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Are There Really No Female Philosophers?

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People seem confused by my recent statement that there are no female philosophers aside from Hannah Arendt. Here is what I mean by that.

We have an art festival in our town. It’s held every September and features work by a couple dozen local artists. Some are atrocious but some are quite good. They are artists doing art but not in the same way as Rembrandt or Degas were artists. I buy artwork there routinely because it’s enjoyable to look at and it’s good to support local artists. But I do it with a clear understanding that it’s art in a very different manner than the art you see in a museum.

Similarly, I am a writer in the sense that I write and publish books. But I’m not a writer like Cervantes or even Jennifer Egan. Of course, there are women who study philosophy and publish in philosophical journals and conference proceedings. I am one of such women. But I’m not a philosopher like Descartes, Hegel, or Arendt. And if you look at this last sentence, aside from Arendt, I have nobody of the female sex to list in a way that would be understandable to everybody.

I’m very interested in discussing why that is and how Arendt managed to become what women don’t usually try to become. But that there isn’t a list of female names to put next to Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Lacan, etc cannot possibly be in dispute.

20 responses to “Are There Really No Female Philosophers?”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “very interested in discussing why that is and how Arendt managed to become what women don’t usually try to become”

    I’ll start with something non-controversial!

    Apart from purely practical considerations (few women were in a position to even try for most of history) being a philosopher seems to be at the extreme end of a few different bell-curves – preferring ideas over people, solitude over sociability, abstraction over practical considerations that very few men are cut out for the job and even fewer women (who generally prefer people and sociability and practicality over abstract ideas and solitude).

    So (just guessing at numbers) let’s say only one out of 100 men would even want to be philosophers and only one out of 100 of them would actually make a serious contribution… the numbers will be even more stark for women… 1 out of 500? 1000?

    Just to get things rolling…

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  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Ayn Rand, and Susan Sontag all have categories at Maverick Philosopher. I think only Ayn Rand is really well known. Does she count as a philosopher?

    D:

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    1. Avatar
      Anonymous

      Just saw the comments in the other thread regarding Ayn Rand. What about Flannery O’Connor?

      D:

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Flannery O’Connor was a writer. I googled and, again,not even Wikipedia lists her as a philosopher.

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Even Wikipedia doesn’t go as far as naming Sontag a philosopher. Ayn Rand was an author (not even a writer). The other two I never heard about which is an answer in itself.

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      1. Demotrash Avatar
        Demotrash

        I’ve heard of Weil, but I think she’s more known in France. She’s more a political activist than a philosopher, and a rather stupid one at that. And if we’re looking at France anyway, Simone de Beauvoir is significantly more well known (she did not consider herself a philosopher so I don’t feel I need to either.)

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          De Beauvoir concentrated on her identity. That was her #1 issue. To me, that disqualifies one as a philosopher but not as a thinker.

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    3. Demotrash Avatar
      Demotrash

      Sontag is fairly well known, but I’ve never thought of her as a philosopher, more a critic.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        I’ve quoted her a couple of times but not for any sort of philosophical insight.

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  3. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    Neither Ayn Rand nor Susan Sontag are philosophers. They cannot even be considered thinkers: the former was an ideologue and the latter was an excellent critic-cum-mediocre novelist.

    Both Edith Stein and Simone Weil are often thought of as philosophers and so described, especially in Continental philosophy (i. e. non-English language philosophy, also known as Analytic philosophy).

    Stein’s contribution to phenomenology, ontology and political philosophy is significant: she was Husserl’s most promising student and would probably have left an even greater mark than Arendt in the history of twentieth-century philosophy had she not decided to abandon all professional work in her field in order to devote herself to a contemplative life as a Carmelite nun after her sudden conversion to Roman Catholicism from her original (very tepid) Jewish faith. She then turned to Aquinas and was doing serious work in neo-thomist philosophy when she was arrested at her convent by the Nazis. Sister Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, as she was then styled, died in Auschwitz in 1942 a martyr to the faith and is now a saint in the Roman Catholic Synaxarium. Her later writings, The Science of the Cross and Ways to Know God, were published posthumously, as was her most significant theological work, Finite and Eternal Being, which came out as recently as 2006 (unfinished).

    Simone Weil is also a serious thinker, although her work is more difficult to categorize in philosophical terms as her formation was much more multi-disciplinary in its approach and themes, and while she was formally trained and practiced as a teacher of philosophy, her work, unlike that of Edith Stein, would not be considered philosophical to any significant degree in terms of Analytic philosophy. Still, her influence is still vital and her work noteworthy in so far as it has contributed to a consistent body of writings that continues to this day. Her contributions range from political philosophy to aesthetics through epistemology, ethics and metaphysics and while they all bear the unmistakable imprint of Weil’s thought, they are neither unitary nor systematic.

