Welcome, everyone, to the first session of the second round of talks in our lecture series,
Philosophy by Hand.
And today, as you can see, we have a very special event by three wonderful guests.
We have here Professor Omonika Kjelzkow-Stranbach from Amsterdam, and we have Professor Sabrina
Ebbers-Meijer from Leiden, and from Copenhagen, I'm sorry, yes, I'm very excited that you're
here.
And also, we have two cameras today, and two Professor Americans, I went from Leiden, and
I will give you a chance to introduce yourselves in a second, and that way, it will be more
credible.
I just want to say a few opening remarks.
So last year, when we started this series, we were more in our comfort zone, meaning
that we had talks that related to fields that are either our own, from the Hetman site project,
the name is the Hebrew tradition, or neighboring traditions that have a shared history.
So that would be the Arabic one, the Latin one, and the Greek one.
However, this year, we have become more ambitious, and we would like to both go wider and deeper,
and by going wider, I mean we will have talks from other traditions that were not represented
last year.
And by deeper, I mean that we will also have more methodological engagement with what
it is that we are doing here.
Now, in my own project, my team and myself, we had this transfer from working on big names,
to working on text, and to working on objects.
And we realized that the material aspect of what we are doing has to be somehow engaged
with in a more theoretical way, because it has philosophical significance.
It's not just places where we can use texts.
So in order to do that, we have decided also to add a methodological aspect into this research,
and also to see who else could be included when we try to widen the scope of philosophical
agency and what is a philosophical object, and also what can be included within philosophical
research.
For that end, we decided to start this season of lectures with a roundtable discussion with
three scholars, each of whom challenged the scope of what they were doing in different
waves.
And therefore, we would like to discuss together from different points of view the potential
of looking at philosophical research, both from the widening and inclusion aspect, and
from the material aspect, and also from the global aspect.
So we are witnessing this kind of momentum right now in the scholarly world of widening
the philosophical spectrum, and there is more inclusion of marginalized traditions and groups
and historical periods, and also there is a wider understanding of what is philosophical
activity and who is a philosophical agent.
Now, my question, with which I would like to start this roundtable, is how should we
navigate within this new cluster of opportunity when doing philosophical research and research
on the history of philosophy in general?
Now, if we agree that the canon should be challenged and should be widened, then how?
And how do we choose narratives, and how do we ask how material choices shape the histories
we write?
Where should we look?
And what does it truly mean to produce an inclusive or exclusive history of philosophy?
And I suggest maybe, Monica, you will start.
Okay.
Firstly, thank you.
Thank you to the organizers for inviting me here to Hamburg.
My journey in Devasappan philosophy begins right here in Germany, in Constance, where
I have been trained, to Devasappan philosophy.
That is my training.
My supervisor, doctoral supervisor, was Hubert Schleshert from the Vienna Circle.
For him, when I came from India to Germany in the 90s, it was to, he saw it as his task
to teach me to do a philosophy which would allow me to make sense of my experience in
Germany using philosophical tools.
So right from the get-go, my training in philosophy has been to Devasappan philosophy for my own
survival as a person of color here in Germany.
This led me to initiating and co-founding the International Journal today.
It is the Journal of World Philosophies.
The Journal has turned 10.
We began here in Germany with Karl Alba, and then very soon, because of the international
interest in the work we were doing, moved to Indiana University Press in the US, where
we continue to be.
Everything you mentioned about being inclusive, about opening up, about doing materiality,
thinking about the materiality of texts, but never making a compromise on scholarship
is something I have learned here in Germany.
And well, then I also am the chief editor of two international book series with Bloomsbury.
One is the Introduction to World Philosophies and the Bloomsbury Studies and World Philosophies.
These three publication projects internationally are all wedded to and endows at Devasappan
canonical philosophy.
So I think that is an introduction, but it also allows me to talk more about the methodologies
we use in the project, but maybe after my co-panelist has had the ethics.
Yeah, my name is Marie-Gideot, I am from the Huygens Institute, Royal Academy of Arts
and Sciences in Amsterdam, and also a professor for a special appointment in Leiden for medieval
written culture.
