Christia Mercer

Last updated
Christia Mercer
Born
Fort Worth, Texas, US
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Brooklyn College (B.A.); Princeton University (Ph.D.)
Scientific career
Fields Early modern philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Institutions Columbia University
Doctoral advisor Margaret Dauler Wilson

Christia Mercer is an American philosopher and the Gustave M. Berne Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is known for her work on the history of early modern philosophy, the history of Platonism, and the history of gender. [1] She has received national attention for her work teaching in prisons and advocating for educational opportunities for incarcerated people. [2] She is the Director and Founder of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University, which "supports innovative research in the history of philosophy and promotes diversity in the teaching and practice of philosophy." [3] She is the editor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts, co-editor (with Melvin Rogers) of Oxford New Histories of Philosophy, and was elected to serve as president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 2019–20. [4] [5]

Contents

Life and career

Born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Mercer studied art history before living in Rome where she studied Latin with Reginald Foster at the Gregorian University. She received a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1989 under the supervision of Margaret Dauler Wilson and a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the Leibniz Archives in the University of Münster in 1984. [6] She taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of California, Irvine before moving to Columbia in 1991.

Mercer has been the Guest Professor, Seminar für Geistesgeschichte und Philosophie der Renaissance, University of Munich, 2003; gave the Ernst Cassirer Lectures at the University of Hamburg, 2006; and was visiting professor at the University of Oslo (2012–15).

She has held fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation (1993–94), NEH (2002), Herzog August Bibliotek, the National Humanities Center (2012), the American Academy in Rome (2013), the ACLS (2015–16), Harvard's Villa I Tatti Library (2015), and the Folger Library (2016). In 2012, Mercer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship [7] [8] and in 2018-19 was chosen as the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. [9] From 2004 to 2015, Mercer was the North American Editor for Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Her teaching awards include the 2008 Columbia College Great Teacher Award [10] and the 2012 Mark van Doren Award, which annually recognizes a professor for "commitment to undergraduate instruction, as well as for humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership." [11]

At Columbia, Mercer has been active in interdisciplinary pursuits. From 2010 to 2012 and 2013–2014, she was the chair for the Core Curriculum course, Literature Humanities, an interdisciplinary course on the masterpieces of Western literature and philosophy taken by all first-year undergraduates at Columbia College. [12] She was the Director for the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia from 2000 to 2001. She has also written articles on plagiarism, [13] Literature Humanities, [14] and queer identity [15] for the Columbia Daily Spectator undergraduate newspaper.

She was elected to serve as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association for 2019–20. [16]

Philosophical work

Mercer began her career working primarily in early modern philosophy. Her book, Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (CUP, 2001), [17] offers a new interpretation of Leibniz's philosophical development. [18] [19] [20] [21] She has published widely on Leibniz and on the diversity and importance of early modern Platonisms.

Mercer has begun to devote herself more and more to contextualizing the history of philosophy. She has designed a book series, Oxford Philosophical Concepts, that enlists prominent international scholars to think creatively about the "lives" of concepts in the history of philosophy. There are more than 20 volumes in various stages of production, and more than 15 published. [22] These include Animals, Dignity, Efficient Causation, Embodiment, Eternity, Evil, The Faculties, Memory, Moral Motivation, Persons, Pleasure, Self-Knowledge, and Sympathy. [23] Each of the volumes traces the historical development of central philosophical concepts and includes interdisciplinary "reflections." [24] She is also the editor of the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy series, which she launched with the late Eileen O'Neill [25] and now co-edits with Melvin Rogers, [26] and which "speaks to a growing concern to broaden and reexamine philosophy's past". [27] The first book in this series is titled Mexican Philosophy in the 20th Century (2017) and was edited by Carlos Alberto Sanchez and Robert Eli Sanchez. Mercer has written about the importance of inclusive history of philosophy in op-eds for the New York Times and the Washington Post . [28]

Motivated by her friend, Eileen O'Neill, she has become increasingly devoted to discovering and articulating the ideas of early modern and late medieval women. [29] Her paper, "Descartes' Debt to Teresa of Ávila, Or Why We Should Work on Women in the History of Philosophy," in Phil Studies, August, 2016, exposes that the famous evil deceiver argument in the Meditations on First Philosophy is indebted to Teresa of Ávila and asks how this crucial fact has been overlooked for centuries. [30] Alongside her book on the philosophy of the English philosopher Anne Conway [31] she is publishing a new edition and translation of Conway's Principles with Andrew Arlig, Laurynas Adomaitis, and Jasper Reid. Her forthcoming book, Feeling the Way to Truth: Women, Reason and the Development of Modern Philosophy, argues that historians of philosophy need to rethink core assumptions about seventeenth-century philosophy and that the writings of women play a much more significant part in that history than has been recognized.

