Lost voices: on counteracting exclusion of women from histories of contemporary philosophy

“Bad philosophy” and “derivative philosophy”: Labels that keep women out of the canon

“…Jones herself described with delight how, as Mistress of Girton, she held summer garden parties for children and their parents (Jones 1922, 79). To date, only the present authors have called out Russell's insinuation that being ladylike and maternal are qualities incompatible with philosophical intelligence or a scholarly persona (Janssen‐Lauret forthcoming; Connell and Janssen‐Lauret 2022). The truth is the reverse: it is Russell and more recent defenders of his decision to assign credit to Frege over Jones who show a deficit in the scholarly virtues of objectivity and of assigning due credit to originators of ideas based on date of first publication.…”

“…We have already seen historians claim that Carnap's or Kripke's modal logics deserve more attention than Barcan's, although she published hers first, that although Constance Jones came up with the sense‐reference distinction first, “it must be mentioned” that she was not as good a logician, as Frege and Russell had “misgivings about her abilities” (Ostertag 2020, n. 4), that Stebbing was just a follower of Moore, that Welby's ideas were vague. Here the historians echo those women's male contemporaries: Quine, who conflated Barcan's logic with Carnap's (Janssen‐Lauret 2022a, 371–72); Russell, who called Jones “prissy, motherly and utterly stupid” (Connell and Janssen‐Lauret 2022, 201); Ayer, who thought Stebbing a “disciple” (1977, 71); Peirce, who described Welby's book as “feminine” and “painfully weak” (qtd. in Connell and Janssen‐Lauret 2022, 200).…”

“…Peirce recommended that “the male reader” needed to read only part of Welby's book (qtd. in Connell and Janssen‐Lauret 2022, 200). But we argue below that Welby's writing style (not unlike Jones's) really was feminine, in a way that actually exhibits some epistemic virtues not shared by her male contemporaries.…”

Susan Stebbing

“…Stebbing clearly regarded Moore as a mentor figure and mentioned him regularly in her work on incomplete symbols and analysis, which dates mostly from the early 1930s. Stebbing was generous with acknowledgements where she took her views to originate with others, a trait typical of early analytic female philosophers (Connell & Janssen-Lauret, 2022). Although this trait is, in general, admirable, Stebbing at times gave herself insufficient credit for originality.…”

“…But a definition of analytic philosophy as three or four men and their followers is overly narrow, too, not least because it misrepresents all women working on logic and philosophy of science in the early analytic period as either marginal figures who followed the Great Men or not analytic philosophers at all. The women whom I have dubbed 'grandmothers of analytic philosophy', including E. E. C. Jones and Christine Ladd-Franklin (Janssen-Lauret, in press-a, in Victoria Welby (Connell & Janssen-Lauret, 2022), and Grace de Laguna (Janssen-Lauret, in press-b) fall into the latter category. The 'grandmothers', similar in age to Frege or Whitehead rather than Russell or Wittgenstein, also resembled Frege in being originators of ideas -such as the sense-reference distinction (Jones, 1890) and inferentialism in logic and language which became influential only many years after the very early analytic period in which they lived.…”