WEBVTT - autoGenerated 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:17.040 Welcome, everyone, to the first session of the second round of talks in our lecture series, 00:00:17.040 --> 00:00:18.040 Philosophy by Hand. 00:00:18.040 --> 00:00:23.800 And today, as you can see, we have a very special event by three wonderful guests. 00:00:23.800 --> 00:00:29.680 We have here Professor Omonika Kjelzkow-Stranbach from Amsterdam, and we have Professor Sabrina 00:00:29.680 --> 00:00:38.000 Ebbers-Meijer from Leiden, and from Copenhagen, I'm sorry, yes, I'm very excited that you're 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:39.000 here. 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:45.240 And also, we have two cameras today, and two Professor Americans, I went from Leiden, and 00:00:45.240 --> 00:00:52.920 I will give you a chance to introduce yourselves in a second, and that way, it will be more 00:00:52.920 --> 00:00:53.920 credible. 00:00:53.920 --> 00:01:00.080 I just want to say a few opening remarks. 00:01:00.080 --> 00:01:07.960 So last year, when we started this series, we were more in our comfort zone, meaning 00:01:07.960 --> 00:01:15.960 that we had talks that related to fields that are either our own, from the Hetman site project, 00:01:15.960 --> 00:01:21.840 the name is the Hebrew tradition, or neighboring traditions that have a shared history. 00:01:21.840 --> 00:01:27.000 So that would be the Arabic one, the Latin one, and the Greek one. 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:36.760 However, this year, we have become more ambitious, and we would like to both go wider and deeper, 00:01:36.760 --> 00:01:43.760 and by going wider, I mean we will have talks from other traditions that were not represented 00:01:43.760 --> 00:01:44.760 last year. 00:01:44.760 --> 00:01:50.200 And by deeper, I mean that we will also have more methodological engagement with what 00:01:50.200 --> 00:01:53.240 it is that we are doing here. 00:01:53.240 --> 00:02:03.240 Now, in my own project, my team and myself, we had this transfer from working on big names, 00:02:03.240 --> 00:02:09.360 to working on text, and to working on objects. 00:02:09.360 --> 00:02:21.000 And we realized that the material aspect of what we are doing has to be somehow engaged 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:27.760 with in a more theoretical way, because it has philosophical significance. 00:02:27.760 --> 00:02:31.800 It's not just places where we can use texts. 00:02:31.800 --> 00:02:42.120 So in order to do that, we have decided also to add a methodological aspect into this research, 00:02:42.120 --> 00:02:48.600 and also to see who else could be included when we try to widen the scope of philosophical 00:02:48.600 --> 00:02:57.000 agency and what is a philosophical object, and also what can be included within philosophical 00:02:57.000 --> 00:02:58.360 research. 00:02:58.360 --> 00:03:10.760 For that end, we decided to start this season of lectures with a roundtable discussion with 00:03:10.760 --> 00:03:18.400 three scholars, each of whom challenged the scope of what they were doing in different 00:03:18.400 --> 00:03:20.120 waves. 00:03:20.120 --> 00:03:27.920 And therefore, we would like to discuss together from different points of view the potential 00:03:28.480 --> 00:03:38.040 of looking at philosophical research, both from the widening and inclusion aspect, and 00:03:38.040 --> 00:03:42.280 from the material aspect, and also from the global aspect. 00:03:42.280 --> 00:03:50.000 So we are witnessing this kind of momentum right now in the scholarly world of widening 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:57.680 the philosophical spectrum, and there is more inclusion of marginalized traditions and groups 00:03:57.680 --> 00:04:05.400 and historical periods, and also there is a wider understanding of what is philosophical 00:04:05.400 --> 00:04:07.960 activity and who is a philosophical agent. 00:04:07.960 --> 00:04:13.880 Now, my question, with which I would like to start this roundtable, is how should we 00:04:13.880 --> 00:04:23.240 navigate within this new cluster of opportunity when doing philosophical research and research 00:04:23.240 --> 00:04:25.800 on the history of philosophy in general? 00:04:25.800 --> 00:04:33.880 Now, if we agree that the canon should be challenged and should be widened, then how? 00:04:33.880 --> 00:04:42.600 And how do we choose narratives, and how do we ask how material choices shape the histories 00:04:42.600 --> 00:04:44.120 we write? 00:04:44.120 --> 00:04:47.000 Where should we look? 00:04:47.000 --> 00:04:57.920 And what does it truly mean to produce an inclusive or exclusive history of philosophy? 00:04:57.920 --> 00:05:02.120 And I suggest maybe, Monica, you will start. 00:05:02.120 --> 00:05:03.120 Okay. 00:05:03.120 --> 00:05:05.560 Firstly, thank you. 00:05:05.560 --> 00:05:11.120 Thank you to the organizers for inviting me here to Hamburg. 00:05:11.120 --> 00:05:16.880 My journey in Devasappan philosophy begins right here in Germany, in Constance, where 00:05:16.880 --> 00:05:21.560 I have been trained, to Devasappan philosophy. 00:05:21.560 --> 00:05:23.560 That is my training. 00:05:23.560 --> 00:05:30.400 My supervisor, doctoral supervisor, was Hubert Schleshert from the Vienna Circle. 00:05:30.400 --> 00:05:40.320 For him, when I came from India to Germany in the 90s, it was to, he saw it as his task 00:05:40.320 --> 00:05:48.080 to teach me to do a philosophy which would allow me to make sense of my experience in 00:05:48.080 --> 00:05:50.960 Germany using philosophical tools. 00:05:50.960 --> 00:05:56.720 So right from the get-go, my training in philosophy has been to Devasappan philosophy for my own 00:05:56.720 --> 00:06:01.400 survival as a person of color here in Germany. 00:06:01.400 --> 00:06:06.960 This led me to initiating and co-founding the International Journal today. 00:06:06.960 --> 00:06:09.040 It is the Journal of World Philosophies. 00:06:09.040 --> 00:06:11.040 The Journal has turned 10. 00:06:11.040 --> 00:06:16.800 We began here in Germany with Karl Alba, and then very soon, because of the international 00:06:16.800 --> 00:06:23.160 interest in the work we were doing, moved to Indiana University Press in the US, where 00:06:23.160 --> 00:06:27.440 we continue to be. 00:06:27.440 --> 00:06:33.760 Everything you mentioned about being inclusive, about opening up, about doing materiality, 00:06:33.760 --> 00:06:40.120 thinking about the materiality of texts, but never making a compromise on scholarship 00:06:40.120 --> 00:06:43.800 is something I have learned here in Germany. 00:06:43.800 --> 00:06:53.280 And well, then I also am the chief editor of two international book series with Bloomsbury. 00:06:53.280 --> 00:06:58.840 One is the Introduction to World Philosophies and the Bloomsbury Studies and World Philosophies. 00:06:58.840 --> 00:07:07.080 These three publication projects internationally are all wedded to and endows at Devasappan 00:07:07.080 --> 00:07:09.040 canonical philosophy. 00:07:09.040 --> 00:07:16.080 So I think that is an introduction, but it also allows me to talk more about the methodologies 00:07:16.080 --> 00:07:21.760 we use in the project, but maybe after my co-panelist has had the ethics. 00:07:21.760 --> 00:07:33.400 Yeah, my name is Marie-Gideot, I am from the Huygens Institute, Royal Academy of Arts 00:07:33.400 --> 00:07:44.840 and Sciences in Amsterdam, and also a professor for a special appointment in Leiden for medieval 00:07:44.840 --> 00:07:46.800 written culture. 