Philosophical Canon Research Articles

The Plasticity of the Human and Inscribing History within Biology: A Response to Donald J. Munro

The Plasticity of the Human and Inscribing History within Biology:A Response to Donald J. Munro Sonya N. Özbey (bio) Donald J. Munro's essay, "When Science Is in Defense of Value-Linked Facts," takes a stand against the fact-value dichotomy which has been heavily pronounced within the Greco-European philosophical canon. As Munro also points out, the continuing persistence of the fact-value dichotomy is traceable to Moore's discussion of the "naturalistic fallacy" (which claims that we cannot derive what is "good" from what is "pleasant") and Hume's discussion of the is-ought problem (which states that we cannot move from "descriptive" statements to "prescriptive" ones). In opposition to these two views, classical Confucian thinkers present us with descriptive statements about human commonalities, including their inborn affects. These affects are also morally relevant, because especially within the Mencian tradition they serve as the basis for various morally significant virtues, such as benevolence (ren 仁) and righteousness (yi 義). It is this moral system that Munro defends as a more convincing alternative to the dominant approaches in Western moral philosophy. Munro in his essay discusses the interrelations between values, affects (or emotions), and facts and demonstrates that various affects that humans share in common are factually observable and that they inform various moral values. Among these affects, Munro focuses on contentment and tranquility (which embody the values of health and well-being), love and care (which embody the value of human bonding) and, finally, shame and respect (which embody the values of cooperation, harmony, and adaptation to hierarchy). Munro engages with a variety of scientific fields, ranging from primatology to neurobiology, to demonstrate that these value-laden affects are measurable and observable in humans and (in different degrees) in other animals. As Munro demonstrates throughout his essay, people's affective tendencies are emphasized to a considerable degree within the Confucian discourse, while they are relatively underappreciated within the Greco-European philosophical canon. This is not a coincidence, because, as Judith Butler, among others, has noted, when we see binaries operating within a philosophical system, what we see is not simply binaries and oppositions co-existing without dominating over each other. Oppositions often get formulated at the expense of the exclusion and suppression of one side of the binary (mind over matter, reason over affect, and so on).1 This also means that when Mencius, let us say, famously says that the laws or patterns of the world please his heart the [End Page 918] way certain foods please his mouth,2 he is not simply privileging affect over reason or vice versa (which would presuppose their initial separateness). Instead, reason itself becomes affective, and ethics gets intertwined with matters of taste and beauty. This is what Munro wonderfully terms the "clustering" of the emotional and the cognitive factors. That various philosophical dichotomies, including the reason-affect and fact-value dichotomies, are shaped by the cultural milieu in which they are produced seems undeniable. The fact that there is an entire philosophical tradition that is not built on a radical articulation of the fact-value dichotomy should provide us with enough motivation to at least question the validity of this very dualism. Moreover, one could also follow the lead of Munro and point to the evidence of the hard sciences, which provide further support for a moral system that relies on observations about humans' shared characteristics. This is certainly not to say, however, that such a moral system is without its critical pitfalls. In my response to Munro's essay, I would like to lay out several other criticisms that one might raise against theories of human nature and the very project of grounding various values in biological foundations. After this brief exegetical overview, which will also involve a discussion of how Munro's essay implicitly or explicitly addresses these challenges, I will attempt to chart new directions that this study may facilitate. This includes a suggestion to repurpose Confucian accounts of personhood to help us generate alternative formulations of human agency and action, followed by a general reflection on the variety of ways we could draw inspiration from the classical Confucian canon. Tying Morality to a Theory of Human...

An Overlooked Argument for the Categories: Kant’s Interlude of Justification in the Prolegomena

The deduction of the categories lies undoubtedly at the very heart of Kant's theoretical philosophy and, for this reason, it is one of items in the philosophical canon that is greatly discussed and least agreed upon. In the modern and contemporary Western philosophical tradition as well as in Kant’s literature, the loci classici for its consideration are the 1781 and 1787 editions of the Critique of pure reason. In this paper, I aim at presenting and discussing an argument that Kant advances in the Prolegomena and which is virtually ignored in the approach of the deduction of the categories. At first, an inquiry into the distinction between analytic and synthetic methods is carried out. After that, the difference between judgments of perception and judgments of experience is taken into account. Finally, the Prolegomena’s argument for the categories is brought into discussion.

