Abstract
In this paper I review the progress that has been made in recovering the lost voices of philosophical women. After considering some of the challenges that this work of recovery has faced and still faces, I consider the promise which the future holds for extending this work of recovery across both time and space, to all philosophical traditions across the world. Focusing particularly on the challenges of alterity and erasure, I argue that the contextual approaches developed to face these are especially relevant to the challenges to be faced when for extending this work beyond Anglo-America. I suggest that this work of recovery is comparable to the recovery of ancient philosophy in the European Renaissance. With the extension of this work of recovery to women philosophers of all times, and all cultures, we can look forward to a new Renaissance—a Renaissance not of the Greek philosophers of antiquity, but of the philosophy of women.
I am most grateful to the Brazilian Council for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES: Programa de Apoio a Eventos no País (PAEP) proposal number: 647 218), for the funding which enabled me to attend the First International Conference Women in The History of Philosophy in Rio de Janeiro, for which I wrote this paper.
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Notes
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For examples of university philosophy courses which incorporate philosophy by women, see the Project Vox website http://projectvox.library.duke.edu/.
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Madame de Scudéry was partly rehabilitated by Victor Cousin mid-nineteenth-century.
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The 1967 edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edwards, 1967) contained not a single woman. Neither did The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy ed. Schmitt, Skinner and Kessler (CUP, 1987).
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Hutton, S. (2022). A New Renaissance: The History of Women Philosophers Across Boundaries and Cultures. In: Lopes, C., Ribeiro Peixoto, K., Pricladnitzky, P. (eds) Latin American Perspectives on Women Philosophers in Modern History. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00288-5_2
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