Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association
Author(s)
Christia Mercer
Abstract
The main point of Christia Mercer’s American Philosophical Association presidential address of January 2020 was to show that philosophy’s past offers a means to empower its present. One of its main goals was to encourage colleagues to make the philosophy we teach and practice more inclusive (both textually and topically) and to adopt a more public facing engagement with our discipline. She argues that philosophers must no longer ignore either our discipline’s resistance to change or the most pressing challenges of our time. Professional philosophers face two options: remain silent or employ more critical philosophical tools to speak to today’s challenges. The lecture’s second goal is to make clear how easy it is to approach philosophy’s past in a way that will speak to such challenges. It shows that the standard philosophical canon was invented until the nineteenth century, and then offers examples of how to “retrieve” a more accurate history of philosophy and so transform the stories we tell about our discipline’s past. She shows that the standard decades long approach to the history of philosophy has not only led to an inaccurate account of that history, it has ignored important (and sometimes) provocative ideas relevant to the problems we face in our current world. If we can muster the courage to rethink the standard story, hone new tools, and grapple with unfamiliar ideas, we will discover exciting new topics, methods, and arguments that will enliven our discipline. Given the extraordinary challenges of our times, Mercer proposes that “we need all the help we can get.”
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