Journey · 10 stops
From Gargi to Oluwole
Three thousand years, four continents: on the ground of the world, mind and body, logic and the sources of knowledge.
Stops
Stop 1 of 10: Gargi Vachaknavi
Were there women among the first philosophers? In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, composed in northern India around the 8th to 6th century BCE, the Brahmin Gargi Vachaknavi challenges the sage Yajnavalkya at King Janaka’s court: on what is the world woven? Her questioning drives him to the imperishable that is “the unseen seer”. Whether Gargi lived is uncertain; that the text shows a woman debating as an equal is not.
Stop 2 of 10: Hipparchia of Maroneia
In Greece the record is thinner. Plato lets Socrates learn about love from the priestess Diotima, probably a literary figure, and tradition names Aspasia as Pericles’ teacher of rhetoric. The one woman with a chapter of her own in Diogenes Laertius’ “Lives” is Hipparchia, who left a wealthy family to live the Cynic life with Crates in the streets of Athens – the same frugality and the same freedom of speech as a man. Convention, the Cynics held, has no authority against nature.
Stop 3 of 10: Hypatia
Seven centuries later Hypatia heads a school in Alexandria, teaching mathematics, astronomy and Platonic philosophy to pagans and Christians alike. Her commentaries are lost; her pupil Synesius praises her as a teacher. Her murder by a Christian mob in 415 made her a symbol – of reason destroyed by fanaticism, or of a martyr – and much later writing about her is projection. What remains is a woman recognised as the leading philosopher of her city.
Stop 4 of 10: Ban Zhao
In China, Ban Zhao completed her brother’s “Book of Han” and taught the empress. Her “Lessons for Women” prescribe humility and devotion to the husband’s family and were read for centuries as a manual of submission. But they also argue that wives can only serve well if they are educated, and demand that girls be taught from the age of eight like boys. A learned woman securing a place for her daughters within the system – the ambiguity of her text is the ambiguity of her position.
Stop 5 of 10: Marguerite Porete
Medieval Europe produced a rich women’s literature of mysticism, from Hildegard of Bingen to Julian of Norwich. Marguerite Porete, a beguine from Hainaut, went furthest: in “The Mirror of Simple Souls” the soul that has annihilated its own will lives in God “without a why” and no longer needs the virtues as masters. Her judges read that as heresy, and she was burned in Paris in 1310. Meister Eckhart was in the city the following year; many scholars think he knew her book.
Stop 6 of 10: Elisabeth of Bohemia
Two years after Descartes published his “Meditations”, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia pressed him in a letter (1643): how can an immaterial soul move the body? Descartes never answered to her satisfaction, and her objection has become the textbook problem of dualism. Her correspondence shows how women did philosophy in the seventeenth century – by letter, outside the universities, as Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish and Damaris Masham also did.
Stop 7 of 10: Émilie du Châtelet
A century later Émilie du Châtelet joined Newton’s physics to Leibniz’s metaphysics in her “Foundations of Physics” and translated the “Principia” into French – still the standard version. She defended living force (vis viva) against the Newtonians and the use of hypotheses against Newton himself. For a long time she was remembered only as Voltaire’s companion; her treatise is now read as philosophy of science in its own right.
Stop 8 of 10: Anna Julia Cooper
In 1892 Anna Julia Cooper, born into slavery in North Carolina, published “A Voice from the South”. The progress of a people, she argued, is measured by the position of its Black women: only when they enter “in the quiet, undisputed dignity” of their womanhood does the whole race enter with them. She criticised Black male leaders for ignoring women and white feminists for ignoring race – and at sixty-six took a doctorate at the Sorbonne.
Stop 9 of 10: Ruth Barcan Marcus
In the twentieth century women finally gain university posts, in every field of the discipline. Ruth Barcan Marcus combined quantifiers with modal operators in 1946, giving the formula that bears her name, defended modal logic against Quine and proposed that names are mere “tags” – a view close to what Kripke later made famous. Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch and Midgley reshaped ethics at Oxford in the same decades; Arendt and Beauvoir did the same for politics and existence.
Stop 10 of 10: Sophie Oluwole
The journey ends in Lagos. Sophie Oluwole, the first Nigerian woman to earn a doctorate in philosophy, argued that the Yoruba oral tradition – the Ifá corpus, Orunmila as a sage comparable to Socrates – contains genuine philosophy, and that the discipline’s written, Western self-image excludes it. The sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí went further and asked whether the category “woman” itself was a colonial import. The question of who counts as a philosopher is still open.
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