Introducing the book A History of Women Philosophers: Contemporary Women Philosophers by Mary Ellen Waithe

At the beginning of the twentieth century, women philosophers still faced many restrictions in accessing formal education in philosophy, but in this century they were able to enter philosophy departments and attain the rank of professor. Although evidence of sex discrimination cannot be ignored or underestimated, at least it is no longer unusual to be a woman philosopher. The present book, which is the fourth volume of the series A History of Women Philosophers, challenges a common belief: that philosophy is the domain in which the minds of the greatest men roam. The book's authors show that contemporary women philosophers, like their male counterparts, have been involved in shaping the

Kargadan Publishing has recently released this volume under the title A History of Contemporary Women Philosophers, translated by a group of philosophy-trained translators under the supervision and direction of Maryam Nasr Esfahani. On this occasion, a review and critique session for the book was held on Tuesday, Khordad 2nd, with the presence of Mostafa Malekian, Maryam Nasr Esfahani, and Seyedeh Zahra Moballegh at the Shahr-e Ketab Cultural Center.

I Scent a Whiff of Improvement in the World's Affairs

Ali-Asghar Mohammadkhani

Cultural Deputy of Shahr-e Ketab

Previously, the relationship of women with the history of philosophy was always questionable to me, both in terms of the views and perspectives of philosophers toward them, and in terms of the significant absence of women philosophers in the history of philosophy. On the one hand, I saw no trace of female philosophers in official histories of philosophy, and on the other hand, the history of Western philosophy, from Aristotle to Kant and Schopenhauer, was full of strange opinions about women. This is despite the fact that the number of female philosophers in Western countries, including the United States, Germany, France, and Britain, has been far greater than in the rest of the world.

We Iranians today are familiar with some Western female philosophers, and their works have also been more or less translated into Persian. For example, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, and Rosa Luxemburg are known to us. All of these cases raise the questions: Were women truly absent from the field of philosophy before the twentieth century, having no role or presence in it? If they had a role and presence, created ideas, and accomplished works, why have they not been mentioned in the history of philosophy? What could be the root of this neglect?

By introducing thirteen contemporary women philosophers in the fourth volume of a four-volume series on women philosophers, Mary Ellen Waithe has brought this marginalized thought to the forefront. The research and book by Mary Ellen Waithe and her colleagues have become a basis for recalling the names of women to the history of philosophy. Following this book, Régine Pietra wrote Women Philosophers in Ancient Greece and Rome and Lisa Whiting and Rebecca Buxton wrote Queens of Philosophy, both of which are available in Persian translation today. These two books, in addition to expressing the role of women in the past, are a sign of greater attention to women in philosophy and to female philosophers. As we also witness in Iran, over the past two or three decades, the presence of women in postgraduate studies in philosophy has grown significantly compared to the pre-revolution era.

Among past philosophers, Plato has a very positive view of women. In his book The Republic, he points out that women can be, on an equal footing with men, philosopher-kings or rulers of the Platonic ideal city-state. A statement that was completely radical and progressive for that period. Nevertheless, from that era until now, women have been marginalized and less seen. Pietra says somewhere in her book: "Women philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome wrote philosophical books, but only fragments in praise of them and testimonies are available, which the compilers of biographies and theories of ancient philosophers have all repeated in an exaggerated manner." It seems that today we must draw attention to the extraordinary intellectual heritage of women philosophers and recall their role in shaping the philosophical tradition. Until now, philosophy has been male-dominated, but recently the situation has been changing, and we have been facing an improvement in the status of women, whether in the field of postgraduate education, in terms of the thoughts and ideas of philosophers in different countries, or in the publication and introduction of books.

There Is No Clear Male-Female Camp Here

Mostafa Malekian

Philosopher in the field of ethics

The editor-in-chief of this collection claims to have selected twentieth-century women philosophers according to three criteria, yet by those same three criteria, the book omits some of the great women philosophers of the twentieth century. One of them is Elizabeth Anscombe, a student, collaborator, translator, and expositor of Wittgenstein and one of the philosophers closest to him in the twentieth century, who is herself a very powerful analytic philosopher; another is Iris Murdoch, a philosopher, poet, and playwright who, in my view, is a very important thinker, especially for those working in the field of ethics and particularly for those working in the virtue-ethics branch of that field. I cannot, therefore, accept that these figures were selected according to those three criteria.

Writing a history of women philosophers must involve a certain motive and function. The motive for writing such a history goes back to me, the historian of thought, or the editor, or the compiler, or the author of the book, and its function relates to its reader. The question, then, is this: what motive and function are there in writing and reading the history of women's philosophy? My critique will also proceed from this perspective.

