Including Women in the Picture
Thales of Miletus is commonly taken to be the first philosopher to write in Greek: Aristotle, for example, introduces him as the first ancient thinker to dedicate himself to natural philosophy (Met. 983b18).Footnote 1 Rarely is it acknowledged that Thales was a close acquaintance of Cleobulina, herself a philosopher, known for authoring riddles.Footnote 2 Cleobulina is one of the figures who prompted us to work on this volume: ancient female thinkers whose breakthroughs and contributions have long been left out of the history of philosophy.
Our sources suggest that in antiquity there were women engaging in philosophical activity alongside men. However, with the only – and very contested – exceptions of the Pythagorean women from the first century bce and the Confucian writer Ban Zhao in the second century ce, almost no direct evidence and no writings by these thinkers have survived. We are left with a list of names and sparse information about these women’s lives and intellectual activities, all of which has been written by men. As a result, the ideas of female ancient philosophers remain unrecorded and untaught.
This book is about ancient women philosophers, their ideas and contributions to the history of philosophy, and the methods we use to retrieve and re-evaluate them. In what follows, we outline the objectives and key questions of the volume. We devote a substantial section to the specific challenges in the study of ancient women philosophers, with special focus on source issues. We also discuss the methods our contributors have adopted to face the challenges and approach these thinkers philosophically. We argue that the study of ancient women philosophers has a special value for our understanding of the history of philosophy. While at first a daunting enterprise, work on this unique set of thinkers and the available evidence both enriches our insight into the methodology of the history of philosophy and re-introduces philosophical contributions that would otherwise be lost.
This Book: Rationale, Scope, and Objectives
We start by asking three questions to problematise the very title of this volume. The book is about a broad range of thinkers, who lived at different times and in different places, and discussed a wide variety of topics. They share three features: they are women, philosophers, from antiquity. Each of these features, however, raises further questions.
The first question is whether it matters that these thinkers are women and, if so, why. Should we be interested in these figures insofar as they are women? Do we ever think of Plato and Aristotle as men doing philosophy? Our answer is yes, it matters, to some extent. Our aim is not to argue that in ancient philosophy we come across female-specific ways of thinking, sets of issues, or approaches and solutions to puzzles. This book makes no essentialist claims about women’s ways of reasoning and doing philosophy. On the one hand, then, the answer to the question of whether it matters that these philosophers are women is no. While some women philosophers, such as the authors of the Pythagorean letters and Ban Zhao, write about topics traditionally associated with the female gender, such as motherhood and married life, this book shows that ancient female thinkers discussed a much wider range of questions, from home economics to rhetoric; from ethical theories about pleasure, the self, and renunciation to theoretical doctrines about the structure of the cosmos and the knowledge of first principles; and from gynaecology to the fate of the soul at death.
There is, however, at least one reason why it does, and should, matter that these thinkers are women. One of the aims of this volume is ‘reparatory’: we redress a historical wrong and reclaim a place in the history of philosophy and the philosophical canon for those thinkers who have not received enough academic attention. The reasons for this exclusion range from the lack of primary sources to the fragmentary and dubious nature of the available evidence. Yet we suspect that at least part of the reason why women thinkers have been overlooked is because they were women. For example, insofar as in their own time women had a less direct access to philosophical practice or because some of them discussed female-coded topics, which modern scholars did not consider worthy of philosophical investigation. Since these figures were partly disregarded because they were women, it is partly as women that we now propose to reintroduce them in the scholarship.
That said, we are primarily interested in these female intellectuals insofar as they are philosophers and had philosophical ideas. This leads us to our second, more challenging, question: what does it mean for a woman, or for any ancient thinker, to be a philosopher?
Scholars have proposed various criteria to decide which ancient female intellectuals should be classified as philosophers: women are called philosophers (i) when they are referred to as such in the sources,Footnote 3 (ii) when they author philosophical texts,Footnote 4 (iii) when they live with and study under other (male) philosophers,Footnote 5 and (iv) when they have philosophical ideas.Footnote 6 For the purpose of this book, we are interested in philosophical ideas. Specifically, we focus on women philosophers either insofar as they contribute original arguments to ancient philosophical debates or because the study of these thinkers offers new perspectives to the understanding of our philosophical history. As detailed in the next section, most of the existing studies on women philosophers focus on their lives. In a sense, therefore, our volume aims to give a philosophical, rather than historical and biographical account of these figures and their intellectual contributions.Footnote 7
Finally, one may ask, which period counts as ancient in the history of philosophy?
