Nietzsche! Heidegger! Sartre! But where are the women?

It is never too late to brush up on the name dropping during for your next conversation over tea or coffee (or wine or...). If a philosopher or major thinker happens to be mentioned, even if it is just by surname, it is very likely that the name will be that of a man. And why? Are there no women philosophers? Actually, there are.

What there is not, it's their mention in any course work, or reading list from either introductory or especialised study on the matter. So MOTU comes at your service, sharing a sample on the lives of these incredible women, their thoughts and careers.

Now you know, next time philosophy or existentialism, or structuralism or... pops up in a conversation (even if it does not, why not bring it up yourself?) you can mention one of the extraordinary ladies below!

from The Independent online (article originally published in 2005)


Hannah Arendt: 1906-1975
German-born Jewish philosopher who studied under Heidegger (with whom she also had a brief relationship) before being imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933 for her work on anti-Semitic propaganda.

She escaped and fled to Paris; seven years later, following the fall of France, she moved to the US. Initial interests in existentialism and in the thought of St Augustine gave place to a more political awareness. She is best known for The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), as well as for her coverage of Adolf Eichmann's trial (published first in The New Yorker and then in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil). Her justification for capital punishment in Eichmann's case was that, as Eichmann had not wanted to share the earth with the Jews, the Jewish state had no reason to share the earth with him. The first two volumes of her projected three-volume Life of the Mind were published posthumously, as was her Reflections on Kant's Political Philosophy.


Hypatia of Alexandria: C370-415AD

Follower of Plotinius who developed neo-Platonism at Alexandria from about 400 to her death in 415. She was so well-known, apparently, that correspondence addressed only to "The Philosopher" is said to have reached her.

Also a leading mathematician and astronomer, she is thought to have taught ideas relating to different levels of reality and humanity's ability to understand them. She seems to have believed that everything in the natural world emanates from "the one" - and that human beings lack the mental capacity fully to comprehend ult imate reality.

Her subsequent obscurity probably reflects the fact that none of her work survives (although letters from a pupil do). It appears, however, that her influence made the city's Christian community feel threatened - perhaps partly because of her emphasis on the value of science. She was torn to death by a Christian mob (including monks armed with oyster shells). Admirers revere her as a philosophical martyr comparable to Socrates.


Simone de Beauvoir: 1908-1986
Undeservedly overshadowed by her lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir developed an education in traditional philosophy (she wrote a thesis on Leibniz) into more radical explorations of feminism and existentialism.

Some of her ideas - about human freedom, for example, and about "being-for-itself" and "being-in-itself" - overlapped with Sartre's, but her best philosophical work, such as The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), was important in its own right, as was her towering work of feminist ideology, The Second Sex (1949). In The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that women have been held back throughout history by the perception that they are a "deviation" from the male norm - an assumption that must be broken if feminism is to succeed.


Elizabeth Anscombe: 1919-2001
Oxbridge-rooted academic principally concerned with defining the actual nature of phenomena such as mind and morality, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe has been described as the pre-eminent British philosopher of the 20th century. She had intellectual roots not only in classical philosophy but also in Roman Catholicism and in the modern philosophy of Wittgenstein and Frege. A friend of Wittgenstein, she produced the definitive (and still unrevised) translation of his Philosophical Investigations in 1953, as well theIntroduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus in 1959. Her Intention (1957) is considered to be the founding document of modern "action theory". An analytical philosopher of exceptional rigour, she allegedly once said to A J Ayer: "If you didn't talk so quickly, people wouldn't think you were so clever"; to which the philosopher replied: "If you didn't talk so slowly, people wouldn't think you were so profound."


Anne, Lady Conway: 1631-1679
An English follower of Descartes with an interest in the kabbala and, later, Quakerism.

Born Anne Finch, she studied philosophy secondhand - via her brother - under Henry More at Cambridge. Her sex debarred her from studying the subject herself, but she corresponded with More for most of her relatively short life - she died at the age of 47.

Preoccupied with the question of substance - she doubted the existence of inert matter - she developed a God-based theory of nature as an integrated mental and material order ("life and figure are distinct attributes of one substance"), made up of individual "monads".

In this, she anticipated Leibniz, who acknowledged her as an influence. Her one surviving work, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, was published posthumously (and anonymously) in 1690.

Anne Conway suffered from severe migraines and is said to have considered the operation known as trepanning as a possible cure.


