Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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W10: Mehr als Brieffreundinnen: Wie historische Philosophinnen in systematische Philosophielehre integriert werden können Location: 23.21 U1.97 How can we systematically integrate texts by historical women philosophers into university teaching? This question will be addressed in a full-day workshop as part of the GAP.12 Congress in Düsseldorf. We will present innovative teaching formats and materials that aim at increasing the visibility of women in philosophy. These include information materials created by the BMFTR joint project, a reader project with texts by early modern female philosophers translated into German for the first time as well as a special issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy on “How To Teach Historical Women Philosophers.” | |
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Teaching Women into the History of Early Analytic Philosophy University of Manchester, United Kingdom A great number of women were active in early analytic philosophy. However, there is still a lack of attention paid to their contributions in research and teaching. In order to change this situation, this talk sets out practical ways to incorporate women’s works into a core philosophy syllabus. One challenge in so doing is our sense of familiarity with works by, e.g., Russell, Carnap and Quine that comes from the fact that these are the texts almost all philosophy students are set as undergraduates. Pedagogically, it will thus be important to explain early analytic women philosophers’ style and context, i.e., state how their ideas diverge from that of their male teachers, mentors etc. For they often have different ideas and arguments, some of which pre-figure later moves that are more celebrated when written by men. For example, Constance Jones’s 1890 signification-denotation distinction is equivalent to Frege’s sense-reference distinction while dispensing with the third realm and explicitly making room for signification (sense) without denotation (reference). Susan Stebbing’s 1932 distinction between same-level and directional analysis made an advance on her mentor Moore and solved the paradox of analysis 10 years before it was formulated. Ruth Barcan’s 1946-47 quantified modal logic was not only the first such logic, but forced Quine to re-examine his anti-modal arguments and replace them with a more interesting and principled anti-essentialism. Stebbing, Alice Ambrose and Margaret MacDonald wrote compellingly about the nature and function of philosophy, in an original manner, distinct from Russell, Wittgenstein or Ryle, and still very much relevant to philosophers today. After briefly discussing some of these examples, this talk will focus on practical suggestions about how to integrate early analytic women’s work in teaching, such as interrogating ‘great man’ narratives by designing courses that are not person- but topic-based, examining women’s influence on others and their exchanges with others instead of presenting their ideas as a ‘critique’ of men’s, including women’s names in essay and exam questions, discussing the discrimination or disadvantages they faced as a result of their gender (and/or race, religion, disability) and how it shaped their lives and careers and, if applicable, their thought. | |

