Philosophy, Especially, Should Welcome Demographic Diversity

“Philosophy is a dialectical discipline that thrives in the clash, reconciliation, and creative synthesis of diverse views; and our views are profoundly shaped by our cultural backgrounds and life experiences. Uniformity dulls our collective philosophical thinking. A fair and flourishing discipline would treasure rather than repel those who have historically been excluded.” So writes Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) at The Splintered Mind. . He notes that philosophical questions are ones that are relevant to people from all backgrounds: Philosophical reflection is an essential part of the human condition, of interest to people of all cultures, races, classes, social groups, and body types. Who doesn’t care whether we have immaterial souls that might continue to exist after we have died, about ethical issues such as war and human rights, about what’s worth pursuing in life, about when and how far we should trust scientific authority, about the best forms of government, about the origin and structure of the world? Nothing about these issues—and nothing about philosophy as a discipline devoted to the fundamental questions of human existence—should make it of more interest to one gender rather than another, one cultural group rather than another, or to the able-bodied more than to the disabled. Yet academic philosophy in the US today lacks demographic diversity: Study after study and testimonial after testimonial show that the culturally privileged are overrepresented in academic philosophy… For example, the self-reported gender of regular members of the American Philosophical Association in 2025 was 70% male, 29% female, and 1% nonbinary/something else… In 2025, 4% of regular APA members reported being Black or African American, compared with 14% of the U.S. population. The NSF data suggest no surge of new Black philosophers in the pipeline: the percentage among recent PhD recipients is also 4%. The NSF data show no American Indian or Alaskan Native philosophy PhD recipients in 2024… and only one in past four years (among 1692 doctorates awarded), although Native Americans constitute nearly 2% of the U.S. population. Another concern that has recently drawn attention is the linguistic insularity of mainstream Anglophone philosophy—that is, the neglect of work written in other languages. In 2018, three collaborators and I examined citation practices in leading Anglophone journals and found that 97% of citations referred to work.. The post Philosophy, Especially, Should Welcome Demographic Diversity first appeared on Daily Nous.