There appears to be a groundswell of demands in numerous philosophy departments across the country for climate studies, studies that will be specific to departments, that will gauge the climate for women and other underrepresented groups, that will include students, and that will try to collect more comprehensive data while also being more specific to a local context than this guide can be. This is fantastic, and in many cases the folks pushing for and organizing the studies are untenured, or are even students! It indicates what has been under the surface the some time but has lately, for a variety of reasons, come to the surface: the need for a more open gathering of assessments and sharing of information about how we are doing in philosophy in relation to questions of diversity and pluralism.

Some of us have done climate studies before, sometimes in departments and sometimes in whole universities. I hope we can share the experiences of these earlier studies with the newer folks engaging in them, building a base across the generations, as a way to give further impetus to this development. We want to make this site a space for such accounts—please send them to us at our website email address: pluralistsguidetophil@gmail.com.

Let me begin by sharing my own story, which is instructive in a couple of interesting ways. A few years back when I was teaching at a different institution, a female colleague and I decided to conduct a comprehensive climate survey of all the women in our department, including graduate students, faculty, and office staff. This was prompted by our fatigue at being on the constant receiving end of complaints from women, mostly students but some staff, who regularly asked us to ‘keep this private.’ Such steady complaints and reports are part of daily life for many women faculty and faculty of color who find their offices the go-to place for climate of complaints. We often feel like we are perceived to be the social workers of the department. But always with the plea not to tell anyone what we are hearing.

So my colleague and I decided we needed to try to do something proactive. We surmised there was a general climate problem, rather than a single bad apple. This was a department that did not have a long history of having women faculty or students—there had been one senior (and excellent) woman for a long time, but we were the first junior female faculty hired in roughly 25 years. So the department was unused to having women faculty around, did not have a way to talk about climate issues, and did not really understand climate issues. It also contained more than one faculty member who engaged in borderline sexual harassment fairly regularly. So after hearing several complaints, my colleague and I researched surveys, studied the AAUW reports on gender climate, consulted with our local social scientists, and sent out our survey.

We made the survey anonymous, even to us, then assessed the results and published the findings just to our department members. We reported what we took to be significant, general findings. We made suggestions for improvement. We strove for a tone of’ ‘we are a community with shared values and we are all in this together and together we can make things better.’ We strove to avoid self-righteousness or an attitude of holier than thou. In my own conversations I often shared the idiotic comments I had made to male students without thinking, (such as, when I was trying to move a bookcase in my office and a male student poked his head in, I said “I need a man”). We strove to interpret our colleagues as generally sharing our commitment to equality. We stated that our goal was to open up a conversation. We did this. When we were untenured.

You might well wonder, what was the result?  An angry focus on and dissection of our methodology, and a demand to know who exactly had said or done what exactly to whom. We had written our results up in a way to show that there was a department wide climate problem, that it needed a department wide collective response rather than isolated instances of individual sanction. (This is obviously not always the case, nor was it the case later on in the life of that department when an individual was sanctioned, but it was true at that point in time).

Yet few collective and constructive responses actually resulted from our efforts. Just an attack on methodology and an insistence that we tell which individual accused which individual about what exactly. I have heard this story repeated elsewhere. Bad news is often met with a firing squad set up for the messenger, and in our more sophisticated era, a firing squad can be set up for the methodology by which the message is established. This is obviously a defensive response. This is not to say that methods should never be of concern, or should be free from debate. Of course not. We are philosophers, after all! But it is to say that even if one does a comprehensive internal survey of all faculty, graduate students, and staff within a department the result may be, guess what, an attack on methodology as a way to disengage with the substantive issues of climate.

My colleague and I, nonetheless, received tenure, but she retired early (very early!) just a few years later. I suspect the climate was getting to her.

The Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy is not meant or able to replace or replicate such comprehensive internal climate surveys. It is meant to produce results that may, however, prompt such a survey. Go for it. My story is about 18 years old. We are in a different time and place, and who knows what will happen? Let’s find out, and let’s share our results together on this site. We will construct a new page for this information as it comes in.

When philosophers make claims about the intrinsic nature of the good, the necessary features of epistemic justification, or the unifying qualities of the beautiful, they generally imagine themselves to be making such claims for all people, for all time. In other words, the range or scope of the claims is thought to be universal. Aristotle did not restrict his claims about the nature of the good to the Greeks, nor did Locke specify that he was only exploring English understanding. Their aim was human experience, human understanding, and the human condition.

Such an approach is not unique to the old-fashioned. Universal claims are not unique to modern philosophers, ancient philosophers, or analytic philosophers. Derrida believed binaries to be hierarchical, James took beliefs to have sensible affects, and Heidegger thought he could enumerate the conditions of mortal experience in list form. There are other issues about which philosophers believe one’s time and place does make a difference, such as self-government, but many of the most important claims that philosophers of all sorts make are couched in terms of a universal reach.

