Resisters, Diversity in Philosophy, and the Demographic Problem

Abstract

The discipline of academic philosophy suffers from serious problems of diversity and inclusion whose acknowledgement and amelioration are often resisted by members of our profession. In this paper, I distinguish four main modes of resistance – naivete, conservatism, pride, and hostility – and describe how and why they manifest by using them as the basis for a typology of types of “resister”. This typology can hopefully be useful to those of us trying to counteract such resistance in ways sensitive to the different motives and strategies that these resisters tend to employ.