00:07:46.800 --> 00:07:56.240 And my involvement in this discussion is very literal, not philosophical at all, I would 00:07:56.240 --> 00:08:02.400 say, because I'm not a philosopher, I'm a manuscript scholar. 00:08:02.400 --> 00:08:11.040 And for the past 15 years or so, I've been studying not so much the center of the medieval 00:08:11.040 --> 00:08:16.720 written page, but the area around it, the margin. 00:08:16.720 --> 00:08:26.600 And I've made observations on what readers add to their texts in medieval manuscripts. 00:08:26.600 --> 00:08:35.560 So that is how I think I can contribute to this discussion. 00:08:35.560 --> 00:08:42.920 Because it is there that we find new material, material that hasn't been edited or studied 00:08:42.920 --> 00:08:55.760 yet, but it's also there that we find evidence of an engagement with philosophical traditions 00:08:55.760 --> 00:09:06.400 that goes against the accepted narrative of a philosophy of the Latin West beginning 00:09:06.400 --> 00:09:08.560 in the 12th century, so to say. 00:09:08.560 --> 00:09:14.160 So that's, I think, where I come in in this discussion. 00:09:14.160 --> 00:09:26.520 Yes, so it's me, Sabrina Ebersmayer, Professor of Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen, 00:09:26.520 --> 00:09:34.280 where I am the first and only woman with a permanent position and with a professorship 00:09:34.280 --> 00:09:40.000 since the foundation of the university in the late 15th century, with, of course, philosophy 00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:42.720 faculty always being there. 00:09:42.720 --> 00:09:48.160 So that explains, perhaps, already or gives an indication why I'm sitting here. 00:09:48.160 --> 00:09:55.400 So I started out as a Renaissance scholar and then moved into early modern philosophy. 00:09:55.400 --> 00:10:04.560 And on the sideline, I always was struck by the fact of a strange gender divide in philosophy. 00:10:04.560 --> 00:10:10.240 If you studied in Germany, so that was an experience in itself in philosophy departments. 00:10:10.240 --> 00:10:12.280 So I don't know how it is now. 00:10:12.280 --> 00:10:16.360 But just to say, I never, ever had experienced a female teacher. 00:10:16.360 --> 00:10:22.760 And also the text we read were exclusively male authors, plus there were no references 00:10:22.760 --> 00:10:29.680 to any female philosophers, except perhaps that there were some lovers around, like Eloise, 00:10:29.680 --> 00:10:35.800 the lover of Abella, or Hannah, the lover of Heidegger or so, and that point, that was 00:10:35.800 --> 00:10:38.200 all the information one got. 00:10:38.800 --> 00:10:44.000 Yeah, so with a lot of sideways, I then, in the end, focused. 00:10:44.000 --> 00:10:47.040 So that's my main research focus by now. 00:10:47.040 --> 00:10:50.640 I study women's representation in the history of philosophy. 00:10:50.640 --> 00:10:57.400 And these are usually two different tasks. 00:10:57.400 --> 00:11:05.960 So the one is to look at the way histories of philosophies are usually written and reconstruct 00:11:05.960 --> 00:11:14.040 how they work and how mechanisms of exclusion work and what kind of prejudices are already 00:11:14.040 --> 00:11:16.640 involved in historical writings. 00:11:16.640 --> 00:11:17.640 That is one part. 00:11:17.640 --> 00:11:22.560 And the other part is, of course, studying, finding, studying, editing works written by 00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:25.760 women philosophers. 00:11:25.760 --> 00:11:32.400 When it comes to the first part, I think an issue when it comes to inclusion or diversifying 00:11:32.400 --> 00:11:38.400 the canon in philosophy, one issue is, of course, the self-understanding of philosophy 00:11:38.400 --> 00:11:45.400 as a discipline that strives for neutrality, for objectivity, to rigorous thought, to the 00:11:45.400 --> 00:11:46.400 truth. 00:11:46.400 --> 00:11:48.280 And I'm going along all the way along. 00:11:48.280 --> 00:11:50.080 I'm very much into that. 00:11:50.080 --> 00:11:51.920 That's why I was attracted to philosophy. 00:11:51.920 --> 00:11:54.240 That's why we study philosophy. 00:11:54.240 --> 00:11:59.280 But there is, of course, also this other side that we all situated somewhere. 00:11:59.280 --> 00:12:04.680 And this insight that we are all situated somewhere and keep our own biases with us 00:12:04.680 --> 00:12:10.840 and that they have an impact, that insight came into philosophy I would say rather late. 00:12:10.840 --> 00:12:14.920 So other disciplines were very early on admitting that. 00:12:14.920 --> 00:12:19.320 Philosophy kind of was always very much reluctant, at least in my experience, to accept that. 00:12:19.320 --> 00:12:25.400 And of course, there had been feminist philosophers like Harding or Donna Haraway, or you can 00:12:25.400 --> 00:12:30.000 even also go to, I mean, standard classical May philosophers. 00:12:30.000 --> 00:12:37.960 You might think of Thomas Nagel and the View from Nowhere or Richard Rorty and his ideas 00:12:37.960 --> 00:12:43.360 how that philosophy is not a natural kind, that we always kind of construct what philosophy 00:12:43.360 --> 00:12:46.000 is as human beings. 00:12:46.000 --> 00:12:52.960 So that is, I think, a conversation that we all should have about our situatedness and 00:12:52.960 --> 00:12:57.080 how we then tell the history of philosophy. 00:12:57.080 --> 00:13:02.920 And when it comes to the other point, women's contributions, so to say, I think the material 00:13:02.920 --> 00:13:04.520 aspect comes in. 00:13:04.520 --> 00:13:10.520 So the first very basic things, and I had this on one slide there as well, yes, so there 00:13:10.520 --> 00:13:16.080 are all these women around from ancient times up to today, and we usually don't even know 00:13:16.080 --> 00:13:17.080 their names. 00:13:17.080 --> 00:13:21.000 They don't appear in our courses, not in the reference works we use. 00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:24.440 If we want to include them, it's always a trouble and an issue, and you have to put 00:13:24.440 --> 00:13:26.520 an extra effort, and why is that so? 00:13:26.520 --> 00:13:29.120 So there's a lot to do that. 00:13:29.120 --> 00:13:30.840 But of course, also, it's great. 00:13:30.840 --> 00:13:36.040 I mean, you even find great texts like we, I don't find, right? 00:13:36.040 --> 00:13:38.920 So texts are never ever really forgotten. 00:13:38.920 --> 00:13:45.520 But for instance, we are working now on a critical edition of a philosophical treatise 00:13:45.520 --> 00:13:51.640 written by a Danish philosopher, Birke de Tod, who was sometimes called the first Danish 00:13:51.640 --> 00:14:00.320 feminist mid 17th century, because, for instance, she translated Seneca into Danish, and she 00:14:00.320 --> 00:14:06.880 wrote a dedication to that huge and large book, and then that dedication was dedicated 00:14:06.880 --> 00:14:07.880 to the women in Denmark. 00:14:07.880 --> 00:14:13.200 And she said, well, you should all study philosophy, because that would make Denmark better, because 00:14:13.200 --> 00:14:19.400 Plato already said, you know, everyone should be virtuous in the best society. 00:14:19.400 --> 00:14:21.760 How can it be that we don't know about her? 00:14:21.760 --> 00:14:27.000 And she also offered a chapter treatise on the way to a happy life. 00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:32.760 How is it that this text has even not ever been edited? 