And my involvement in this discussion is very literal, not philosophical at all, I would
say, because I'm not a philosopher, I'm a manuscript scholar.
And for the past 15 years or so, I've been studying not so much the center of the medieval
written page, but the area around it, the margin.
And I've made observations on what readers add to their texts in medieval manuscripts.
So that is how I think I can contribute to this discussion.
Because it is there that we find new material, material that hasn't been edited or studied
yet, but it's also there that we find evidence of an engagement with philosophical traditions
that goes against the accepted narrative of a philosophy of the Latin West beginning
in the 12th century, so to say.
So that's, I think, where I come in in this discussion.
Yes, so it's me, Sabrina Ebersmayer, Professor of Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen,
where I am the first and only woman with a permanent position and with a professorship
since the foundation of the university in the late 15th century, with, of course, philosophy
faculty always being there.
So that explains, perhaps, already or gives an indication why I'm sitting here.
So I started out as a Renaissance scholar and then moved into early modern philosophy.
And on the sideline, I always was struck by the fact of a strange gender divide in philosophy.
If you studied in Germany, so that was an experience in itself in philosophy departments.
So I don't know how it is now.
But just to say, I never, ever had experienced a female teacher.
And also the text we read were exclusively male authors, plus there were no references
to any female philosophers, except perhaps that there were some lovers around, like Eloise,
the lover of Abella, or Hannah, the lover of Heidegger or so, and that point, that was
all the information one got.
Yeah, so with a lot of sideways, I then, in the end, focused.
So that's my main research focus by now.
I study women's representation in the history of philosophy.
And these are usually two different tasks.
So the one is to look at the way histories of philosophies are usually written and reconstruct
how they work and how mechanisms of exclusion work and what kind of prejudices are already
involved in historical writings.
That is one part.
And the other part is, of course, studying, finding, studying, editing works written by
women philosophers.
When it comes to the first part, I think an issue when it comes to inclusion or diversifying
the canon in philosophy, one issue is, of course, the self-understanding of philosophy
as a discipline that strives for neutrality, for objectivity, to rigorous thought, to the
truth.
And I'm going along all the way along.
I'm very much into that.
That's why I was attracted to philosophy.
That's why we study philosophy.
But there is, of course, also this other side that we all situated somewhere.
And this insight that we are all situated somewhere and keep our own biases with us
and that they have an impact, that insight came into philosophy I would say rather late.
So other disciplines were very early on admitting that.
Philosophy kind of was always very much reluctant, at least in my experience, to accept that.
And of course, there had been feminist philosophers like Harding or Donna Haraway, or you can
even also go to, I mean, standard classical May philosophers.
You might think of Thomas Nagel and the View from Nowhere or Richard Rorty and his ideas
how that philosophy is not a natural kind, that we always kind of construct what philosophy
is as human beings.
So that is, I think, a conversation that we all should have about our situatedness and
how we then tell the history of philosophy.
And when it comes to the other point, women's contributions, so to say, I think the material
aspect comes in.
So the first very basic things, and I had this on one slide there as well, yes, so there
are all these women around from ancient times up to today, and we usually don't even know
their names.
They don't appear in our courses, not in the reference works we use.
If we want to include them, it's always a trouble and an issue, and you have to put
an extra effort, and why is that so?
So there's a lot to do that.
But of course, also, it's great.
I mean, you even find great texts like we, I don't find, right?
So texts are never ever really forgotten.
But for instance, we are working now on a critical edition of a philosophical treatise
written by a Danish philosopher, Birke de Tod, who was sometimes called the first Danish
feminist mid 17th century, because, for instance, she translated Seneca into Danish, and she
wrote a dedication to that huge and large book, and then that dedication was dedicated
to the women in Denmark.
And she said, well, you should all study philosophy, because that would make Denmark better, because
Plato already said, you know, everyone should be virtuous in the best society.
How can it be that we don't know about her?
And she also offered a chapter treatise on the way to a happy life.
How is it that this text has even not ever been edited?
So there are these two manuscripts, which we now digitalise, and we're preparing critical
edition and so on, but it has not been recognised or read or whatever.
