The Women Philosophers, Scientists, Doctors, and Mathematicians of the Greek World

Abstract

Women’s philosophical texts comprise a large number of surviving prose writings. As we have described, profound changes in ways of thinking developed in Greece in the seventh to fifth centuries B.C.E. This shift—the rational-scientific world-view—first emerged in the writings of the Ionic intellectuals of Asia Minor. Stimulated by their interactions with the ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian civilizations, they extended the mathematical, astronomical and mystical ideas they borrowed. As described earlier, a second wave of rational-scientific and mystical thought emerged from Southern Italy and Sicily, which the Asia Minor Greeks fled to during the era of tyrannies and the Persian invasions. This innovative thinking emerged on both the eastern and western frontiers of Greek civilization and set the foundation for Western rationality. The Greeks called this new way of thinking about the world “philosophy” or “love of wisdom.”1