Mary Ellen Waithe. Introduction to volume 4

MARY ELLEN WAITHE. Introduction to Volume 4

The twentieth century marks the time in which women at last began to achieve full admission to the discipline of philosophy, as indicated by the achievement of the rank of Professor in a department of Philosophy. Although contemporary evidence of the persistence of discrimination on the basis of sex can neither be overlooked nor understated, this, nevertheless is the century that marks women’s admittance to the pro-fession. As I write this Introduction in 1992, I am aware that it is no longer a mark of extraordinary dedication and fortitude to be a woman philosopher. I recall with amazement a photograph I came upon twenty years ago while rummaging through a box of photographs in the storage room at the University of Minnesota Department of Philosophy where I was a graduate student. The black and white photograph was taken in the early 1950’s. I’m not sure whether memory serves but D. Burnham Terrell, Grover Maxwell and possibly Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars were among those in the photograph, along with four women. The photo was captioned “The Philosophy Department.” I remember showing the photograph to Professor Maxwell and Professor Terrell and possibly to Feigl. One of the women I recognized as my own teacher, May Brodbeck. Back then I had no idea that I would eventually be the one to reconstruct the history of women philosophers, and I admit that I failed to ask who the other women were. As Professor Terrell has recently informed me, one of the other women was Mary Shaw Kuypers.Although discrimination in admissions to doctoral programs, in securing professional positions and in obtaining equitable salaries and equitable promotion through the ranks still faces women in philosophy, (especially lesbian women and women of color) nevertheless, women are in the profession in greater numbers than ever before. And we know that for the most part, we are not special qua women philosophers. Now, for the first time, with the important contributions made by Ethel.A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, xix-xlii. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kersey, by Sr. Prudence Hope Allen, by the American Philosophical Association’s Society for the Study of Women Philosophers, by the journal Hypatia, and, hopefully, by this series, we know something about our foremothers: the women who truly were special qua women philosophers. This volume chronicles the end of two and a half millennia during which it was something special to be a woman philosopher.Women philosophers at the turn of the twentieth century still had extremely limited access to formal education in philosophy. When they were admitted to co-educational institutions of higher education and completed the requirements for the Ph.D. it was not unusual for the degree to be denied. William James said that her oral examination ranked above any other he had heard, yet Harvard refused to award the Ph.D. to Mary Whiton Calkins. Women’s colleges, including the Ivy League “Seven Sister Colleges” (Barnard, Radcliffe, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Vassar, Mount Holyoke) as well as public colleges like Hunter College of the City University of New York, and Girton College of Cambridge University provided sex-segregated education for women. It was not until 1948 that Girton became a full college of Cambridge University, and its women students became eligible to receive degrees. In 1885, Cambridge Training College was founded to prepare women for the teaching profession but did not grant the Ph.D. in Philosophy. It is not surprising therefore, to find that women philosophers’ highest degrees sometimes are in mathematics, the sciences, history, and letters. It is not surprising that often they did not teach philosophy in universities, or, if they did, that it was in the sex-segregated women’s colleges. Selfeducation, long the recourse of medieval and early modern aristocratic women, became increasingly rare in the twentieth century. Of women philosophers whom we have been able to identify, only Victoria, Lady Welby, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Haldane and May Sinclair were either privately or self-educated.In determining the contents of this volume, I have again followed the practice of considering a woman as a philosopher if the content of her writings or teaching corresponds to that of any recognized philosophical subject matter of this or any other historical period. I have not excluded women from consideration in this volume on the basis that they lacked the Ph.D. in philosophy, or that they did not teach philosophy, or that they also belonged to some other profession. Thus, some women in this volume have previously also been identified as psychologists, literary writers, physicians, theologians or scientists, etc.Professional associations frequently provided opportunities for women to engage in philosophical discourse with their male counterparts. Women not only participated actively in reading papers before professional societies of philosophers, but also were regularly invited to comment on papers given by male philosophers who were their contemporaries. The women in this volume have participated in symposia with the pragmatists James and Dewey, and the analytic philosophers Stout, Russell, Whitehead, Bosanquet, Mace, Acton and others. By the turn of the century, professional associations including the American Philosophical Association, the Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy, the Mind Association and the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club admitted women as participants and as members. The opportunity to participate with men on the more nearly level playing field of professional philosophy societies provided women philosophers with leadership opportunities in our profession. By the time the century was half spent, four women, Beatrice Edgell, Hilda Oakeley, Lizzie Susan Stebbing and Dorothy Emmet had served as presidents of the Aristotelian Society, and Mary Whiton Calkins had served as President of the American Philosophical Association (as well as