Four motives and functions can be considered for writing this book. One is seeking justice and demonstrating the contribution of women philosophers to the history of Western and world philosophy, which is a valuable motive and an important function. In this respect, the book is successful, for it has at least shown what contribution these thirteen contemporary women philosophers of the twentieth century have made to the evolution and development of our philosophical thought in the twentieth century, especially in the realm of Western philosophy.

This motive and function can become somewhat deeper and more complex. This time, the point is that the philosophical views of women should receive attention just like those of other philosophers. Here, the issue is no longer the contribution of women to the field of philosophy, but rather the impact that awareness of these philosophers' views has on the intellectual development of audiences. For instance, does familiarity with the views of Weil or Rand, like familiarity with the views of Kant and Avicenna, become a source of intellectual transformations and developments in the mind of me, the philosophizing individual or the person interested in philosophy? In this respect too, the book is successful.

But sometimes the discussion concerns a third and fourth motive and function, which I will elaborate on in this space.

The current or movement we refer to as feminism has passed through three stages over the course of its history in the West. In the first stage, feminists argued that women's rights must also be fulfilled in social and political life and that women should not be subjected to injustice, aggression, violation, and oppression. Justice demands that women's rights be fulfilled just as men's rights are. Of course, men's rights have more or less been fulfilled throughout history, because history has been patriarchal, but now we seek the fulfillment of women's rights. The discussion at this stage was legal, social, and political.

In the second stage, the problem is again legal, social, and political, with the difference that now it is not merely about women's rights. Rather, the idea of eliminating gender discrimination is at stake. Second-wave feminists held that, apart from the need to fulfill women's rights, women have rights equal to those of men.

Roughly from the early twentieth century, especially from the end of World War I and particularly from the end of World War II, a third feminist current emerges that no longer speaks of securing women's rights or the equality of rights between women and men, but instead emphasizes the necessity of reporting the way women look at the world. Third-wave feminists argue that, until now, men have looked at the world, and in art, philosophy, science, or technology, men's perspectives have always been presented, and now women's perspectives must also be reported. In a manner of speaking, it is as if the process of the products we have received has, until now, flowed through the minds and souls of men, and now we want to know what products will result if these processes flow through the minds and souls of women; what the convergences and divergences of these reports will be; and what differences it would have made if these reports had reached the ears and eyes of humanity. Here, the issue is no longer social, legal, or political, but rather more epistemological and philosophical. Until now, men's perspectives have constricted the space for women's perspectives, and now women's perspectives must be put forward alongside men's perspectives. Naturally, when Ellen Waithe writes the History of Contemporary Women Philosophers, she must address this point.

If it is to be the case that when women look at the world they produce a perspective different from that of men, then the differences between women and men in the area of the body will also lead to corresponding differences in the area of the mind and psyche. For if only the bodies of men and women differ, it is quite possible that women, by looking at the world, will produce different outcomes. If feminism in this third stage wishes to make an acceptable claim, we must accept that women and men also differ in their mental and psychological faculties. Otherwise, the History of Contemporary Women Philosophers has only the first and second functions and nothing more. For women are not supposed to produce outcomes unique to themselves. Whereas if we accept this difference, a third and fourth function are also at work for the History of Contemporary Women Philosophers. One is that women ask questions about the world that men do not ask (the third), and the other is that women give answers to questions that men could not (the fourth).

The difference between the third and fourth functions goes back to a discussion in epistemology. Every object of cognition / every phenomenon has multiple and different aspects, and it is possible that one person looks at one aspect of it and another at a different aspect. Depending on which aspect of each phenomenon you look at, you acquire a different perspective and offer different outcomes. This pertains to the object perceived. But the perceiver / knower / cognizer can also have different standpoints. If every object of cognition has different aspects (n) and perceivers can also look at that known object from different standpoints (m), then (n*m) outcomes are possible. Therefore, epistemologically speaking, if two people say different things about a specific phenomenon, it is possible that each has looked at a domain of that object, or each has looked at one domain of that object from a standpoint. Thus, the different dimensions and aspects of a known object make the questions different, and the standpoints of the scholars and knowers toward that known object lead to different answers.

When I spoke of the third benefit of the History of Women Philosophers, that women ask questions about the universe that men do not ask, I had in mind that women look at dimensions of matters that men do not look at. And when I said that women might give answers to questions that differ from men's answers, it meant that men look from certain standpoints and women from other standpoints. Now, if the minds and psyches of women differ from those of men just as their bodies do, it is possible that both their questions and their answers will differ from men's. If their questions have become different, it means women look at dimensions of a phenomenon that men do not pay attention to, and if their answers to the same questions have been different, it means their standpoint differs from the standpoint of men.