Another limit of the existing literature on ancient women philosophers is that it is focused on ancient Greek and Roman women. As such, current scholarship risks promoting the narrative according to which philosophy was first invented by the Greeks in the sixth century bce with thinkers like Thales. This raises several difficulties: first, there is evidence that philosophy was not an exclusively Greek phenomenon and that the Greeks themselves acknowledged the influence of other philosophical traditions.Footnote 8 Second, in the case of female thinkers, the argument that philosophy was invented by the Greeks seems less relevant, as most of these figures are not described as philosophers in the sources.Footnote 9 Third, it is unclear how one might draw boundaries between what counted as Greek or Western in antiquity and what did not, especially when we consider figures such as Hypatia of Alexandria, who lived in Egypt but wrote in Greek. Not all studies are as Eurocentric: Buxton and Whiting’s recent book Philosopher Queens (2020) includes women thinkers like Ban Zhao and Lalla, and Waithe and Boos Dykeman are currently working on a volume on women philosophers outside the Greek, Roman, and Judaeo-Christian tradition. Finally, more work on non-Western women thinkers has been done by scholars of Indian and Chinese philosophy, but this work has been largely ignored in Hellenic studies.Footnote 10 By bringing women philosophers from the ancient philosophical traditions in India and China into dialogue with those of ancient Greece and Rome, our book aims to contribute to the ongoing work of decentring ancient philosophy.
As a result, the volume comprises women from various philosophical traditions. Different traditions, however, have different periodisation and different ways to date antiquity. We cover women who count as ‘ancient’ within their culture and consistent with the categories operative within those traditions. For example, ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is dated approximately between the Archaic Age in the sixth century bce and the spread of Christianity in the fifth century ce. Yet Indian philosophy begins around the eighth century bce with the composition of some of the earliest philosophical texts from antiquity – namely, the Upanishads – and Chinese philosophy extends into the fifth century ce.Footnote 11
Status Quaestionis: Previous Scholarship from Ménage to the Philosopher Queens
The attempt to include women thinkers in the history of philosophy is not unprecedented. In recent years, the scholarship on women philosophers has been expanding and attracting growing academic attention. The initial trend has been to recount the lives of women philosophers – to name, date, and place ancient female thinkers. This was an essential first step, which laid the foundations for current work on women philosophers and enabled researchers to go beyond biography and engage with these thinkers’ philosophical ideas. We should then start by recognising our debt of gratitude to those scholars who first raised the questions of what role women played in the history of philosophy and why their voices had mostly been silenced, and by so doing, put ancient women philosophers on the academic agenda.
In Europe, modern engagement with ancient women philosophers starts in 1690s France with the publication of Historia Mulierum Philosopharum by Ménage. After reading Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Ménage compiled his own philosophical history focused on women philosophers to challenge the assumption that there had been none up to the early modern period. The result is a list of sixty-five names, divided by schools: Platonists, Academics, Cyrenaics, Cynics, Peripatetics, Stoics, and Pythagoreans. The focus is exclusively on women philosophers from Greece and Rome.
Recent scholarship on ancient women philosophers can be grouped according to two trends: scholars interested in what philosophers said about women and scholars who focus on ancient women who were themselves philosophers, but who primarily give biographical accounts of these thinkers.
More attention has been given to ancient philosophical theories about, rather than by, women, and concerning gender, family life, and the female role in society: notable examples are Tuana’s Feminist Interpretations of Plato (Reference Tuana1994), Freeland’s Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (Reference Freeland1998), Pang-White’s Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender (Reference Pang-White2016), and Howard’s Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (Reference Howard2019).Footnote 12 The advantage of these studies is showing that ancient thinkers considered women and other topics traditionally linked to the female gender, such as home economics, to be philosophically valuable. Yet this approach leaves the canon itself unaltered. Our aim is to include women philosophers in the philosophical canon alongside Plato, Aristotle, Buddha, and Confucius.
In 1987, Waithe published her History of Women Philosophers. The first volume of this anthology, Ancient Women Philosophers 600 BC–500 AD, focuses on Greek and Roman philosophers. Waithe’s approach is optimistic and charitable. Despite the several and challenging source issues we discuss in the next section, she argues that the available evidence shows that through history there have always been women doing philosophy. After Waithe’s epoch-making anthology, scholars turned their attention to women philosophers. Further examples are Kersey’s Women Philosophers (Reference Kersey1989) and Warren’s Unconventional History of Western Philosophy (Reference Warren, König and Whitmarsh2009).Footnote 13 The former is a biographical dictionary of women thinkers. The latter puts women philosophers in conversation with better-known male philosophers by comparing their theories and arguments. Both strategies succeed in including women in the existing canon. Yet they risk conveying the idea that either we cannot engage with these women’s ideas or that women are philosophically interesting only when in dialogue with men. Our aim is to show that women are philosophers in their own right.