On what basis can a specific individual with limited experience develop philosophical claims with such an impossibly grandiose reach? On the basis of philosophical argument. But what is the relationship between philosophical argumentation and empirical engagements which might test the claims philosophers make against a broad array of diverse human experiences, and might in that way mandate a larger inclusion of interlocutors? Many philosophers, old and new, have believed such empirical engagements are necessary, as Anthony Appiah outlines in his recent book, Experiments in Ethics. Hume and Hegel both thought philosophy needed to engage with history, Descartes looked to physiology, and many today believe we must look to the neurosciences to confirm our theories about the nature of rationality, the mind, and consciousness.

Yet despite the fact that numerous philosophers believe that philosophy needs to know something about actual persons and how they operate in order to make universal claims, they still tend not to believe that the relevant empirical facts will, in most cases, manifest diversity across diverse groups of people. There are certainly differences in the ‘prior probabilities’ different groups assume, or in the types of cognitive bias or implicit associations a group may manifest. But at a sufficiently abstracted, ‘meta’ level, the mind is the mind, and it is this level that most philosophers are most interested in.

At this level of abstraction, then, the empirical turn in philosophy (which, as Appiah shows, is not actually new) does not provide any grounds for thinking that the diversity of the human condition will make its way onto the mainstream philosophical menu. The members of that small subset of that small geographically aligned grouping can still in good conscience do their business without branching out, no matter how empirically inclined they are. They can continue in this way, that is, as long as they ignore one basic point.

The one universal idea that is shared among western philosophers and in fact all who understand their vocation in relationship to Socrates, is that philosophical advance occurs through philosophical argumentation. In other words, through arguing with each other. Whether we do this in the agora, the salon, the classroom, or the blogosphere, we joust with and question each other, raise objections, consider implications, and, in short, debate. This is not an empty exercise, or a mere opportunity for display and aggression. We all know that our debates can often fall into such useless and even venal exhibitions. But we believe nonetheless that an open process of argumentative exchange is vital for reaching philosophical truth, however diversely we define the latter.

When open debates are summarily closed by entirely arbitrary social facts – facts about who can afford to be involved, or who has the civil liberty to be present, or who has the basic wherewithal to speak up – then the exchange of reasons can no longer be counted on to establish the truth and advance the cause of inquiry.

Anyone who seriously believes that social inclusion makes no difference to the content of philosophical argumentation should peruse the titles of journal articles through the 20th century. Only in the second half, only, that is, after the debate rooms had had their doors cracked open by a few inches, does one begin to see a serious debate over abortion, and racism, and the concept of the just unilateral intervention. New voices brought new questions, new objections, new theories.

What this should prove to us is that whether one is an experimental philosopher, or a continental philosopher, or a philosopher of mathematics, there is the possibility that an arbitrarily closed community of discussants will inhibit the range of ideas on the table. This should be of philosophical concern.

Philosophy is, without a doubt, in a process of transition. Perhaps it always has been; perhaps that is its intrinsic nature. But our tendency to rest contentedly on the abstract openness of the philosophical domain of inquiry should not keep us from being concerned about the actual material constraints that operate adversely on the inclusiveness of our conversations, or about the conservatism endemic to any institution, or about the conformism that a tight job market breeds.

The testament to the current transitional moment is the birth of new sub-fields of inquiry, including feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and LGBTQ philosophy. Communities have developed around these concerns precisely because they have experienced an uncertain fit in the usual areas, e.g. metaphysics, ethics, history of philosophy, etc. Although much of LGBTQ philosophy is linked to metaphysics, for example, it is rarely on the agenda of the key metaphysics conferences. As the profession as a whole works to readjust to new methodological debates, and new agendas of discussion, it is important that these new sub-fields survive and flourish. Philosophers of all stripes should welcome them and support them, if only for the sake of the joy to be had when our most cherished assumptions get a kick in the pants. This is why we signed up to the discipline.

The domains we generally name as “American philosophy” and “continental philosophy,” as problematic as these domain names are, have also continued to operate with an uncertain relationship to the centrally recognized sub-fields of the Analytic mainstream. Though much larger and older than the newer sub-fields listed above, these areas continue to face some obstacles to inclusion of their own, both internally and externally. It is an interesting question, about which much has been written, as to whether philosophy as a whole hangs together into one unified project of inquiry, or whether some of the internal divisions are drastic enough that they constitute incommensurable forms of life, so to speak. If justification ends at a form of life, as Wittgenstein proposed, this may help explain why philosophers sometimes seem to be talking past each other rather than talking with each other, and why our best arguments are sometimes unintelligible to other philosophers as arguments. At the same time, the appeal of this well-known Wittgensteinian idea spans these divisions. Perhaps this is reason to think that our intra-disciplinary boundaries mark different takes on a shared enterprise – methodological distinctions rather than irreconcilable differences.

So our discussion, and debate, and jousting, goes on. But let us remember that motivation of wonder that brought us all to this heterodox conversation in the first place, and let us not give assistance to the border patrol.

Linda Martín Alcoff
City University of New York