familiar: metaphysics and epistemology; ethics, social, and political philosophy; and philosophy of mind and philosophy of education. The fourth is less familiar, but essential to achieving our goal of making philosophy more inclusive: the metaphilosophical issues of what counts as philosophy and what counts as a philosophical work.
Our work will include creating a range of resources for research, teaching, and general audiences. This will include expanding ProjectVox.org, SFU’s bibliographic database of philosophical works by women, and the New Narratives podcast series (available through iTunes), as well as developing and networking existing and new digital collections.
The partnership that the grant is supporting is comprised of Professor Shapiro and 11 co-investigators at 11 different institutions:
- Marguerite Deslauriers (McGill University)
- Corey Dyck (Western University)
- Patricia Sheridan (University of Guelph)
- Andrew Janiak (Duke University)
- Karen Detlefsen (University of Pennsylvania)
- Christia Mercer (Columbia University)
- Jacqueline Broad (Monash University)
- Dalia Nassar (University of Sydney)
- Martina Reuter (Jyväskylä University)
- Anne-Lise Rey (Université de Paris X-Nanterre)
- Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin (Université de Lyon 3-Jean Moulin)
The project also involves over 70 academic scholars and librarians as collaborators.
You can learn more about the project here.
Thanks, Justin for sharing this. I really want to emphasize that, while I am the PI, this is in a very important sense not my grant. As this a Partnership Grant, all the Partner institutions, with the co-applicants, along with our collaborators and any one else who wants to come along for the ride, will be working together — coordinating our actions— to do the work of this project. This team approach has really served us well in doing the work that has already done, and I think it is really critical to our methodology.
This looks really great, and I’m glad to see it. I am curious as to why the stopping point is 1940. Is the idea that there is a break with “post war” philosophy? That would seem plausible and reasonable, though if it was somewhat more arbitrary than that (i.e., “we had to stop somewhere and that seemed like a good place”) I don’t think that would be obviously unreasonable. I’m just curious about the thinking here.
Matt, 1940 is a somewhat arbitrary date. However, there are at least two considerations. First, this is a project in diversifying the _history_ of philosophy, focused on women and also including other marginalized groups (and recognizing that one historical philosopher might actually fit in multiple marginalized categories (what people cooler than I am term intersectionality). Second, if people can name a female philosopher, it is usually Simone De Beauvoir, and her first work is published in 1943 (with The Second Sex coming in 1949). So arbitrary but not without reason. Philosophers being as ahistorical as many (but not all!) are, the further forward the date moves, the less likely we are to get contemporary philosophers and others to recognize that there are loads of women doing philosophy not only in the early modern period, but also in the medieval period, and 19th century and early 20th century. Lots of work just starting to be done, and this project aims not just to incentivize that work but also to connect them into our understanding of the history of philosophy. The more you look the more it is astonishing what interesting and rich discussions have simply disappeared.
Thanks, Lisa – that all makes really good sense. Congratulations again on a terrific project.
Hi Lisa,
In a number of blog posts at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, I have drawn attention to the remarkable homogeneity of Canadian philosophy departments, arguing (among other things) that the most effective ways to correct the lack of diversity in philosophy will involve consideration of how marginalization and exclusion of various constituencies of philosophers is differently (re)produced in disparate geographical contexts.
So, for instance, I have pointed out that nondisabled white women philosophers cannot be said to be underrepresented in Canadian philosophy departments, where, all in all, nondisabled white women (and those who have passed or pass as such) comprise more than 30% of full-time faculty. In other contexts, I have also argued (see my “Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability”) that the phrase “women and other underrepresented groups in philosophy” (which is similar to the phrase that your project description uses) is exclusionary rather than inclusive and conceals the fact the “women” referred to in the phrase are nondisabled heterosexual white women who are the least disadvantaged of underrepresented philosophers.
This project’s core team seems to be composed primarily by white women and doesn’t seem to include any philosophers of race or philosophers of disability. Thus, I am wondering how you would respond to a disabled philosopher of disability or someone else who is concerned that this project (like so many other “diversity” initiatives in philosophy) really means only binary gender differences among nondisabled white people when it uses the term ‘diversity’ and is really designed to bring only more nondisabled white women into the history and profession of philosophy when it refers to “inclusion”. Has your team designed specific strategies to address the historical exclusion of critical examination of disability and race from the history of philosophy and of disabled and racialized philosophers?
Congratulations, Lisa, and all the collaborators!!! What a testament to the importance of this work, from which we all benefit. Wonderful news!
