Why the dearth of female philosophers?
Excellent job of flipping out, not answering the question, and then attacking the poster. Oh, please. My first comments were polite enough, thanks. Later, I pointed out that raheel didn’t seem to be reading the links folks were providing. If you don’t like my tone, well, life’s rough. But I damn sure answered the question, focusing not on the obvious historical factors that have for centuries worked against women’s education (since raheel was clearly aware of those from the start), but on the hypothesis that the “dearth” raheel sees is as much a question of male awareness as female achievement. Pointing out that flaw in the framing of the question is hardly “attacking” the poster. scarabic: Again, that Hypatia of Alexandria, Mary Shelly, Hannah Arendt and others don’t leap as immediately to mind as Plato, Kierkegaard and ridiculously inflated dead-enders like Heidegger is hardly a problem of women underachieving in philosophy. In short, there is no “dearth” of brilliant female philosop
I’m a recent graduate of a large state university, where I majored in philosophy. I (a dude) was struck by how few girls there were in my philosophy classes. While I don’t doubt that the historical oppression of women plays a huge role in why the great majority of prominent philosophers have been men, it also seems to me to be the case that, these days, college girls just aren’t as likely to be interested in taking philosophy as college guys are. I often pondered why that was (joking to my friends that I had picked the wrong major). My theory is that it’s similar to the science/engineering situation – philosophy is perceived as being an arcane, difficult, nerdy-guy topic. So, despite the fact that the student body at my university was about 50/50 male/female (probably slightly more female), philosophy class seemed to be more along the lines of 80/20. The gender disparity was especially noticeable in the two 400-level classes I took (i.e., the classes that one might take when considerin
I am a woman and a philosophy teacher. There are a number of issues you are asking about all at once. Let’s separate them. 1. Who are the great women philosophers? Here are several lists. Medieval era, 500-1600 Modern era, 1600-1900 Geocities page that covers 600 BCE – 1500 CE Wikipedia has a mixed list of historical and contemporary women philosophers A page with photos and portraits of some historical and some contemporary women philosophers 2. Why does the common person know of so few great historical female philosophers? As in pretty much all fields, the active and passive barriers to women’s intellectual contributions have been enormous. For most of Western history (which is the o