President of the American Psychological Association). Now in official, public, organized and recognized ways, women philosophers and their male counterparts worked closely, as colleagues.My research indicates that it has always been this way; indeed I have identified only two women for whom no affiliation has been found with a male philosopher (Shikibu Murasaki and Julian of Norwich). But in this century, the affiliations, the “mainstreaming” into academic philosophy is by stronger connections than in the past. Rather than being participants in exchanges of correspondence, or hostesses of philosophical discussions, women philosophers hold teaching positions at major universities and elected positions in notable professional soci-eties. Rather than publishing their work at their own expense, as did Margaret Cavendish, women philosophers are well represented in the booklists of the very best academic and intellectual presses.Being in the company of male colleagues sometimes had its draw-backs. For example, there is troubling evidence that the theory of iden-tity that Bertrand Russell produced in Principles of Mathematics (and belatedly acknowledged to have been originated by Frege in Sinn und Bedeutung) actually originated with E. E. Constance Jones, who was a faculty member at Cambridge when Russell was a student there. Others, like Lou Salom6, found intimate relationships with Nietzsche and Ree stifling, as Beauvoir sometimes found her relationship with Sartre to be. Hannah Arendt briefly was lovers with Martin Heidegger (her teacher) and later, commemorated his work. But most women philosophers were not romantically involved with male philosophers.Twentieth century women philosophers represent all schools and fields of philosophy. There are phenomenologists, logical positivists, pragmatists, feminists, objectivists, existentialists, socialists, marxists, aestheticians, anarchists, and pacifists. There are logicians, ethicists and philosophers of science, of religion, of history, of literature, of mathe-matics, of psychology, and of education. They write of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Mill, Sidgwick, James, Dewey, and other predecessors and contemporaries. They comment, in oral presentations and in publications, on each others’ work. Some have undertaken the sad task of writing the obituary of a female colleague.The great developments in science and in society frequently influenced the subject matters that women philosophers wrote on. Toward the end of the last century, the impact of Social Darwinism, the experimentations in medicine (especially neurology) and in physics, and the suffrage movement all influenced women philosophers to take up the pen. Developments in neurology, coupled with the tremendous impact of Freud’s psychology and the growing interest in phenomenology, led turn- of-the-century philosophers like Gerda Walther, Sophie Bryant, Lou Salome, and Evelyn Underhill to investigate the ontological status of psychic phenomena, and of mystical experience. It is not unusual to find that the women who are included in this volume are professionally trained in, for example, physics and philosophy, mathematics and philosophy, psychology or psychoanalysis and philosophy, etc. In the early and middle parts of this century, the World Wars, the development of pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and Einstein’s discoveries prompted women philosophers to present their own views on everything from elasticity to the consequences of the theory of relativity for ethics.The suffrage movement, the social work movement and the pacifist movement often had female leadership, and it was not uncommon for women philosophers to take active roles in all three of these great social movements. Often these women were gifted public speakers who wrote philosophy for academic as well as for non-academic presses. Philosophers including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Jane Addams, Helen Dendy Bosanquet, Una Bernard Sait, and May Sinclair are just a few who understood that suffrage was not the only feminist issue, but that so also was the poverty, oppression, exploita-tion and ignorance that social work theory combatted, and so was war. Many women philosophers argued against the political philosophies that created economic and social oppression, that resulted in class dif-ferences and impoverished large populations. By and large it was women and their dependent children who suffered most from poverty, and women philosophers like Jane Addams and Helen Dendy Bosanquet worked actively to transform the charitable impulses of the wealthy into social services for the poor. When women finally had the vote, the question of divorce law reform, and the inherent ethical conflicts of duties to self, duties to children and duties to keep promises became the subject of writings by women philosophers. Some, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Una Bernard Sait, argued on pragmatist grounds for liberalization of educational and employment opportunities for women, and for government investment into labor-saving technologies research that would liberate women from housework. Gilman argued for parental training and later, Sait argued for the professionalization of housework, so that hired homeworkers would be adequately compensated. May Sinclair took a more radical view of feminist activism for suffrage, arguing that when oppression was so great and so long-lived, duties of non-violent protest may no longer hold.In the twentieth century, the nature of philosophy was again chang-ing. Pragmatists, phenomenologists, existentialists and many social and political philosophers frequently eschewed the ivory tower as an appro-priate environment for philosophizing, preferring to practice instead in the “real world” of social and political activism. Many preferred to write instead in forms that “ordinary” intelligent people could understand and appreciate. May Sinclair, Ayn Rand, Jane Addams, and Simone de Beauvoir represent only a few of the women whose philosophical works are deliberately written for the average intelligent reader and presuppose no particular advance training in philosophy.