This third and fourth function is demonstrated in the History of Women Philosophers when the women philosophers examined in that book have had either shared and specific questions or shared and specific answers. That is, either there are questions that all women philosophers ask and only women philosophers ask, or answers that are common among women philosophers and only women philosophers give such answers. Therefore, although women and men are common in humanity and certainly have shared questions and answers, if the seed of feminism in the sense of feminine perspective is to be conceived, we must pay attention to whether, in addition to the shared questions and answers of women and men, there exists a series of questions and answers common among women and specific to women. It is at this time that the third and fourth functions emerge.

From this perspective, the book is not successful. For, first, not all the women philosophers discussed in this book subscribe to mental and psychological differences between women and men; they believe that only the biological differences between women and men are valid, and that the rest of the differences emerged later through cultural developments, and that new cultural developments will reveal the intellectual and psychological sameness of women and men. Thus, the presupposition (whether correct or incorrect) of a difference between women and men in mind and psyche is not accepted by these philosophers. Apart from this, throughout this book there is no shared opinion among women philosophers that is specific to them. Neither a question that only women philosophers have asked and that has escaped the notice of male philosophers, nor a different answer specific to women philosophers and not to male philosophers. Even the editor of the book herself admits that she saw a serious difference only among Pythagorean women compared to Pythagorean men, although they were raised in the same school. She also adds that, apart from this case, she has seen no difference between women philosophers and men philosophers; that is, women philosophers have not collectively and specifically posed a question or put forward an answer that no male philosopher has asked or answered in that way.

Of course, some authors in this book have claimed a difference in the mind and psyche of women and men. For instance, it is quoted from Perkins Gilman that women never value rationality as much as men do, and conversely, men do not value feelings and emotions as much as women do. Furthermore, men value deductive reasoning, while women value intuitive or inductive reasoning. Also, women are inclined toward cooperation, and men are inclined toward dominating rivals and their peers. These differences are mental and psychological. But neither in Gilman's works nor in the works of the other philosophers in this book is there any indication that women have valued feelings and emotions more than men. In this very book, Susan Stebbing, who was one of Bertrand Russell's students, possesses a rationality so rigorous and rigid that it is rarely seen in men.

Therefore, in this respect, the book is not successful in its third and fourth motives and functions. My intention is not to prove or refute the difference between the minds and psyches of women and men. Rather, I am saying that such a thing is not in the text of this book. These women philosophers have neither put forward a specific question nor given a specific answer to a question. The disagreement of women with male philosophers is like the disagreement they have with women philosophers, and the disagreement among women philosophers themselves is also like the disagreement among male philosophers themselves. In other words, one cannot see a clear and distinct camp for women and men. Among the views of these women philosophers, there are views similar to those of men and views different from those of men. Just as these women themselves sometimes have views close to each other and sometimes opposing views. Therefore, that demarcation is not documented in this book.

Treatises that remained behind talk of the kitchen!

Maryam Nasr Esfahani

Ethics researcher and philosophy instructor

Mostafa Malekian is one of the first people to have introduced feminist and woman-centered philosophies. When we were children, in an interview he named many of these philosophers and said that working on these individuals in Iran is worthwhile. But this remained neglected until more female students entered the field of philosophy, and some of them, like most female philosophy students in all universities around the world, felt a sense of alienation in the university and turned to theories, and gradually the books of those women thinkers were published in Persian. Also, a number of philosophy students became interested in tracing these different voices. Like most of those who came together to translate and publish this collection collaboratively.

The history of philosophy, like the history of everything else, is a masculine history. The number of women in this field, both globally and in Iran (for compounded reasons), is smaller. Our philosophy departments still strongly resist female faculty members. Even today, the official narrative of the history of philosophy is replete with the anti-woman pronouncements of philosophers. In such an atmosphere, Mary Ellen Waithe, who herself belongs to the first generation of women philosophy professors and who, perhaps like all of us, assumed that women philosophers had appeared in the twentieth century, accidentally discovers that lists of women philosophers throughout history exist and pursues the matter, hoping perhaps to publish an article from this line of inquiry. Waithe issues a call for papers, and the result is that the article turns into a four-volume collection, one of the first published collections on the history of women philosophers, to which specialists proficient in the original language texts contributed. Of course, just as translations vary in quality, so too do the texts. Some of these articles are the first scholarly texts written about a particular woman philosopher and her works.

