Just to prove that Philosophy is not an 'all male affair', here's a list of the Independent's 'Top 10 female philosophers'.
Some are still alive...
You can see the full list at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/ten-great-female-philosophers-the-thinking-womans-women-498733.html
Neil Turnbull
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Thanks, Neil, plenty of provocative material in this article, not "just" relating to female philosophers but to the state of the philosophical field in general.
ReplyDeleteFor example, Camille Paglia opines that:
"Today's lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy has traditionally practised may be a dead genre. This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundmentally altering young people's brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry.
Today's philosophers are now antiquarians".
Paglia is being polemical here, of course, but does she have a point? Has philosophy been somehow rendered moribund by contemporary culture?
Of course, as a practitioner of philosophy-as- everyday life (an approach which Paglia ignores in favour of a more traditionalist definition of philosophy as abstract, sterile analysis of concepts practiced by lofty scholars who need a reality check)I want to utter a resounding "No"! Philosophy is alive and well in our schools, the academy and the wider world.
That said, is the everyday life approach, the nostalgia for the Ancient Greek notion of philosophy as lived, a response to changes in contemporary culture?
Does it recognise that Philosophy as more traditionally understood is under threat from information technology, from the influences of network thinking?
Ruth Griffin