Emily Hulme at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
This is an important book. It gathers the fruit of recent research on women in ancient philosophy, and across twelve chapters (all very well-written) offers the reader food for thought on a huge range of topics. We meet scientists and Cyrenaics, Epicurean sex workers and neo-Platonist mathematicians. Two chapters take us outside the standard story of Mediterranean antiquity, and we learn much from these perspective-shifting chapters. For example, Ban Zhao stands out as what, in the Greek tradition, we’d call a phronima: a woman who uses her practical wisdom to write philosophical texts even against the backdrop of difficult cultural headwinds that would seem to make a woman in philosophy an impossibility. While readers might be tempted to skip to the chapters that serve their current research interests, I would strongly encourage taking a look at the whole book: it is more than a sum of its parts, because the recurring themes look different precisely when they’re understood to be recurring.
The introduction will be required reading for anyone working on this topic, and gives judicious coverage of the relevant issues (e.g., why does it matter that these figures are women? Are they doing philosophy in a particularly “womanly” way? How should we manage studying women who are more often the subject of men’s writings than authors themselves?).
more here.
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