00:14:32.760 --> 00:14:37.400 So there are these two manuscripts, which we now digitalise, and we're preparing critical 00:14:37.400 --> 00:14:42.600 edition and so on, but it has not been recognised or read or whatever. 00:14:42.600 --> 00:14:50.680 So yeah, a lot of interesting things to say, I feel, I talk a lot, but I'll put that out. 00:14:50.680 --> 00:14:51.680 Well, thanks. 00:14:51.680 --> 00:14:58.360 All three of you, I have a short follow up question regarding that. 00:14:58.360 --> 00:15:08.480 So all three of you, well, in so many, you use different terms, but you are all challenging 00:15:08.480 --> 00:15:15.320 something in the work that you are doing. 00:15:15.320 --> 00:15:27.920 And my question is, with your method of work, which obviously causes some disruption in 00:15:27.920 --> 00:15:38.160 accepted narratives, if successfully integrated within a larger narrative, how would that 00:15:38.160 --> 00:15:39.960 look like? 00:15:39.960 --> 00:15:45.240 And maybe I'll ask you first, because you said some interesting things to me in conversation 00:15:45.240 --> 00:15:48.440 regarding the beginning of scholasticism. 00:15:48.440 --> 00:15:53.040 So yeah, I kind of put you in a corner there with that question. 00:15:53.040 --> 00:15:54.040 Yes. 00:15:54.040 --> 00:15:57.200 So I think I need my slides now. 00:15:57.200 --> 00:16:07.200 It's just if you look at editions of the Latin philosophical texts that were read in the 00:16:07.240 --> 00:16:17.160 ages, so Aristotelian texts of the Latin tradition in Latin translation and the Boethius texts, 00:16:17.160 --> 00:16:19.800 you don't really see this. 00:16:19.800 --> 00:16:27.240 You don't see the engagement that happened in the manuscripts with these texts. 00:16:27.240 --> 00:16:35.000 And this has not been edited, these glosses and notes and marginal annotations, because 00:16:35.000 --> 00:16:39.120 not because they were from women, but because they were anonymous. 00:16:39.120 --> 00:16:49.040 We don't know any names of these marginal authors and also because marginal texts are 00:16:49.040 --> 00:16:57.760 much more fluid, much more flexible than the standard texts in the middle of the page. 00:16:57.760 --> 00:17:03.920 Well, at least for a large part of the written tradition, if you look at sermons, it may 00:17:04.040 --> 00:17:11.040 be the same situation for the middle of the page and some other categories of texts as 00:17:11.040 --> 00:17:11.800 well. 00:17:11.800 --> 00:17:20.840 But in these marginal traditions, especially, it's just happening by the communities that 00:17:20.840 --> 00:17:26.880 owned these manuscripts, that produced these manuscripts and that worked with these manuscripts. 00:17:26.880 --> 00:17:36.240 So there's a lot of engagement already with philosophical texts, with dialectical texts 00:17:36.240 --> 00:17:42.480 before Scholasticism, before Abenara and Eloice. 00:17:42.480 --> 00:17:50.000 So yeah, that's the challenging things that we tried to work out in a project called Art 00:17:50.000 --> 00:18:00.800 of Reasoning, where we also showed how methods of making arguments were picked up in these 00:18:00.800 --> 00:18:14.640 early manuscripts and got their own visualizations, their own tools to start working in a dialectical 00:18:14.640 --> 00:18:22.880 way with text and that grew into separate treatises in the periods of the medieval 00:18:22.880 --> 00:18:30.320 universities and the later schools, but it's already there in the 9th century, 10th century, 00:18:30.320 --> 00:18:32.720 11th century manuscripts. 00:18:32.720 --> 00:18:37.040 So that's definitely something that we are challenging, yes. 00:18:38.480 --> 00:18:38.880 Thank you. 00:18:38.880 --> 00:18:39.520 Thanks. 00:18:39.520 --> 00:18:57.360 So if there is a main narrative in philosophy about itself, that self-understanding of philosophy, 00:18:57.360 --> 00:19:04.720 at least within Europe, is considered to be that discipline, which is an art, which allows 00:19:04.720 --> 00:19:10.800 you to understand why you have the argument you have, and to be thoroughly able to understand 00:19:10.800 --> 00:19:15.280 why you have the argument you have, you should be able to understand how other people are 00:19:15.280 --> 00:19:16.000 challenging you. 00:19:16.800 --> 00:19:24.240 If you are just doing a kind of an exegesis, which is completely canonical, it's nothing 00:19:24.240 --> 00:19:29.840 but an exegesis, then I would challenge that philosopher to tell me why that argument is 00:19:29.840 --> 00:19:30.960 a philosophical argument. 00:19:31.680 --> 00:19:40.960 So I think the work I do is a work which there is a question as to why it should not be integrated 00:19:41.920 --> 00:19:49.520 into an academic philosophy and anybody who suggests to me that they do not see a reason 00:19:49.520 --> 00:19:53.520 for it has to give me convincing reasons as to why it should not be. 00:19:54.480 --> 00:20:02.080 These convincing reasons, I have now not found those reasons to be convincing, 00:20:02.080 --> 00:20:03.280 because then they're not even given. 00:20:04.400 --> 00:20:05.680 This is point one. 00:20:05.680 --> 00:20:12.320 Point two, when it comes to world philosophies, the term itself might be unfamiliar to many 00:20:12.320 --> 00:20:17.600 people in the world, but the German language has that term, but philosophy is here in the 00:20:17.600 --> 00:20:23.680 German tradition used, which is common and known to people in the academy. 00:20:25.120 --> 00:20:27.760 This is the kind of philosophy we do. 00:20:27.760 --> 00:20:35.760 We are using the tools of philosophy to basically make many world philosophy traditions known to 00:20:35.760 --> 00:20:40.880 us, and the reasons for challenging the standard view of these world philosophical traditions, 00:20:40.880 --> 00:20:43.200 again, goes back to that main narrative. 00:20:43.200 --> 00:20:48.640 That main narrative of philosophy and even philosophy about itself has been, and especially 00:20:48.640 --> 00:20:53.360 when it comes to the Asian traditions, a very extractivist mode. 00:20:53.360 --> 00:20:57.120 It is to understand them for colonial reasons. 00:20:57.120 --> 00:21:02.000 It is to understand them for reasons which feed into discourses here. 00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:06.320 And the question is, do you really want to continue that extractivist mode today? 00:21:07.200 --> 00:21:08.080 If so, why? 00:21:08.080 --> 00:21:10.480 Again, give us convincing reasons. 00:21:10.480 --> 00:21:12.080 Those reasons are not given. 00:21:12.080 --> 00:21:15.200 And even if they were given, we'll have to find out why they're not given. 00:21:15.200 --> 00:21:21.440 So I have no questions as to why we should not be done at my trial and visited Amsterdam. 00:21:21.440 --> 00:21:28.800 I teach my courses parallel to the ones offered in the philosophy program. 00:21:28.800 --> 00:21:32.400 And I think for students, it just enriches the perspectives they have. 00:21:33.120 --> 00:21:39.920 So I am all for opening it up for that, whether you call it an integration, 00:21:39.920 --> 00:21:41.920 whether you call it, you're going to use a better word. 00:21:41.920 --> 00:21:42.800 I do not know. 00:21:42.800 --> 00:21:43.760 We can debate that. 00:21:44.560 --> 00:21:50.640 But there is no question as to why any university system in Europe, which says, 00:21:51.840 --> 00:21:53.920 we do not want to operate, will have to show us why. 00:21:54.640 --> 00:21:55.280 And why not? 00:21:56.560 --> 00:21:56.880 Thanks. 