Subsequent to Ménage and Waithe, only a few article-length works engaged with the ideas of ancient Greek and Roman women: for example, Wider’s ‘Women Philosophers in the Ancient World’ (Reference Whitmarsh1986), Hawley’s ‘The Problem of Women Philosophers in Greece’ (Reference Hawley, Archer, Fischler and Wyke1994), and Deslauriers’ ‘Women, Education, and Philosophy’ (Reference Deslauriers, James and Dillon2012). More work has been done on Indian and Chinese women philosophers, both historical and fictionalised, such as Blackstone’s Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha (Reference Blackstone1998), Wang’s Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture (Reference Wang2003), and Lindquist’s ‘Gender at Janaka’s Court’ (Reference Lindquist2008). Recent and forthcoming publications include studies of female thinkers throughout the history of philosophy, such as Philosopher Queens by Buxton and Whiting (Reference Buxton and Whiting2020), Women’s Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy by Chouinard et al. (Reference Chouinard, McConaughey, Medeiros Ramos and Noel2021), and a forthcoming book on teaching women philosophers by Hagengruber and Hutton. Others look at women both as authors and as subjects of philosophical investigations: for example, Filosofe, Maestre e Imperatrici by Bonelli (Reference Bonelli2020), and the new Routledge Handbook on Women and Ancient Philosophy by Brill and McKeen (forthcoming).
Our book complements and builds upon these works. The original contribution we hope to make to the ongoing conversation about ancient women philosophers is threefold. First, we introduce new figures to the academic discourse, such as the Cyrenaic Arete and the Pythagorean Perictione. Second, and related, we do not restrict antiquity to Graeco-Roman philosophy. Rather, we include chapters about the ancient Indian, Chinese, and Arabic philosophical traditions. Third, and most importantly, we pay special attention to these women’s philosophical achievements, their novel arguments and, where extant, their writings. As argued in the next section, this enquiry takes different shapes in different schools and different stages of the history of philosophy, and ranges from close argument analyses of philosophical texts to studies of ancient philosophical communities that include women, as well as philosophical readings of ancient biographies, medical treatises, novels, and poems.
This leads us to our final remark: while this book aims at including a wide variety of figures, ideas, themes, and scholarly approaches, it is not exhaustive. The panorama of female intellectuals in antiquity is much wider, and there are more figures, traditions, and methodologies one could discuss. Our hope is that the chapters in this volume will encourage new scholarship in the field of ancient women thinkers, globally.
Challenges and Approaches
In this section, we discuss the methodological challenges we face when we attempt to learn more about the philosophical ideas of ancient women. These can be divided into two groupings: those that impact the recovery of women’s ideas where we have texts written by women, and those that impact the recovery where we have no texts. We include women covered in the chapters of this volume, as well as some others (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Methodological Challenges
We include in each discussion a defence of the approaches our contributors have taken to make use of the sources notwithstanding these issues. Looking across these case studies, we have found that engagement with ancient women philosophers raises questions that have wide-ranging implications for the methodology of the history of philosophy. We begin by describing the general state of the source material.
The Source Issue
It is difficult to overstate the challenge we face regarding sources for the philosophical thought of ancient women. After all, in the Greek and Roman philosophical traditions, there is not a single surviving text incontestably ascribed to a woman philosopher. On the face of it, you might think that would, or should, sink a project like ours before it even gets started. We want to begin the discussion of challenges and approaches by facing up to the source issue and discuss how it is that there is material for a book on ancient women philosophers at all. We feel it crucial to be frank about the state of the evidence, the significant challenge it poses, and the ways we (and our contributors) have found to engage with the ideas of ancient women notwithstanding these.
There are a few different source categories. Outside of the Greek and Roman traditions, we find a comparatively rich set of sources. However limited, this is one of the many benefits of widening the scope of this volume to the degree that we have. We have direct evidence for Ban Zhao in the Confucian tradition, for instance. Though work on Ban Zhao faces other challenges (e.g., the Job Title section, below), her voluminous writing, across a number of genres, is well preserved.Footnote 14
Some women left writings that are now lost. This includes Hypatia of Alexandria, Arete the Cyrenaic, and possibly Theano the Pythagorean.Footnote 15 Others, such as the group known as Pythagorean women, are credited with writing letters and treatises, but their philosophical status, authenticity, and dating is now contested.Footnote 16 We will discuss these rich yet challenging texts in the Pseudonymity section.