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Victoria, Lady Welby (1837-1912) was self-educated and a corre-spondent with many leading philosophers of her day, including Spencer, Peirce, Russell, Carus, James and others. Her primary interest was in philosophy of language, and it is she who is credited with founding signifies: the philosophy of interpretation. Her early writings reflect three central views. One, the simplest form of knowledge (and the least informative) is the physical evidence needed to test scientific hypotheses.Two, knowledge always requires interpretation. Third, there are different levels at which interpretation occurs; the highest level of interpretation is that which reveals the ultimate significance of an idea in its broadest context. Throughout her writings Welby insisted that the study of the four levels of sense (the literal meaning of a text, treating the entire body of the text as either literal or metaphorical and thus as having the same sense, the contextual sense of a text or passage, and the import of the work as a whole), meaning and significance should be systematized as a discipline. Scientific theory, she claims employs deep metaphor and analogy which obfuscates its meaning. Without a recognition and examination of the language of science, we cannot hope to advance philosophy of science. There are three ways Welby says, in which science con-fusingly uses the word “sense.” First, there is “sense” as in sensory perception; second, there is the sense or meaning of a term or the judgment about an observation, and third there is “making sense” as in the philosophical significance, social importance or moral value of a scientific generalization. The latter sense of “sense” in science is what she identifies as signifies. It is the purview of philosophy, poetry and religion and involves ideals and values. Signifies, she says, emphasizes the relation of the sign to its referent, to the volitional meaning or intent of the person employing the sign, and to the moral significance, emotional force, social value or appeal of the sign.E. E. Constance Jones (1848-1922) was a lecturer in logic at Girton College Cambridge. Her professional career began with completing the translation of the German philosopher Hermann Lotze’s Mikrocosmus begun by Elizabeth Hamilton. Hamilton had died halfway through the translation, and Sidgwick recommended that Jones be invited to complete the translation. Jones’ career-long support of Sidgwick’s ethical hedonism resulted in an invitation by his widow to posthumously edit his lectures on Spencer, Martineau and Green’s ethics. However, Jones’ primary interests were in what would come to be called analytic philosophy. She published numerous papers and several looks of logic in which she introduced the idea that if the law of identity is a significant assertion it must be an assertion of “denomination in diversity of determination.” This concept would later be introduced to the English philosophical community by Bertrand Russell as “sense and reference” as if he had originated the idea and then discovered that it had been anticipated by Frege’s Sinn und Bedeutung. It now seems plausible that Russell, who was a young mathematics student at Cambridge when Jones published what she called her “interesting little theory” there, not only did not discover it independently of Frege, but may have relied both on Jones and on Frege. Although Jones’ publication preceded that of Frege by two years, it appears that their discoveries were, in fact, mutually inde-pendent, and perhaps were stimulated by common interests in the philosophy of Lotze. Like many English women philosophers, Jones was active in the Aristotelian Society which often provided a forum for her ideas. She was an active participant in its symposia along with other leading philosophers including Bosanquet, Ward, McTaggart, Sidgwick and Bradley. The Society’s Proceedings as well as the Mind Association’s journal, Mind published many of her formal papers. She was considered to be among the senior faculty of the Cambridge University Moral Sciences club. For more than a quarter of a century, “Miss E. E. Constance Jones” as she is called played a leadership role in the development of the British analytic tradition.Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was an American philosopher whose writings explored the sexist nature of much of philosophy, and much of society. Although she spent two years at Rhode Island School of Design, she must be considered self-taught in philosophy. She was a socialist and a Fabian Society member who advocated the abolition of class differences and collective ownership of land and of industry. Yet, she rejected marxist revolutionary methods and marxist focus on class struggle. She was a radical feminist who not only supported suffrage but economic independence for women, communal child-rearing, divorce reform, and the morality of suicide. She was a staunch critic of what she identified as androcentric philosophy which she saw as praising rationality to the exclusion of sensitivity, deductive logic to the exclusion of induction and insight, dominance to the exclusion of cooperation, and the deprecation of all that is traditionally identified with the feminine. She advocated instead a “human philosophy” committed to the social service of caring for the needs of others, promoting for example educational reform over the expansion of insti-tutions of punishment, nurturance over mere procedural justice. Gilman believed in a deity that was an ungendered force for social good, a force that could be tapped as a source of guidance and strength. She advocated the social collective good over that of the individual and a social consciousness rather than an individual soul that would survive the deaths of individuals. She contrasted her religious views to those of androcentric religions that privilege the afterlife over the life of society, the power of the individual over the value of the group, that view lif as a fight against death, and that fail, through disvaluing and subju-gating women and the nurturing emotions, to advance human needs. Gilman took issue with the social Darwinists and believed instead that advancement of the human race required the liberation of women. She defined anthropological progress in terms of the advancement of the whole through collective, liberationist action. The oppression of women, she believed, was the greatest obstacle to social progress. She called for full reform of the social institutions of marriage, family and home, called for the professionalization of homemaking, and for the understanding that the true role of motherhood is the progress of the civilization, yet most women lack anything approaching professional, scientific training in childbearing, nurturance and education. Yet for all her apparent enlightenment, Gilman was a product of the most insidious effects of social Darwinism: the belief that western culture and therefore the white race represented the most anthropologically and morally advanced. She advocated eugenics for the creation of a superior society. With her bias in favor of not only white northern European, but English culture, Gilman’s social ethics was fundamentally utilitarian. Given the superiority of the English, right conduct is that which tends toward the greatest development of morally and intellectually superior