Political and activist work

In 2015, Mercer became the first Columbia University professor to teach in a prison as part of Columbia's Justice In-Education Initiative. [32] At Taconic Correctional Facility, she taught female prisoners texts including the Aeschylus's Oresteia , Euripides's Medea , Aristophanes's Lysistrata , and William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night . She has been active in the education and prison reform movements, publishing op-eds and posts in the Washington Post and other outlets about philosophy's gender bias, the history of Christianity, and the prison-industrial complex. [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] In 2015, her post on the Columbia prison divestment campaign was publicly challenged by Jonathan Burns, director of public affairs for the Corrections Corporation of America, who accused her of making "multiple misleading and false statements about our company." Mercer's response argued that "Mr. Burns's demand for corrections exemplifies the tortured logic of the corporation he represents." [38]

Mercer is the founder of Just Ideas, which "brings together Columbia interns and some of the most talented professors in New York City to engage on equal terms with people in New York prisons." [39] Her experience with teaching incarcerated students was featured in a nationally broadcast segment on CBS This Morning and described in her op-ed for the Washington Post and in a piece about her experience for Columbia News . [40] [41] She has also taught in Metropolitan Detention Center, a Federal Prison in Brooklyn, which she wrote about in NBC Think . [42] Since early 2018, she has organized mini-courses that are available to the men of Metropolitan Detention Center. [43] Each year, roughly 250 MDC men graduate from a mini-course, and a dozen professors and two dozen Columbia undergraduates take up the opportunity to teach.

In 2018, she published an op-ed arguing for the importance of making access to books available to incarcerated people. [44] She was interviewed on this topic by WBUR's On Point. [45] In 2019, she published an article on "the philosophical origins of patriarchy" in The Nation. [46]

Recent awards and positions

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz</span> German mathematician and philosopher (1646–1716)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who invented calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics and statistics. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his knowledge and skills in different fields and because such people became less common during the Industrial Revolution and spread of specialized labor after his lifetime. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science. In addition, he contributed to the field of library science by devising a cataloguing system whilst working at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, that would have served as a guide for many of Europe's largest libraries. Leibniz's contributions to a wide range of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, primarily in Latin, French and German.

In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification", often in contrast to other possible sources of knowledge such as faith, tradition, or sensory experience. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patricia Churchland</span> Canadian-American analytic philosopher

Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland. Larissa MacFarquhar, writing for The New Yorker, observed of the philosophical couple that: "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Rescher</span> American philosopher (1928–2024)

Nicholas Rescher was a German-born American philosopher, polymath, and author, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh from 1961. He was chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science and chairman of the philosophy department.

Early modern philosophy The early modern era of philosophy was a progressive movement of Western thought, exploring through theories and discourse such topics as mind and matter, is a period in the history of philosophy that overlaps with the beginning of the period known as modern philosophy. It succeeded in the medieval era of philosophy. Early modern philosophy is usually thought to have occurred between the 16th and 18th centuries, though some philosophers and historians may put this period slightly earlier. During this time, influential philosophers included Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, all of whom contributed to the current understanding of philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Conway (philosopher)</span> English philosopher

Anne Conway was an English philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose work was in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists. Conway's thought is a deeply original form of rationalist philosophy, with hallmarks of gynocentric concerns and patterns that lead some to think of it as unique among seventeenth-century systems.Conways work was an influence on Gottfried Leibniz, and Hugh Trevor-Roper called her "England's greatest female philosopher."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nancy Cartwright (philosopher)</span> American philosopher of science

Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire is an American philosopher of science. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Durham. Currently, she is the President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Merrihew Adams</span> American philosopher (1937–2024)

Robert Merrihew Adams was an American analytic philosopher, who specialized in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and the history of early modern philosophy.