The bulk of our evidence of ancient women philosophers (e.g., the Hippocratic women, Hipparchia the Cynic, Arete, the Neoplatonists Hypatia and Sosipatra, Macrina, the sister of Gregory of Nyssa, the Epicurean women) is to be found in works authored by men.Footnote 17 These are more often accounts of their lives than their doctrines (e.g., Hipparchia, Arete, Hypatia). In some cases, it includes men’s reflections on women’s ability to practise philosophy (e.g., in Plato and Aristotle, but also Musonius Rufus in the Stoic tradition).Footnote 18 Within the group of women whose evidence is all via male-authored works, there is then a category of fictional or fictionalised women – where the latter are representations of historical women philosophers (e.g., the Hippocratic women, Hypatia, Macrina, as well as Augustine’s mother Monica) or of those who may have been real (e.g., Diotima, Sulabhā).Footnote 19 Finally, there are depictions of fictional women in the works of men that are nonetheless evidence of the role of women in ancient philosophical communities (e.g., Megara in the Stoic tradition).Footnote 20
The situation is complex, and there is a question of how to approach each of these types of evidence. We have found that doing so requires both specificity and generality: each case needs to be researched carefully and considered contextually. At the same time, it is helpful to look up from the specifics to the landscape of ancient women’s philosophical engagement and the sources to draw some general methodological conclusions. In the rest of the introduction, we aim to provide some of this latter perspective.
Challenges with Texts
Lost Texts
Bridging our main groupings (Texts and No Texts, Figure 1) is the category of lost texts – that is, instances where we know of the work of some ancient woman, usually only by title, but this has been lost. Sources like Diogenes Laertius are full of lists of lost works from male philosophers. Thus, we should perhaps not be surprised that so many works by ancient women failed to survive. Yet, when we look across the oeuvre of ancient women generally, we think it is – and should be – shocking how little direct evidence of their thought is available to us. To dismiss this worry too quickly by pointing out that many works by men are also missing too prevents us from enquiring further into the historical and cultural forces that have resulted in the current loss. We urge scholars not to shy away from this issue. In the chapters of this volume, many of our contributors find interesting ways of dealing with lost texts, including considerations of what information can be gleaned from a title, speculations regarding the content of lost works, and reflections on the reasons why certain works have failed to be preserved. We can also step back and consider the wider question of why so few texts by ancient women have reached us, which is a question worth asking in both research and teaching contexts.
Pseudonymity
The sole texts allegedly by women surviving within the ancient Greek tradition are the Pythagorean texts a collection of ten letters and five treatises ascribed to named Pythagorean women. The dating of these texts is debated, though the prevailing view places them between the first century bce and the first century ce. These texts have not received the sustained scholarly attention one might expect of the only surviving works by ancient women philosophers in the Western tradition. This is, principally, for two reasons: their content and authorship.
The letters are written by women to other women, and many discuss female-coded topics such as female virtues, the married life of wives, childcare, household management, and the role of women in society. This has led to them being perceived as non-philosophical. In our volume, Twomey makes the case for reading them as philosophical, especially when considered against some of Aristotle’s remarks about home economics (Chapter 7). Doing so demands a broadening of what is considered a properly philosophical topic, including re-thinking the philosophical concerns that can emerge in practical ethics in the domestic sphere. We consider this outcome a philosophically provocative one, whose impact goes beyond these specific texts. Furthermore, not all of the texts are concerned with female-coded issues. For instance, Aesara’s On Human Nature concerns the make-up of the human soul. In Chapter 8, Pellò and De Cesaris discuss Perictione’s On Wisdom, which concerns metaphysics, epistemology, and the value of wisdom. Even by the standards of the traditional canon, the questions these women raise would be considered philosophical.
The second reason why these letters and treatises have not been welcomed into the dominant philosophical discourse is controversy over their authorship. It is not clear whether they are written by the named authors (i.e., the women from ancient Pythagorean societies), by a group of Neopythagorean women using the names of their predecessors, or, most problematically, by men using female pseudonyms. There are contemporary arguments from scholars on either side, and there is, in our view, still doubt.Footnote 21 We will say more about the sense in which this doubt matters in discussing male authorship. Regarding pseudonymity, we find that the debate over authorial attribution has eclipsed philosophical engagement with the content of these texts. While we think it is important to take up the issue of the gender of the authors, we are also of the view that this should not be a barrier to our engagement with the philosophical significance of the writings ascribed to the Pythagorean women. These texts purport to express the views of ancient women on philosophical issues. Rather than starting from the pseudonymity debate, we condone our contributors’ focus on the content and philosophical arguments of these writings.