Sarah Margaret Fuller: 1810-1850
US-born feminist and champion of transcendental idealism, whose Woman of the Nineteenth Century was America's first major feminist manifesto. A pupil of Emerson, she taught in Rhode Island and Boston before moving to Europe in 1846 and marrying an Italian aristocrat. Together with her husband and son, she drowned off Fire Island, New York, after fleeing the Italian revolution.


Susan Haack: 1945-
British-born professor of philosophy and law at the University of Miami. Inhabits the difficult end of the spectrum, propounding an epistemological theory called foundherentism, a kind of Third Way between foundationalism and coherentism. (If you need to ask, you wouldn't understand.) Works include: Deviant Logic (1974), Philosophy of Logics (1978), and Defending Science - Within Reason Between Scientism and Cynicism (2003).


Mary Wollstonecraft: 1759-1797
English feminist and egalitarian, associated with Thomas Paine and William Godwin (her husband). A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) argued against the slave trade; A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) did what it said on the jacket. Described marriage as "legal prostitution". Opposed monarchy, church and military. Died after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley.


Ayn Rand: 1905-1982
Controversial Russian novelist and philosopher, a "radical capitalist" whose works are popular with young Tories (and Camille Paglia). Moved to US in 1924 and developed a philosophy of individualism she called Objectivism ("a philosophy for living on earth"). Best-known works: The Fountainhead (1935) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Appeared in a Tobias Wolff memoir, and was played by Helen Mirren in a 1999 film about her life.


Dame Mary Warnock: 1924-
Mary Warnock has significantly more influence on the way British society thinks of itself than any living male philosopher. She is a champion of a woman's right to philosophise. A veteran of royal commissions and committees of inquiry, she has published (among much else) The Uses of Philosophy (1992), and Women Philosophers (1996).

Profiles by Ellie Levenson

Carmen Herrera

I am ashamed to admit I never heard of Herrera before. This incredible lady who is 94 years old, is having her first solos show in the UK (in Birmingham) this month until the 13th of September at IKON Gallery. (source The Observer)

Apparently Herrera, like many female artists who have settled in NYC in the 1950s, was "at the wrong place at the worng time", since the decade was ruled by "male abstract Impressionists" like De Kooning, Pollock, Rothko etc.



But here she is, standing strong, and painting too. An absolutely remarkbale woman!

Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750-1848)

Auf Wiedersehen Pina

Pina Bausch (1940 - 2009)

Chquinha Gonzaga (1847-1935)

video taken from youtube shows Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 20th century. Chiquinha was the first popular composer in Brasil.

Leila Diniz (1945-1972)

Dorothea Tanning (1910-)

Maria de los Remedios Varo (1908-1963)

Leonora Carrington (1917 - )

"The face seemed to regain some of its absolutely-irresistible-atraction, although the folds were of course still there. From the lunar plexus i arose like a hungry trout and was caught fast on the sharp barbed hook that hangs inside all once-very-beautiful face.

A thin magnetic mist formed between myself, the face and clear perception. This is what I saw in the mist. 'well, well, i was really beggining to petrify in that old lunar plexus. This must be me, this beautiful, smilling fully toothed creature. There i was, sitting in the dark bloodstream like a mummified foetus with no love at all. Here I am, back in the rich world, where I can palpitate again, jump up and down in the nice warm swimming pool of outflowing emotion, the more bathers the merrier. I Shall be Enriched." (My Flannel Knickers 1955)

Testimony of Ding Zilin, mother of Jiang Jielian

The tank man is Wang Wei Lin
王维林 (source youtube)





Testimony of Ding Zilin, mother of Jiang Jielian
January 31, 1999

Jiang Jielian, male, born in Beijing on June 2, 1972, had just passed his 17th birthday when he died. He was a junior at the High School attached to People's University. Around 11:10 p.m., on June 3, 1989, he was killed behind the flower bed in front of Building 29, on the north side of Fuwai Street, Muxudi. A bullet hit him from behind and passed through his heart. His ashes are kept at a mourning altar in his home.




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Testimony of Ding Zilin, Jiang Jielian's mother:

Jiang became deeply involved in the student movement when it first started in April 1989 after the death of Hu Yaobang. He often went to the People's University and Beijing University after class to read the big-character posters and listen to speeches. On April 19, students from various colleges in Beijing gathered in front of Xinhua Gate [the entrance to the leadership compound, Zhongnanhai], requesting that the government re-evaluate Hu Yaobang's achievements, and demanding to be allowed to express their respects to Hu. There were confrontations with the police. Jiang participated in that rally. After this, he was involved in several other activities in the student movement.

