Web Resources on Women and Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy

Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change (Edited by Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins): Looks at problems of women’s under- representation and lack of seniority in a disciplinary area that has proven highly resistant to the many feminist critiques of patriarchal orientation over a 2,000 year history. Brings multiple perspectives to bear on interpretation and potential remedy including those afforded by empirical psychology, institutional analysis, theories of discrimination, and philosophy itself.

The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Philosophy (Edited by Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby): The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide through an area of philosophical thought and literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. They encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject.

Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (by Charles W. Mills):Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison’s metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual “whiteness” has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race’s centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential…the essays demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophys made visible and addressed.

Race in Philosophy (by Lucius Outlaw): Outlaw seeks to make the idea of race respectable and to define races in terms of a combination of biological inheritances and cultural elements embodying values. Arguing that we need an African-oriented philosophy and a social science aimed at facilitating the articulation of African culture, he envisions “more than housecleaning” for philosophy in America. “Renovations are in order.”Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (edited by Andrew Valls): The contributors examine canonical western philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Spinoza, the British Empiricists, and the German Idealists to see if their ideas lend support to racist doctrines or provide resources to critique or even reject racist theories? An innovative and substantial intervention in critical race theory, Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy brings together an impressive roster of thinkers to trace the question of race in modern philosophical inquiry and explore its influence on contemporary philosophy. From Locke’s treatment of the issue of slavery and Descartes’s silence on the issue to Hegel’s philosophy of religion and Nietzsche’s “racial profiling,” this book illuminates the complex relationship between race and philosophy.