Job Title and Genre
A further reason why women philosophers have been excluded from the historical narrative involves the question of who counts as a philosopher and what counts as a philosophical text. We have already discussed the shifting criteria for who counts as an ancient woman philosopher. In terms of disciplinary association, women philosophers have continually been branded, instead, as hetairai/courtesans (the Epicurean women); mystics, prophets, or Saints (Diotima, Macrina); or poets (Ban Zhao, Sappho). Alternatively, they have been excluded from the realm of the professional by being depicted primarily as daughter, mother (Arete, Perictione), sister (Macrina), wife (Hipparchia, Theano, Sosipatra) or similar, in relation to male thinkers. Sometimes both moves are made: for example, Macrina is both Saint and sister, to the exclusion of philosopher. This is, of course, not an issue for women alone. Not all ancient male philosophers, especially outside of the Greek tradition, are referred to as philosophers. Therefore, though this issue is especially prevalent with women, the approaches we take to circumvent it could be relevant to our recovery of other philosophers, too.
We approached this volume with an awareness of this issue, sometimes known as ‘coat-tailing’, in which women thinkers are situated not according to their ideas or even their philosophical allegiance but rather are subsumed under and identified by their association with some male relation or teacher.Footnote 22 One solution has been to refer to these women as the more generic ‘thinker’ or ‘intellectual’. While this might be pragmatic in certain contexts, for this project we want to resist this move. We feel it is important that these women be recognised as philosophers. There are several reasons for this, one of which is that we would like them to be included in philosophy curricula. We want to restore them to the canon of philosophy, which better reflects their historical and intellectual status.
Our contributors resist this deflationary trend through their close consideration of these women, the assessment of their ideas, and a refusal to limit our description of them in this restrictive and gendered way. In many cases, they can show that, in their own time, these women were indisputably considered philosophers. Many figures resist rigid categorisation and prompt us to question attempts to create a dichotomy between, for example, sex worker and philosopher or mother and educator.Footnote 23 Though there are lingering issues with criteria, these are challenges that pertain to all genders. If we want to be stricter, we might sooner be excluding Milesian ‘natural scientists’, for example, than some of these women.
A related issue is genre. While some ancient women philosophers write philosophical treatises, others write letters, journals, poems, or communicate their commitments through lifestyle. While there are examples of male philosophers doing the same, it is particularly common in our evidence to see women using non-mainstream genres. And there is reluctance, then, to accept these works as philosophical. For example, Pang-White spends a stretch of her chapter on Ban Zhao defending her status as a philosopher despite a tradition of resistance to reading her works of fiction and advice to women as such (Chapter 11). Here again, our view is that we ought to first engage earnestly with the content of the work, then determine its philosophical merits, rather than seeing genre as a barrier to engagement. Our contributors confront this issue as it pertains both to individuals and groups of women, and in doing so encourage greater general reflection on the issue of labelling and its justification.
Challenges without Texts
Male Authorship
How should we approach evidence of ancient women philosophers that exists only in male-authored works? This issue raises a dilemma, because, on the one hand, in an effort to recover and engage with the philosophical ideas of ancient women, our general approach involves an open-mindedness to different types of source. We would frankly cripple our ability to work on these figures at all if we were to exclude evidence of their thought that is written by men. In this volume, Adamson writes that ‘there is no sharp contrast between studying ancient women philosophers and reading what ancient men said about women philosophers’ (Chapter 12).
That said, there is a potential clash between this open-minded approach and our motivation. In addition to concerns about bias, distortion, misrepresentation, and invention, cases where our only evidence of an ancient woman’s thought is in the writing of a man, or where a man writes in the guise of a woman, are particularly problematic if one of the principal reasons we are interested in this material is the gender of the author. We might seem to undermine the aims of the project by including – and indeed relying heavily upon – male-authored works. What if all these sources tell us is what a certain ancient audience would have accepted as being the philosophical perspective of a woman, without them accurately reflecting the work of any particular historical woman philosopher? Would we still consider them valuable?
Consider the parallel with Presocratic philosophy. McKirahan (Reference McKirahan1994: ix) summarises the state of our evidence as follows:
Not a single work of any of the ‘Presocratic’ philosophers has been preserved from antiquity to the present …. We are confronted instead with a variety of quotations and paraphrases of their words, summaries of their theories, biographical information (much of it fabricated), in some cases adaptations and extensions of their views, and also parodies and criticisms. These materials come from a wide range of authors who write with different purposes and biases, and whose reliability and philosophical and historical acumen vary enormously. These circumstances have led some scholars to despair of the possibility of reaching the truth about the early philosophers.