00:22:01.200 --> 00:22:08.720 Well, I think your question was what problems or how do we challenge? 00:22:08.720 --> 00:22:09.920 How do we challenge? 00:22:09.920 --> 00:22:10.420 Yes. 00:22:11.520 --> 00:22:13.200 And what happens when it works? 00:22:16.480 --> 00:22:18.880 Okay, so what do we challenge? 00:22:18.880 --> 00:22:27.600 So I think to make it big, I would say there are for me at least two things at stake. 00:22:28.160 --> 00:22:36.160 The one that one cannot avoid when doing the stuff that I'm doing is to ask at least always 00:22:36.160 --> 00:22:40.080 the so-called great question, what is philosophy? 00:22:40.720 --> 00:22:42.720 What is at the core of our discipline? 00:22:43.360 --> 00:22:47.200 And philosophy has this slippery identity. 00:22:47.200 --> 00:22:48.720 We're not really a science. 00:22:48.720 --> 00:22:52.240 So we don't have that method we can all rely on. 00:22:52.240 --> 00:22:56.480 So what is it really that that makes out of our identity? 00:22:56.480 --> 00:23:05.200 And just my personal view is that I think this long tradition of exclusivity 00:23:06.160 --> 00:23:09.920 and also this idea that it's only few, it's only the very smart and in the end, 00:23:09.920 --> 00:23:15.200 the very few smart guys, it's in the end, the few geniuses who become philosophers. 00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:19.200 And that is what is at the core of this discipline. 00:23:19.200 --> 00:23:26.880 And if we open up to get different voices in, so-called minor voices and lived experiences 00:23:26.880 --> 00:23:32.480 from different parts of society, then that picture is challenged. 00:23:32.480 --> 00:23:34.720 So then in the end, what is philosophy then? 00:23:34.720 --> 00:23:36.720 Is every thought a philosophical thought? 00:23:39.360 --> 00:23:43.200 Does it have to be a specific text form or not or whatever? 00:23:43.200 --> 00:23:46.400 So I think that's a very difficult question. 00:23:46.400 --> 00:23:51.520 I'm not saying I have a clear answer there, but I think we're in this conversation about 00:23:53.440 --> 00:23:57.040 when we do the kind of research that I'm doing. 00:23:57.040 --> 00:24:03.360 And the other big topic that I think is that is patriarchy. 00:24:04.160 --> 00:24:12.960 That is the idea looking back in history, at least if we just look at the so-called 00:24:12.960 --> 00:24:20.720 Western tradition, as far as we can look back, society has been structured patriarchal. 00:24:21.680 --> 00:24:26.720 Women were excluded, confined to the inner sphere, 00:24:27.760 --> 00:24:30.880 where it had no place or very few places in the public sphere. 00:24:33.040 --> 00:24:38.240 From the very beginning, there was this awkwardness, this hierarchy between women and men in our 00:24:39.840 --> 00:24:42.000 history, as far as we can think back. 00:24:42.800 --> 00:24:47.360 So given that these structures are still reflected in all our institutions, 00:24:47.360 --> 00:24:51.200 all our textbook, all our understanding, all our history writing, 00:24:52.720 --> 00:24:58.880 how can we just change all that by integrating or just reading now the history of philosophy? 00:24:58.880 --> 00:25:04.080 I mean, there are a lot of people doing things, but I think during feminist history of philosophy 00:25:04.080 --> 00:25:10.800 kind of contributes to rethinking our own past and patriarchal structure. 00:25:10.800 --> 00:25:14.480 And that kind of still sits in our own minds as well. 00:25:14.480 --> 00:25:20.880 So it's also not meant as any accusation to anyone of any specific gender. 00:25:21.600 --> 00:25:27.840 It's just that it is implemented in the way we structured society, history, and our own minds. 00:25:34.880 --> 00:25:36.720 Could I maybe add something to this? 00:25:36.720 --> 00:25:50.640 Because I think that this bias or this narrowing mechanism for what we see when we look at texts 00:25:51.200 --> 00:26:03.680 is also part of how the disciplines shaped us and how we are taught. 00:26:03.680 --> 00:26:11.440 For example, the discipline of editing texts has greatly obscured a lot of text 00:26:13.120 --> 00:26:20.160 in these material objects that transmitted philosophical traditions. 00:26:23.760 --> 00:26:31.200 And also the fact that we don't know the names of people who wrote in these manuscripts, 00:26:31.200 --> 00:26:38.960 or the fact that they couldn't gain authority because they were women or because they were 00:26:40.080 --> 00:26:45.520 from a different background. So there's also a very 00:26:47.040 --> 00:26:56.160 limiting gravity going from the disciplines themselves in which we are taught. 00:26:56.160 --> 00:27:04.400 I think if I can add to that, this is a big problem. It's a problem because if you continue 00:27:04.400 --> 00:27:12.880 to, as I see in that editorial work, if you continue to rely on fixed understandings of 00:27:13.920 --> 00:27:19.520 what a tradition is and their understanding of people located outside your, it is very problematic. 00:27:20.480 --> 00:27:25.920 It is problematic because very little attention is given to the source text itself. 00:27:25.920 --> 00:27:34.320 It is much more about self-understanding and how people from other parts of the world are understood 00:27:34.320 --> 00:27:42.160 in relation to a European thinker. There is very little thorough work happening on what 00:27:42.160 --> 00:27:50.240 did the thinkers have to say for themselves. And I think especially not only is this problematic 00:27:50.240 --> 00:27:55.360 in scholarship, it is especially problematic when we are teaching very young people 00:27:58.080 --> 00:28:06.320 Eurocentric in the sense, literally centered on Europe, thinking when the world of our students 00:28:06.320 --> 00:28:11.680 is going to be a very different world from that of ours. For many of the challenges the 00:28:11.680 --> 00:28:16.640 world faces today, these students will have to think alongside other people situated in other 00:28:16.640 --> 00:28:23.680 parts of the world. And it is, I think, I see it as my obligation as a pedagogical person, I mean 00:28:23.680 --> 00:28:30.880 professional pedagogical person or teacher to see to it that I'm giving them the philosophical tools 00:28:30.880 --> 00:28:40.720 to help them understand their reality outside that very narrow framing of this is my locale, 00:28:40.720 --> 00:28:45.920 namely Europe. This is a privilege unfortunately they do not have anymore. 00:28:45.920 --> 00:29:00.800 Okay, thank you, thank you very much for that. And well, what I get from each of you in a different 00:29:00.800 --> 00:29:10.560 way is I took three things, one from each, well I took a lot more, but basically you were talking 00:29:10.560 --> 00:29:18.400 about the idea of the genius, which is one person and this is the person who we research. 