Cutting Through the Veil of Ignorance: Rewriting the History of Philosophy

Abstract

Taking into account the long and rich history of women philosophers our interpretational patterns have to become transformed: How then can we understand the important impact of women philosophers upon the discipline, even though we otherwise confirm that they were excluded from it? And how is it possible that their philosophies resulted in contributions of general relevance, when they insisted also that philosophical concepts are connected to gender awareness? I argue that research on the history of philosophy provides explanations and solutions and presents itself as a heuristic method to answer these paradoxes. Our knowledge of the history of philosophy is always partial. Each generation only partially knows its own tradition because each sees the history of philosophy as framed by contemporary categories, philosophical as well as cultural. The history of philosophy as a whole is thus a record of inclusions and exclusions, of forgetting and rediscovering. The philosophy of the present is not the book on the top of the pile containing all the information in the books below. Rather, the pile of books discloses multiple worlds of ideas, which we can explore to discover insights alternative to those currently popular, some of which we may never have heard of. Such a wealth of new insights is offered by the study of the history of women philosophers, where the criteria for inclusion and exclusion differ from those applied in the mainstream. The record of the work of women philosophers was never highly regarded, as their writings were excluded for reasons of cultural misogyny. Now, however, we have a major body of work informing us about women philosophers from antiquity up to the present. 1 As the historical records prove, women have long been creating original contributions to philosophy. We have valuable writings from female philosophers from antiquity and the Middle Ages, and a continuous tradition from the Renaissance to today. The history of women philosophers thus stretches back as far as the history of philosophy itself. The presence as well as the absence of women philosophers throughout the course of history parallels the history of philosophy as a