Congratulations! This is a wonderful set of projects and I’m very much looking forward to all they produce.
I would like to follow up on Shelley Tremain’s comment. Nine white women, two white men (inferring from the names), and not a single person of color? Haven’t Africana philosophers been contesting the canon for decades, and documenting its exclusionary whiteness?
It is utterly astonishing to me–someone who got his PhD way back in 1985–that, all these decades later, this discipline is still intent upon maintaining its Jim Crowed character even while all around the world, even in good old Canada (where I got said PhD), people are protesting racism and white supremacy. What in God’s name does it take to get through to you people?
Charles Mills, Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center
Well said Charles
Congrats on the well deserved big grant!!
Second to everything Shelley Tremain said above. I also wish to repeat a few things I said to many of the participants a few years back at APA Eastern after Mercer’s talk:
There are several schools of canon criticism, and this movement you guys have led is just one.Intellectual historians and Africana philosophers have gone much deeper, imho, but focusing not just on inclusion but on the ideology of canon construction. The canons we have are relics of nineteenth-century historiography. They had racial and Eurocentric motivations, quite beyond being just all-male and limited in topical scope. Finding women who were adjacent to these canonical philosophers does not get you to the deeper points, C. Mercer did get there, mind you, but you guys would do well to read and cite the Africana philosophers and intellectual historians who did the laborious work on these topics. Start with Peter Park’s book (Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosphy). But by all means please do use the grant money well by incorporating the hard work of less celebrated scholars who carved these paths.
Prof Lisa Shapiro, Prof Patricia Sheridan, Prof Marguerite Deslauriers, Prof Karen Detlefsen, Prof Christia Mercer, Prof Jacqueline Broad, Prof Cory Dyke, Prof Andrew Janiak, Prof Dalia Nassar, Prof Martina Reuter, Prof Anne-Lise Rey, Prof Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin,
Congratulations on establishing a multi-million-dollar financial basis for your project, ‘Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy’!
I am particularly pleased to read of your ‘less familiar…philosophical theme’: namely, ‘the metaphilosophical issues of what counts as philosophy and what counts as a philosophical work’. Pleased, because this apparently responds to my exhortation [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/opinion/philosophy-is-deadwhite-and-dead-wrong/2012122.article] that ‘we reflect critically on this notion of “taking care of the philosophy”, by considering, on the one hand, who gets to do philosophy and, on the other, what gets done in philosophy’.
My attention was attracted by your advertisement for post-doctoral fellowships [http://www.newnarrativesinphilosophy.net/post-doctoral-fellowships.html]—and I might have applied, were it not for your curious stipulation that ‘The successful applicants will have a PhD in Philosophy (within the past five years)’—but I was deeply disappointed to read that the jobs you have created appear to be precarious, with no prospect of promotion or permanency. In order to explain to you how a potentially decolonial project, such as yours, needs to engage not just in the content of the curriculum, but also in the conditions of work, I draw your attention to an old article that seems, unfortunately, as relevant as ever, entitled ‘Why is the university still white?’ [https://www.newappsblog.com/2015/06/why-is-the-university-still-white.html]. What is more, I draw your attention to the unionised campaign, at least here in the UK, to Stamp Out Casual Contracts [https://www.ucu.org.uk/stampout]. The tide has turned firmly against the sort of exploitative ”decolonial” project you are proposing, and I urge you, strongly, to restructure your budget—*you have the money*—and show respect for the people you plan to hire. This is 2020: and what might previously have gone unremarked as standard practice or feasible reform or what-you-just-have-to-put-up-with-because-the-system-is-the-system is being, across the globe, roundly rejected in favour of radical transformation. Do not lag behind. Prove yourselves worthy of this political moment.
Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias C——— natcphd נְתַנְאֵל
Just to echo and amplify the points made above: Lisa, while I see the value of this project, I am also disappointed that you haven’t started working towards the eradication of malaria. I have been saying for years, on social media and on my blogs, that the eradication of malaria is a crucial moral goal for humanity. It is unfortunate that you have chosen to not devote any significant time or resources towards this goal, and have focused instead on studying hyper-privileged white women who wrote letters to Descartes without ever so much as laying eyes on a mosquito. Now, this grant is good news, because not only can you use it to further your project, you can also help to end malaria. However, if you don’t, I will be forced to conclude that you are the sort of awful person who does one good thing without also at the same time doing all of the other good things you might do.
