Philosophical Diversity

Philosophy, like national parks, has a diversity problem, or so it is said. What this actually means is that academic philosophy has a diversity problem, that it is mostly white and mostly male, and that it is generally dismissive toward non-Western contributions. 

Over at The Splintered Mind, Eric is given to collecting numbers regarding the citation frequencies of non-Western, female, and ethnic minority thinkers. As expected, those numbers are all very small, prompting him to ask, "Why don't we [U.S.-based philosophy professors] know our Chinese philosophers?"

I keep thinking of the videotape format war of the 1970s and 80s. Why did VHS win out over Betamax? There are many reasons, but they all seem to boil down to the vagaries of consumer choice. Likewise for the ascendancy of Anglo-American over Chinese philosophers. Any attempt to extrapolate the "determining factors" can only result in generalizations of consumer needs and demands of varying practical significance.

But unlike the market dominance of VHS, the homogeneity of academic philosophy reputedly derives from internal prejudice, a presumed distortion of how differences would actually be accommodated if faculty appointments were subject to external criteria.

And yet the distinction between internal and external is hard to maintain. External criteria, being diverse, can only be applied on the basis of internal prejudice. But where does the formation of such prejudice take place? When Chancellor Phyllis Wise of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "unhired" Professor Steven Salaita for incendiary discourse, is she looking out for the public good or for the good of the university?