00:29:20.080 --> 00:29:25.520 And you were talking about people who nobody cares about because they do not have names, 00:29:26.880 --> 00:29:33.600 right? And you were talking about people put in front of other people where there is a pure 00:29:33.600 --> 00:29:41.680 hierarchy, what is in the front and what is in the periphery. And this leads me to a question 00:29:41.680 --> 00:29:48.080 that we have encountered in our research from a different perspective. We have noticed when 00:29:48.080 --> 00:29:54.720 working with philosophical manuscripts that the philosophers are only part of the story because 00:29:54.720 --> 00:30:04.320 you have a lot of people who have an active role philosophically in shaping the text, copying it, 00:30:04.320 --> 00:30:10.720 translating it, annotating it, studying it, as we have just seen from yours. So I think there are 00:30:10.720 --> 00:30:21.360 many reasons to rethink the idea of what or who is a philosophical agent and how should we define 00:30:21.840 --> 00:30:29.040 and understand it and whether this idea of the soul genius working alone with a serious look 00:30:29.680 --> 00:30:37.680 on their face surrounded by books has in a way run its course. And maybe we should look for new 00:30:37.680 --> 00:30:44.640 ways to portray a philosophical agent. So I would like to hear your answers for that in no particular 00:30:44.640 --> 00:30:56.640 order. Well, I can just start and give you some more time to think. So when teaching once a class 00:30:56.640 --> 00:31:07.040 in philosophy, the student mentioned Brian Eno who is a musician who introduced this concept of 00:31:07.040 --> 00:31:15.600 seniors in opposition to genius and seniors meaning that it's a scene of various things and 00:31:15.600 --> 00:31:20.240 people that are active and creating something. And then of course someone can also stand out, 00:31:20.240 --> 00:31:28.720 but it's never ever just this one individual person there. And well, me coming also from 00:31:28.880 --> 00:31:38.160 the early modern period, I think early modern scholars are very much aware that a lot of the 00:31:38.160 --> 00:31:49.120 philosophical thought in that period was communicated in networks. So the entire idea that one 00:31:50.800 --> 00:31:55.840 write letters, I mean, it's always, Descartes is always a classical example that his works cover 00:31:55.840 --> 00:32:00.640 just the first three or four volumes of the Dontanerie edition. The rest is just all the 00:32:00.640 --> 00:32:13.280 letters he wrote. So there was a big network around. So yeah, I think we are now rethinking 00:32:14.560 --> 00:32:23.920 this idea and researching within the networks. But just as a tiny small thing, 00:32:24.720 --> 00:32:32.560 even if you do so and even if you reconstruct a lot of tiny authors or anecdotes or whatever, 00:32:33.120 --> 00:32:40.080 you might still carry your biases with you. They might be colonial biases or gender biases. 00:32:40.080 --> 00:32:47.040 Just an example is the Eubach week, right? This history of philosophy which brings so many 00:32:47.040 --> 00:32:54.880 detailed information on very obscure figures and so on, but hardly any woman. So they are 00:32:54.880 --> 00:33:04.240 just not part of it. So yeah, so I think even if we look at new approaches and see the benefits 00:33:04.240 --> 00:33:09.360 of it, I think it's still important that we reconsider our own biases. 00:33:09.360 --> 00:33:21.200 I find this very difficult, philosophical agency, because I'm not a philosopher. 00:33:23.120 --> 00:33:35.520 But I can go back to a literal interpretation. And in one of my slides, maybe you can show it. 00:33:35.520 --> 00:33:44.880 It's not this one. Well, yeah, the other one is better even. If you look at this manuscript, 00:33:45.520 --> 00:33:56.960 I love your scenic, what was it? Senious interpretation, because here you see how 00:33:56.960 --> 00:34:06.400 a crowd is annotating this manuscript, right? There's multiple hands commenting on the text 00:34:06.400 --> 00:34:14.800 and multiple layers from earlier and from later. And in the other picture that you have, 00:34:14.800 --> 00:34:22.400 you can see how little slips are added into the manuscript with extra texts. These are, 00:34:22.400 --> 00:34:30.480 in fact, sometimes supporting texts, but also sometimes contradictory texts to create 00:34:33.600 --> 00:34:40.400 examples of how authorities are sometimes speaking against each other. So yeah, 00:34:43.040 --> 00:34:49.600 it's a crowd. Yeah, it's a crowd. And we don't know who the participants of these grounds were. 00:34:49.600 --> 00:34:58.240 But it's still very interesting. And we should still study, I think, what's happening there. 00:34:58.800 --> 00:35:10.000 And maybe the way to go is not making an edition of all these texts in the classical sense of the 00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:20.080 words, but rather figuring out the methods of working with these texts. What did they do? How 00:35:20.080 --> 00:35:28.000 did they process the text in the middle of the page? And can we see patterns there? Can we see 00:35:28.000 --> 00:35:43.520 how they used images to create understanding or try out formulas to do synergistic reasoning or 00:35:45.680 --> 00:35:56.480 just added slips with contradictory quotations? So yeah, I think that would be my answer, that 00:35:56.480 --> 00:36:02.880 we could do that instead of going for the traditional editions that obscure 00:36:06.800 --> 00:36:09.120 variants rather than highlighting it. 00:36:12.640 --> 00:36:20.960 Yeah, thank you. So who virtualized at my doctor's supervisor taught me to take both sides of that 00:36:20.960 --> 00:36:30.000 term very seriously, namely to be a philosopher and to be an agent. This is the work I have been 00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:40.880 trained to understand and to do. It means for me, in my understanding, never accept any philosophical 00:36:40.880 --> 00:36:45.600 position simply because somebody tells you the person who has that position is a powerful 00:36:45.600 --> 00:36:51.680 philosopher. It always means do your own thinking. It always means never rely on secondary 00:36:51.680 --> 00:36:57.680 literature. It always means go back to the source and do that reading yourself. It means piecing 00:36:57.680 --> 00:37:04.560 together a puzzle which you have to learn to do yourself and then work in community across 00:37:04.560 --> 00:37:11.200 disciplines to make that understanding understandable to you first. It, of course, 00:37:12.080 --> 00:37:18.880 is in tension with any kind of a disciplinary understanding of philosophy because with that 00:37:22.480 --> 00:37:25.360 interpretation of what it means to be a philosophical agent, 00:37:25.360 --> 00:37:31.520 it will become difficult to understand the need for one particular canon. 00:37:31.520 --> 00:37:44.000 And some of that work I have learned to do but also to appreciate because it has helped me a lot 00:37:44.560 --> 00:37:53.920 in working across traditions but also working to understand that other disciplines might have 00:37:53.920 --> 00:37:58.480 insights which I as a philosopher will need to understand. I cannot say, oh, by the way, no, 00:37:58.480 --> 00:38:05.040 history. No, I don't know. I'm not a historian. I cannot do that. I need for my philosophical work 00:38:05.040 --> 00:38:10.960 to borrow from different disciplines. Some of that work I have just finished doing, 00:38:10.960 --> 00:38:17.120 completing in a monograph. That monograph took me a very long time. It is called this one. It's 00:38:17.120 --> 00:38:24.480 called The Freedom to Know. I am engaging with the work of people there who according to my training 00:38:24.480 --> 00:38:30.880 in this country would not qualify as philosophers, although some of them did have a disciplinary 00:38:31.440 --> 00:38:38.560 this well trained in philosophy even here in Germany. But it is to learn to understand their 00:38:38.560 --> 00:38:43.040 positions and to learn to understand their positions using philosophical notes. 