I’ll bite, Avalonian, though I do wish we were all using our real names here.
Your comment suggests that addressing gender inequities in the history of philosophy is a good, and that Shelley, Charles, and I were unfairly criticizing the PIs for not also addressing race, disability, etc. But that does not characterize the situation well.
My issues are with the rhetorical aspects of the work done, throughout their careers, by the PIs. They’ve made a big name and received lots of funding for ‘expanding the canon’. But all they ever did was trace relationships within the canon from famous men to their women associates. This might represent a minor good, insofar as it brings recognition to some women authors. But it’s methodologically and philosophical shallow as a scholarly program, especially in light of the fact that there have been real historiographical criticisms of the canon that they have chosen to ignore. The PIs fall victim to all those relevant criticisms, and moreover they have actively ignored the many attempts that some of us have made to get their attention.
So yea, I asked them to share the wealth. There are better arguments, and better pieces of scholarship on the historiography of philosophy than what they are offering. But they are well positioned, Ivy-educated white women. And they have shown no interest in engaging the work of anyone outside their network. (I do hope I’m being unfair here, but we need some evidence of that!)
I am and have been willing to work with them. but the crickets are writing volumes for them while you are making a bad joke, behind cover of anonymity.
Well I’m certainly glad I tapped a hammer on this fault line. Those of us interested in genuinely making the discipline better and more inclusive should take a long, hard look at this comment and ask themselves what it represents. I am not going to respond to the various (extremely serious) accusations of bad scholarship against various smart and well-intentioned people. But I suggest we all ask ourselves why, in claiming to aim at greater inclusivity, anyone would ever be driven to describe the recovery of women philosophers from the history of philosophy as “a minor good”. After decades of consciousness-raising concerning the ways in which our field has failed and continues to fail women? Really?
The project is enormously valuable; anyone who denies this is not actually interested in inclusivity, but is only lashing out. Doubtless it can be improved and made more effective wrt. some of its goals by refocusing. But this is true of ALL valuable projects. So in order for this to count as a legitimate criticism, we need to know a lot: we need reason to think that the improvements were feasible given the constraints people were under, that the people didn’t actually try to enact the improvements, that there aren’t lots of other people who are already carrying out complementary projects (i.e… “the APA… numerous articles, books, panels, even entire conferences…”), that in trying to get better they won’t unwittingly undermine their other goals, etc. Absent this knowledge, we risk launching the angry demand that people do the thing we want them to do because it’s our thing. No person is under any obligation to acquiesce to such a demand.
But I do understand that other commenters (i.e. Prof. Mills) are trying to provide the missing argumentation here and I’m sympathetic to some of it. I merely wanted us to guard against a certain recent tendency: there are always more voices to include, more diversity to add to any existing project. But a broadly feminist project–which this has been for years, though it may be recently expanding its mandate–does not *automatically* have to expand its focus and dilute its resources simply because other people can think of voices they are excluding. We need an approach that is far more subtle than that!
OK ‘Avalonian’. You’re trying to prod me individually, whereas I am raising substantive criticisms of senior scholars in my field under my own name. You have not signed your name, so I don’t know if you’re even an historian of philosophy.
You’re argument is: “anyone who denies the value of the project is just angry.” I’m not going in for that, but I will remind of the rest of the argument. These people purport to be diversifying the canon, but they ignore all the relevant literature that has established certain facts about the canon they wish to diversify. I am challenging them to engage with some other fields – especially critical historiography like Park or classical Africana philosophers like Eze and Mills – in order to accomplish *their own goals*. No one is asking them to choose different goals. I couldn’t make these criticisms of standard canonical historians, but rather only of the purportedly subversive ones.
I don’t see how any of this makes me either uninterested in inclusivity or angry. No one is asking them to pursue my specific projects or anyone else’s. It’s all about what it means to expand or diversify the canon. I don’t think their scholarship achieves its goals. Hence I criticize it here and in print.
You are right to say that we should know more about the circumstances of the grant application. They should be explaining all that to us.
I will only respond again if you have the courage to sign your name.
Kevin, some people have good reasons to prefer staying anonymous, and Avalonian has consistently used the same pseudonym and, to me, regularly proved to be a respectful and considerate commenter. I support Justin’s recent experiment with non-pseudonymous commenting, but if one thing is clear is that people can post under their own name and still not be particularly nice to others in their comments… In fact, contrary to prejudice, I’m not sure anonymous or pseudonymous commenting has really been correlated with viciousness here.