So yeah, a lot of interesting things to say, I feel, I talk a lot, but I'll put that out.
Well, thanks.
All three of you, I have a short follow up question regarding that.
So all three of you, well, in so many, you use different terms, but you are all challenging
something in the work that you are doing.
And my question is, with your method of work, which obviously causes some disruption in
accepted narratives, if successfully integrated within a larger narrative, how would that
look like?
And maybe I'll ask you first, because you said some interesting things to me in conversation
regarding the beginning of scholasticism.
So yeah, I kind of put you in a corner there with that question.
Yes.
So I think I need my slides now.
It's just if you look at editions of the Latin philosophical texts that were read in the
ages, so Aristotelian texts of the Latin tradition in Latin translation and the Boethius texts,
you don't really see this.
You don't see the engagement that happened in the manuscripts with these texts.
And this has not been edited, these glosses and notes and marginal annotations, because
not because they were from women, but because they were anonymous.
We don't know any names of these marginal authors and also because marginal texts are
much more fluid, much more flexible than the standard texts in the middle of the page.
Well, at least for a large part of the written tradition, if you look at sermons, it may
be the same situation for the middle of the page and some other categories of texts as
well.
But in these marginal traditions, especially, it's just happening by the communities that
owned these manuscripts, that produced these manuscripts and that worked with these manuscripts.
So there's a lot of engagement already with philosophical texts, with dialectical texts
before Scholasticism, before Abenara and Eloice.
So yeah, that's the challenging things that we tried to work out in a project called Art
of Reasoning, where we also showed how methods of making arguments were picked up in these
early manuscripts and got their own visualizations, their own tools to start working in a dialectical
way with text and that grew into separate treatises in the periods of the medieval
universities and the later schools, but it's already there in the 9th century, 10th century,
11th century manuscripts.
So that's definitely something that we are challenging, yes.
Thank you.
Thanks.
So if there is a main narrative in philosophy about itself, that self-understanding of philosophy,
at least within Europe, is considered to be that discipline, which is an art, which allows
you to understand why you have the argument you have, and to be thoroughly able to understand
why you have the argument you have, you should be able to understand how other people are
challenging you.
If you are just doing a kind of an exegesis, which is completely canonical, it's nothing
but an exegesis, then I would challenge that philosopher to tell me why that argument is
a philosophical argument.
So I think the work I do is a work which there is a question as to why it should not be integrated
into an academic philosophy and anybody who suggests to me that they do not see a reason
for it has to give me convincing reasons as to why it should not be.
These convincing reasons, I have now not found those reasons to be convincing,
because then they're not even given.
This is point one.
Point two, when it comes to world philosophies, the term itself might be unfamiliar to many
people in the world, but the German language has that term, but philosophy is here in the
German tradition used, which is common and known to people in the academy.
This is the kind of philosophy we do.
We are using the tools of philosophy to basically make many world philosophy traditions known to
us, and the reasons for challenging the standard view of these world philosophical traditions,
again, goes back to that main narrative.
That main narrative of philosophy and even philosophy about itself has been, and especially
when it comes to the Asian traditions, a very extractivist mode.
It is to understand them for colonial reasons.
It is to understand them for reasons which feed into discourses here.
And the question is, do you really want to continue that extractivist mode today?
If so, why?
Again, give us convincing reasons.
Those reasons are not given.
And even if they were given, we'll have to find out why they're not given.
So I have no questions as to why we should not be done at my trial and visited Amsterdam.
I teach my courses parallel to the ones offered in the philosophy program.
And I think for students, it just enriches the perspectives they have.
So I am all for opening it up for that, whether you call it an integration,
whether you call it, you're going to use a better word.
I do not know.
We can debate that.
But there is no question as to why any university system in Europe, which says,
we do not want to operate, will have to show us why.
And why not?
Thanks.
Well, I think your question was what problems or how do we challenge?
How do we challenge?
Yes.
And what happens when it works?
Okay, so what do we challenge?
So I think to make it big, I would say there are for me at least two things at stake.