humanity, and thus tends toward the good of most. In addition to advo-cating eugenics, Gilman also advocated euthanasia and assisted suicide, to avoid needless suffering of persons who were terminally ill, and needless draining of health care resources for the care of those who could not be helped. She believed that when death was inevitable, pain was unbearable and contributions to society were no longer possible, a Board of Health should administer euthanasia. Gilman died by chloroform inhalation three years following her diagnosis of breast cancer. Her suicide note stressed her view that an advanced, civilized society extends to its members the right to die with dignity.Lou Andreas Salome (1861-1937) was a Russian-born philosopher who studied philosophy, religion and theology in Zurich, and travelled extensively in Europe. Among the intellectuals in her circle were philosophers Paul Ree and Friederich Nietzsche, as well as the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Her primary orientation to philosophy was phenomenological, and her primary interests were religious experience, theological ethics, and what has in recent years come to be called “philosophy of sex and love” but which she considered to be the philosophy of women. In the area of the epistemological and ontological status of religious experience, Salome explored what she considered the essence of religion: that like art and sex it served the human need to merge with the world beyond ordinary experience. While we feel inadequate when faced with the experience of the divine, we also identify ourself with its powers. The creative tension that this recognition gives rise to allows us to acknowledge the limits of human abilities and to revere that which extends beyond our limits. This intui-tive love of the divine is accompanied by a religious joy that is revealed through narcissistic love of the divine in the knowing self. She views women as more integrated than men, capable of knowing in erotic spiri-tuality, truths which transcend mere logic. Only male artists approximate this level of liberating, spiritual knowledge. It is in the experience of love that true self-knowledge becomes possible, love offers the means of transcending consciousness. Salome’s views on the religious and erotic context of self-knowledge explain in part her interests in psychoanalysis, and accord nicely with Freud’s own demythologizing of religion and his emphasis on sexuality as the key to self-knowledge. But she differed sharply from Freud in her views of narcissism. Where Freud considered narcissism to be regressive and pathological, Salome considers it creative and unifying, not only with self as ego, but with nature.

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) was one of those truly excep-tional women who rose to the highest leadership positions in philosophy as well as in psychology. An American philosopher, Calkins studied under William James and Josiah Royce. Her philosophical education began in highschool and continued at Smith College where she majored in classics and philosophy. Soon after graduation she began teaching Greek at Wellesley while completing her Master’s degree at Smith. She studied psychology at Clark University and psychology and philosophy at Harvard (under Royce). She completed all the requirements for the Ph.D. in Philosophy at Harvard, and William James ranked her oral defense higher than any he had previously heard. Nevertheless, Harvard refused to grant the degree on grounds of sex. Years later Radcliffe offered to grant her the Ph.D. based on the work completed at Harvard, but Calkins declined. In 1905 she became the first woman president of the American Psychological Association and in 1918 the first woman president of the American Philosophical Association. In the interim, Columbia University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters and Smith an honorary Doctor of Laws. Upon her retirement from Wellesley in 1929, she was appointed Research Professor. Psychology was Calkins’ first love, and the opportunity for a tutorial with William James whose Principles of Psychology had just been published provided her with a first-hand introduction to the latest insights of one of its greatest theorists. Eventually, Calkins would publish four full-length texts in psychology and in excess of sixty articles on subjects ranging from mental association, emotions, behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Her focus often was on defining the scope of subject matter of psychology and on analyzing the nature of the self and its relation to soul and body. In exploring questions about the nature of the self conceived as psyche, and the soul conceived spiritually, and the body conceived physically, Calkins connects the psychological with the metaphysical and the biological. While philosophy attempts to settle questions about the ultimate reality of persons, psychology accepts the reality of the self as given and investigates it as an object of introspection. She wrote two original texts: The Persistent Problems of Philosophy: An Introduction to Metaphysics through the Study of Modern Systems (which saw five editions in twenty nine years) and The Good Man and the Good (which saw three editions in seven years). She revised a translation of LaMettrie’s Man a Machine and editions of Hobbes, Locke’s Essay, Hume’s Enquiry and Treatise (as one work), Berkeley’s Essays, Principles, and Dialogues and authored more than thirty articles in philosophy. She was what can be described as a personal idealist who held that mental realities exist as a self, part, or process of a self, that reality is ultimately reducible to mental entities. Some mental entities are recognizably self, and some are recognizably selves outside oneself. The universe, or Absolute Self, is one perceptive, conscious, thinking, feeling, willing, complete, all-inclusive self of which lesser selves are constituent parts. Ethics, therefore, becomes a psychology of metaphysics, a knowledge of right action by the self in its relations to other selves and to the inclusion of all selves in the Absolute Self. Since the function of ethics is not merely to know the good, but to be good, knowledge of the psychology of human behavior including perception, reason, motivation and action is an essential constituent part of ethics. Calkins denied that there were morally significant differences between the minds of women and those of men. She favored suffrage and co-education, pointing out that from infancy girls are socialized differently than boys, therefore any psychological research claiming to identify inherent differences cannot account for the effects of different nurturance given girls and boys. Indeed, her professional life as a Wellesley educator was spent in developing women’s intellectual prowess, much as her professional life at the forefront of the disciplines of philosophy and psychology was spent furthering scholarship in those fields by revealing their inherent interdependence.Lizzie Susan Stebbing (1885-1943) was an English philosopher who was educated at Girton and received the Master’s Degree from the University of London in 1912. Following lectureships in philosophy at King’s College and a co-directorship at Kingsley Lodge School for Girls in Hampstead she became part-time Lecturer at Bedford College of the University of London. A member of the Aristotelian