PHILOSOPHERS, FEMALE

From Philosopedia

PHILOSOPHERS, FEMALE

“Most philosophers these days are attached to university teaching or research departments,” Colin Klein has noted. “Not so in the past; and before the end of the nineteenth century there were no women academic philosophers, because there were no women academics.”

Mary Warnock in Women Philosophers (1996) includes women of merit who were “concerned with matters of a high degree of generality, and . . . at home among abstract ideas.” Her work presented the “generalising, explanatory, and argumentative aspects of their works. Included among the seventeen she describes are the following:

Anne Conway (1631–1679);

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797);

Harriet Martineau (1802–1876);

Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912);

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930);

Susan Stebbing (1885–1943);

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975);

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986); and

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999).

Peter J. King's 100 Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers (New York, 2004, Barron), which includes philosophers from the East as well as the West, from Thales and Confucius to the present day, lists Susan Haack as one of the very few living philosophers to be so honored. In 2005 Haack learned that she had been named in the Sunday Independent (London, 14 July 2005) as one of the ten most important women philosophers of all time.