Women in the History of Philosophy
The standard twentieth-century histories of European philosophy do not include women as important, original contributors to the discipline's past. Some relegate a few to footnotes; most omit women entirely. Recent research, inspired by the influence of feminist theory, and by a renewed interest in the historiography of philosophy, has uncovered numerous women who contributed to philosophy over the centuries.
Women's representation in philosophy's history was not always as marginal as it came to be by the opening of the twentieth century. For example, in the seventeenth century, Thomas Stanley's history mentioned twenty-four women philosophers of the ancient world, while Gilles Ménage discussed some seventy, including women Platonists, Academicians, Dialecticians, Cyrenaics, Megarians, Cynics, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, and Pythagoreans. With respect to the moderns, the seventeenth-century treatises of Jean de La Forge and Marguerite Buffet provided doxographies of women philosophers. Even in the nineteenth century, when women were virtually being erased from the standard histories, Lescure, Joël, Foucher de Careil, and Cousin wrote special studies on female philosophers.
Published 1987–1991, A History of Women Philosophers, volume 1, 600 BC–500 AD, edited by Mary Ellen Waithe, has provided a detailed discussion of the following figures: Themistoclea, Theano I and II, Arignote, Myia, Damo, Aesara of Lucania, Phintys of Sparta, Perictione I and II, Aspasia of Miletus, Julia Domna, Makrina, Hypatia of Alexandria, Arete of Cyrene, Asclepigenia of Athens, Axiothea of Philesia, Cleobulina of Rhodes.
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