Society, and an active contributor of papers to its Proceedings, she was elected its President in 1935. She also published extensively in Mind. Her primary orientation was in analytic philosophy. She was an author of several logic texts, works on philosophy of science, pragmatism, critical thinking, and social/political philosophy. Her Master’s thesis, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism (1914) criticizes Bergsonian intuitionism as well as pragmatism on the ground that neither school of thought gives a satisfactory account of the nature of truth. Modern Introduction to Logic is an attempt to describe the connections between syllogistic logic and symbolic logic, summarizing and explaining recent developments in logical theory and notation, and their relationship to the Aristotelian tradition (A revised and condensed version later appeared as A Modern Elementary Logic). Logic in Practice (1935) and Thinking to Some Purpose (1939) emphasize the role that logic, conceived broadly as rationality, clarity and knowledge, have in non-academic areas of human endeavor. In Philosophy and the Physicists Stebbing debunks two popular accounts of what contemporary physics means. Written during the early part of World War II, Ideals and Illusions represents a departure from the more analytical works that preceded it. Using the disillusionment in Europe as an example, Stebbing explores, in a series of essays, the extent to which individuals and nations are morally responsible for the persistence of conditions of war, oppression and destruction. She examines the role of idealism and the question of the pragmatic implementation of political ideals. In this context, she examines the role of individual virtue in the development of a collective public will to implement political ideals that are morally praiseworthy. She contrasts the good of pursuing one’s own happiness and the happiness or good of nations, with the good of coming to the aid of victims of aggression or of misfortune and thus seeking a greater good: the good of a wider, international community. Essence is constantly related to existence. A thing is according to its universal essence as well as its individual essence; thus Being is a unified whole resulting from the joining together of essential attributes in a determinate structure.A transfer to a convent in Holland was insufficient to assure her safety. In July, 1942, Edith Stein was taken prisoner and murdered a month later in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Sr. Teresia Benedicta a Cruce was declared a Saint by Pope John Paul II in 1987.Gerda Walther (1897-1977) was born in a tuberculosis sanitorium in Germany, where her mother was a patient and her father was the Medical Director and owner. Her mother died when Gerda was five years old and Gerda was raised by her father and stepmother who was also her aunt. Her parents were active in the socialist movement in Germany and it was there that Walther learned Marxist philosophy. An avowed marxist/socialist political agitator, after four years of studies in Munich she went, at age 20 to Breisgau to join Husserl’s circle. Husserl relegated her to Edith Stein’s “kindergarten” but apparently on Stein’s recommendation, also allowed her to enroll in his courses. Walther wanted to write her doctoral dissertation on the essence of social communities, and knew that Husserl would want to direct her elsewhere, so she returned to Munich to study under Alexander Pfander, graduating summa cum laude. Her dissertation Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften (On the Ontology of Social Communities) was later published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und Phanomenologische Forschung. Karl Jaspers sponsored her for habilitation (faculty status), but economic changes in Germany left her destitute, and forced her to take a series of unrewarding menial jobs. However, her interests in philosophy and in psychology inspired her to study and write, and her interests expanded to include phenomenological interests in mental and spiritual phenomena. The Nazi disapproval of phenomenology and parapsychology resulted in at least one of her publications appearing under a pseudonym, F. Johansen. While forced into employment censoring foreign-language mail, Walther committed acts of subversion: pencilling in warnings and news of relatives prior to forwarding the very mail that she was supposed to censor.In her doctoral dissertation, Walther argued that humans are by nature socialized, political animals who desire to live in community. In this work she analyzed the nature of living in community in terms of the epistemological question “how can we have knowledge of other minds?” Husserl and Stein’s view was that it is the individual body which is given first and which then gives expression to the mental. Walther’s view was that there existed some direct inner connection between humans: knowledge of the phenomenal world is merely an expression of that inner connection. A community consists of people who in at least some important part of their lives, know of each other and know that they are in relationship to the same intentional object. As a result of this knowledge there is interaction among them motivated by that intentional relation with a common intentional object, and a feeling of belonging together.Walther’s best known philosophical work Die Phanomenologie der Mystik (Phenomenology of Mysticism) is an outgrowth of a mystical experience. In it she gives a phenomenological account of mystical and similar parapsychological experiences. In it, Walther postulates the mystical experience as a basic, irreducible phenomenon. She offers an ontology of mystical and spiritual phenomena, and argues that common prejudices prevent most philosophers from objectively studying the phenomenology of mystical experience. These prejudices include an often unspoken assumption that human minds cannot experience the divine directly, and an empiricist bias that favors dismissing non-sensory experiences. Non-empirical spiritual data she argues, are as varied as are sensory data, and mystical, occult or other parapsychological experiences cannot merely be dismissed out of hand on the grounds that they are not empirically verifiable. She denies that mystical experience is akin to the phenomena of mental illness and is therefore, evidence of psychopathology.Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was born in Russia and changed her name from Alice Rosenbaum upon emigration to the United States. “Ayn” was the name of a Finnish author, and “Rand” was chosen in honor of the Remington-Rand typewriter she brought with her. Following an early education at the University of Petrograd and a purge of undesirables by the Communist Party, Rand settled in Chicago with devoutly Jewish relatives. Rand’s career was perhaps the most unconventional of any women philosophers of this century. Her literary writing for the Hollywood screen gave her the notoriety needed to make a success of her philosophical novels. Perhaps the most widely read of the twentieth-century women philosophers, and I believe, the only one to have sold movie rights to her work, Ayn Rand developed a fiercely loyal following. Known as the founder of objectivist philosophy, the main theme of Rand’s works is that happiness is the moral purpose of human life, productivity its highest activity, and reason its sole absolute. Her philosophical system in We the Living describes two archetypal figures, the Witch Doctor (faith) and Attila (force) who have conspired to issue in a morally bankrupt culture. Aquinas, by reintroducing Aristotelian ethics, and the industrial revolution, by giving value to productivity, temporarily freed the world from the conspiracy of faith and force. As the founding fathers of the American Revolution recognized, “a free mind and a free market are corollaries.” But modern philosophy, because it based itself on pragmatism, portrayed the businessman as a looter rather than as a producer. Modern philosophy misunderstands the virtue of selfishness. Rand called for the rise of a “new” intellectual who will provide capitalism with a firm ethical foundation. In The Virtue of Selfishness Rand outlines her view that the maintenance of life and pursuit of happiness are identical; the values of reason, purpose and self-esteem correspond to the virtues of rationality, productivity and pride. Capitalism, Rand claims, is the only economic system based on individual rights, especially property rights. Laissez-faire capitalism, she claims, is the purest form of capitalism. In The Romantic Manifesto Rand addresses questions of aesthetics and the importance of art to human consciousness. This work, perhaps better than most, explains why Rand chose the artistic medium of literature as the vehicle for her philosophic views. Artistic expression solidifies what would otherwise be mere philosophic abstractions. It integrates multiple concepts and thus is a vehicle for communicating moral ideals.The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution addresses her views on the effects of higher education in fostering conformity and socialization over the development of conceptual skills that foster individuality. Born in Paris, she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the Ecole Normale Superieure and later taught philosophy in Marseilles, Rouen and Paris. She is considered by many solely in terms of her long-lived relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Like him, she was a political activist and existentialist philosopher. She wrote a number of literary works including She Came to Stay, The Blood of Others, All Men are Mortal, The Mandarins (for which she was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt), Les Belles Images, and The Woman Destroyed. Although she repeatedly denied that she was a philosopher, we must understand that by that she meant she was not a philosopher in the traditional, academic sense. She wrote philosophy for the masses, philosophy that any intelligent, educated person could understand. She sought to write for “real people” the “metaphysical novel.” There is only one reality, she claimed, and that is the real world. The world of ordinary living people who seek to understand the ambiguity of their existence through existentialist embrace of the concrete problems of moral choice and right action in a frequently immoral world. Thus The Ethics of Ambiguity denies that lived experience can be safely categorized by lifeless, useless philosophical systems. Other contemporary philosophies distance themselves from lived experience and thereby fail to account for the fullness of human experience. Beauvoir develops in its stead a critical methodology to articulate the plurality and difference of the experience of concrete individuals who, rather than being completed persons are, instead, always in the process of becoming. Existentialism, rather than skeptically suspecting lived experience, valorizes it. The Blood of Others claims that each individual is responsible to every other human being and for everything that happens, thus recognizing both the individual power and moral duty to change social structures. Each individual is defined in relationship to others and to the world. Femininity is a cultural construct that is socially imposed on women; it is not a construct that is biological or natural in any way. Femininity therefore is a consequence of culture: of custom and education. In The Second Sex Beauvoir argues that the imperialism of human consciousness required consciousness to view itself as subject and all else as object, as something to dominate. Male became the archetype for consciousness, female that of the other. Because women lived among those who dominated them they were prevented from developing the concrete means for organizing themselves into a political force. Years after writing The Second Sex Beauvoir identified herself as a militant feminist who would take her own fate in hand in concert with other women in the movement for liberation.Simone Weil (1909-1943) is best known for her religious mysticism. However, she was a complex thinker who brought several different traditions to bear on philosophical thought. First, was the wide scope of the humanities including philosophy and literature, second was mys-ticism and religious experience, third was the social and political, fourth was the mathematical and scientific. Central to her writings was a highly speculative analysis of the essential forms in aesthetics, mathematics, ethics and science. Her primary concern is to articulate and analyze the lived experience of the least well off in society in terms of the formal, structural relationships among people and institutions, particularly as they are revealed in literary works. In The Iliad of The Poem of Force she examines the relationship between human concepts of destiny and soul and explores the extent to which individuals can be said to have created their own destiny, and the contradictions between the ideas of “creating one’s own destiny” and the concept “destiny” itself. Thus, she also examines the nature of the beautiful, the good, duty, virtue, right action, desire, impulse, passion and imagination. A posthumously published collection of works includes her analysis of basic aesthetic concepts: the limits of artistic creativity imposed by choice of medium, by artistic ability, by time and by space. She also explores the idea of necessity of relationships between the parts of a work of art: altering one of these relationships may compromise its artistic merit, thus requiring what she labels “attention.” Attention is the focus on only that which is neces-sary to the artistic expression of the innate form of the work of art; it requires honest expression.Weil’s writings often focus attention on the lived experience of those who are oppressed, who are made by the social hierarchy to occupy a less than fully human role in society. Oppressed peoples are treated like objects, human objects, a concept that, while defying all logic, is clearly a true depiction of social life. It is impossible for those who have never been marginalized to truly understand the effects of dehumanization. Developing the artist’s discipline of attention enables us to see the world as it is. Only through such disciplined attention to the marginalization of others can we learn how to meet the needs of the oppressed. Those needs can begin to be met by viewing oppressed people as individuals, not merely members of a class, by asking them to give voice to that which they are suffering. This requires abandoning the dehumanizing detachment from the oppressed that the political life permits and entering instead into personal relationships that inspire hope and enable healing.

