Philosophers

Hello, I have to do a report on women philosophers and I really am having a problem finding someone to do my report on. Does anyone know any notable women philosophers I could do my report on?

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How about Elizabeth Anscombe? Here's an interesting obituary in the Guardian (she died in 2001):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4115443,00.html

It is a fact, as inescapable as it is unfortunate, that female philosophers have generally been eclipsed by the men, over the millennia. But there have been a fair few women who have done good stuff in philosophy.

Someone from the ancient period, often cited by people searching for such figures, was Hypatia, a philosopher and mathematician of the fourth century AD. Unfortunately, we have to rely more on other people's testimonies of her than on her own works: as far as I know, none of the latter have survived. In the medieval period, I suppose one might mention Heloise, the beloved pupil of the scholastic philosopher, Peter Abelard. The evidence would seem to suggest that she was genuinely a pupil, and even an inspiration, as well as being a lover, and that she probably understood what Abelard was going on about far better than most women in her time would have done. But, again, we don't have a whole lot to work with, philosophically speaking.

The problem, through most of history, was that proper education was simply unavailable to girls and women. It wasn't until the seventeenth century that women properly started to publish important work in philosophy, and even there it was still limited to those who were lucky enough to be rich/noble/royal enough to be in a position to command great philosophers to serve as their private tutors. Of those who did find themselves in that lucky position, perhaps none of them ever quite matched the efforts of men like Descartes or Leibniz or Locke, but some of their works are nevertheless genuinely interesting in their own right. Two especially interesting figures, among several others that I might mention, whom I would be particularly inclined to recommend would be Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish. (Or, to be precise: Anne, Viscountess Conway, and Margaret, Marchioness of Newcastle). The former, in her The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, offered a fascinating synthesis of neoplatonism and kabbalah. The latter, known to some in her own time as 'Mad Madge' (which is actually the title of a recent biography), was frankly bizarre, changing her mind from one work to the next, writing on absolutely every topic that took her fancy, and sometimes saying some very silly things indeed. But she was fun: and, every now and then, she could still come up with a really good point.

More towards our own time, once the doors of formal academia were finally opened to women in the twentieth century, a great many of them started to do undeniably important work. Just a few names, off the top of my head, would include: Mary Warnock, Susan Stebbing, Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, Nancy Cartwright, Philippa Foot, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Simone Weil, as well as the afore-mentioned Elizabeth Anscombe.

Just take care not to fall victim to the same confusion to which many others have unfortunately succumbed, and write the report on Hilary Putnam. (He really isn't a woman!).

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