The one that one cannot avoid when doing the stuff that I'm doing is to ask at least always
the so-called great question, what is philosophy?
What is at the core of our discipline?
And philosophy has this slippery identity.
We're not really a science.
So we don't have that method we can all rely on.
So what is it really that that makes out of our identity?
And just my personal view is that I think this long tradition of exclusivity
and also this idea that it's only few, it's only the very smart and in the end,
the very few smart guys, it's in the end, the few geniuses who become philosophers.
And that is what is at the core of this discipline.
And if we open up to get different voices in, so-called minor voices and lived experiences
from different parts of society, then that picture is challenged.
So then in the end, what is philosophy then?
Is every thought a philosophical thought?
Does it have to be a specific text form or not or whatever?
So I think that's a very difficult question.
I'm not saying I have a clear answer there, but I think we're in this conversation about
when we do the kind of research that I'm doing.
And the other big topic that I think is that is patriarchy.
That is the idea looking back in history, at least if we just look at the so-called
Western tradition, as far as we can look back, society has been structured patriarchal.
Women were excluded, confined to the inner sphere,
where it had no place or very few places in the public sphere.
From the very beginning, there was this awkwardness, this hierarchy between women and men in our
history, as far as we can think back.
So given that these structures are still reflected in all our institutions,
all our textbook, all our understanding, all our history writing,
how can we just change all that by integrating or just reading now the history of philosophy?
I mean, there are a lot of people doing things, but I think during feminist history of philosophy
kind of contributes to rethinking our own past and patriarchal structure.
And that kind of still sits in our own minds as well.
So it's also not meant as any accusation to anyone of any specific gender.
It's just that it is implemented in the way we structured society, history, and our own minds.
Could I maybe add something to this?
Because I think that this bias or this narrowing mechanism for what we see when we look at texts
is also part of how the disciplines shaped us and how we are taught.
For example, the discipline of editing texts has greatly obscured a lot of text
in these material objects that transmitted philosophical traditions.
And also the fact that we don't know the names of people who wrote in these manuscripts,
or the fact that they couldn't gain authority because they were women or because they were
from a different background. So there's also a very
limiting gravity going from the disciplines themselves in which we are taught.
I think if I can add to that, this is a big problem. It's a problem because if you continue
to, as I see in that editorial work, if you continue to rely on fixed understandings of
what a tradition is and their understanding of people located outside your, it is very problematic.
It is problematic because very little attention is given to the source text itself.
It is much more about self-understanding and how people from other parts of the world are understood
in relation to a European thinker. There is very little thorough work happening on what
did the thinkers have to say for themselves. And I think especially not only is this problematic
in scholarship, it is especially problematic when we are teaching very young people
Eurocentric in the sense, literally centered on Europe, thinking when the world of our students
is going to be a very different world from that of ours. For many of the challenges the
world faces today, these students will have to think alongside other people situated in other
parts of the world. And it is, I think, I see it as my obligation as a pedagogical person, I mean
professional pedagogical person or teacher to see to it that I'm giving them the philosophical tools
to help them understand their reality outside that very narrow framing of this is my locale,
namely Europe. This is a privilege unfortunately they do not have anymore.
Okay, thank you, thank you very much for that. And well, what I get from each of you in a different
way is I took three things, one from each, well I took a lot more, but basically you were talking
about the idea of the genius, which is one person and this is the person who we research.