QUESTIONS OF CANON FORMATION IN PHILOSOPHY: THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN AFRICA

The history of philosophy is not just an academic discipline, but considered to be a philosophical activity itself. It has been instrumental in shaping our understanding of philosophy, our philosophical canon and curricula. The history of philosophy in Africa is still a young discipline, although philosophical thinking (concepts, manuscripts, books and philosophers) can be traced back until ancient Egypt. Facing the problem of exclusion and inferiorisation of traditions of thought and philosophy in Africa, the discipline of the history of philosophy involves very specific problems and requires a project of “conceptual decolonisation”. This explains both the importance and the difficulty of writing a history of philosophy in Africa.

Studying Kanonbildung: An Exercise in a Distant Reading of Contemporary Self-descriptions of the 19th Century German Philosophy

In 19th century Germany, the number of publications in the history of philosophy increased dramatically. According to Ulrich Schneider’s calculations, from 1810 through 1899, 148 original textbooks by 114 authors were published in German. The aim of this article is to analyse how the documented in these publications canonic vision of 19th century German philosophy evolved. An analysis of 66 treatises published from 1802 through 1918 allows dividing 19th century philosophers into groups based on the frequency of their names across the tables of contents, describing the changes in the leading group composition and in the share of attention received by a given philosopher over time (the patterns of attention for Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Herbart, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Jacobi and Fries are discussed in detail). The paper presents thus a formal analysis of how historical reputations of philosophers were made, how they stabilised, or faded. The authors claim that the current understanding of the history of 19th century philosophy differs significantly from the one recorded in the German textbooks of the era (e.g. Herbart’s key position within the 19th century philosophical Canon; Schopenhauer’s recognition by university philosophers during his own lifetime).

A Philosophy of Loneliness by Lars Svendsen

Reviewed by: A Philosophy of Loneliness by Lars Svendsen Oliver Leaman (bio) A Philosophy of Loneliness. By Lars Svendsen. Translated by K. Pierce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp 182. Paper $19.99. ISBN 978–1-78023–747-3. This is an entertaining and intelligent book on a subject we often have preconceptions about, which the author takes delight in showing to be false. It is an interesting blend of philosophy and social science, which is not an easy combination to get to work properly. Sometimes when it is not well done the reader gets the impression that a lot of half-digested facts are being thrown at her and a bit of theory is then used to try to vaguely tie it all together. Here the facts work with the theory nicely, the detail of loneliness in different countries and communities gives us some idea of how to explore the notion conceptually, and deepens the account of loneliness as a complex idea. Svendsen is excellent on the links between loneliness and the emotions, especially the link with trust, and on the different varieties of loneliness that can be said to exist. He uses stories well, and, for this reader at least, the use of unfamiliar stories from Norwegian culture was enlightening. According to the book, loneliness is omnipresent and Svendsen outlines the tangled links between loneliness and solitude, and how perhaps modern culture has changed the nature of how we should understand those links. Svendsen has some blind spots, one of which is the idea that solitude might be good for some things like self-knowledge. This is a much discussed topic in the philosophical canon, the idea being perhaps that the less distraction, the more able one is to contemplate important things. He gives an example on p. 110 of how Kant views the situation, suggesting that social isolation could be considered sublime. There is a long tradition in philosophy and mysticism of regarding being by oneself as very helpful for both intellectual and personal development, since we can concentrate on things without other considerations getting in the way. There are many Asian traditions which privilege isolation and it is also paramount within many varieties of Greek and religious thought in general. The idea is that when we are by ourselves and have no one else to do things with, we are able to think much more authentically about who we are beneath the social veneer. There is also the idea that when we are feeling lonely we are able to think things out in a useful way, the sort of point we get in a lot of the songs by [End Page 1] Frank Sinatra, for instance. It is very much part of the old Hollywood notion that you go to a bar, smoke a cigarette, have a drink, and think things through by yourself, or perhaps with the help of an anonymous bar tender. Nowadays the movie equivalent is going into some sort of quasi-medical facility where again one is often encouraged to think in isolation about what is going on in your life. It is only by removing oneself from familiar surroundings, including people, that progress can be made, and a feeling of loneliness is then a stage on the route to better understanding. Certainly in religious accounts of experiencing levels of spiritual growth there is often a lonely stage and then you are filled with a consciousness of God. You may well be expected to spend time by yourself as an essential part of the process, and this does not seem unreasonable. That theory may be wrong but it deserves serious treatment and not the cursory dismissal it gets in this book. Another difficulty I had with the book is the author's determination to link loneliness with friendship and love, which might be regarded as rather strong emotions, and not also with milder relationships which can be important for us. We spend a lot of time talking about those deep emotions we can experience and how they figure in our lives, and they are indeed significant, but there is also a wide range of much milder emotions and relationships, like feeling...

