This book aims to redress the balance in the field of Contemporary Philosophy, considered predominantly male, by highlighting the philosophical achievements of various female figures during the period 1870-1970.
Contemporary Philosophy is generally presented by its historians as a field founded entirely by men, with no prominent female contributors. Historical investigation of the development of contemporary analytic philosophy, for example, usually centres around Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, with occasional ventures into Moore or the Vienna Circle. Such accounts leave out vast swathes of the historical record (from early 19th century to 20th century), in particular the women, including Christine Ladd-Franklin, Sophie Bryant, E.E.C. Jones, Susan Stebbing, Dorothy Wrinch, Alice Ambrose, Margaret MacDonald, Martha Kneale, Ruth Barcan Marcus and Ayda Ignez Arruda publishing on themes central to analytic philosophy– logic, language, realism, and relations. It is noteworthy that this pattern in historiography is not unique to one strand of philosophy or one part of the world but re-appears again and again. In the continental tradition, the development of Schopenhauer's philosophy leaves out significant contributions of women such as Olga Plümacher. The chapters in this book examine central themes from the perspective of female philosophers to provide a fuller picture of Philosophy of this period.
This volume will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Philosophy and Women’s Studies and for everyone interested in the contribution of women philosophers. It was originally published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.
Introduction—Lost voices: on counteracting exclusion of women from histories of contemporary philosophy 1. Worse than the best possible pessimism? Olga Plümacher’s critique of Schopenhauer 2. Christine Ladd-Franklin on the nature and unity of the proposition 3. “It is quite conceivable that judgment is a very complicated phenomenon”: Dorothy Wrinch, nonsense and the multiple relation theory of judgement 4. Margaret MacDonald’s scientific common-sense philosophy 5. Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle: a philosophical friendship 6. Alice Ambrose and early analytic philosophy 7. The early work of Martha Kneale, née Hurst 8. Ruth Barcan Marcus and quantified modal logic 9. History of logic in Latin America: the case of Ayda Ignez Arruda
Sophia M. Connell is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College London. She held previous appointments in Cambridge. Her research includes ancient Greek philosophy and women in the history of philosophy. She is the author of Aristotle on Female Animals (2016) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Biology (2021). Frederique Janssen-Lauret is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester, specializing in philosophical logic and history of analytic philosophy. She is author of Susan Stebbing (2022) and co-translator of Quine’s Significance of the New Logic (2018).