00:38:44.000 --> 00:38:50.800 Much of what they did a century ago is understandable today if you are familiar with 00:38:50.800 --> 00:38:55.520 debates in social, critical social and political epistemology. It has to do with 00:38:56.880 --> 00:39:02.640 not only the bias of being a philosopher, but it also has to do with knowledge extraction. It has 00:39:02.640 --> 00:39:08.080 to do with cultural borrowing. It has to do with who borrows from whom under which conditions, 00:39:08.080 --> 00:39:14.400 social hierarchy. And it has to do with the power differentials which determine whether 00:39:14.400 --> 00:39:21.760 positions canonical or not. It is a work I think I would have not been able to do without that 00:39:21.760 --> 00:39:28.080 training I got here in learning to understand what it means to be a philosopher when you 00:39:28.080 --> 00:39:34.080 are simply challenging what is presented to you as a philosopher and as a philosopher, 00:39:34.080 --> 00:39:38.800 disciplinary philosopher. So yes, that's my first answer. Thank you. 00:39:39.760 --> 00:39:41.440 Does anyone want to follow up? 00:39:44.800 --> 00:39:50.480 Okay, so I want to be a bit more practical at the moment. Monica, you just said 00:39:52.080 --> 00:39:57.680 that you have to read, you have to go straight to the sources, right? But 00:39:57.680 --> 00:40:12.880 there is a certain I would say process that texts and works should be subject to in order 00:40:12.880 --> 00:40:24.320 for them to be available. And when we work on topics and corpora that are completely uncharted, 00:40:24.320 --> 00:40:37.920 we have to make them visible, right? Because otherwise our horizon is as wide as what is 00:40:37.920 --> 00:40:51.680 presented to us. But that means that we have to do some selections of our own. And there is no 00:40:51.680 --> 00:40:58.720 shortage of material and all of that. And once you start looking it never ends, right? 00:41:00.240 --> 00:41:09.360 So how do you pick and choose assuming that you have also some responsibility 00:41:10.640 --> 00:41:16.960 over and above what you are personally interested in? And I know that all of you have a lot of 00:41:16.960 --> 00:41:24.400 sources to work with. So it's a real practical challenge. I can go first if you want. Well, 00:41:24.400 --> 00:41:29.600 in the World Philosophies Project, exactly because of those reasons, exactly because of the fact that 00:41:29.600 --> 00:41:34.960 you will always, it is very difficult to find a standpoint which is free of pass. You might not, 00:41:34.960 --> 00:41:41.040 as a human being, never find one. It is very difficult not to be selective. So in the World 00:41:41.040 --> 00:41:45.920 Philosophies Project, we have learned to do philosophical work which does not claim from 00:41:45.920 --> 00:41:54.240 the get-go that it is universal. In the Practical Guide to World Philosophies, the Int, 00:41:54.240 --> 00:41:59.920 in our current volume, which I co-authored with my colleague Leah Kohev and so on, we are talking 00:41:59.920 --> 00:42:07.440 about the colonial survey model which we have learned to depart from because it is simply as 00:42:07.440 --> 00:42:14.000 a human being not possible to have a complete and comprehensive overview of a subject. All we can 00:42:14.000 --> 00:42:19.760 do is a philosophy from ground up and then show the limitedness of that view. But it has to do 00:42:19.760 --> 00:42:24.320 with a lot with the understanding of relational knowing which is being developed at the field. 00:42:24.320 --> 00:42:30.960 It has a lot to do with standpoint epistemology and it has a lot to do with an intersubjective 00:42:30.960 --> 00:42:37.760 understanding of what philosophy is. So with that, I am very comfortable to say whatever I offer 00:42:38.320 --> 00:42:43.520 in a philosophical text is just one limited reading. We can discuss it but it is a limited 00:42:43.520 --> 00:42:46.880 reading in a specific point in time and please, that is it. 00:42:52.800 --> 00:42:59.200 I must say I feel very humbled and maybe also a bit chastised by your words, 00:42:59.200 --> 00:43:07.360 saying that you need to think for yourself and be an agent. I did not really 00:43:08.320 --> 00:43:17.120 think about myself like that, I was not trained. So I go where my personal interest leads me 00:43:19.040 --> 00:43:28.560 and you are right, I can go to the margin because I read Latin and I have the 00:43:28.560 --> 00:43:37.760 paleographical knowledge and I can interpret what I see. But that is a lot of training 00:43:38.720 --> 00:43:48.720 in different disciplines with all their biases. So yeah, how that works out. 00:43:48.720 --> 00:44:04.160 I think when I work with my students, I try to show them that the material object itself 00:44:04.160 --> 00:44:11.120 has stories to tell and that we can try to unearth them, to piece them together 00:44:12.080 --> 00:44:22.160 and that this is a really interesting thing to do. But yeah, it is just my enthusiasm, I think, 00:44:22.160 --> 00:44:34.000 that I bring to the table and then interesting observations and conclusions. I do not have this 00:44:34.000 --> 00:44:44.400 mission or vision or strategy that you actually have. Sorry. 00:44:49.840 --> 00:44:53.360 I think my answer would be that when it comes to my own research, 00:44:55.600 --> 00:45:01.920 the problem concerning the material and the selection and everything, I would say that is 00:45:01.920 --> 00:45:08.000 not something specific to my current research interest in women's history or philosophy. 00:45:08.000 --> 00:45:14.160 I think that was very similar to when I was working on different and other traditions. 00:45:14.160 --> 00:45:26.960 So I once worked on commentaries and treatises on Plato's theory of love during the Renaissance, 00:45:26.960 --> 00:45:33.200 once I worked on moral treatises of humanists. And in both projects, actually, there was always 00:45:33.200 --> 00:45:40.480 a little bit the side questionnaires, this really philosophy. Usually also we hop from 00:45:40.480 --> 00:45:47.920 Thomas Aquinas to Descartes or something. So I think there are a lot already in the 00:45:47.920 --> 00:45:55.600 history of, in the standard history of philosophy, there is a lot of disagreement and renegotiation 00:45:55.680 --> 00:46:02.640 and conversation about what is philosophy and how do we approach the history. But when it comes then 00:46:02.640 --> 00:46:08.880 in the end to select, I think that is the kind of thing we learn by training, right? We read the 00:46:09.840 --> 00:46:16.560 research literature, we study and screen first the sources, then we select the sources based on 00:46:16.560 --> 00:46:21.840 our screening and the secondary literature, then we dive in and study in depth and contribute. 00:46:22.480 --> 00:46:29.600 So I think that's very classical, so to say, in the way and not necessarily so much 00:46:29.600 --> 00:46:33.840 specific and likely at least concerning the topic I'm investigating. 00:46:39.200 --> 00:46:43.040 Okay, I want to touch on about maybe two last things. 00:46:43.920 --> 00:46:50.320 Mark and you started to talk about it and also Monica regarding 00:46:52.400 --> 00:47:01.360 this, the things that we do are still not what most people do in our respective fields. 