The author encounters enormous difficulties in this book, and she and her team of collaborators have shown admirable dedication. She points out that obtaining documents about Hypatia was extremely difficult. Hypatia's tragic life is very famous, but to obtain documents about this woman, Waithe had to go to the mathematics section of the library and reconstruct Hypatia from documents relating to her father and classmates. On the other hand, simply because Victoria Lady Welby was from the royal family, even her childhood paintings had been preserved. Thus, a whole shelf of material lay before her, and she had to write an article by examining this volume of works; that is, her task was arduous.

Women have confronted the history of philosophy with different strategies. One is to write the history of the excluded; that is, the history of those who did not go along with the dominant current of philosophy. Another is to go to the history of philosophy to highlight a neglected aspect within it, for example, to look at his or her previously disregarded treatises or intellectual positions. For instance, the reference to the equality of men and women in the Republic was ignored for centuries. While this treatise is the most important and influential treatise in political philosophy, even its commentators used to skip over Plato's reference to the equality of women and men. Therefore, it is not strange that these women philosophers were lost, and now some people have, with such difficulty, archaeologically excavated and re-examined history, brought these figures to light, and constructed such a history for us. The third strategy is to reread the history of philosophy in very modern ways, for example, psychoanalyzing Plato or extracting metaphors from within texts and analyzing them. However, this work is classical, and in fact, Waithe wanted to present, parallel to existing histories of philosophy, a history of philosophy that would gradually be absorbed into the existing history of philosophy. Because many of these individuals are very important. Among these thinkers are those whose ownership of their ideas is disputed, or who were not seen or heard because they were women, especially in an era when women were not granted doctoral degrees in philosophy.

In authoring and compiling this collection, Ellen Waithe first encounters the Pythagorean women philosophers of the sixth century BCE. She realizes that works by these women survive, but they have been deemed so insignificant that they have not even been translated into English. Waithe goes to a center for Pythagorean studies and asks the professors in this field about these works. These professors assure her that these are not valuable works and are merely talk about kitchen matters. Waithe drops the matter. But later she returns and reads the texts herself. It is then that she realizes the Pythagorean studies professors' claim was incorrect, and these underestimated works are letters, short philosophical treatises about everything, albeit with a feminine approach. Thus, Waithe becomes interested in collecting these documents. She translates fragments of these works and introduces the works of these women.

In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates acknowledges that he learned the concept of love from his teacher Diotima, a priestess, and merely repeats her words. But when Waithe begins her research on Diotima, she encounters the proposition that this figure is fictional. This, however, raises a question for Waithe, since scholars had not considered any of the other characters in the dialogues to be fictional and had made an exception only for Diotima. She investigates further and discovers that Platonic commentators deemed Diotima fictional on the grounds that the notion of a woman being so wise was absurd! Subsequently, this assumption was repeated so often that it came to be taken as fact.

In the second volume of this series, Waithe turns to the Middle Ages. The medieval period holds a unique feature in the history of women’s studies: the convents where nuns could become literate and gain access to wisdom. During this same era, there were philosophers whose work was primarily theological and who thought in ways relatively similar to those nuns. In the early modern period as well, philosophers have been erased from history. For instance, a philosopher who greatly influenced Descartes, or another from whom Leibniz was so deeply influenced that he took the word “monad” from her.

When we began translating this work, I felt it was very necessary. My earliest memories in philosophy class were of being repelled from its masculine domain. That is why I thought we must prove that women have been present in the field of philosophy—from the time they wore disguises to enter the academy, to when they interpreted Pythagorean views and ideas in such a way that they could retrieve those ideas within the spheres they controlled, like the home, family, and friendships among themselves. I believe these efforts must be seen. Fortunately, modern works are gradually being translated, but perhaps these classical works can, regardless of whether these thinkers hold different approaches today or not, gently shift our view of the history of philosophy and of the singularity of the dominant narrative concerning the absence of women from that history.

A Philosopher’s Recommendation of Solitude: An Invitation Against the Humanities

Zahra Moballegh

Researcher and Lecturer in Philosophy

In the process of translating this book, we encountered new names and concepts; that is, not all of these concepts are repetitive. As it happens, I want to speak about whether there is anything new in the thoughts of women philosophers. No, there is certainly nothing common among the thoughts of all women, and fundamentally, something like a feminine or masculine thought is not demonstrable today, whether biologically or in practice within these texts. But I want to trace a common current through the narrative that these four volumes provide of the thoughts and life stories of these women, and based on that, offer a critique of the structure of the academy, and especially the structure of the academy in the humanities.

By reading this book with a discerning eye, we can arrive at something common across these four volumes, though not necessarily something feminine. Just as the author asks, I want to pose this question: does reading the works of these women philosophers add anything to the history of philosophy? Has something been lost from or absent in the history of philosophy or philosophical thought that we can add to it by reading and compiling these works and more? Is that lost thing something feminine? Or, as the series editor asks, when we read this book, do we arrive at a fundamentally different understanding of the nature of philosophy itself?