But of course, scholars have not given up engaging with Presocratic philosophers, or Hellenistic philosophers, for that matter.
The parallel between the evidence for Presocratic and ancient women philosophers is not a perfect one. We have more instances of reports of Presocratic ideas, for instance, than we do for ancient women, even if these reports are problematic in their own ways. Like the Presocratics, however, much preliminary work goes into assessing the reliability of the sources and whether we have additional evidence to corroborate their claims. And like for the Presocratics, we have reasons, still, to engage with the available evidence, with all the caveats required to do so in a responsible way.
A different version of this question is raised in the Indian tradition, which includes important canonical texts that are not attributed to a single author but are rather the product of an intellectual community.Footnote 24 The natural result of this is less emphasis on individual authorial attribution in general, and more focus on the identity of particular characters or speakers. The inclusion in this volume of work from this tradition thus prompts a question: does the example of a communally authored text emphasise the ‘male authorship’ issue and make it more pressing, or does it provide a way of making it less urgent, via a focus on representation rather than authorial attribution?
Historicity
We mentioned the landscape of real vs. fictional vs. fictionalised women. This is a thorny issue for this kind of project because if one wants to exclude any fictional or fictionalised woman from the study of ancient women philosophers, we are down to very slim pickings. We also lose some of our most interesting examples, such as Diotima. This is the kind of loss which, if applied to male equivalents, would not be acceptable. If we were to exclude Socratic dialogues from our research and teaching because Plato fictionalises Socrates, for instance, or the Analects because they were composed by Confucius’ disciples, the impoverishment that would result would be keenly felt.
And of course, when we teach Socrates, Plato, Cicero, and the Buddha, this is not what is done. We do not take the divide between fiction and history as a reason not to engage with their philosophy. This comparison helps justify our inclusion of fictionalised women. Yet it does not dissolve the issue of fictional women, where there is no historical basis. Moreover, there is the added burden of gender. The question therefore remains: to what extent are we entitled to use fictional or fictionalised figures as evidence of the thought of ancient women philosophers? Should the lack of historical evidence prompt us to reject these figures and sources as inauthentic?
To aid consideration of this question, we observe three interpretive trends in the scholarship and some advantages and disadvantages of each.
Artifact
This view is developed by Dutsch in relation to the debate regarding the Pythagorean women (Reference Dutsch2020: 3). It contends that, given the impossibility of establishing historicity, a different approach is required. One such approach is to consider women as icons, to abandon hope of connecting specific women to texts, and to focus instead on texts as cultural artifacts. An advantage of this view is that we avoid what can be a distracting focus on the historicity debate, which can draw us away from the works and ideas themselves. It also encourages open-mindedness regarding the forms an intellectual legacy can take. The major disadvantage is that this view detaches too much from the importance of the fact that there existed women philosophers throughout antiquity.
Literary
This is the kind of ‘bite the bullet’ view where we accept that the fictional and fictionalised is all we have and work within that frame.Footnote 25 The major advantages of this approach are that, like the Artifact view, it avoids being taken over by the historicity debate. It also facilitates the attribution of value to fictional accounts of women. The existence of literary women philosophers itself can be an argument for the existence of real women philosophers inspiring these characters. Minimally, it can tell us what a certain audience would accept as the view of an ancient woman philosopher. In addition, it raises the possibility that in novels, authors can do more with women philosophers and give them more argumentative strength.Footnote 26 The major disadvantage of this view is that, again, it can underestimate the importance of the connection to real, historical women: if part of our motivation is to engage with the philosophical ideas of ancient women philosophers, how can we be satisfied with evidence that has or may have no connection to these women? We must at least do more to articulate what information this evidence gives us about existing ancient women philosophers.
Strong Historicity
This view argues that our default position should be to trust the evidence for ancient women philosophers and implicitly shifts the burden of proof to those who reject it.Footnote 27 Where other approaches require strong positive evidence that works originate with or provide evidence from historical women, this view says that this requirement is too strong in part because it would result in the elimination of ancient women from the canon. The advantage is that this forces us to reconsider what the threshold of evidence ought to be. The disadvantage is that it may seem unduly optimistic. We find it imperative to be honest about the source issues, and we consider some of the value of working on these figures to come from this transparency, where this view tends to suppress or downplay the challenges. We also feel the exclusively historical aim is too high. It undervalues the fictional and the role it plays in informing us of real women philosophers in antiquity.
We think of these approaches as on a continuum. Our position is not to force a generalisable choice on this spectrum. Rather, we recognise that each philosopher and source demands a nuanced approach, and encourage close consideration of the costs and benefits of the approach one takes to categorise the evidence.