<i>A History of Philosophy</i> (Copleston) Book by Frederick Copleston

A History of Philosophy is a history of Western philosophy written by the English Jesuit priest Frederick Charles Copleston originally published in nine volumes between 1946 and 1975. As is noted by The Encyclopedia Britannica, the work became a "standard introductory philosophy text for thousands of university students, particularly in its U.S. paperback edition." Since 2003 it has been marketed as an eleven volume work with two previously published other works by Copleston being added to the series.

Women have made significant contributions to philosophy throughout the history of the discipline. Ancient examples include Maitreyi, Gargi Vachaknavi, Hipparchia of Maroneia and Arete of Cyrene. Some women philosophers were accepted during the medieval and modern eras, but none became part of the Western canon until the 20th and 21st century, when some sources indicate that Susanne Langer, G.E.M. Anscombe, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir entered the canon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Neiman</span> American philosopher, essayist and cultural commentator

Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marius Nizolius</span> Italian humanist

Marius Nizolius was an Italian humanist scholar, known as a proponent of Cicero. He considered rhetoric to be the central intellectual discipline, slighting other aspects of the philosophical tradition. He is described by Michael R. Allen as the heir to the oratorical vision of Lorenzo Valla, and a better nominalist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tamar Gendler</span> American philosopher

Tamar Szabó Gendler is an American philosopher. She is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale as well as the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at Yale University. Her academic research focuses on issues in philosophical psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, and areas related to philosophical methodology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Dauler Wilson</span> American philosopher

Margaret Dauler Wilson was an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at Princeton University between 1970 and 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Crary</span> American philosopher

Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Hagengruber</span> German philosopher

Ruth Hagengruber is a German philosopher, currently professor and head of philosophy at the University of Paderborn. She specialises in the history of women philosophers as well as philosophy of economics and computer science and is a specialist on Émilie Du Châtelet. Hagengruber is the director of the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists and founder of the research area EcoTechGender. She invented the Libori Summer School and is the creator of the Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers, for which she holds the position of editor in chief together with Mary Ellen Waithe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gillian Lester</span> American academic

Gillian L. L. Lester is a Canadian legal scholar who is the 15th Dean of Columbia Law School. She joined Columbia Law School on January 1, 2015, as Dean and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law. Previously, Lester was acting dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law where she had been a professor since 2006. Before that, she was a full professor at the School of Law of the University of California, Los Angeles. Lester announced she will step down as Dean of Columbia Law School at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year.

Maria Rosa Antognazza was an Italian-British philosopher, who was professor of philosophy at King's College London.

Donald Paul Rutherford is a Canadian philosopher and an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He is known for his research on early modern philosophy. Rutherford is a former president of Leibniz Society of North America (2010-14) and a winner of its Essay Prize (1992). He is an editor of Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy.

Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature is a 1995 book about the concept of order in Leibniz's thought by Donald Rutherford.