On May 13, the college students started a hunger strike and sit-in on Tiananmen Square. Jiang often cycled to the Square at night to join the students who had organized themselves as guards to keep order in the Square. He would go to school as usual the next day. On May 17, at the climax of the hunger strike, Jiang and his classmates organized the participation of over two thousand students from his high school in the million-strong march in support of the college students. That was the first time in the movement that high-school students had organized themselves to join a march.

After Li Peng had declared martial law on May 19, Jiang went out on several nights and was among the many Beijing citizens who stopped military trucks to explain to the soldiers about the student movement and ask them not to enter the city. At dusk on June 3, the Central TV Station broadcast an "Urgent Warning," telling citizens not to leave their homes or they would be responsible for the consequences, which could be serious. Jiang was very uneasy at home, worried for the safety of the college students in the Square. He insisted on going there. I tried in vain for two hours to persuade him not to go. Finally, he struggled out of my arms, ran into the bathroom, locked the door from the inside and climbed out of the window. (We lived on the ground floor.) He never came back.

He left home at 10:30 p.m. on June 3, and met a classmate at the gate of People's University. They decided to cycle together to Tiananmen Square, but when they got to Muxudi they could not go any further. By then the whole area was a surging mass of people confronting the troops, who were marching from west to east. Following orders, the troops shot indiscriminately at the crowd. Many people fell and there was a lot of blood. After a burst of shooting, Jiang and his classmate ran for safety behind the flower bed in front of Building 29, north of the subway exit, but they were both hit. At that time, they still thought the troops were using rubber bullets. A bullet grazed his classmate's arm, while Jiang Jielian was shot from behind, the bullet running aslant through his heart. His classmate heard him say softly, "I think I've been hit by a bullet." Then he squatted down and passed out. Bright red blood soaked his pale yellow T-shirt. It was around 1:10 a.m. Then people nearby risked their own lives to carry him to the north entrance hall of Building 29. Seeing that he was wounded severely, they stopped a tricycle to take him to the hospital, but then they worried that the tricycle was too slow and so they stopped a taxi. Two people, whose names are still unknown today, carried him into the car and took him to the hospital.

He didn't come home all night. We had no idea where to look for him. We, his parents, could do nothing but wait anxiously at the gate of the People's University. At about 6:00 a.m. on June 4, the classmate, accompanied by his father, came to tell us the news. He said Jiang had been seriously wounded and taken to the hospital but he did not know which one. He had been unable to accompany him because the taxi had been full. On the morning of June 4, we relatives, neighbors and classmates searched everywhere in more than 20 hospitals in Beijing. There were countless wounded and dead in those hospitals, but we didn't find Jiang Jielian. That afternoon, Beijing Children's Hospital contacted the People's University to ask for the body to be claimed. It turned out that those kind people had taken my son to the Children's Hospital. According to a doctor, who spoke to us later, Jiang had been among the first batch of wounded sent to the hospital. When the doctors put him on the operating table, he had long stopped breathing. The death certificate from the hospital states: "Dead before arrival at the hospital." He was one of the first victims of the Beijing Massacre.

At dawn on June 5, the People's University sent a vehicle and moved Jiang's body to Zhongguancun Hospital, near the campus, where it was kept in the morgue. At 4:00 p.m. on June 6, his parents, relatives, friends, teachers and classmates-over 20 people in all-held a simple memorial service at the hospital. We put the red headband, of which he had been very proud, around his thick, jet black hair-it was a symbol of the cause for which he gave his life's-blood. There were no wreaths or mourning music during the service, only sobs and his parents' wails of grief. On June 7, his body was sent to Babaoshan for cremation, taking the long way round to avoid the troops stationed in Beijing. Before he was cremated, his relatives, teachers and classmates laid a wreath. A scroll saying, "It is honorable to love one's country" covered his body. His parents were in grief too deep to attend. A farewell letter written by his mother, stained with blood and tears, was laid on his chest.

After the June Fourth Massacre, Jiang Jielian was the only casualty of high-school age whose death was acknowledged in internal bulletins by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities. Now it is known, however, that there were at least nine high-school students killed in the massacre. On September 11, 1989, on the hundredth day after his murder, we took his ashes home and put them where his bed had been before his death. On front of the box where the ashes are kept, his father carved the following inscription for our beloved son:

In these short 17 years
You lived like a real man
Your humanitarian nobility and integrity
Will be kept in the undying memory of history.
Your forever loving Father and Mother.


Ding Zilin