On the Outskirts of the Canon: The Myth of the Lone Female Philosopher, and What to Do about It

Abstract

Women philosophers of the past, because they tended not to engage with each other much, are often perceived as isolated from ongoing philosophical dialogues. This has led-directly and indirectly-to their exclusion from courses in the history of philosophy. This article explores three ways in which we could solve this problem. The first is to create a course in early modern philosophy that focuses solely or mostly on female philosophers, using conceptual and thematic ties such as a concern for education and a focus on ethics and politics. The second is to introduce women authors as dialoguing with the usual canonical suspects: Cavendish with Hobbes, Elisabeth of Bohemia with Descartes, Masham and Astell with Locke, Conway with Leibniz, and so on. The article argues that both methods have significant shortcomings, and it suggests a third, consisting in widening the traditional approach to structuring courses in early modern philosophy.

Philosophy’s Diversity Problem

“…For those willing to look, there are many female philosophers who did interact with their male counterparts, and those women who did not often had very good reasons for not doing so—primarily concerning access to education and availability of books. The myth of the lone female philosopher has been largely debunked (Berges ), but remnants of it still exist today—especially in its use as a justification for not including women in the philosophy curriculum. The underrepresentation of women in reading lists (Baron, Dougherty, and Miller ), whether or not directly correlated with the underrepresentation of women in philosophy, should be addressed by incorporating more women into the syllabus.…”

The Exclusion of Early Modern Women Philosophers from the Canon: Causes and Counteractive Strategies from the Digital Humanities

“…As Sandrine Berges notes, sometimes it is these women philosophers themselves who did not feel the need to mention their own female contemporaries or predecessors in their reflections (Berges 2015). By these omissions, they aimed to proclaim themselves the first and the only ones to have written about the ontological and/or sociopolitical differences between men and women.…”