Subjects of Desire

In the latter period of his work, Samuel Beckett began to devote much of his writing to exploring the nature of the voice and the gaze. Even those works that directly concerned silence and blindness implicitly thematized the voice and the gaze by embodying their absence. With later works, Beckett began to call into question the way in which these phenomena contributed to the constitution of subjects, modes of self-identification, and their relation to chosen objects of desire. In the 1950s and 1960s, Beckett produced dozens of short pieces of prose and theatrical works that wholly dispensed with traditional plot and character in favor of a series of experimental reductions, for example, to breath and light (Breath), to a disembodied voice (Company, Eh Joe, That Time, Cascando), or to a mouth illuminated by a point of light (Not I). Jacque Lacan, who would come to secure the place of the voice and the gaze in the philosophical canon, wrote and lectured on these concepts at the same time. If brought into dialogue, the work of each thinker—each highly nuanced and complex in its own right—can serve as a hermeneutic tool for better elucidating the function of the voice and the gaze and the role that they play in the formation of subjects. A great deal of critics have erroneously overlooked Lacan’s insistence that when he invokes these concepts he is not speaking about the phenomenal voice or the gaze of perception as such; similarly, Beckett’s work, though it directly thematizes their phenomenal aspects, treats these concepts in a thoroughly Lacanian manner.

Fanon: Africana Philosopher of Existence

ABSTRACTThe idea of the absence of reason and philosophy among colonized cultures is very prevalent in the Western philosophical canon. The purpose of this study is to make an argument for a readin...

Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African WritingBeing Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature

Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African WritingBeing Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature

Polycentric democracy: using and defusing disagreements

One of the main debates in political philosophy throughout the past four decades has been whether modern societies, despite their profound and ubiquitous disagreements, can find forms of association or institutional settings that are superior to our current modus vivendi arrangements. It is this question, I argue, that has motivated some of the most important recent contributions to political philosophy, such as John Rawls's A theory of justice (1971) and Political liberalism (1993), James Buchanan's work on constitutional economics (cf. 1975), and Gutmann and Thompson's approach to deliberative democracy (cf. 2004). We might think of these contributions as constituting the philosophical canon with respect to the question of how we should deal with deep and pervasive disagreements in society. While the philosophical approaches of the above-mentioned authors are construed around a diverse set of moral and methodological priors, they also have something important in common: these authors view disagreements about facts and norms not only as a problem of pure theory but also as a predicament that fundamentally endangers the stability of society. Not surprisingly, they regard pervasive political disagreements in modern liberal societies mainly as a threat that needs to be contained.As I show in the first chapter of the dissertation, the canonical approaches fail to produce institutional recommendations that can be viewed as an advancement beyond the current modus vivendi from a wide variety of comprehensive views. This motivates the thesis to propose a philosophical U-turn in the spirit of Adam Smith. This U-turn consists of three guiding ideas. The first is that a diversity of perspectives is not merely a nuisance, but an asset when solving hard problems. The second idea builds on the founding insight of institutional economics. Institutional economists have long held that whether self-interest works to the disadvantage or advantage of society depends on the rules of the game. By the same token, the dissertation argues that whether diversity-the cause of political disagreements- works to the advantage or disadvantage of society is a function of the rules of the game. The third idea is that an institutional structure that is construed around the idea of using diversity might have a better chance at generating an overlapping consensus than the canonical approaches that are based on a taming approach towards diversity.The second part of the dissertation aims at getting a better conceptual understanding of the gains of diversity by comparing the two main approaches for reaping the benefits from diversity: expert deliberation and polycentric systems. The core insight of this analysis is that polycentric systems outperform expert deliberation with respect to hard problems because they are able to ameliorate the psychological and epistemic inhibitors of collective deliberation. in other words, the core insight of the second part is that competition-allowing diverse people to act on their idiosyncratic hunches-is crucial to unlocking the gains from diversity.In the third part of the dissertation, I apply these insights to the political realm and advance the concept of a polycentric democracy. …