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There are nearly one hundred women philosophers of this century named in this volume. The lives and works of thirteen of them receive chapter- length treatment here. The final chapter provides brief profiles on an additional twenty-nine. In the Appendix to this volume fifty-four others are listed. Just over a decade ago, I came to the conclusion that there were many more women philosophers throughout the course of our profession’s history than could possibly be mentioned in the nice little article I had in mind for perhaps The Journal of the History of Philosophy. Lengthier treatment clearly was needed. I decided to proceed cautiously and include in that treatment only women philosophers who, in a colloquial sense “were history.” I did not originally intend to prepare a volume on twentieth century philosophers. However, so many of my colleagues who have constituted the Project on the History of Women Philosophers felt strongly that the discipline was as much in need of this volume as it was of the first three volumes, that I was easily persuaded to agree to prepare it. However, doing so has presented me with challenges that did not arise with the earlier volumes.I have always wanted this series to be a history. For the reason I have wanted to include only those women philosophers who were deceased, who productivity as philosophers had come to full closure.Since a century is the longest lifetime that one usually gets, it was easier, with volumes one through three to include in the history for that period, any woman philosopher about whom sufficient information could be unearthed. There was no problem in assuming, for example, that someone who published in the sixteenth century was by now, well and truly deceased. Unfortunately, that assumption cannot be made quite so glibly with respect to someone who published in 1930, but for whom one has been utterly unable to discover a date of birth or a date of death. Not all women philosophers whose biographies appear in Who's Who with dates of birth in the late nineteenth century subsequently appear in Who Was Who. Deaths are often not recorded in the same types of source materials that record active productivity. Attempts to receive permission to cull through the records of the American Philosophical Association for obituary notices were received with the unpromising explanation that the Association itself is attempting to collect its records from the archival repositories of the universities that were homes to the former presidents of its three divisions. The records of the Association are not centrally held, but remain with those of its past presidents. My quest to eliminate from consideration in this volume women who were still living but for whom dates of death were not to be found in the usual sources was further complicated by the interesting statistic that many of us have tended to live and to be productive to an extremely ripe old age. There are several centenarians and near-centenarians amongst us. On the other hand, some women philosophers died much too young: some of our foremothers died in childbirth, or committed suicide in middle age, or were put to death in a concentration camp. In retrospect I realize that I needed the services of a private detective to conduct searches through public records of birth and death. I also needed the services of a full-time secretary to engage in correspondence with the many philosophical societies of which women philosophers were members, and the many academic institutions at which women philosophers had studied or taught. Unfortunately, I have not had these services available to me.When dates of death have not been forthcoming, I have sometimes resorted to making two ad hoc assumptions (which in some cases will be wrong). The first assumption is that a date of birth precedes the first published record of professional activity (award of the doctorate, mem-bership in a professional society, publication, or appointment to an academic post) at age twenty-five. The second assumption is that no philosopher lived more than a century. Therefore, if a floruit date would be at least a century old, I have felt rather comfortable in assuming that the person is deceased. In most such cases, her philosophical writings are listed in the Bibliography. In every case, I have collected some archival information about them. Many of the names can be found in Ethel Kersey’s valuable work: Women Philosophers, a Biocritical Source Book. Readers will perhaps have knowledge of other women who lived and wrote at the turn of the century. Some of those subjects, who perhaps can be said to have lived most of their professional lives in the nineteenth century, may be included instead in a second edition to Volume 3 of this series, should one be necessary.Although the research for this volume began a decade ago, it may never be complete. I have collected information and unconfirmed leads on a number of other women, whom, for lack of evidence of teaching or writing philosophy, are not mentioned in these volumes. In such cases, the information is still spotty: names on membership lists of profes-sional societies, or incomplete textual references to a person, or mere mention of a woman as a “philosopher” in works by others are insuffi-cient evidence for me to be willing also to make such an attribution.The selections for the main chapters reflect three things: first, my conviction that there is reason to consider the subject to be a philosopher; second, the availability of sufficient written philosophical work by the subject; and third, interest and expertise in the source language and area of philosophy on the part of scholars who compose the Project on the History of Women in Philosophy and who have offered to prepare a chapter on that subject. Relegation to the final chapter, or indeed to the Appendix, in no way indicates that a woman subject is of lesser importance than she who receives fuller treatment. Indeed, the number of women philosophers is too great to give to all those who might otherwise be identified as “important philosophers” a chapter of their