Thanks Nicholas. I don’t have a problem with Avalonian as a commenter, or with anyone else here.
The comment above, however, was clearly intended to single me out (Avalonian wasn’t about to make similar suggestions to Mills, even though my initial comments were arguably softer in tone than Charles’s were), and impute motives or character traits.
This is all very detailed stuff as regards methodology in the history of philosophy. Arguments get elided, and if you’re not an historian of philosophy focused specifically on issues of canonicity, it probably seems different than it is. So my complaint was oriented to that. If you don’t work in these fields, ‘more women in the canon’ sounds like a great goal. But if you’re already committed to a certain view of said canon (e.g. you are interested in the material history and ideological role of it), it doesn’t necessarily matter all that much who else you add to it. That’s why I say the ‘new histories’ bring out a minor good.
I’d give more arguments to all these points if I knew my interlocutors were philosophers who are not historians (to whom my positions will be counterintuitive, but that’s no mark against me). But my responses were initially directed at the PIs, who know well what everyone in here is saying (I still think Avalonian does not, which is no mark against them).
I’m not part of the vita canonica, obviously hehe, and I will try to also help eradicate malaria which is possible, however may I suggest that you can really also help end metaphyics. I mean you already study epistemology and theory of mind which pretty much subsumes the new-age field right?
Metaphysics is a footnote, talk about high middle period, what were they smoking!
I’d also like to register astonishment and concern at this exclusion of philosophers of color (and philosophers with disabilities — unfortunately, I am not as competent to say as much here) among the principal investigators. I work on the history of analytic philosophy and still there are so many obvious choices in the exact directions of the project’s overall goal that come up in my work. So, no, Avalonian—the point is not that there are other unrelated good things that could be done. The point is that the very project being laid out will suffer significantly with this exclusionary approach. (That’s part of the point anyway. The other part is that it’s straightforwardly unjust to exclude in this way.)
Dwight Lewis, for instance, works on Black early modern scholars like Anton Wilhelm Amo, but also works on early modern women like Jacqueline Pascal and Elisabeth of Bohemia. In fact, his piece at the APA blog on Amo shows why those working on centering Elisabeth’s work in the early modern canon (of which I’m one!) would be interested in working with an Amo expert. There’s also the person who wrote the fantastic OUP “Introduction to Africana Philosophy”, Lewis Gordon. Professor Gordon gives rich introductions to the life and works of Africana philosophers from 1400-1940 like Zara Yacob, Benjamin Banneker, Jacobus Capitiein, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Carter Woodson, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg, Archibald Grimke, Antenor Firmin, George Willmot Blyden, and Frantz Fanon. Professor Mills has also done work on Frederick Douglass which is absolutely breathtaking (like all of his work). It’s also work that us white folks could stand to think about as we sit in this time between Juneteenth and July 4th. There’s also Professor Kola Abimbola who has done work on Yoruba Philosophy, Professor Tina Fernandes Botts who has done work on gender and race in the history of philosophy, Professor Meena Krishnamurthy who has done work on the erasure of marginalized philosophers around the world. And, yes, Professor Peter K.J. Park’s work here is fantastic.
As Kevin and Matt have pointed out, Avalonian’s facetious comparison to “eradicating malaria” utterly fails as a reductio (if that’s what it was intended to be) given that the explicit avowed mandate of the project is to make philosophy more inclusive “by retrieving philosophical work of women and individuals from other marginalized groups.” Well, it has historically been the case in the modern period in the West that people of color are a major component of such groups, because of course of the West’s racist history of oppression of non-Europeans. The exclusionary whiteness and racism of the canon has been the subject of numerous articles, books, panels, even entire conferences, for decades now. To its credit, the APA has finally recognized this, and begun–insofar as it can influence the profession–to foster a greater consciousness of the need for such reform in what and whom and how we teach. Do any of the 12 philosophers named (sorry, I got the numbers wrong in my earlier comment) have any expertise in the areas of Africana, Asian/Asian American/Asian Canadian, Latinx/Hispanic, Indigenous philosophy? Do any of the “70 academic scholars and librarians” have such expertise? (And by the way, are any of the latter people of color, either or is it an all-white enterprise from top to bottom?) If not, then why should we have any confidence that they will be able to do a competent job of recovering the unrecognized philosophical texts from these communities? And it’s not as if there aren’t Canadian philosophers of color working specifically in these areas, such as Meena Krishnamurthy at Queen’s and Chike Jeffers at Dalhousie. Were they approached? Were they even consulted? Feminists of all colors have long been familiar with the multiple formal and informal mechanisms through which male domination reproduces itself, such as (in the academy and elsewhere) the old boys’ networks. White women who consider themselves progressives should be additionally aware (especially after the multiple critiques over the years by feminists of color) of the ways in which they too can be part of such closed circuits of exclusion.