Degree apprenticeships, the ‘joy of learning’ excellence framework, and the common good

Degree Apprenticeships are fairly recent in the landscape of UK Higher Education. As is often the case with initiatives that try to build bridges between the world of work and the world of university education, there is suspicion that in such relationships higher education becomes servant to the needs of business and industry. Alternatively, Degree Apprenticeships perhaps offer a way for Higher Education to add value to the students’ working life. In our paper we try to argue for ways in which the value of the University-side of the provision within Degree Apprenticeships might reflect something of the value of the common good, and of the value of the joy of learning. Leaning on the venerable history of the triangle in the Western philosophical canon, and in Plato in particular, we demonstrate ways in which Degree Apprenticeships and Plato’s famous example of education as the journey to and from the cave can be brought together. In passing, we are claiming that Higher Education in all its forms would do well not to lose sight of its responsibilities to education as a servant of the common good, and above all, to the joy of learning.

The Value of Diversity and Inclusiveness in Philosophy. An Overview

In introducing the present issue, I clarify in which sense knowledge and philosophy can discriminate and marginalize some individuals. In the first part, I focus on the traditional exclusion of women from philosophy and explore some feminist projects of re-reading the philosophical canon. In my analysis, I pay particular attention to the gender gap in philosophy and the so-called “demographic problem” in academia. In the second part, I examine the best practices for remedying these forms of injustice and promoting diversity in philosophy.

Can Non‐Europeans Philosophize? Transnational Literacy and Planetary Ethics in a Global Age

Defenders of the Enlightenment highlight the long neglected anticolonial writings of thinkers like Immanuel Kant, which serve as a corrective to the misrepresentation of the Enlightenment's epistemological investment in imperialism. One of the most pervasive repercussions of the claim that the Enlightenment was always already anti‐imperial is that postcolonial critique is rendered redundant, and the project of decolonizing European philosophy becomes unnecessary. Contesting the exoneration of Enlightenment philosophers of racism and sexism, this article debunks the claim that Kantian cosmopolitanism was an antidote to colonialism. Addressing the ambivalent legacies of the European Enlightenment for the postcolonial world, with special focus on the “Syrian refugee crisis,” the article examines the enduring normative violence exerted by Enlightenment principles of cosmopolitanism and outlines the contested terrains that inflect current geopolitics of knowledge‐production. Given that the normative idea of philosophy, as defined during the Enlightenment, continues to delegitimize non‐European perspectives, the integration of previously marginalized knowledges into the philosophical canon is insufficient; rather, in order to desubalternize non‐Western epistemologies, it is imperative to undo the uneven distribution of epistemic agency globally. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak's ideas of transnational literacy and planetary ethics, the article concludes by underscoring the contribution of postcolonial‐feminist critique in imagining postimperial philosophy in a global age.

Between “Canon” and Library in Medieval Jewish Philosophical Thought

A common methodological assumption is that the number of preserved manuscripts is a reliable indicative of a book’s popularity. Also common is the recourse to levels of popularity in determining the relative importance of each work in the so-called medieval Jewish “philosophical canon”. This paper argues that in the study of Jewish medieval philosophy the quantitative method is misleading. In the medieval world of Islam the double liminality of Jewish philosophers—as Jews, and as philosophers—determined the books they read, those they had in their possession, those they openly cited, and the differences between these categories. The manuscript evidence must therefore be complemented by additional information, gleaned from other sources. Rather than a fixed canon, the end-result should give us a reader-sensitive library: what did people read, who were the readers of particular books, and what books influenced their writings.

