Topics Profession

Question In a discussion about philosophy as a profession I referred to one of the questions on this site to claim that the division of male and female philosophers is more equal than ever and it's not at all only male philosophers. But when we started thinking about it we could only come up with female philosophers who are doing practical philosophy (e.g. Nussbaum, Noddings, Gutmann, Warnock). So the question arose - are there at least somewhat significant female philosophers in for example theoretical philosophy or history of philosophy that you could name? Are there female philosophers in all the fields of philosophy?

Accepted:
December 9, 2008

Comments

Yes, there surely are (just look through the list on the right), though it's probably also true that women are better represented in practical philosophy than in philosophy generally. Outside practical philosophy, among the earliest in this country was Ruth Marcus who taught Saul Kripke, among many others, and had a very distinguished career at Yale. Leigh Cauman (even earlier) studied with Quine, taught logic, and was the managing editor of the Journal of Philosophy for many years. Women are very strongly represented in ancient philosophy, with Gisela Striker (Harvard) a good example. In the history of modern philosophy there's Beatrice Longueness (NYU) . If you look through the various departments -- www.philosophicalgourmet.com/overall.asp -- you'll find that most of them have one or more female philosophers outside practical philosophy, so examples could be multiplied. While the profession is still a long way from where we should and want to be, further progress is made likely by there already being a substantial female presence in most areas of philosophy.