"Women in philosophy​ have always needed a special stroke of luck."

May 13, 2024 12:02 PM

Whenever I read claims about ‘forgotten women’, I want to ask: ‘By whom?’ Feminists? Society? The ‘culture’? And why ‘forgotten’? Forgetting presupposes something once known, but the general ‘we’ who have ‘forgotten’ these women are also the ‘we’ who were not taught them in the first place. Such generalisations risk shifting the focus, and the responsibility, away from the agents of our ignorance: the historians and philosophers who made a world in which certain texts were deemed unworthy of preservation and the history of women’s thought was kept to the margins.

– A Comet that Bodes Mischief by Sophie Smith. She discussed women in philosophy on the LRB Podcast.
posted by Kattullus (4 comments total)

Thank you for posting this interesting review.
posted by 15L06 at 1:27 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]

I just listened to that episode of the LRB Podcast and found it fascinating/disheartening. Thank you for the link to the article.
posted by OrangeDisk at 3:00 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]

Thank you for this:
"As Desmond Clarke points out in the preface to his edition of Poulain, Hume published The Treatise of Human Nature, famous among contemporary philosophers for introducing the ‘is-ought’ problem, just a year later. Did he know Sophia’s essay? It’s not impossible. If Sophia was a woman then philosophers have for centuries attributed to a man the discovery of a problem already identified by a woman who was herself trying to expose philosophy’s sexism. That seems unbearable, but maybe it’s glorious."
posted by HearHere at 11:02 AM on May 14 [2 favorites]

also went and listened to this LEB podcast. thanks for the rec!
posted by tamarack at 9:42 PM on May 14 [1 favorite]