The Problems of Philosophy’s Centenary

180 Reviews c:\users\arlene\documents\rj\type3602\red\rj 3602 134 red.docx 2017-01-09 4:03 PM THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY ’S CENTENARY James Connelly Philosophy / Trent U. Durham Oshawa, on, Canada l1j 5y1 jamesconnelly@trentu.ca Bernard Linsky and Donovan Wishon, eds. Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic: New Essays on Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. Stanford, ca: csli Publications, 2015. Pp. x, 277. us$30. isbn: 978-1-57586-846-2. espite the over 100 years which have passed since its original publication in 1912, Russell’s Problems of Philosophy remains, and will continue to be, a rewarding and productive subject of scholarly study for a variety of interrelated reasons. First, its enduring status as a popular textbook for introductory philosophy courses makes it a broadly available, and widely accessible, point of entry to both philosophical inquiry in general, as well as to Russell’s complex, fascinating and challenging ideas in particular. Second, it marks an important, historical and thematic point of transition within Russell’s philosophy . In particular, it marks a shift in emphasis from (though not a “clean break” between) the more technical, mathematical and logical work which characterized Russell’s early career, and which culminated in Principia Mathematica (1910–13), toward the broader epistemological, metaphysical, and scienti fic inquiries that characterized Russell’s work in the second decade of the twentieth century and beyond. Finally, the text originates from a brief but exceptionally fertile period within the history of analytic philosophy, during which two of the twentieth century ’s most original and influential analytic thinkers, Russell and Wittgenstein , collaborated extensively upon a host of important questions, themes and topics (e.g., propositions, sense, reference, logic, truth, and meaning) which would occupy centre stage within the analytic tradition for many decades afterward. While Russell and Wittgenstein’s names will be linked inextricably together for posterity, they only ever directly and actively collaborated for any extended period of time during the roughly two years intervening between Wittgenstein’s arrival at Cambridge in fall 1911 and his departure for Norway in fall 1913. Russell completed the manuscript of the Problems in late summer 1911, just prior to Wittgenstein’s arrival at Cambridge. The proofs were reviewed and revised by Russell in November, following Wittgenstein’s arrival, and the book was subsequently published in January 1912. While Wittgenstein therefore had little if any direct influence on the composition of the text, the Problems doubtless had a substantial influence on Wittgenstein’s philosophical development, and the views expressed in it formed part of the a= Reviews 181 c:\users\arlene\documents\rj\type3602\red\rj 3602 134 red.docx 2017-01-09 4:03 PM immediate philosophical context of Wittgenstein and Russell’s enormously important and influential philosophical interchanges during this period. This is especially true with regards to the multiple-relation theory of judgment developed and defended by Russell in Chapter xii (“Truth and Falsehood”). Thus, on the basis of the many insights it promises to yield into these formative interchanges alone (but not only on that basis), the Problems is destined to occupy a place within the philosophical canon, for many centuries to come. As the editors of Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic assert succinctly: “… The Problems of Philosophy has entered the canon of History of Philosophy that is relevant to current issues” (p. 2). Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic: New Essays on Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, offers a critical survey of Russell’s key epistemological , logical and metaphysical views, as espoused in this canonical philosophical text. The book consists of a series of eleven papers, authored by a variety of highly competent Russell scholars, including several of the leading contemporary scholars of early analytic philosophy. Each of the papers originated in a centenary conference held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Problems’ publication, at the University of Mississippi, on 29 November–1 December 2012. This may partly explain why the papers seem to coordinate, organically, so as to constitute a deep, informative, and highly integrated discussion of Russell’s views and of their philosophical significance. In the first contribution to the volume, “The Place of The Problems of...

FOUCAULT'S ICONIC AFTERLIFE: THE POSTHUMOUS REACH OF WORDS AND THINGS

ABSTRACTThe lasting influence of Michel Foucault's work is both instantly recognizable in that his very name can be invoked as a noun or adjective (“Foucauldian”), as a critical stance or attitude without further elaboration, and yet his signature concepts have been flattened, stretched, exaggerated, and thinned as they have been applied by his most enthusiastic followers. Although Foucault has entered the canon of philosophers, he also became iconic, most notably with the typographic icon, power/knowledge, a (possibly unwanted) achievement of recognition and compression virtually unknown to other philosophers. In this essay, I consider the Foucault of the philosophical canon, and I trace some of the main routes of the iconic Foucault into acceptance or nonacceptance by the academic disciplines, notably history and anthropology, and numerous other unexpected venues where variants of Foucault's ideas have found surprising homes. I also contemplate the meaning of the status of “iconicity” as it has been analyzed by sociologists, and the possibility that iconic misreadings of Foucault's concepts have been extraordinarily “good to think with” by his critics.