00:47:02.400 --> 00:47:12.080 There is still a specific dominance of certain things and topics and we have to work 00:47:13.040 --> 00:47:28.160 in order to grow. What do you think are good ways to get students or get people to be interested 00:47:28.160 --> 00:47:38.320 in the kind of things that we are talking about today and what kind of modifications would you 00:47:38.320 --> 00:47:46.240 make in, I would say, philosophical training in order to be able to do this in a meaningful way 00:47:47.280 --> 00:47:53.040 that does not try to reinvent the wheel and just reject everything because we do not, 00:47:53.920 --> 00:47:56.080 I think, we do not want to do that. 00:47:56.080 --> 00:48:05.360 Should I go first? Yeah, well, change in philosophical training, I don't know, 00:48:06.240 --> 00:48:14.000 because I don't know about philosophical training, but let's say historical training or 00:48:14.800 --> 00:48:30.880 manuscript training. So, what really helps me as a scholar to establish my new approach to manuscripts, 00:48:31.600 --> 00:48:39.920 looking at the margin and the traces of readers and users of books, 00:48:40.720 --> 00:48:50.800 what really helps me there is the digitization that is happening since the year 2000 or so. 00:48:51.680 --> 00:49:02.000 So, many manuscripts have become visible online and we can see, we can search for Aristotle 00:49:02.000 --> 00:49:10.080 and just compare hundreds of manuscripts of these texts and see how different 00:49:10.720 --> 00:49:17.920 they were from place to place, from period to period, from audience to audience, from whatever 00:49:17.920 --> 00:49:28.720 to whatever. So, that really helps to make new statements about the history of Aristotle in the 00:49:28.720 --> 00:49:38.960 religious. You can just access all this material now from your own computer screen. 00:49:43.040 --> 00:49:50.960 And so, what needs to be added to the training of someone researching this is that 00:49:51.920 --> 00:50:03.360 they understand the world of digitalization and metadata added to these online libraries, 00:50:03.360 --> 00:50:11.680 so that they can use them, but can also see how they present us again with a biased picture, 00:50:11.680 --> 00:50:21.280 how only some manuscripts holding institutions are online and others are not, 00:50:22.080 --> 00:50:28.000 how only some parts of the collection are digitized and other parts are not, 00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:39.120 how only some of the description data about manuscripts are part of the metadata and others 00:50:39.120 --> 00:50:50.960 are not. Marginal annotations are not. So, that's I think my task as a teacher also to 00:50:50.960 --> 00:51:01.360 make students aware of that and as a scholar to try and influence that movement of creating these 00:51:01.360 --> 00:51:11.440 online resources that everybody uses that have serious shortcomings. Yeah, that's what I would 00:51:11.440 --> 00:51:20.880 answer to that. Thanks. For my current position in Amsterdam at the prize university, 00:51:21.840 --> 00:51:26.800 I have no lack of interest of students. There are enough of students very interested in the 00:51:26.800 --> 00:51:33.920 work we are doing. There is also because of my international network, there are enough 00:51:33.920 --> 00:51:41.520 possibilities to involve colleagues so that young, especially doctoral students are in a conversation 00:51:42.800 --> 00:51:45.840 with those of us who do this work in the international context. 00:51:46.880 --> 00:51:54.800 I think so when it comes to philosophical training, it is possible given the setup in which I am today 00:51:54.800 --> 00:52:02.560 to set this up for those doctoral students. However, I wish to see more in Europe 00:52:03.280 --> 00:52:09.120 is the infrastructure to support this kind of training. It is simply happening because 00:52:11.040 --> 00:52:15.840 it is possible because of the voluntary work of many colleagues who do not need to do this for me 00:52:17.120 --> 00:52:22.560 abroad, but they do it to support the students in Europe. What we need here in Europe are 00:52:23.520 --> 00:52:30.800 very different funding programs for doctoral students to be able to develop new ways of doing 00:52:30.800 --> 00:52:36.880 philosophical research outside the standard understanding of philosophy. A lot of homework 00:52:36.880 --> 00:52:43.520 has to be done because the scholarships and the funding schemes are all geared towards a very 00:52:43.520 --> 00:52:49.360 standard understanding of what philosophy is and what it should be. That has to be seriously 00:52:49.360 --> 00:52:55.360 rethought with people whose lives are affected by the philosophy which is done today. I would 00:52:55.360 --> 00:53:09.760 like to see changes there. Yes, I think I have two points. When it comes to teaching, I would say 00:53:10.240 --> 00:53:20.000 in my view, in my experience, it is now the students who changed quicker than we faculty 00:53:20.000 --> 00:53:26.000 members or the universities. When I started, for instance, in Denmark, I don't know, 10 years ago, 00:53:26.000 --> 00:53:33.120 teaching a class in history of philosophy or a lecture series, I introduced two women and then 00:53:33.120 --> 00:53:38.640 there were some unhappy students with that. They said, oh, do we really have to, you know, 00:53:39.840 --> 00:53:44.400 put the precious time on, for instance, Manner Wollstonecraft and Olympus of Bohemia, 00:53:44.400 --> 00:53:51.120 the two of the two, and we have so much, so few time on lock, how can that be? Now, last year, 00:53:51.120 --> 00:53:55.680 the students came to me, how can it be that we have only two women on the syllabus? Are 00:53:55.680 --> 00:54:00.560 you serious about that? How can it be that we don't learn anything about philosophical 00:54:00.560 --> 00:54:05.680 traditions out of the viewer? What kind of philosophy education is this year that you 00:54:05.680 --> 00:54:12.960 are offering to us? So it's actually the students who challenge us to take up a little bit the pace 00:54:13.920 --> 00:54:20.560 and react quicker on things, and I think that's a good thing. When it comes to disseminating in 00:54:20.560 --> 00:54:26.640 research, what we are doing, I think, when it comes to my kind of research, the problem is how to 00:54:26.640 --> 00:54:36.240 avoid the segregation or the ghettoization of feminist history or philosophy. So either you do 00:54:36.240 --> 00:54:42.640 kind of a standard history of philosophy, and then you have maybe here and there, one, two women in, 00:54:42.640 --> 00:54:49.280 or you do women's history of philosophy and then, you know, you present all these women thinkers, 00:54:49.280 --> 00:54:54.720 and then this is all you read again by those who are interested in that tradition. And of course, 00:54:54.720 --> 00:55:01.440 at some point in history, it's important to produce this research literature also so that 00:55:01.440 --> 00:55:06.240 you have an amount of research literature you can engage with and to prepare tax editions and 00:55:06.240 --> 00:55:13.760 everything. But of course, it's important to permit the standards of the mainstream philosophy, 00:55:13.760 --> 00:55:22.240 and I think that's just, again, every one of us who has positions as editors of journals, 00:55:22.240 --> 00:55:30.000 as organizers of conferences, as PIs of large research projects, everyone, actually, I think, 00:55:30.000 --> 00:55:36.720 is the call on to having these questions in the back. And what I also sometimes try to do is 00:55:36.720 --> 00:55:43.040 publish articles. For instance, we made an edition of a chapter of Beketa Todd's treatise, 00:55:43.040 --> 00:55:47.760 it's about women's education, we made a critical edition in English translation, 00:55:47.760 --> 00:55:54.400 and we did not, for instance, submit that to Hypatia, this journal on feminist history of 00:55:54.400 --> 00:55:59.120 women's philosophy, it would have been a great choice, but we decided to send it to Vivarium, 00:55:59.760 --> 00:56:04.880 because we thought, well, it's other kind of audience who reads Vivarium, and they are then 00:56:04.880 --> 00:56:12.720 confronted with that text. So yeah, so I think it's a way ahead of us, but it's also a good way. 00:56:12.720 --> 00:56:21.840 Well, thank you. So just one last question. So assuming that we 00:56:24.240 --> 00:56:29.920 agree that we have some challenges ahead of us, although I only hear success stories 00:56:31.440 --> 00:56:40.160 today, which is quite nice to know, are you in general optimistic or pessimistic or 00:56:40.160 --> 00:56:46.720 undecided? Monica, you go first. 