References

  1. ↑ "Christia Mercer". philosophy.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2021-06-08. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  2. ↑ Why NY is expanding top tier higher education in prisons , retrieved 2019-09-20
  3. ↑ "Our Mission – Center for New Narratives in Philosophy". newphilosophy.org. Archived from the original on 2020-12-26. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  4. ↑ "Columbia Faculty Page". Columbia University. Archived from the original on 2021-06-08. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  5. ↑ Mercer, Christia. "Curriculum Vitae". Archived from the original on 2021-06-29. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  6. ↑ "Biography". blogs.cuit.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  7. ↑ Leiter, Brian. "Three philosophers win Guggenheim Fellowships". Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog. Typepad.com. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
  8. ↑ "Christia Mercer's Guggenheim page". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Archived from the original on 2020-09-27. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  9. ↑ "Christia Mercer". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  10. ↑ Toure, Madina (24 October 2008). "Profs Honored With Teaching Awards". Columbia Daily Spectator. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  11. ↑ "Mercer, Lurie Receive Van Doren, Trilling Awards". Columbia College Today. Summer 2012. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  12. ↑ "Faculty Profile: Christia Mercer". Columbia University. Archived from the original on 1 November 2012. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  13. ↑ "Cheating and Dante's hell - Columbia Spectator". Columbia Daily Spectator. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  14. ↑ Mercer, Christia (9 September 2010). "Lit Hum and the Examined Life". Columbia Daily Spectator. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  15. ↑ Mercer, Christia (10 February 2008). "21st Century Feminism or the Need to "Be Queer"". Columbia Daily Spectator. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  16. ↑ "American Philosophical Association — Past Eastern Division Officers". Archived from the original on 2021-04-16. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  17. ↑ Mercer, Christia (2001). Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origin and Development. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   0521403014.
  18. ↑ Hawthorne, John (28 March 2003). "Active or Passive?" (PDF). Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  19. ↑ Look, Brandon. "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
  20. ↑ McDonough, Jeffrey. "Leibniz's Philosophy of Physics". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
  21. ↑ Youpa, Andrew. "Leibniz's Ethics". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
  22. ↑ "Christia Mercer". philosophy.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2021-06-08. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  23. ↑ "Oxford Philosophical Concepts - Oxford University Press". global.oup.com. Retrieved 2019-09-20.
  24. ↑ "Oxford Philosophical Concepts". www.oxford-philosophical-concepts.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  25. ↑ "Eileen O'Neill Memorial Fund". www.oxford-new-histories.com. Archived from the original on 2018-08-15. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  26. ↑ "Oxford New Histories of Philosophy — Series Editors' Foreword". www.oxford-new-histories.com. 10 July 2018. Archived from the original on 2018-12-23. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  27. ↑ "Oxford New Histories of Philosophy". www.oxford-new-histories.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  28. ↑ "Biography – Christia Mercer". blogs.cuit.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  29. ↑ "Eileen O'Neill, 1953-2017 (obituary by Christia Mercer) - Daily Nous". dailynous.com. 6 December 2017. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  30. ↑ Mercer, Christia (2017). "Descartes' Debt to Teresa of Ávila, or Why We Should Work on Women in the History of Philosophy". Philosophical Studies. 174 (10): 2539–2555. doi:10.1007/s11098-016-0737-9. S2CID   171117738.
  31. ↑ "Christia Mercer | Department of Philosophy". philosophy.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2021-06-08. Retrieved 2015-09-15.
  32. ↑ "Philosophy Professor Teaches Core Classics at Women's Prison | Columbia News". news.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2015-09-13. Retrieved 2015-09-15.
  33. ↑ Strauss, Valerie (2015-06-18). "The lessons of Juneteenth still matter 150 years later". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2015-09-15.
  34. ↑ Strauss, Valerie (2015-06-16). "Radical Pop-Up Schools: A new way to reach educationally disadvantaged communities". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2015-09-15.
  35. ↑ Anderson, Nick (2015-04-28). "Philosophy's gender bias: For too long, scholars say, women have been ignored". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2015-09-15.
  36. ↑ Mercer, Christia (2015-03-24). "I teach philosophy at Columbia. But some of my best students are inmates". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2015-09-15.
  37. ↑ "Sorry, Fox: Obama Was Right About Christianity's 'Terrible Deeds'". 6 February 2015. Retrieved 2015-09-15.
  38. ↑ Strauss, Valerie (2015-07-15). "Update: Columbia University divesting from private prison companies. Why other schools should too". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2015-09-15.
  39. ↑ "About Us | Center for New Narratives in Philosophy". newnarratives.philosophy.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2021-06-19.
  40. ↑ Why NY is expanding top tier higher education in prisons , retrieved 2018-10-22
  41. ↑ "I teach philosophy at Columbia. But some of my best students are inmates". Washington Post. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  42. ↑ "Opinion | Reading gives prisoners hope. States want to take it away". NBC News. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  43. ↑ "Pedagogy of Dignity Workshop". rethinking-justice.org. Archived from the original on 2018-10-23. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  44. ↑ "Opinion | Reading gives prisoners hope. States want to take it away". NBC News. 25 January 2018. Retrieved 2019-09-20.
  45. ↑ "Can Criminal Justice Reform Happen This Year?". www.wbur.org. Retrieved 2019-09-20.
  46. ↑ Mercer, Christia (2019-07-01). "The Philosophical Origins of Patriarchy". The Nation. ISSN   0027-8378. Archived from the original on 2019-11-15. Retrieved 2019-09-20.
  47. ↑ "Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics". Oxford University Press Catalog. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.