And you were talking about people who nobody cares about because they do not have names,
right? And you were talking about people put in front of other people where there is a pure
hierarchy, what is in the front and what is in the periphery. And this leads me to a question
that we have encountered in our research from a different perspective. We have noticed when
working with philosophical manuscripts that the philosophers are only part of the story because
you have a lot of people who have an active role philosophically in shaping the text, copying it,
translating it, annotating it, studying it, as we have just seen from yours. So I think there are
many reasons to rethink the idea of what or who is a philosophical agent and how should we define
and understand it and whether this idea of the soul genius working alone with a serious look
on their face surrounded by books has in a way run its course. And maybe we should look for new
ways to portray a philosophical agent. So I would like to hear your answers for that in no particular
order. Well, I can just start and give you some more time to think. So when teaching once a class
in philosophy, the student mentioned Brian Eno who is a musician who introduced this concept of
seniors in opposition to genius and seniors meaning that it's a scene of various things and
people that are active and creating something. And then of course someone can also stand out,
but it's never ever just this one individual person there. And well, me coming also from
the early modern period, I think early modern scholars are very much aware that a lot of the
philosophical thought in that period was communicated in networks. So the entire idea that one
write letters, I mean, it's always, Descartes is always a classical example that his works cover
just the first three or four volumes of the Dontanerie edition. The rest is just all the
letters he wrote. So there was a big network around. So yeah, I think we are now rethinking
this idea and researching within the networks. But just as a tiny small thing,
even if you do so and even if you reconstruct a lot of tiny authors or anecdotes or whatever,
you might still carry your biases with you. They might be colonial biases or gender biases.
Just an example is the Eubach week, right? This history of philosophy which brings so many
detailed information on very obscure figures and so on, but hardly any woman. So they are
just not part of it. So yeah, so I think even if we look at new approaches and see the benefits
of it, I think it's still important that we reconsider our own biases.
I find this very difficult, philosophical agency, because I'm not a philosopher.
But I can go back to a literal interpretation. And in one of my slides, maybe you can show it.
It's not this one. Well, yeah, the other one is better even. If you look at this manuscript,
I love your scenic, what was it? Senious interpretation, because here you see how
a crowd is annotating this manuscript, right? There's multiple hands commenting on the text
and multiple layers from earlier and from later. And in the other picture that you have,
you can see how little slips are added into the manuscript with extra texts. These are,
in fact, sometimes supporting texts, but also sometimes contradictory texts to create
examples of how authorities are sometimes speaking against each other. So yeah,
it's a crowd. Yeah, it's a crowd. And we don't know who the participants of these grounds were.
But it's still very interesting. And we should still study, I think, what's happening there.
And maybe the way to go is not making an edition of all these texts in the classical sense of the
words, but rather figuring out the methods of working with these texts. What did they do? How
did they process the text in the middle of the page? And can we see patterns there? Can we see
how they used images to create understanding or try out formulas to do synergistic reasoning or
just added slips with contradictory quotations? So yeah, I think that would be my answer, that
we could do that instead of going for the traditional editions that obscure
variants rather than highlighting it.
Yeah, thank you. So who virtualized at my doctor's supervisor taught me to take both sides of that
term very seriously, namely to be a philosopher and to be an agent. This is the work I have been
trained to understand and to do. It means for me, in my understanding, never accept any philosophical
position simply because somebody tells you the person who has that position is a powerful
philosopher. It always means do your own thinking. It always means never rely on secondary
literature. It always means go back to the source and do that reading yourself. It means piecing
together a puzzle which you have to learn to do yourself and then work in community across
disciplines to make that understanding understandable to you first. It, of course,
is in tension with any kind of a disciplinary understanding of philosophy because with that
interpretation of what it means to be a philosophical agent,
it will become difficult to understand the need for one particular canon.
And some of that work I have learned to do but also to appreciate because it has helped me a lot
in working across traditions but also working to understand that other disciplines might have
insights which I as a philosopher will need to understand. I cannot say, oh, by the way, no,
history. No, I don't know. I'm not a historian. I cannot do that. I need for my philosophical work
to borrow from different disciplines. Some of that work I have just finished doing,
completing in a monograph. That monograph took me a very long time. It is called this one. It's
called The Freedom to Know. I am engaging with the work of people there who according to my training
in this country would not qualify as philosophers, although some of them did have a disciplinary
this well trained in philosophy even here in Germany. But it is to learn to understand their
positions and to learn to understand their positions using philosophical notes.
Much of what they did a century ago is understandable today if you are familiar with
debates in social, critical social and political epistemology. It has to do with
not only the bias of being a philosopher, but it also has to do with knowledge extraction. It has
to do with cultural borrowing. It has to do with who borrows from whom under which conditions,
social hierarchy. And it has to do with the power differentials which determine whether
positions canonical or not. It is a work I think I would have not been able to do without that
training I got here in learning to understand what it means to be a philosopher when you
are simply challenging what is presented to you as a philosopher and as a philosopher,
disciplinary philosopher. So yes, that's my first answer. Thank you.
