A history of women philosophers

A HISTORY OF WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS

Acknowledgements

So many have contributed so much to this volume. In addition to the very capable contributions made by the named authors, I wish to thank several people who have helped with the research, writing, and editing of this volume.Professor Alice Ambrose was kind enough to take my telephone call during Christmas holiday of 1991. She allowed me to read to her the contents of an entire file drawer containing the names of those women philosophers who are discussed in the final chapter, or who are mentioned in the Appendix. She graciously filled in details she remembered about the lives and works of many of those women.

Often, when my research staff could find no published information about a subject’s life, education, professional experience, or even a date of death, Professor Ambrose was able to provide me with personal remembrances. I have indicated in the text and notes to Chapter 14, information that Professor Ambrose provided. Speaking with her gave me an odd sensation of work completed and of times changed. After our conversation ended, I recollected the feeling that had come over me that day, more than a decade ago, when I “found” the first work I located by an ancient woman philosopher.

I remember standing in the library stacks, poring through page after page of Stobaeus, looking for the fragment by Aesara of Lucania On Human Nature which from Wolff’s Latin translation, was clearly a work of philosophy. I did not read Greek (and still don’t), but had transliterated Wolff’s Greek for Aesara of Lucania. And suddenly, there it was, staring back at me from the pages of Stobaeus.

Tears came to my eyes. And now, a decade later, I was actually speaking to someone who personally had known a woman philosopher about whom I was writing. The millennia bridged from the time of Aesara to the time about which I spoke with Alice Ambrose contained our entire history, the history of women philosophers. Summarizing that history could not have been possibl.A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, xv-xviii. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.without Professor Ambrose’s assistance, nor without the assistance of many others.Professor Jane MacIntyre of the Philosophy Department of Cleveland State University was kind enough to spend several hours tracking down a few details regarding E. E. Constance Jones. I wish to thank her for her successful efforts on my behalf during what otherwise would have been a more relaxing time in Great Britain.Professor Joyce Mastboom of the Department of History of Cleveland State University interrupted her maternity leave to attend to urgent academic matters and then graciously interrupted that work to proofread German and Dutch entries in the Bibliography.I have had great and valuable research efforts made by Ms. Samantha Cicero, my undergraduate Research Assistant. Ms. Cicero generated nearly all of the biographical and bibliographical information that ultimately would become entries about the women subjects of the final chapter. She spent hundreds of hours over the course of an academic year, manually searching through volume after volume of early years of Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Mind, and other journals for works by and information about women philosophers. She was untiring, enthusiastic and a thorough investigator. Like a later-day Agatha Christie, Ms. Cicero pieced together seemingly unrelated fragments of biographical data until we had a fair picture of the life and work of a previously unheard-of philosopher. Sometimes, we would find numerous articles whose author’s surname alone was given. In later volumes there might be a casual reference to the work of “Miss” so-and-so. The surname would be recognized, and Samantha would backtrack through the journals for the earlier articles. The problem was not simplified by the fact that many of our subjects married and began writing under their husband’s name with no indication whatsoever that “Mrs. Stephen,” for example was the former “Miss Costelloe.”

This meant that we at times had two files on one person until a reference to the “Mrs.” would mention her former name. It was Ms. Cicero who first came across E. E. Constance Jones’ rather delicate reminder to the philosophic community of Cambridge that Bertrand Russell had used her ideas without attribution.At the time that the final chapter in this volume was in preparation, the Philosophers ’ Index was, if memory serves, available on CD-ROM for dates from the later 1940s onward. Unfortunately, no indices ever identified women authors qua women, so unless Ms. Cicero had a name to begin with, automated indices were not useful for locating works women whose names were not known. In order to identify those names, we relied on information supplied to me by others, and especially on the bibliography prepared by the former Nancy Weber, who now writes under the name Morgan G. Willow. Morgan had generously permitted me to use her bibliography for the last two volumes of this series. Many of the names of women philosophers who are mentioned in the final chapter or in the Appendix originated with the Weber bibliography. Still other names were to be found in Kersey’s Women Philosophers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook.My graduate Research Assistant, Ms. Jenny Heyl was part of the team that worked so hard on the Bibliography for this volume. She has two loves: the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and biomedical ethics. Although she normally undertakes research in ethics on my behalf, she regularly assisted with proofreading, finding missing citations, and diplomatically persuading our Interlibrary Loan Department to obtain for my review literally hundreds of works by women philosophers. I want also to thank that department for allowing me to substantially increase its workload during 1991 and 1992.I want also to thank Ms. Colleen Carmigiano Palko for her efforts to standardize entries in the early drafts of the bibliography for this volume. In addition to much typing, she drafted summaries of the contents of some of archival materials for the profiles of many of the philosophers who are considered in the final chapter.Cindy Kunsman is a hardworking, perfectionist of a secretary.

I have no idea how many drafts of how many chapters she corrected and printed out. I also have lost count of how many revisions there were to the Bibliography and devoutly hope that she has not kept track of the number. She has an eye, not only for detail, but an uncanny ability to persuade a word processor to do things for her that it flatly refuses to do for me. Her warmth and sense of humor shined like a beacon through hundreds and hundreds of pages of second, third and fourth drafts. My thanks to her for being so flexible and for saying that she actually enjoys reading the material she is typing.Finally, thanks to my daughter Allison. She will be ten years old by the time this volume comes to press. Although her sense of time is now more mature than it was when at age three she inquired whether Aesara of Lucania lived with Mohamar Ghadaffi (both lived in Libya) she has spent her entire life witnessing her mother writing about women philosophers. I thank her for not begrudging me the many, many times I have brought home manuscripts and proofs to correct. She may not choose to become a philosopher, but she will always know that the history books may fail to tell us about the contributions to learning and to society that women have always made.