Figure 1: Hypatia, a Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher.
If you ask someone to name some famous philosophers, they will probably give you a list of men: Plato, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Nietzsche, and so on. But there are lots of women doing (great!) philosophy, and there always have been.
In recent years, there have been many moves to improve the representation of women in philosophy.[i] This includes a growing trend for rediscovering the work of women philosophers from the past. The philosophy of these women is interesting and important, but it hasn’t received the same kind of attention over time as that of their male counterparts. However, there is now a change in the air: we are seeing more books and articles about women philosophers of the past, their ideas, achievements, and their importance.
Let’s look first at the Early Modern Period, running roughly from 1500 to 1800. Many male philosophers were making their mark, such as René Descartes (1596-1650), John Locke (1632-1704), and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). But there were also many important women philosophers. Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, (1618-1680) exchanged letters with Descartes, challenging his philosophical views, as well as presenting and defending her own. Mary Astell (1666-1731) was an English philosopher, who applied her metaphysical view of mind and body to defend the education of women. Put briefly: it is their social position that puts women at an intellectual disadvantage, not any innate differences from men. Other notable Early Modern philosophers include Anne Conway (1614-1687), Catharine Cockburn(1679-1749), Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) (mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein).
Figure 2: Mary Wollstonecraft
Slightly later, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1880) was not only a fantastic novelist, but a philosopher. She also translated Spinoza’s Ethics into English for the first time (in 1856). The story of why her translation wasn’t published at the time is hugely frustrating – her boyfriend got into a disagreement with the publisher about money.[ii]
Figure 3: Statue of George Eliot in Nuneaton.
My own small contribution to this celebration of women philosophers looks to the early Twentieth Century. There is still a tendency to focus on the work of men, such as Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), rather than that of women, such as Hilda Oakeley (1867-1950) and Susan Stebbing (1885-1943). Martha Kneale (1909-2001) is best known for the book The Development of Logic, co-authored with her husband William Kneale. I have argued that she should also be recognised and remembered for a groundbreaking philosophical development:
Necessity (what must be the case, what couldn’t have been otherwise) and a priori knowledge (what you can know just by thinking in the right way, rather than having to look at and interact with the world around) are important and central notions in philosophy. For a very long time, philosophers assumed that necessity and a priori knowledge always come together. In the 1970s Saul Kripke famously argued that there can be necessary truths that are not a priori; this has had a lasting impact on philosophy. But back in the 1930s, Martha Kneale argued that there are necessary truths that are not a priori!
This kind of discovery allows us to give women their proper place in the history of philosophy. But it also allows us to learn from them: if we’re ignoring half of the philosophers, we are sure to be missing out. If we’re paying attention, we double our chances to learn more and better philosophy.
[i]E.g. the excellent work by the Society for Women in Philosophy. [ii]Thanks to Clare Carlisle, a philosopher at KCL, the translation is now published.