Decentering the Dialogic: Lacan with Bakhtin

This paper will argue that the structure of Dostoevsky’s poetics is constituted around the phenomenology of shame and the gaze. Dostoevsky should be read not only inter-textually or as historical object but critically, with Lacanian psychoanalysis and the European philosophical canon. 1 Positioning Dostoevsky at the limit separating the theological tradition and European philosophical positivism, our analysis will present him as a precursor to psychoanalytic and phenomenological concepts of subjectivity of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this sense Dostoevsky with Lacan can be used to re-frame and situate Bakhtinian concepts of the dialogical; a re-reading that makes more explicit the radical ideas inherent in Bakhtin’s work but at once problematises some of these ideas in terms of the implicit structure of the subject and inter-subjectivity.

Toward a Minor Michelstaedter

Carlo Michelstaedter (1987–1910) is mostly known for his tragic suicide and for his undefended tesi di laurea, titled La persuasione e la rettorica. He has thus been commonly regarded as a marginal, peripheral thinker, and his work has been often placed on the outskirts of the Italian philosophical and literary canon. In this article I focus precisely on Michelstaedter as a minor author, and on his work as an example of minor writing, but in light of what Deleuze and Guattari have called “minor literature,” a concept they first enunciate in their work on Kafka. A comparison between Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories and Michelstaedter’s oeuvre does not in fact confirm Michelstaedter’s purportedly marginal position vis à vis canonical Italian culture. Rather, it allows, first, a reassessment of the potential of the attribute minor that overturns the negative connotations attached to Michelstaedter’s peripherality, and, second, a literary and pragmatic interpretation of his work capable of both preserving its uncanny intensity and underlining its socio-political implications.

Metaphorical Language in the Zhuangzi

AbstractChapter 27 of the ancient Chinese text the Zhuangzi (c. 400 BCE) describes three kinds of language: yuyan , zhiyan , and chongyan . Wang Fuzhi ( 1619–1692) first coined the term ‘sanyan ’ or ‘tripartite‐language’ to emphasize their overlapping characteristics and incorporate them into a cohesive approach to the text. Sanyan has been used consistently in interpreting the Zhuangzi since the earliest compilation of its extant version and continues to inform academic publications today. Based on descriptions found in the Zhuangzi's ‘miscellaneous chapters’ (chapters 23–33) and on contemporary scholarship, I will explain how this model of sanyan functions and then how it facilitates philosophical reading of the Zhuangzi. Understanding the Zhuangzi's metaphorical language through sanyan lends access into the interrelated semantic field of the pre‐Qin philosophical canon and helps unravel Zhuangzi's often‐cryptic philosophical expressions.

Wittgenstein and His Literary Executors

Rush Rhees, Georg Henrik von Wright and Elizabeth Anscombe are well known as the literary executors who made Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy available to all interested readers. Their editions of Wittgenstein’s writings have become an integral part of the modern philosophical canon. However, surprisingly little is known about the circumstances and reasons that made Wittgenstein choose them to edit and publish his papers. This essay sheds light on these questions by presenting the story of their personal relationships—relationships that, on the one hand, gave Rhees, von Wright and Anscombe distinct insights into Wittgenstein’s philosophizing; and, on the other hand, let Wittgenstein assume that these three former students, and later colleagues and friends, were the most capable of preparing his work for publication. Using hitherto unpublished archival material as well as information from published recollections, the essay sketches the development of the personal and philosophical bonds from which the literary heirs’ distinct ways of handling Wittgenstein’s unpublished writings grew in later years.

Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical Canon

ABSTRACT:I reflect critically on the early modern philosophical canon in light of the entrenchment and homogeneity of the lineup of seven core figures: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. After distinguishing three elements of a philosophical canon—a causal story, a set of core philosophical questions, and a set of distinctively philosophical works—I argue that recent efforts contextualizing the history of philosophy within the history of science subtly shift the central philosophical questions and allow for a greater range of figures to be philosophically central. However, the history of science is but one context in which to situate philosophical works. Looking at the historical context of seventeenth-century philosophy of mind, one that weaves together questions of consciousness, rationality, and education, does more than shift the central questions—it brings new ones to light. It also shows that a range of genres can be properly philosophical and seamlessly diversifies the central philosophers of the period.