Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author's Conclusion

• The idea that intelligence comes in many forms suggests a better rationale for enjoining more (and more different) voices to join the intellectual choir. Diverse scholars don’t just sing the same standards differently; they grow up learning different songbooks. Philosophy ought to nurture Grandma’s variety of smarts alongside Socrates’, neither of which is well captured by IQ (Thrasymachus, Socrates’ arch-nemesis, would undoubtedly have qualified for Mensa). Making the cohort of professional philosophers less white and less male is a good idea largely because it would make philosophy itself less parochial, by expanding the range of questions we care to ask and by taking seriously diverse perspectives on what constitutes a successful answer to those questions.
• Considerations of reparative justice also speak in favour of promoting diversity. But calls for reparative justice first need to make plain why increased access to the groves of academe would be good for structurally disadvantaged people. The plain fact is that any human life lived well involves developing ways of being smart that are tailored to the idiosyncratic contours of one’s own life. It’s good for everyone in academia to be exposed to the many varieties of intelligence recognised in different (sub)cultures. It’s also good for wise – and potentially wise – people to have access to ways of living, such as being a philosopher, that allow them to dedicate themselves to reflecting and expounding on what they learned from their grandmothers – or whatever else their own, personal intelligence enables them to see especially clearly.
• To the extent I heeded it, my dad’s mantra kept me out of trouble as a young man. But as Aristotle might have said (if he hadn’t himself been a gatekeeping old coot), the best life for a human being consists not only in avoiding stupidity, but also in helping diverse intelligences flourish in conversation with each other.