How to change ‘the canon’ in the classroom: canon reflection and canon reformation in teaching the history of (early modern) philosophy

Most people working in the history of philosophy today agree that the discipline still has to give more attention to the contributions of women philosophers. Accordingly, there has been more research on women philosophers' work over the past two to three decades. This applies especially to early modern philosophy, since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time when contributions by women were widely acknowledged and published. However, the growing bulk of research literature on these women philosophers' work still does not seem to be very well integrated into our teaching syllabi. One reason for this is that women's writings often do not seem to ‘fit’ into the standard narratives we tell about the history of philosophy in class. In this paper, I will address this problem by presenting a way to teach courses in the history of (early modern) philosophy in which canon reflection and canon reformation are essential parts of the syllabus. This implies not only including seminar sessions on the topic of canon formation and the processes of canon exclusion but also designing research-oriented writing tasks for students in which they themselves actively contribute to canon reformation.