Article ID: CBB649608640

Feminism and Ideology in Ancient Philosophy (2000)

unapi

Feminism and gender are lenses through which scholars are now viewing ancient philosophers' views on God, form and matter, space and time, science and logic, education and virtue, souls and stars - not just the expected or likely topics of marriage, family, love, sex, and procreation. A new ferment in feminism is signaled by revisionist studies like the volumes devoted to Plato and Aristotle in the Perm State series Re-Reading the Canon, and Mary Ellen Waithe's three-volume A History of Women Philosophers.1 Often, feminist critical readings of the ancients challenge the canonical fathers of the western tradition by arguing that their philosophical views purveyed a concealed ideology: They formulated claims that worked to undergird millennia of sexist (and other kinds of) domination - and that sustained the centuries-long exclusion of women from philosophy. Of course, feminist critiques of canonical works as ideological are not unique to philosophy. In reassessments of the canon in fields like literature, art history, and musicology, feminists have argued that we must not only question individual instances but, more comprehensively, the construction of canons and companion notions such as 'quality' and 'genius'.2 In recent studies of the history of the arts, questions of method have been very pressing and hotly disputed. Similarly rich discussion about method, ideology, and canons have been slower to develop in philosophy. To speak personally for a moment, I can scarcely remember one class session that addressed either method or canons in the history of philosophy during my philosophical education (ending in 1978). However, recent years have seen some very interesting and provocative discussions of canon formation - ranging from fairly conservative scholarly accounts of why, say, the Stoics were excluded from the canon of important ancient philosophers as late as the nineteenth century, to the radical and controversial accounts of a book like Black Athena targeting alleged racism in canon construction in our field.3 Feminist canon revisionism is a major part of a broader dialogue about values and methods in the history of philosophy. Feminists studying the ancients do more than question misogyny or search out alternative foremothers (from, say, the Pythagoreans). Rather, feminism is a kind of method that involves looking at the tradition differently: gathering ideas from it for our present projects, and more self-consciously questioning certain principles of reading texts. Feminist critical studies of the ancients can challenge and engage with competing conceptions of method in the history of philosophy.4 Why bother to do history of philosophy at all, and how should we practice this enterprise so that it may still have meaning as we start the new millennium? Are there ideologies at work, not just within the texts and opinions of the philosophers themselves, but as the backdrop of our discipline, the history of philosophy? To begin to answer these questions, I need a working definition of 'ideology'.

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Authors & Contributors
Francesco Fronterotta
Taylor, C. C. W.
Sedley, David N.
Schiebinger, Londa L.
Reis, Burkhard
O'Brien, Denis P.
Concepts
Philosophy
Soul (philosophy)
Metaphysics
Medicine
Feminism
Natural philosophy
Time Periods
Ancient
Early modern
4th century, B.C.
Renaissance
Medieval
20th century
Places
Greece
Rome (Italy)
Europe
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