own.I realize that there are some shortcomings evident both in this volume and in the series of which it is a part. There is insufficient treatment of non-western and non-white women. That deficiency hopefully will be remedied by other scholars. I welcome hearing from others who have successfully engaged in such research. These likely shortcomings are the reason that this series is titled A History of Women Philosophers rather than The History of Women Philosophers.In this, the final volume of the series, it is perhaps appropriate to reflect upon the conditions which gave rise to the series. A myth gave rise to it. That myth, unduly enshrined by male historians of philosophy who were either grossly incompetent or who clearly knew better, was that philosophy is the stuff of only the greatest male intellects. By now it should be clear to those who have in the past claimed to be the custodians of our professional record (including the editors of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy) that the historical record (much of which has been assembled in this series, as well as in the works of Allen and of Kersey) speaks otherwise. The record shows that in every historical epoch in which we have a record of men engaging in philosophy, we also have a record of women engaging in philosophy. That record shows that just as male philosophers have framed the “great questions” of philosophy, whether in logic, metaphysics, ethics, political thought, epistemology, cosmology, ontology, religion, language, or aesthetics, so too have women philosophers framed them. That record shows that just as male philosophers left a written record of their views for posterity, so too have women philosophers written. The record shows that just as male philosophers have taught philosophy and had disciples, students, followers, so too have women philosophers led academies, chaired departments, headed professional associations, and nurtured the development of other philosophers.In the decade-long effort at recapturing our lost history I have become aware of three significant differences between male and female philosophers. First, and most obvious is the unequal access to training in philosophy. Statistics from our own professional societies indicate that although the number of women in the profession is increasing, the increase is small compared to other professions, for example, law and medicine. Unfortunately, the statistics also show that when women do receive Ph.D.s in philosophy, they neither rise through the faculty ranks as quickly as do men, nor do they receive the same compensation. A second, and perhaps more crucial difference between male and female philosophers is one that may account for the general omission of females from the received canon. That difference is the absence of women historians of philosophy. Although Cornelia De Vogel stands as an exception (at least regarding ancient philosophy) to the general rule that historians of philosophy are all male, she too, appears to have been unaware of works by women philosophers in antiquity. The third difference between female and male philosophers that I have noticed is that it is rare that male philosophers have seriously addressed arguments in support of women’s equal moral, social and political status with men. For this reason, we tend to think of feminist philosophy as an invention of the twentieth century, or at best, of the late nineteenth century. One may quibble as to what precisely feminist philosophy consists in, and I do not intend to attempt to define it here. Precise definitions notwithstanding, it is clear that women philosophers have addressed what used to be called “the woman question” ever since there have been women philosophers. I believe that the first wave of philosophical feminism began when Phintys of Sparta and Perictione I addressed the “excellences” of woman at the same time that Plato was admitting Axiothea and Lasthenia (in drag) to his lectures. The second great wave of feminism was in the woman-dominated institutions of greater learning in the medieval period: from the convents and female monasteries headed by Hildegard and Mechtild who led and educated women, right through to the writings of Christine de Pisan. The third wave of philosophical feminism came when philosophical writing accompanied political activism, from Mary Wollstonecraft through Jane Addams and Emma Goldman. If I am correct in my accounting, we represent the fourth wave of feminist philosophy: when contemporary feminist thought is taught in the academies, lived in daily life, and exercised at the polls. In every epoch, there have been women philosophers who confronted women’s issues, inquired as to woman’s nature, and exhorted their male counterparts to take them seriously.And still, the canon remains largely unintegrated. If one wants to find the works of Locke or Kant, one has only to venture to any public or academic library and there they are, in the 100 section of the Dewey decimal system (where it has not been replaced by the Library of Congress system). If one wants to find women philosophers, one must look page by page through early philosophical journals, or through state archival material, or through “famous ladies” books, or through histo-ries of other disciplines in which women philosophers also became proficient. I welcome, more than I can express, the important work in this area now being done by others, especially Ethel Kersey and Sr. Prudence Allen. Clearly, in volumes two and three of this series, I have missed identifying some philosophers who came to Kersey’s attention, just as she has missed some whose works I have uncovered. There is still so much to do. There are scores of major works to be translated, contemporary editions to be prepared, deeper analyses to be done, and connections between the works of different women and between their works and the works of the men to be explored. I have no doubt that there remain many women philosophers of the past whose names we have not yet learned of. It is my privilege to introduce you to some of those whose names and works we do know of: these, our immediate predecessors.