Diversity Reading List

The chapter portrays how contextual examples are relevant to methods of teaching that empower understanding. Focusing on argument from Vine Deloria, jr’s Red Earth, White Lies, Native students inspire one another to learn critical thinking skills, as they discover ways to determine whether Deloria’s concerns with the logic of Western thought are shown to be justified. In the context of teaching about a particular critical thinking fallacy, students grasp the application of logical skills in their own meaningful
cultural context. The point driven home is that the meaningful and culturally relevant contextual content of examples used to teach critical thinking can excite and inspire Native students to learn. Thus philosophers can reinforce the acquisition of critical thinking skills for Native students by using meaningful, familiar content to reinforce understanding and praxis, for the recognition of cognitively false conclusions. This chapter implies an ethical maxim: using examples only from Western thought to teach critical thinking skills may prejudice students of other traditions in their acquisition of these skills.

From the Introduction: "Anne Waters shows how nondiscrete nonbinary ontologies of being operate as background framework to some of America’s Indigenous languages. This background logic explains
why and how gender, for example, can be understood as a non-essentialized concept in
some Indigenous languages of the Americas. [...] The Indigenous understanding that all things interpenetrate and are relationally interdependent embraces a manifold of complexity, resembling a world of multifariously associated connections and intimate fusions Such a nondiscretely aggregate ontology ought not to be expected to easily give way to a metaphysics of a sharply defined discretely organized binary ontology. From an Indigenous ontology, some multigendered identities may be more kaleidoscopic and protean concepts than Euro-American culture has yet to imagine."

Introduction: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) is established in the popular imagination as the “first feminist,” but another philosopher provided a systematic analysis of women’s subjugated condition and a call for female education nearly a century before Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Mary Astell’s (1666-1731) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest by a Lover of Her Sex, Parts I and II (1694, 1697) is a philosophical text that argues that women are in an inferior moral condition compared to men, analyses the causes of this problem, and presents a two-part remedy.