Does anyone want to follow up?
Okay, so I want to be a bit more practical at the moment. Monica, you just said
that you have to read, you have to go straight to the sources, right? But
there is a certain I would say process that texts and works should be subject to in order
for them to be available. And when we work on topics and corpora that are completely uncharted,
we have to make them visible, right? Because otherwise our horizon is as wide as what is
presented to us. But that means that we have to do some selections of our own. And there is no
shortage of material and all of that. And once you start looking it never ends, right?
So how do you pick and choose assuming that you have also some responsibility
over and above what you are personally interested in? And I know that all of you have a lot of
sources to work with. So it's a real practical challenge. I can go first if you want. Well,
in the World Philosophies Project, exactly because of those reasons, exactly because of the fact that
you will always, it is very difficult to find a standpoint which is free of pass. You might not,
as a human being, never find one. It is very difficult not to be selective. So in the World
Philosophies Project, we have learned to do philosophical work which does not claim from
the get-go that it is universal. In the Practical Guide to World Philosophies, the Int,
in our current volume, which I co-authored with my colleague Leah Kohev and so on, we are talking
about the colonial survey model which we have learned to depart from because it is simply as
a human being not possible to have a complete and comprehensive overview of a subject. All we can
do is a philosophy from ground up and then show the limitedness of that view. But it has to do
with a lot with the understanding of relational knowing which is being developed at the field.
It has a lot to do with standpoint epistemology and it has a lot to do with an intersubjective
understanding of what philosophy is. So with that, I am very comfortable to say whatever I offer
in a philosophical text is just one limited reading. We can discuss it but it is a limited
reading in a specific point in time and please, that is it.
I must say I feel very humbled and maybe also a bit chastised by your words,
saying that you need to think for yourself and be an agent. I did not really
think about myself like that, I was not trained. So I go where my personal interest leads me
and you are right, I can go to the margin because I read Latin and I have the
paleographical knowledge and I can interpret what I see. But that is a lot of training
in different disciplines with all their biases. So yeah, how that works out.
I think when I work with my students, I try to show them that the material object itself
has stories to tell and that we can try to unearth them, to piece them together
and that this is a really interesting thing to do. But yeah, it is just my enthusiasm, I think,
that I bring to the table and then interesting observations and conclusions. I do not have this
mission or vision or strategy that you actually have. Sorry.
I think my answer would be that when it comes to my own research,
the problem concerning the material and the selection and everything, I would say that is
not something specific to my current research interest in women's history or philosophy.
I think that was very similar to when I was working on different and other traditions.
So I once worked on commentaries and treatises on Plato's theory of love during the Renaissance,
once I worked on moral treatises of humanists. And in both projects, actually, there was always
a little bit the side questionnaires, this really philosophy. Usually also we hop from
Thomas Aquinas to Descartes or something. So I think there are a lot already in the
history of, in the standard history of philosophy, there is a lot of disagreement and renegotiation
and conversation about what is philosophy and how do we approach the history. But when it comes then
in the end to select, I think that is the kind of thing we learn by training, right? We read the
research literature, we study and screen first the sources, then we select the sources based on
our screening and the secondary literature, then we dive in and study in depth and contribute.
So I think that's very classical, so to say, in the way and not necessarily so much
specific and likely at least concerning the topic I'm investigating.
Okay, I want to touch on about maybe two last things.
Mark and you started to talk about it and also Monica regarding
this, the things that we do are still not what most people do in our respective fields.
There is still a specific dominance of certain things and topics and we have to work
in order to grow. What do you think are good ways to get students or get people to be interested
in the kind of things that we are talking about today and what kind of modifications would you
make in, I would say, philosophical training in order to be able to do this in a meaningful way
that does not try to reinvent the wheel and just reject everything because we do not,
I think, we do not want to do that.