    Simone Weil was also Jewish – from an assimilated background -and like Stein developed an interest in Christianity that turned her later writings into mystical meditations on the Christian faith. However, unlike Stein, although she went to Mass daily, she never formally converted to Roman Catholicism and after she died – more or less intentionally by self-starvation – she was buried in an unmarked plot of land between the Jewish and the Catholic sections of Ashford cemetery, in Kent, England, where she had joined the Free French forces while escaping Nazi-occupied France.

    What I notice is that the three most significant female philosophers of the twentieth century were all Jewish, and of the three two became Christian and one is now a saint in the Roman Catholic church. As a Jew who recently converted to Christianity I am constantly inspired by their example, and as a current student of philosophy [Birkbeck College, London] I am overawed by their wide-ranging and extensive work.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Ashkenazi Jew genes plus the definition of the soul offered by Christianity is, indeed, the winning recipe.

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  4. Avatar
    Anonymous

    There’s Philippa Foot, the ethicist who is credited with inventing the (in)famous trolley car problems. Not a Kant or Heidegger level figure, but still pretty big as 20th century philosophers go.

    (commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)

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  5. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    @AcademicLurker

    Philippa Foot? Nah, just another academic philosopher, like Iris Murdoch and countless others. They don’t count.

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  6. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    CORRIGENDA:

    Unfortunately yesterday I accidentally erased my post twice and while rewriting it I made a mistyfying omission. The sentence in brackets “Continental philosophy (i. e. non-English language philosophy, also known as Analytic philosophy)” should read as :

    Continental philosophy (i. e. non-English language philosophy, whereas Anglo-American philosophy is known as Analytic philosophy).

    Thank you.

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  7. mitchellporter Avatar
    mitchellporter

    A little belatedly, I want to round off my own contribution to this discussion.

    It’s a fact that prior to modern times, the list of philosophers that humanity has managed to remember, just as with the list of thinkers in general, artists, conquerors and rulers… is overwhelmingly male. Various explanations have been proposed as to why. Today it’s fashionable to talk about IQ distributions, also about personality. Feminists have highlighted difficulties specific to women, from just the ease of getting pregnant in eras without contraception, all the way to cultural orders that have specifically kept women out of the intellectual spheres or out of public life in general, while also unearthing many examples of women who did play a role or who wanted to play a role.

    So we have a history, let’s say of several thousand years, in which women generally faced, along with the difficulties that everyone faces in a competitive world, barriers specific to their sex, and then a modern period of approximately a century, in which there has been an attempt at equal opportunity.

    The thesis was originally that there have been no female philosophers except for Hannah Arendt. We commenters have named some others and their contributions. The real thesis seems to be, that Arendt is the only female philosopher in the top tier, or perhaps the only one who belongs in the canon. While this exact opinion hasn’t really found support in the comments, I would still be interested in hearing more about it. I think it’s bound up with a few other ideas, like unapologetic Eurocentrism regarding the intellectual world, Heideggerian ideas about what philosophy is, and I suspect some ideas about the psychology of being a thinker.

    (I’d also be interested to know, what were Clarissa’s thoughts on this matter, in the years when she was a liberal?)

    If I ask myself, who do I think are the philosophical thinkers of the first rank, and are any of them women… what strikes me is that the ones coming to mind, are very much outside the academy. Within the modern academy, I don’t have strong opinions about how high, say, Arendt or Anscombe ought to rank. On the other hand, my chief candidate for a modern female philosopher who founded a school of thought, Ayn Rand, is clearly an outsider, and even counting her as a philosopher is apparently controversial.

    Moreover, if I think about some of the most brilliant individuals I’ve known or known of, who contributed to my own intellectual development, they were or are female outsiders whose exclusion actually represents (in my opinion) a structural failure of the intellectual society around them. Celia Green was next to Anscombe’s milieu (Oxford) and is a thinker who could define an era, but apparently her thought was just too far out and too threatening to even be engaged with. Marni Sheppeard was a physicist who was right about many things far in advance of her peers, but who nonetheless perished on the margins while still trying to prove herself. And T.L., who I know right now, does what she can, while under conditions of quite unnecessary adversity.

    Of course there have been many male intellectual outsiders as well. I am actually more interested in why talented outsiders don’t prosper, than in why women specifically are rare in the first ranks of the canon. But I do have to note the existence of significant female thinkers in the top tiers of my counter-canon.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      In the years when I was a raging liberal, I wrote my doctoral dissertation and then my first book about the women’s tendency to self-infantilize aggressively in direct relationship with the rights and freedoms they receive. Today, I see as much proof of that contention as ever. The simple answer to why women don’t pursue the life of the mind as actively as men now that there are literally zero barriers is this: they don’t wanna. It’s too hard and there’s no reward. It’s easier to just marry a philosopher than do the readings yourself.

