From top left, philosophers Margaret Cavendish, Im Yunjidang, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Hildegard von Bingen, Hypatia of Alexandria, and Mary Wollstonecraft will be featured in the first season of Philosophy Talk’s Wise Women series. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, Getty Images, and Encyclopedia Britannica)

Despite the intellectual contributions female philosophers have made over the centuries – millennia, even – their stories, thoughts, and ideas have been cast into the shadows of obscurity.

Philosophy Talk, the nationally syndicated public radio program hosted by Stanford professors Ray Briggs and Joshua Landy hopes to shine a spotlight on some of these thinkers and their extraordinary lives in a special radio series, Wise Women.

“Women have been having philosophical thoughts and have been trying to get them heard for an extremely long time,” said Briggs, a professor of philosophy in the School of Humanities and Sciences who has been a Philosophy Talk co-host since 2019. “I’m just really excited to do a bunch of philosophy and read smart philosophers who deserve to be profiled.”

Through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 16 episodes will air over two seasons. In each hour-long show, Briggs and Landy will focus on a different female philosopher with a guest scholar. The first season will highlight thinkers from antiquity to the 19th century, while the second season will focus on contemporary figures from the 20th century.

This has not been the only time Philosophy Talk has devoted episodes to female philosophers. Philosophy Talk previously aired an episode on the French post-war existentialist Simone De Beauvoir and another on the political philosopher Hannah Arendt (because the show has already devoted attention to these women, they will not be featured in the Wise Women series). More recently, an episode on Mexican philosophy highlighted the Baroque Spanish poet and thinker Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

“We’ve been doing different bits and pieces along the way, but Wise Women is our first effort to be more systematic,” explained Landy, the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French and a professor of comparative literature who has been co-hosting Philosophy Talk since 2017.

Telling the lives of 16 interesting women

The idea for Wise Women was conceived by Laura Maguire, who has been Philosophy Talk’s director of research since 2011.

In selecting which women to highlight, Maguire and the rest of the Philosophy Talk team sought a balance of chronological, geographical, and intellectual diversity.

The first episode in the series aired July 23, 2023 – and is available on the Philosophy Talk website and other audio platforms – and focused on Hypatia of Alexandria, a public figure and scholar in Ancient Egypt who taught mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy.

Hypatia was also a Neoplatonist, which listeners also learned about. Hypatia taught about the concept of “the One,” the belief that all life and existence emanate from a single transcendent source.

Episodes in the 2023-24 season will include other notable women, like Margaret Cavendish who wrote extensively about the philosophy of science, and Elisabeth of Bohemia who is known for her devastating critique on Descartes’ claim that the mind and body are separate entities.

For Maguire, who earned her PhD in philosophy from Stanford in 2005, one of the most interesting aspects of the project has been understanding the amount of disagreement between the women in the series, particularly their beliefs and attitudes towards women’s rights.

For example, the second season will feature the early 20th-century anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman who ardently championed for human liberation and advocated for women’s rights, particularly the legalization of birth control and contraceptives – yet she took a contrary stance towards the women’s suffrage movement.

“There isn’t a single feminism, and there isn’t a single woman’s view of women’s rights,” said Maguire.

Overlooked from the canon

There are many reasons why women have been overlooked in philosophy.

One is that throughout history, women have not been granted the same access to education as men.

“Thus, it was very hard for women to become philosophers,” Landy explained.

Some women turned to other mediums, like art, poetry, and music, to offer their philosophical reflections about the world, human consciousness, nature, God, and the divine.

As the Wise Women series demonstrates, there were women – many of whom were polymaths – who found extraordinary success during their lifetime, like Hypatia who led one of the most respected schools of the time, and Anna Julia Cooper, a former slave in the American South who, after emancipation, went on to earn her PhD in history at the Sorbonne in Paris and became one of the earliest advocates for the rights of black women.

“A lot of these people are just staggeringly smart and I think Cooper is a great example of that,” Briggs said.

In the 20th century, philosophy underwent a shift during World War I and II, periods that saw a mass exodus of men leaving the workforce to enlist in the military. Much like other industries that saw women stepping into jobs previously held by men – such as agriculture and manufacturing – education too was transformed as an increasing number of female scholars took on academic responsibilities and positions at colleges and universities.

“We think about Rosie the Riveter but we don’t think about Rosie the philosopher,” Landy said.

Post-World War II, it was more common to see female philosophers in the academy. For example, there was the “Oxford Quartet” – philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley, each of whom will have dedicated episodes in the second season of Wise Women.

Always new things to learn

Briggs and Landy say they are looking forward to learning about women they know little, or in some cases, nothing about, such as the Korean Confucian scholar Im Yunjidang.

“I know a little bit about Confucian thought, and what I know of it, I find extremely interesting,” said Landy. “I had not come across Im Yunjidang, who pushed for the equality of women within the Confucian world, and I’m finding the prospect of learning about figures I know the least about the most exciting.”

The next episode in the Wise Women series, air date forthcoming, will feature Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century mystic, botanist, and composer. The first season will close with an episode on Nísia Floresta, a 19th-century writer and translator who, because of her vocal views for educational and social equality for women, is known as “the Brazilian Mary Wollstonecraft” (Wollstonecraft too will be featured in the first season of the series).

“I feel like we’re only kind of scraping the surface with this series,” said Briggs, noting that many Philosophy Talk listeners have suggested more women for the show to profile. “This is just a start to expanding candidates and is definitely not the last word.”