Should I go first? Yeah, well, change in philosophical training, I don't know,
because I don't know about philosophical training, but let's say historical training or
manuscript training. So, what really helps me as a scholar to establish my new approach to manuscripts,
looking at the margin and the traces of readers and users of books,
what really helps me there is the digitization that is happening since the year 2000 or so.
So, many manuscripts have become visible online and we can see, we can search for Aristotle
and just compare hundreds of manuscripts of these texts and see how different
they were from place to place, from period to period, from audience to audience, from whatever
to whatever. So, that really helps to make new statements about the history of Aristotle in the
religious. You can just access all this material now from your own computer screen.
And so, what needs to be added to the training of someone researching this is that
they understand the world of digitalization and metadata added to these online libraries,
so that they can use them, but can also see how they present us again with a biased picture,
how only some manuscripts holding institutions are online and others are not,
how only some parts of the collection are digitized and other parts are not,
how only some of the description data about manuscripts are part of the metadata and others
are not. Marginal annotations are not. So, that's I think my task as a teacher also to
make students aware of that and as a scholar to try and influence that movement of creating these
online resources that everybody uses that have serious shortcomings. Yeah, that's what I would
answer to that. Thanks. For my current position in Amsterdam at the prize university,
I have no lack of interest of students. There are enough of students very interested in the
work we are doing. There is also because of my international network, there are enough
possibilities to involve colleagues so that young, especially doctoral students are in a conversation
with those of us who do this work in the international context.
I think so when it comes to philosophical training, it is possible given the setup in which I am today
to set this up for those doctoral students. However, I wish to see more in Europe
is the infrastructure to support this kind of training. It is simply happening because
it is possible because of the voluntary work of many colleagues who do not need to do this for me
abroad, but they do it to support the students in Europe. What we need here in Europe are
very different funding programs for doctoral students to be able to develop new ways of doing
philosophical research outside the standard understanding of philosophy. A lot of homework
has to be done because the scholarships and the funding schemes are all geared towards a very
standard understanding of what philosophy is and what it should be. That has to be seriously
rethought with people whose lives are affected by the philosophy which is done today. I would
like to see changes there. Yes, I think I have two points. When it comes to teaching, I would say
in my view, in my experience, it is now the students who changed quicker than we faculty
members or the universities. When I started, for instance, in Denmark, I don't know, 10 years ago,
teaching a class in history of philosophy or a lecture series, I introduced two women and then
there were some unhappy students with that. They said, oh, do we really have to, you know,
put the precious time on, for instance, Manner Wollstonecraft and Olympus of Bohemia,
the two of the two, and we have so much, so few time on lock, how can that be? Now, last year,
the students came to me, how can it be that we have only two women on the syllabus? Are
you serious about that? How can it be that we don't learn anything about philosophical
traditions out of the viewer? What kind of philosophy education is this year that you
are offering to us? So it's actually the students who challenge us to take up a little bit the pace
and react quicker on things, and I think that's a good thing. When it comes to disseminating in
research, what we are doing, I think, when it comes to my kind of research, the problem is how to
avoid the segregation or the ghettoization of feminist history or philosophy. So either you do
kind of a standard history of philosophy, and then you have maybe here and there, one, two women in,
or you do women's history of philosophy and then, you know, you present all these women thinkers,
and then this is all you read again by those who are interested in that tradition. And of course,
at some point in history, it's important to produce this research literature also so that
you have an amount of research literature you can engage with and to prepare tax editions and
everything. But of course, it's important to permit the standards of the mainstream philosophy,
and I think that's just, again, every one of us who has positions as editors of journals,
as organizers of conferences, as PIs of large research projects, everyone, actually, I think,
is the call on to having these questions in the back. And what I also sometimes try to do is
publish articles. For instance, we made an edition of a chapter of Beketa Todd's treatise,
it's about women's education, we made a critical edition in English translation,
and we did not, for instance, submit that to Hypatia, this journal on feminist history of
women's philosophy, it would have been a great choice, but we decided to send it to Vivarium,
because we thought, well, it's other kind of audience who reads Vivarium, and they are then
confronted with that text. So yeah, so I think it's a way ahead of us, but it's also a good way.
