Being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy

Being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy

Released Thursday, 18th April 2019
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Being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy

Being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy

Being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy

Being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy

Thursday, 18th April 2019
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Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Groningen) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (15 May, 2013) titled "Being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy". Abstract: Why are there so few women in philosophy, and in technical areas such as mathematical philosophy in particular? Philosophy has the worst gender balance of all fields in the humanities, at around 16%-25% worldwide. The presence of women in philosophy is comparable to engineering and physics; it is worse than in mathematics. Is this a problem? And if it is, what can be done about it? What is it like, being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy? In my talk, I discuss some unconscious psychological phenomena that are now thought to greatly contribute to the phenomenon of poor gender balance in several professional spheres, academia in particular. I will focus especially on implicit biases and stereotype threat, two phenomena widely documented by the literature in social psychology, and how they impact the position of women and other under-represented groups in academia, in philosophy in particular. Many points can be generalized to other dimensions of exclusion such as race/ethnicity, class, sexual orientation etc., but in this talk I will focus predominantly on the issue of gender imbalance. I will also discuss reasons why everyone should be concerned by this situation (i.e. not only the members of the under-represented groups themselves), as well as practical measures that may help improve the position of women in philosophy and elsewhere in academia.

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From The Podcast

Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists.The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws.Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.

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