Diversity Reading List

Comment: Focusing on three nineteenth-century women philosophers, Mary Whiton Calkins, Ellen Bliss Talbot, and Marietta Kies. Could be used as supplementary reading on a history of philosophy course if it covers the nineteenth century.

Comment: This chapter serves as an introduction to Root's booklength study of these themes, so the presentation only gestures at these relationships and provides a brief selection of examples that illustrate them. However, if can be useful for raising initial questions about the relationships among power, art, and culture. It provides a counterpoint to a more sanguine perspective on cross-cultural appreciation expressed by Thomas Heyd in "Rock Art Aesthetics and Cultural Appropriation."

Comment (from this Blueprint): This text is included because while written in a lay style and directed at non-academic readers, it still presents a philosophically interesting argument which challenges the normative assumptions that are often held about 'blue collar' work and professions. The text is therefore useful to raise questions about normative attitudes towards work ethic and work competance, especially as it falls along socio-economic class lines, and their implications for social justice.

Comment: Presupposes some familiarity with Aristotelian and Fregean logic, as well as ideas in analytic philosophy of language (e.g., theories of reference). This would be a good piece for countering the prejudice that nothing worthy of being called logic was done in the classical Chinese tradition. It is also a good piece for expanding students' imaginative horizons and showing them how their ideas of what logic is have been culturally shaped.

Comment: Roskies offers an overview of the debate, providing useful glossary of positions related to it together with a graph representing the relations between them. This can be particularly useful when explaining the differences between the metaphysical, epistemic and ethical claims made in this debate.

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Comment: The paper introduces some of the central ideas in the relevance logic literature, e..g the connection between suppression and sufficiency, and the modeling of negation via the Routley star. It is a natural pick for a specialized course on relevance logic, but it can also be used as an introduction to (or further reading about) relevance logic in a general course on non-classical logics. Some familiarity with classical and modal logic (in particular, the notion of strict implication) is required.

Comment: Can be used in a course on relevant logic or on negation. The emphasis on comparing different models makes it ideal for discussion. No familiarity with relevant logic is required.

Comment: Useful for an introductory philosophy of religion course, or a more specialised course on the afterlife. Because of the personal identity aspects here, Rudder Baker's account could also be applied to reincarnation: does the constitution view work here? Is it harder to maintain personal identity in reincarnation cases than in other cases of surviving our death?

Comment (from this Blueprint): Rudder Baker's chapter on the first-person perspective and gender identity is a great starting place to begin thinking about what it means to experience the world through the lens of gender. Rudder Baker's chapter also poses interesting thought experiements, such as whether a disembodied being would have a gender idetity (she argues "no") or whether it is possible to live in a gender-less society. The chapter also introduces the reader to the necessary conditons by which we might want to say that someone has a gender identity andso is a fruitful springboard for further and deeper discussions about not only gender, but language and personal identity more broadly.