Biographical Focus
One of the ways we distinguish our project from previous studies is our focus on the philosophical ideas of ancient women, as opposed to their lives. This distinction is a troubled one because, in some cases, all we have as evidence for some ancient women philosophers really is biographical. The question is whether, in some cases, it is possible to use the biographical as evidence for the philosophical. We are of the view that we can, and in fact that we ought to, especially in cases where ancient women are members of schools whose doctrines are best displayed in their lifestyles.
We have at least two examples of this in the book: the Pythagorean women and Arete the Cyrenaic. These schools are distinguished by their practical bent: they were insistent that their followers not only ascribe to certain core ideas but also live a certain lifestyle reflecting the shared values of the school. Other such examples may be the renunciate communities in ancient India, of which the character Sulabhā in the Mahābhārata is a spokesperson, the Epicureans, and the Cynic school, of which Hipparchia was a member. Learning about the lives of male and female adherents adds to the wider picture of these philosophical communities and the ideas behind the lifestyle, as well as to our understanding of what philosophically informed lives looked like within these traditions.
‘Great Minds’ vs. Communities
Several chapters in this volume urge us to reconsider what kind of unit we ascribe philosophical ideas to, both in ancient philosophy and, quite possibly, more broadly. Some of our most direct evidence of ancient women philosophers reports them as members of philosophical communities without ascribing to them original or independent philosophical ideas. Yet we know a lot about the doctrines of these communities.
The general strategy in history of philosophy has been to focus on the great minds to whom we can more confidently ascribe particular philosophical ideas – for example, Pythagoras and Epicurus – and discuss philosophical communities as a kind of outgrowth of the thought and influence of these prominent figures. The focus (in both the ancient and contemporary scholarship) is often on student-teacher chains generating lines of individuals.Footnote 28 These trends suppress the role of philosophical communities and especially those members whose individual contributions are not independently recorded.
An alternative approach is to think more holistically about the development of philosophical theories and the role we can attribute to those of any gender identity. We could focus on school doctrines rather than individual authorship, like scholars already do, for example, with Stoicism. If women were active members of philosophical communities, we should resist the assumption that their presence was merely as passive followers. We should instead consider the evidence to the contrary – for example, in the Pythagorean, Cyrenaic, Vedic, and Epicurean traditions. Even where we lack the specifics, we have evidence that women contributed to forming and developing the ideas ascribed to these schools. What happens, then, when we reframe the unit of emphasis from individuals to communities and acknowledge the full membership of these communities? Why should we restrict our interest to those who create, rather than inspire or preserve, philosophical ideas? Once again, these are wide-ranging methodological questions that concern philosophers of any gender identity, tradition, and stage in the history of the discipline.
Philosophical Contribution from Sulabhā to Lucrezia Marinella
We now revisit our overarching proposal that there is a unique value to the study of ancient women philosophers that benefits our understanding and practice of the history of philosophy. In this final section, we want to support this thesis by highlighting some of the original philosophical contributions of ancient women philosophers that the chapters bring to light and some of the methodological questions the work on women raises.
Each chapter in this book revolves around an individual philosopher, or a group of thinkers, focusing on their ideas and novel contributions. Broadly, each chapter addresses three questions: (i) What is our evidence, and what methodological challenges do we face when learning about this figure’s ideas? (ii) What strategies and approaches could one use to engage with this figure philosophically? (iii) What are the original philosophical takeaways from the study of these women thinkers?
The chapters are organised chronologically. The book opens with two studies on the general question of whether philosophical activity is gendered or genderless and whether women have their own distinctive way of doing philosophy. The first two chapters address this issue with examples from two different ancient philosophical traditions in Greece and India. Chapter 1 is about Diotima, the priestess from Mantinea and Socrates’ teacher from Plato’s Symposium. The scholarship has so far primarily focused on the question of whether Diotima is a historical figure and why Plato chose to ascribe his philosophical theories about love and beauty to a woman philosopher. Frisbee Sheffield, by contrast, leaves the question of Diotima’s historicity aside and argues that this episode in the Symposium shows that according to Plato philosophical activity goes beyond gender. Similarly, Chapter 2 focuses on the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata and, in particular, the episode featuring a debate between King Janaka and the woman philosopher Sulabhā concerning good speech and the ethics of renunciation. Once again, Brian Black does not focus on the question of whether Sulabhā was a historical figure. Rather, he considers the implications of gender identity on mokṣa, enlightenment. Like Diotima, Sulabhā’s arguments show that philosophical activity is believed to lie beyond the dualities of gender distinctions.