Well, thank you. So just one last question. So assuming that we
agree that we have some challenges ahead of us, although I only hear success stories
today, which is quite nice to know, are you in general optimistic or pessimistic or
undecided? Monica, you go first.
Well, I mean, I would like to answer your question by first asking you,
in regard to what? In regard, I began in Germany, writing in German, and at one point in time,
I had to take the decision to move the language, because I understood that people, the kind of
work I need to do for myself is the kind of work which is not available to me in the English,
the German language, given the limitedness of the categories available in that language,
on the terms on which I had to speak. So I moved languages. So when it comes to going back to
writing in German, I'm not, I cannot say I'm optimistic about writing again. Yeah, I would have
to, because my writing developed through the English language simply because certain debates
in philosophy and critical social and political epistemology are available in the English language.
I would have to borrow all those terms back into a German vocabulary, which is still being built up.
It's not there. So from that viewpoint, I am optimistic about my future as a philosopher in
a particular kind of debate. I would like to be more open and claim that I can write into languages
using the same vocabulary, but it is a different, difficult proposition, not because of the German
language. I'm very fluent in it. It is because the philosophical debates in that language are
not giving me the vocabulary I need. And it is then, it just takes me the double the amount of
time to write an article today in German. When I have to write something about which I'm writing
in the English language at the same time, if you understand what I mean, the vocabulary,
the philosophical vocabulary is not being built up on certain debates. And it is not being built up
simply because there is no representation there in the German context. So for this society, I wish
that more is done because this is a pluralistic society like any other one in Europe. And for
that, a particular vocabulary in academic philosophy will have to be built up and very soon.
It is extremely urgent for the society to begin doing it now and to understand that philosophy
is a lived tradition wherever in the world we live. It is not a tradition which is simply confined
to history and to the history of ideas. If that is anybody's understanding of philosophy, then we
will have to come back to the drawing table and discuss what that understanding is and why it
resulted. But a lot of real self-reflection has to be done. I don't know, I'm an optimistic person by
nature. But academic climate in the Netherlands is not very, yeah, I don't know. It's just really
difficult to see how the world around us is hardening and how
the value that we that we give to objects from the past
is diminishing. It's difficult to remain optimistic. I don't think that my discipline will survive
manuscript studies in the Netherlands in the future. So there will still be people
interested in manual manuscripts and we have them in our collections so there will still be
specialists. But the places where you can study it, for example, are just very few and in between
on the side. I think I do my best to make people enthusiastic about it and to write
about it and to spread the knowledge about it that we have and to try and curate everything.
But whether it will hold in the future, I don't know. Maybe I'm not an optimistic person
after all. Well, I think we are not talking politics now or world politics for that matter
because that's the different topic. But when it comes to my field of research and women's
history of philosophy, I would say I am optimistic for two reasons. And although of course one could
always argue and be a little bit, I don't know, exhausted because progress is so made so slow in
the end. But I would say, compared to when I started studying philosophy, I don't know,
some 30 years ago or something, or more, whatever. And now all the texts that are available,
all the research that is available, that's a huge difference. And so the younger philosophers grew
up in a totally different philosophical landscape. So I think that makes a huge difference. And also
I must say, just my personal experiences, I might perhaps even invoke Thomas Kuhl's paradigm shift.
You can't in the end change so much people's minds, but some people die out at some point,
and then a new generation comes in that holds different views. And just the conversations I
had in my career with mostly male colleagues, elder than me, naturally they were usually older
when I was younger. And that kind of conversations I had then, the kinds of things that were said
about women and philosophy, that is just, I don't hear it any longer. I don't have these conversations
any longer. All the colleagues younger than me, all those in positions and whatever, I have totally
different conversations with them about these topics. And as I already mentioned, the students
are even more curious and open to learn about these things. So in that sense, I'm very optimistic.
Well, yeah, perfect. So we have a range of views and a range of understandings of what optimism
is. And of course, what pessimism is. So thank you very much for the really rich conversation.
Thank you very much.