It seems these philosophers did not think or write very differently from the mainstream, and one cannot say there is a feminine element in these women's thought that we could extract and claim adds something from women philosophers to the history of philosophy or the history of thought. In fact, I must ask: can a connection be drawn between the life stories of these women philosophers and the content of the thought they produced? Again, I want to say, no. A simple connection cannot be made between these. Their thinking was very different from one another. One is a very precise analytic philosopher who thinks in a highly delineated manner, and another is an existentialist philosopher who thinks very poetically. So one cannot find such a trajectory between a philosopher's thought and her life story. What is common in the life stories of most of these philosophers is their difficult lives.

Many of these women philosophers were either expelled from the academy or denied entry to it, even though they were top-ranked among their classmates, and if educational justice existed, they should have been in the academy instead of their male classmates. Some of them were killed, some were granted permission and found their way into philosophical circles, but this too mostly ended in the theft of their ideas, and there was no court to which they could appeal. In fact, the space was controlled by men who dominated and surrounded the academy, and these women could not even claim ownership of those ideas. This is very saddening for someone who works in the academy and whose entire concern is teaching, research, and writing. The life stories of some of these women philosophers squeeze one's heart. Among them is Edith Stein, who ultimately files a complaint with a court at the Ministry of Science, and the then Minister of Science, Art, and Education even rules that being a woman should not prevent someone from being accepted onto a university faculty, but Edith Stein was so disheartened that she no longer pursued an academic career and abandoned it.

But did these difficult experiences of academic life, and sometimes of livelihood, create something new in the writings of these philosophers? In my opinion, what is common behind all of this, what caused the expulsion of many of these women from the academic space and consigned the names of many of them to obscurity, was their divergence from the official narrative. In fact, it is not the case that only these women were expelled from the academy or that their voices went unheard; many men also remained unknown, we know nothing of them, and they were expelled from the official university space, and as it happens, no book on contemporary male philosophers will be written about them either. Like a philosopher with brilliant thoughts whom we lost some time ago, a large number of whose works remain unpublished, and who was easily cast aside due to not conforming to the official framework and structure.

Is there something common among those who are excluded from the structure? No, there is not. But there has always been a lived experience of rejection and not being heard, or what Arendt calls "worldlessness," in the lives of these individuals, which has been reflected in their works, albeit in a different form in each one. Because one is a moral philosopher, one an existential philosopher, and another an analytic philosopher, and one cannot expect to find a common proposition among them.

At the graduation celebration of several philosophy students, one of the professors advised the philosophy students toward seclusion and isolationism, arguing that the philosopher is different from other human beings and looks at the world from a place higher than other humans. Therefore, they cannot connect with other people. So, philosophers are always reclusive, and this is a good thing. But I, in response to this advice, want to say that advising a philosophy student toward seclusion is a call to sever ties with concrete experiences and to disregard reality in the arena of life. This is an invitation against the humanities. If the humanities and the university are not a place for the constant critique of the status quo, what function can they fundamentally have? Arendt says, "Education comes into being precisely at that point where I decide to love the world so much that I feel responsible for it," and by loving the world, she means precisely this loving the world in interaction with others. Others from within myself, to others who are outside my body.

If many of these women philosophers attend to the question of the body or the critique of repressive politics, it is not merely because they are women. It is because, by virtue of being women, they have been cast out of the conventional structure and can think about something that is not recounted in the conventional structure and the official narrative. Thus, ironically, these women philosophers and those excluded from these structures have access to a perspective on the world that is never accessible in the official narrative, nor is it ever spoken. Therefore, the common thread among these philosophers is their lived experience, brimming with struggle, which connects them to concrete life and an experience of complex relations with others, and for this reason, their philosophy is, ironically, more dynamic and alive—something we have much less of today in the academy, especially in the humanities. Particularly as professors, in the name of specialization, halt their connection with the outside world and, in my view, abolish the very essence of the academy.

These women philosophers, not explicitly but through the thought they have produced, which has been tied to their mode of existence and way of living, in fact critique this academic structure and breathe another life into philosophy. Their texts are full of the passion of life and the issues with which they have been engaged. Hence, reading this book and the primary texts of these philosophers is essential for us and can guide us toward a reconsideration of the structure of the academy.

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A History of Contemporary Women Philosophers

Author: Mary Ellen Waithe

Translation Supervisor: Maryam Nasr Esfahani

Kargadan Publishing

456 pages / 200,000 Tomans

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