Diversity Reading List

Comment (from this Blueprint): Maitra is one of the first to put forward a proposal for a feminist account of mental content by offering a revision of Millikan's teleosemantic account that considers the role of the historical and societal context in the constitution of representational content. She offers a nuanced analysis of mainstream theories of mental content, including Putnam's and Burge's externalism and argues that those views should undertake some modifications before they can be adopted in a feminist framework: namely, their lack of consideration of the historical and societal context.

Comment: Srinivasan made international headlines in 2021 with her book, The Right to Sex (2021), which includes an adapted version of this essay. In the midst of the #MeToo movement and global reckoning with cultures of sexual harrassment, she turned a sharp, philosophical lens towards many of the topics regarding power, sexuality, and feminism that not only had been brushed under the rug in popular media, but had also been largely considered irrelevant for philosophical investigation. This essay would make for fruitful discussion in courses or reading groups specifically focused on feminist themes, or could be used in more interdisciplinary contexts to study the #MeToo movement and the current state of modern feminist thought (other essays on similar topics can also be found in the book). For the purposes of offering the version of the essay in its most academic form, this entry cites the earlier version which was published in the Yale Law Review in 2020.

Comment: Can be used as a general reference for a course focusing on Indian logic. The various sections are independent, so each can on its own serve as a reading in any course wanting to include discussion of a particular system of logic (e.g. a general logic course, or a course in Indian philosophy).

Comment: Can be used in an advanced course on (formal approaches to) truth or the Liar paradox. Familiarity with the semantics of first-order classical logic and transfinite induction is assumed (for the latter, Ch.3 of the Blackwell Guide might be of help - using the Blackwell Guide as a blueprint may also be a way to incorporate this reading in a general advanced course on philosophical logic).

Comment: This paper would fit well in a course on dialogical formulations of logic (as either main or further reading, depending on the time dedicated to Lorenz-style approaches), or in a course on paraconsistent logic (as an alternative way of thinking about paraconsistency); both topics are introduced in an accessible enough way. If students have no familiarity with tableaux systems, sections 4 and 5.2 can be skipped.

Comment (from this Blueprint): This is a written transcript of the James Baldwin lecture, delivered by the computer scientist Arvind Narayanan, at Princeton in 2022. Narayanan's prior research has examined algorithmic bias and standards of fairness with respect to algorithmic decision making. Here, he engages critically with his own discipline, suggesting that there are serious limits to the sorts of quantitative methods that computer scientists recruit to investigate the potential biases in their own tools. Narayanan acknowledges that in voicing this critique, he is echoing claims by feminist researchers from fields beyond computer science. However, his own arguments, centered as they are on the details of the quantitative methods he is at home with, home in on exactly why these prior criticisms hold up in a way that seeks to speak more persuasively to Narayanan's own peers in computer science and other quantitative fields.

Comment (from this Blueprint): An interview about the status of nonhuman animals in ancient Indian philosophy and literature; a very good complement to her paper.

Comment (from this Blueprint): An overview of the role of non-human animals in Indian Thought pointing out that there is not much evidence of that presumption of a fundamental difference between human and nonhuman forms of life that allows us in English to use the word “animal” simply to mean “nonhuman animal.” The concept of the animal is thus not best suited to explore the nature of the human by contrast. Instead we more often find a background presumption of a common condition: whatever lives seeks to sustain its life, wants pleasure and not pain, wants its desires and aims satisfied rather than thwarted.

Comment: This is a long blog post originally published in an online forum on philosophy in the Global Majority organised by the Miami Institute of Social Sciences. It defends a place for thinking and teaching the Western philosophical canon in postcolonial educational spaces such as India, bringing together both recent discussions of decolonising philosophy in the West, as well as older discussions within India about the place of the Western canon. It concludes with a debate on these themes between Mahatma Gandhi and the poet Rabindranath Tagore. I wrote it as a reflection on my own pedagogical practice teaching philosophy in India, but it has also been used in a course on Indian philosophy taught at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. I think it would be a useful counterpoint to think with while talking about the importance of diversity in philosophy -- among other things because it points out that even the question of what constitutes 'diversity' might vary from place to place; and in that sense it might be seen as an instance of philosophical diversity in action. This is a long blog post originally published in an online forum on philosophy in the Global Majority organised by the Miami Institute of Social Sciences. It defends a place for thinking and teaching the Western philosophical canon in postcolonial educational spaces such as India, bringing together both recent discussions of decolonising philosophy in the West, as well as older discussions within India about the place of the Western canon. It concludes with a debate on these themes between Mahatma Gandhi and the poet Rabindranath Tagore. I wrote it as a reflection on my own pedagogical practice teaching philosophy in India, but it has also been used in a course on Indian philosophy taught at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. I think it would be a useful counterpoint to think with while talking about the importance of diversity in philosophy -- among other things because it points out that even the question of what constitutes 'diversity' might vary from place to place; and in that sense it might be seen as an instance of philosophical diversity in action.

Comment (from this Blueprint): This is a brilliant introductory essay to the problem of casteism which plagues not only Indian societies in India, but also the diaspora abroad. The essay provides a nuanced perspective of how we must understand caste (both in its concept and its practice), introduces us to the 20th century debates which were ongoing alongside the freedom struggle against the Raj, and links the caste debate to the debates around it in contemporary British politics. It is a novel attempt to unearth the philosophical underpinnings of the movement against caste oppression. The timing of the essay seems apposite, given the current political situation in India and its impact in the politics of the countries where Indians constitute a sizeable population.