Abstract
In “Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy” I explore several questions: What does it mean for our understanding of the history of philosophy that women philosophers have been left out and are now being retrieved? What kind of a methodology of the history of philosophy does the recovery of women philosophers imply? Whether and how excluded women philosophers have been included in philosophy? Whether and how feminist philosophy and the history of women philosophers are related? I also explore the questions “Are there any themes or arguments that are common to many women philosophers?” and “Does inclusion of women in the canon require a reconfiguration of philosophical inquiry?” I argue that it is either ineptness or simple bigotry that led most historians of philosophy to intentionally omit women’s contributions from their histories and that such failure replicated itself in the university curricula of recent centuries and can be remedied by suspending for the next two centuries the teaching of men’s contributions to the discipline and teaching works by women only. As an alternative to this drastic and undoubtedly unpopular solution, I propose expanding the length and number of courses in the philosophy curriculum to include discussion of women’s contributions.
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Notes
- 1.
I owe this insight to Ms. Nancy Tomaselli, a member of the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers.
- 2.
With respect to the history of Ancient Philosophy and its Canon, for example, the previously untranslated fragment by Aesara of Lucania from her book On Human Nature has now been translated (Waithe 1987). Its relation to the Platonic corpus needs to be discussed: was she adopting a Platonic concept of the tripartite human soul? Had he adopted her analysis? Or, were they both explicating views that were generally known and generally believed to be true? Scholars hold different views of the relative antiquity of her Greek dialect, but much more discussion and analysis is needed before we can with assurance credit that view of the soul to Plato alone.
- 3.
In the history of women’s contributions to Philosophy, an example of such an expression is ‘′Έκδοεως παραναγνωσϑεώης τή ϕιλοσόϕ̧̧ω̧ ϑνγατρί μου ϓπατία̧’ appearing in Theon of Alexandria’s footnote where he acknowledges Hypatia’s responsibility for the Commentary on Book III of Ptolemy’s Syntaxis Mathematica, ‘On the Motions of the Sun’ (Rome 1943, p. 807). Elsewhere (Waithe, HWP 1) I have suggested that Copernicus likely read Hypatia’s own footnote to the effect that ‘for Ptolemy to be correct, the sun would need to be in two places and that is impossible,’ and thus started Copernicus rethinking the Ptolemaic geocentric universe.
- 4.
With respect to the history of women’s contributions to philosophy, the work On the Harmony of Women by Perictione I (Waithe, HWP1, 32) raises all sorts of questions: Is this the same Perictione as Plato’s mother? If she was a philosopher, what was her influence on her son’s philosophical development?
- 5.
I am not suggesting that the thousands of works of philosophy that have been omitted from the HC are to the discipline of Philosophy what the Dead Sea Scrolls are to the discipline of Religion. It is too early to know how significant they are, yet, the point is the same: we must suspend judgment and take the time needed to rethink our history and therefore our Canon.
- 6.
I have in mind multivolume series such as that by Frederick Copleston and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Paul Edwards.
- 7.
For example, William Alexander’s The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity.
- 8.
I rely here upon the excellent translation in Judith Zinsser, Émilie Du Châtelet: Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, pp. 191–192 referring to Du Châtelet, Foundations of Physics, section 577, where Du Châtelet discusses forces vive which we might (roughly) translate as ‘energy’: ‘thus, the force of body A, which had 2 of speed and 1 of mass, was 4, that is to say, as the square of this speed multiplied by its mass.’ Thus, Du Châtelet’s ‘the force of body A’ may be abbreviated as ‘the energy of A,’ or as ‘E’; ‘…the square of this speed…’ may be abbreviated as ‘velocity squared’ or ‘V2’; and “multiplied by its mass’ may be abbreviated as ‘times M’ to yield ‘E = V2M’ or equivalently: ‘E = MV2’.
- 9.
I have encountered no women authors of HC source materials prior to the recovery movement that began in the 1980s. In the 20th century Ariel Durant with her husband Will Durant wrote for a general audience their multivolume Story of Civilization without mention of women philosophers. Elizabeth Flower wrote (with Murray G. Murphey) History of Philosophy in America. Despite Flower’s professional training as a philosopher they omit mention of women philosophers. Mary Ritter Beard wrote Women as Force in History (1942) and included mention of several women who were philosophers. Beard contains sufficient resources to have been a jumping-off point for my own research. Other women philosophers of the twentieth-century wrote works that were called ‘histories’ of particular eras or subdivisions of philosophy, but they too relied upon a small selection of early modern histories.
- 10.
I owe this suggestion to Professor Janet Kournay of Notre Dame University.
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Waithe, M.E. (2020). Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy. In: Thorgeirsdottir, S., Hagengruber, R. (eds) Methodological Reflections on Women’s Contribution and Influence in the History of Philosophy. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44421-1_1
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