      I’m not happy about this, in case anybody wonders. I’m simply studying this phenomenon. After every advance of female liberation is achieved, we suddenly see an avalanche of books where women aggressively express the desire to be little girls, princesses, babies, damsels in distress, and so on in massive waves. Today I was once again working with a novel like that.

      As for why I rank Arendt as a real philosopher even though I don’t use her work myself is that she gets quoted a lot. This means she inspired a lot of thinking. Ayn Rand, and I say this as a sincere fan, doesn’t get quoted. Because there’s nothing to quote.

      There’s no such thing as thinking done in a vacuum. It’s all part of a web of intellectual relationships. It’s a genealogy. That’s why this idea of outsiders doesn’t speak to me. If the field you are in doesn’t accept you, then your stuff is worthless. I’ve seen enough misunderstood geniuses, and every time they were simply into garbled ranting. All men they were. Women at least don’t go for the brooding outsider persona.

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      1. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        There’s no such thing as thinking done in a vacuum. It’s all part of a web of intellectual relationships. It’s a genealogy. That’s why this idea of outsiders doesn’t speak to me. If the field you are in doesn’t accept you, then your stuff is worthless.

        Wouldn’t this dynamic result in an incestuous ecosystem where only “accepted” viewpoints are allowed? People citing their friends, acting as gatekeepers, etc.

        For example, actual solid research on IQ/HBD has had a very hard time getting published and the few people who dare to explore “forbidden” subjects find themselves with dwindling employment prospects. With public datasets being widely available, and the cost of computation low, there are people on substack that do more insightful research than credentialed academics. This is in social sciences, though. Maybe it’s different in the humanities.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          There are definitely efforts to “cancel” inconvenient philosophers. I, for example, have been told by anonymous reviewers that I shouldn’t use Heidegger because he supported the Nazis. Which he did and never took it back. But it never worked. Heidegger was never cancelled and he’s still the most significant 20th-century philosopher. And here I am, reading Yarvin, and there’s no likelihood that his ideas won’t leave a mark and I won’t carry them further.

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      2. mitchellporter Avatar
        mitchellporter

        “If the field you are in doesn’t accept you, then your stuff is worthless.”

        For some reason, I found this to be an unexpected statement from a scholar of literature. Modern literature is such an affirmation of the individual (e.g. its focus on communicating unfamiliar subjectivities), and that statement seems so anti-individual, by making intellectual merit dependent on the verdict of society.

        I have much less sense of how it is in literature or in literary studies, but in physics or mathematics (for example), we certainly have a steady supply of people who think they have the theory of everything or the proofs of everything, and are wrong; but we also have many examples of correct ideas that were published, but were still overlooked for long periods, and it would be unusual if that has stopped happening.

        My own intellectual landscape is a mix of insiders and outsiders, and if I had somehow only had an intellectual diet of great insiders, I might be more polished, but I would be missing some extremely important ideas.

        We’ll just have to disagree on whether Ayn Rand is a notable philosopher. Presumably you know that along with her novels, she did articulate a system of thought that extends to all the classic branches of philosophy. So maybe the question is whether there is enough merit in that system, for it to deserve a place in the intellectual dialectic, so to speak. I think it does.

        In saying the same of Celia Green, I’m championing someone even further outside. If you look her up, Green is described as a lucid dream researcher and a parapsychologist, but she is actually a highly original thinker in many areas. Her sensibility is partly scientific and skeptical, and the part of her works that most resembles technical philosophy is largely a critique of the analytic philosophy of the 20th century.

        But there’s another component to her thought that is very psychological, in that it’s about how to act given the “total uncertainty” of existence. From that perspective, across her books, she develops a diagnosis of human affairs ranging from socialism in politics to materialism in the academy (i.e. proposing a common explanation for those tendencies). As she tells it, she never wanted to concern herself that much with human affairs, she wanted to do fundamental scientific research; her theories about human nature were born of trying to understand the circumstances that impeded her.

        As with Rand, I’m not endorsing the entirety of her worldview, but definitely asserting that her thought deserves a place in the intellectual pantheon that it does not have, even more than is the case with Rand.

        I have more to say on these topics, but have to take a break here.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I looked up Celia Green and the first thing I found are these quotes:

          “When someone says his conclusions are objective, he means that they are based on prejudices which many other people share.”

          That’s exactly what out woke commissars say but ok.

          “It is inconceivable that anything should be existing. It is not inconceivable that a lot of people should also be existing who are not interested in the fact that they exist. But it is certainly very odd.”

          That’s Heidegger which is fine, I’m into Heidegger.

          “People accept their limitations so as to prevent themselves from wanting anything they might get.”

          This is a bit motivational speaker stuff but it’s not bad.

          “People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.”

          Oscar Wilde could have said it and it would have been cute. But 80 years after Wilde it’s not.

          I’m interested in the study of consciously changing dreams because I do that. So I’ll check her out, thank you.

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