Chapter 3 moves on to another group of female intellectuals from antiquity: women physicians. We previously mentioned that one should be broadminded as to what counted as philosophy in the ancient world and which genres should be considered as philosophical. Sophia Connell introduces a new source of evidence for Greek philosophy: the medical treatises from the Hippocratic school. Specifically, Connell shows that medical texts include references to women who both practised medicine and held theories about the human body and human health. Women’s medical expertise included both topics related to the female gender such as fertility and gynaecology, and genderless discussions of the nature of disease and pharmacology.
The book then turns to the issue of philosophy as a way of life and the philosophical value of ancient biographies. The next three chapters focus on Hellenistic philosophy and the role of women in the Hellenistic schools: Epicureanism, the Cyrenaics, and Stoicism. Chapter 4 focuses on Epicurean women. As previously mentioned, most women thinkers from antiquity are not referred to as philosophers in our sources. Specifically, the Epicureans are portrayed by Epicurus’ critics as hetairai and prostitutes. Kelly Arenson counters this narrow picture by focusing on what the available doxographical evidence can tell us about these women’s intellectual achievements: for example, Leontion is reported to have written a book refuting Theophrastus. In Chapter 5, Katharine O’Reilly analyses the available evidence for Arete, who is the daughter of the founder of the Cyrenaic school Aristippus, and the mother and most importantly the teacher of Aristippus the Younger. There is limited evidence for Arete’s life and no direct evidence of her philosophical activity. Nonetheless, her son Aristippus was oddly known as mētrodidaktos, mother-taught. This leads O’Reilly to consider what ancient biographies have to say about Arete’s role in setting and continuing the Cyrenaic philosophical tradition. Finally, Chapter 6 looks at the position of women in Stoic theory and narrative. Kate Meng Brassel proposes to interpret the dramatisation of a woman’s moral choice in a Senecan tragedy as a stand-in for the lost voices of historical women Stoics.
The next two chapters revolve around the Pythagorean women, the best-known and most debated case of female engagement with ancient Greek thought. The question is what makes the letters and treatises ascribed to Pythagorean women philosophical. We mentioned that, so far, the scholarship has primarily debated whether these texts were in fact authored by women rather than men writing under female pseudonyms. In contrast, these chapters focus on their content. In Chapter 7, Rosemary Twomey analyses the letters and treatises about female-coded topics, such as family life and home economics. Her argument is twofold: first, since these topics are also addressed by canonical philosophers and in canonical texts, such as Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s Republic, we should not question that domestic life was considered worthy of philosophical investigation. Second, and more importantly, these texts add to Plato and Aristotle’s social and political philosophy by considering how we are to apply these theories to the private sphere inside the household. In Chapter 8, Caterina Pellò and Giulia De Cesaris analyse a treatise titled On Wisdom and ascribed to the Pythagorean woman Perictione. In On Wisdom, Perictione distinguishes different kinds of things that are and three different sciences to study them. Wisdom is introduced as the highest form of human activity, for it enquires about universals. This shows how the texts of the Pythagorean women contribute novel arguments and original philosophical theories.
In Chapter 9, Anna Christensen analyses the arguments about the nature and immortality of the soul, which Gregory of Nyssa ascribes to his sister Macrina. Once again, the authorship of these doctrines is contested. Christensen argues for Macrina’s intellectual independence from her brother and reclaims for her the title of philosopher. In Chapter 10, Jana Schultz gives an overview of the best-known Neoplatonist women, such as Hypatia and Sosipatra. The focus is again on the available evidence for their lives and intellectual activities. The challenge is to determine what our sources can tell us about both these women’s ideas and the way in which they exemplify Neoplatonic philosophical ideals of womanhood and femaleness. In Chapter 11, Ann A. Pang-White analyses the philosophical ideas of Ban Zhao, a Confucian thinker who writes about pedagogy and women’s education. While Ban Zhao is traditionally seen as a poet and historian, Pang-White shows that her numerous writings include philosophical theories about gender, women’s roles in society, and the value of harmony in the household. We close with a synoptic study of the reception of women’s philosophical potential. In Chapter 12, Peter Adamson investigates how Plato’s theory about women being able to rule and philosophise in the Republic is received by the Neoplatonist Proclus, in the Islamic tradition by Ibn Rushd, and by the early modern feminist Lucrezia Marinella. While the fifth book of the Republic includes arguments written by a man about women doing philosophy, the way in which these theories are interpreted by Plato’s successors is influenced by the historical evidence for real women philosophers.
This is far from the end of the study of ancient women philosophers. What we hope to show, nonetheless, is that philosophical traditions from the ancient world include a wide and diverse range of women thinkers, which is as diverse as the discipline itself.