00:56:50.720 --> 00:56:54.880 Well, I mean, I would like to answer your question by first asking you, 00:56:58.160 --> 00:57:07.440 in regard to what? In regard, I began in Germany, writing in German, and at one point in time, 00:57:07.440 --> 00:57:14.080 I had to take the decision to move the language, because I understood that people, the kind of 00:57:14.080 --> 00:57:18.400 work I need to do for myself is the kind of work which is not available to me in the English, 00:57:18.400 --> 00:57:22.960 the German language, given the limitedness of the categories available in that language, 00:57:22.960 --> 00:57:32.000 on the terms on which I had to speak. So I moved languages. So when it comes to going back to 00:57:32.000 --> 00:57:41.520 writing in German, I'm not, I cannot say I'm optimistic about writing again. Yeah, I would have 00:57:41.520 --> 00:57:48.480 to, because my writing developed through the English language simply because certain debates 00:57:48.480 --> 00:57:54.160 in philosophy and critical social and political epistemology are available in the English language. 00:57:54.160 --> 00:58:00.800 I would have to borrow all those terms back into a German vocabulary, which is still being built up. 00:58:00.800 --> 00:58:12.080 It's not there. So from that viewpoint, I am optimistic about my future as a philosopher in 00:58:12.080 --> 00:58:19.360 a particular kind of debate. I would like to be more open and claim that I can write into languages 00:58:19.360 --> 00:58:25.440 using the same vocabulary, but it is a different, difficult proposition, not because of the German 00:58:25.440 --> 00:58:29.920 language. I'm very fluent in it. It is because the philosophical debates in that language are 00:58:29.920 --> 00:58:36.160 not giving me the vocabulary I need. And it is then, it just takes me the double the amount of 00:58:36.160 --> 00:58:44.320 time to write an article today in German. When I have to write something about which I'm writing 00:58:44.320 --> 00:58:48.400 in the English language at the same time, if you understand what I mean, the vocabulary, 00:58:48.400 --> 00:58:54.160 the philosophical vocabulary is not being built up on certain debates. And it is not being built up 00:58:54.160 --> 00:59:01.120 simply because there is no representation there in the German context. So for this society, I wish 00:59:01.120 --> 00:59:08.000 that more is done because this is a pluralistic society like any other one in Europe. And for 00:59:08.000 --> 00:59:13.200 that, a particular vocabulary in academic philosophy will have to be built up and very soon. 00:59:15.200 --> 00:59:21.600 It is extremely urgent for the society to begin doing it now and to understand that philosophy 00:59:21.600 --> 00:59:27.200 is a lived tradition wherever in the world we live. It is not a tradition which is simply confined 00:59:27.200 --> 00:59:33.440 to history and to the history of ideas. If that is anybody's understanding of philosophy, then we 00:59:33.440 --> 00:59:38.320 will have to come back to the drawing table and discuss what that understanding is and why it 00:59:38.320 --> 00:59:51.680 resulted. But a lot of real self-reflection has to be done. I don't know, I'm an optimistic person by 00:59:51.680 --> 01:00:06.560 nature. But academic climate in the Netherlands is not very, yeah, I don't know. It's just really 01:00:06.560 --> 01:00:16.080 difficult to see how the world around us is hardening and how 01:00:20.880 --> 01:00:27.520 the value that we that we give to objects from the past 01:00:27.520 --> 01:00:41.440 is diminishing. It's difficult to remain optimistic. I don't think that my discipline will survive 01:00:43.760 --> 01:00:53.360 manuscript studies in the Netherlands in the future. So there will still be people 01:00:53.360 --> 01:00:59.840 interested in manual manuscripts and we have them in our collections so there will still be 01:00:59.840 --> 01:01:07.760 specialists. But the places where you can study it, for example, are just very few and in between 01:01:09.840 --> 01:01:22.960 on the side. I think I do my best to make people enthusiastic about it and to write 01:01:22.960 --> 01:01:33.840 about it and to spread the knowledge about it that we have and to try and curate everything. 01:01:34.560 --> 01:01:43.520 But whether it will hold in the future, I don't know. Maybe I'm not an optimistic person 01:01:43.520 --> 01:01:51.760 after all. Well, I think we are not talking politics now or world politics for that matter 01:01:51.760 --> 01:01:59.200 because that's the different topic. But when it comes to my field of research and women's 01:01:59.200 --> 01:02:07.360 history of philosophy, I would say I am optimistic for two reasons. And although of course one could 01:02:07.360 --> 01:02:14.720 always argue and be a little bit, I don't know, exhausted because progress is so made so slow in 01:02:14.720 --> 01:02:20.800 the end. But I would say, compared to when I started studying philosophy, I don't know, 01:02:20.800 --> 01:02:28.400 some 30 years ago or something, or more, whatever. And now all the texts that are available, 01:02:28.400 --> 01:02:36.160 all the research that is available, that's a huge difference. And so the younger philosophers grew 01:02:36.160 --> 01:02:42.640 up in a totally different philosophical landscape. So I think that makes a huge difference. And also 01:02:42.640 --> 01:02:50.640 I must say, just my personal experiences, I might perhaps even invoke Thomas Kuhl's paradigm shift. 01:02:51.280 --> 01:02:57.760 You can't in the end change so much people's minds, but some people die out at some point, 01:02:57.760 --> 01:03:05.520 and then a new generation comes in that holds different views. And just the conversations I 01:03:05.520 --> 01:03:15.600 had in my career with mostly male colleagues, elder than me, naturally they were usually older 01:03:15.600 --> 01:03:21.520 when I was younger. And that kind of conversations I had then, the kinds of things that were said 01:03:21.520 --> 01:03:25.840 about women and philosophy, that is just, I don't hear it any longer. I don't have these conversations 01:03:25.840 --> 01:03:32.880 any longer. All the colleagues younger than me, all those in positions and whatever, I have totally 01:03:32.880 --> 01:03:38.560 different conversations with them about these topics. And as I already mentioned, the students 01:03:38.560 --> 01:03:46.560 are even more curious and open to learn about these things. So in that sense, I'm very optimistic. 01:03:48.560 --> 01:03:58.880 Well, yeah, perfect. So we have a range of views and a range of understandings of what optimism 01:03:58.880 --> 01:04:06.400 is. And of course, what pessimism is. So thank you very much for the really rich conversation. 01:04:28.880 --> 01:04:30.880 Thank you very much.