This project was adjudicated by a committee, under the auspices of SSHRCC, which almost certainly included some of the white feminist philosophers who have benefited (greatly) from the exclusionary historical character of philosophy in Canada and continue to do so. I would like to see the philosophers who approved funding of this project be accountable for the ways in which it will, in its current formulation, reproduce the ableism and racism of Canadian philosophy. Perhaps they could offer an explanation or rationale for why this project, in its current formulation, was funded for *seven* years. Is this what these esteemed philosophers think Canadian philosophy and philosophy more globally should look like in the next decade? Perhaps some of these philosophers are the same philosophers who have been lauding this project on Facebook and Twitter.
It would be great if the Canadian Philosophical Association did something about this situation. But of course it won’t.
I was hesitant to reply to comments on this thread, but I still don’t want to reply with much substance. I simply want to indicate first, that I have read the comments, and appreciate the feedback. Second, I want to indicate that the Partnership is very much aware of the complexity of changing the way we do history of philosophy so that the ways in which we tell the story of philosophical discussions of the past is more inclusive. We are committed to the project being a collaborative enterprise which allows people to pursue their respective research projects while we find ways to bring that research into conversation both among ourselves and with others who may not be part of the project. At the centre of our project are methodological questions about how to do the history of philosophy, and we hope that the methodological advances we make with respect to including women in the history of philosophy will be able to be translated by others, with their own areas of expertise, to other dimensions in the history of philosophy, and perhaps even to contemporary philosophy. I know that there will continue to be animated and rich discussions as we all move forward. I want to thank Matt DeVine for the list he helpfully provides, to which I would add Harriet Jacobs and Mary Prince. Others may add even more figures. These lists are very important and help to bring out just how many interesting philosophers have been simply written out of the stories we tell about what the important questions in philosophy are.
I won’t be replying further, but I will be reading and learning.
I appreciate Lisa Shapiro’s response but the idea put forward here is fallacious, I.e. that the methodology to recover female philosophers (and given the make up of the group almost certainly to be European women) is assumed to be helpful for addressing the exclusions in other parts of the world. But the exclusions are not all the same, not justified for the same reason, and will require distinct methodologies. There has been 40 years of debate about how to define and identify what counts as African philosophy and what counts as Latin American philosophy in order precisely to address exclusions and reform philosophical historiography. None of the people who have labored in these areas are represented here. Yet Shapiro assumes exclusions of European women will apply. How will this committee be able to reflect on such assumptions when they are not even visible? What about a dialogic approach that works horizontally rather than vertically?
I think it is disappointing that Lisa Shapiro has not directly addressed questions and concerns that Charles Mills raised and that none of the other PIs of the “Extending New Narratives” project nor any of its adjudicators has offered rationale or justification for why this project received such an enormous grant given its current formulation.
Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman raised concerns about the working conditions of the project. Over the weekend, I talked about this project with someone who is both a member of the group of 70 scholars/librarians and a member of a racialized minority constituency. From the information given to me, I think that I can reliably report the following: although the white PIs of the “Extending New Narratives” project will receive course releases and other perks from their involvement with the project, the 70 other scholars and librarians, including any minoritized scholars/librarians contributing their expertise, will not receive any monetary or other benefits from the “Extending New Narratives” project itself, but rather will receive benefits for their association with it and contribution to it only if projects of their own making that become associated with it garner benefits themselves.
Nathaniel’s comment was specifically concerned the job posting for the 2 postdocs who will be hired for the project. The job posting for these positions offered an excellent opportunity to include Black, Indigenous, disabled, and other minoritized philosophers as formative members of the project. The job posting could have specified that preference would be given to applicants from racialized, disabled, and other minority constituencies in philosophy. It does not.
I have written a post on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY related to Avalonian’s contributions to this comment thread. You can find my post at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here: https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2020/06/29/avalonian-and-the-courage-of-a-pseudonym/
I have written another post at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY that is relevant to this comment thread and the SSHRC project that is its subject.
You can find my post at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here: https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2020/07/05/ableism-and-racism-in-canadian-philosophy/