JOHN R. SEARLE
695
of the debate.
Here is the traditionalists' view: There is a certain tradition in
American higher education, especially in the teaching of the humanities.
The idea behind this tradition is that there is a body of works of philos–
ophy, literature, history, and art that goes from the Greeks right up
to
the present day, and though it is not a unified tradition, there are certain
family resemblances among the leading works in it, and for want of a
better name, we call it the Western intellectual tradition .
It
extends in
philosophy from Socrates to Wittgenstein or, if you like, from the pre–
Socratics to Quine, in literature from the Greek poets and playwrights
right up
to,
for example, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. The idea
is that if you are going to be an educated person in the United States,
you must have some familiarity with some of the chief works in this tra–
dition because it defines our particular culture. You do not know who
you are, in a sense, unless you have some familiarity with these works,
because America is a product of this tradition, and the United States
Constitution in particular is a product of a certain philosophical element
in this tradition, the European Enlightenment. And then, too, we think
that many works in this tradition, some of those by Shakespeare and
Plato for example, are really so good that they are of
IIllillersai
human
interest.
So much for the naive statement of the traditionalist view. There is
an objection put by the challengers, and the objection, to put it in its
crudest form, is as follows : If you look closely at the reading lists of this
"Great Tradition," you will discover that the books are almost all by
white males from Europe and North America. There are vast areas of the
earth and great civilizations whose achievements are totally unrepresented
in this conception of "liberal education." Furthermore, within the
population of the United States as it is presently constituted, there are
lots of ethnic minorities , as well as the largest minority of all, women,
whose special needs, interests, traditions, and achievements are underrep–
resented or in some cases not represented at all in this tradition.
What is the response of the traditionalists to this objection? At this
point, the debate already begins to get murky, because it is hard to find
traditionalist authors who address the objection directly, so I am going
to
interject myself and present what I think the traditionalists should say,
given their other assumptions. The traditionalist should just acccept this
objection as a valid criticism and amend the "canon" accordingly.
If
great works by Asian authors, for example, have been excluded from the
"canon" of great works of literature, then by all means let us expand the
so-called canon to include them . C loser to home, if great women writ–
ers have been excluded, often because they are women, then let us ex-
