Professor Dotson's post touches on an underestimated problem in academic philosophy: the professional pressure to pass as mainstream philosophers. I write this short comment to her excellent post mainly in order to open a forum for dicussion, so please do read the original post. The pressure of academic passing presents itself to authors who are members of minority groups, or who are interested in discussing minority issues (e.g., disability studies), but is also a lot wider.
All these things make sense for individual philosophers, but they impoverish the discipline as a whole and create a kind of pernicious canon of permissible topics and citable authors. In particular: academic passing creates the problem that only some topics are regarded as properly philosophical, whereas others get underrrepresented because they are presumably not properly philosophical, or only of marginal interest to philosophy. This may result in a self-fulfilling prophecy where some topics (e.g., metaphysics, epistemology) get more prominence in mainstream, general philosophy journals, conferences etc. than others (e.g., feminism, philosophy of culture).
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