Teaching Christine de Pizan in Turkey

Abstract

An important part of making philosophy as a discipline gender equal is to ensure that female authors are not simply wiped out of the history of philosophy. This has implications for teaching as well as research. In this context, I reflect on my experience of teaching a text by medieval philosopher Christine de Pizan as part of an introductory history of philosophy course taught to Turkish students in law, political science, and international relations. I describe the challenges I encountered, the ways in which I dealt with them, and draw some conclusions based on my observations and feedback obtained at the end of the course.

Keywords:

• feminism
• history of philosophy
• service course
• Turkey
• Christine de Pizan

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank two anonymous referees for their insightful comments as well as the audience at the VIIIth International Christine de Pizan Colloquium at which a version of this talk was presented, and in particular Ilse Paakkinen, Karen Green, Mary Ann Case, Zeynep Çeçen, and the conference organiser, Anna Loba.

Notes

See, for instance, Waithe (1987, 1989, 1991 and 1995) and Lopez MacAlister (1989a, 1989b).

A complete list with references, and a description of the course is available at www.bilkent.edu.tr/~phil/phil_243.htm.

This is discussed in many places, but see in particular, Lopez McAlister (1989a, 1989b) and Ree (2002).

In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed ‘canon’; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised’. (Searle 1990)

The Tale of Joan of Arc, in Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Brownlee (1997).

Sometimes, it may even be desirable to take the ideas away from their historical context in order to engage students, see Sakezles (1997).

References are to book and chapter of the City of Ladies.

French and Italian women got the vote in 1945, Romanians and Portuguese a year later, the Belgium in 1948, and the Swiss not until 1972!

Though there were feminist activists even in Ottoman times, see Safarian (2007). One such example, who documents the early feminist movement in Turkey, is the writer Fatma Aliye (1862–1936).

See Atasu (2000). The Turkish second wave of feminism came in the eighties, cf. Diner and Toktaş (2010).

See Ozgalda (1998)'s excellent book on the topic.

Hurriyet Daily News, February 17, 2011. The Turkish government distanced itself from the professor's pronouncement and stated its view that Islamic beliefs do not entail that women are responsible for violence done to them.