Women Philosophers
(formerly Women_Philosophers.com)
dot com 

Welcome to Dr. Kate Lindemann's Women Philosophers dot com!

Women Philosophers have been at work since ancient times. My hope is that you will find the information in these pages to be both interesting and useful.

Did you know that:

• A few thousand years before Pythagoras (the Father of Philosophy), a woman, En Hedu'Anna, was doing philosophy. She lived in the area now designated as Syria and/or Iraq.
• An Empress of the Roman Empire restored philosophy to Rome after Nero killed or exiled all the active philosophers.
• Women's monasteries in Europe were home to many women philosophers. The Abbess Hroswitha, for example, wrote philosophical plays.
• One of Japan's great epic authors was a woman philosopher.
• The work of a female British philosopher established the distinction between philosophy and the empirical sciences that is generally accepted in Western universities today. (Remember that Newton, Galileo and others published their works as Natural Philosophy, not as Natural Science)
• The St. Louis Hegelians in the United States are credited with introducing professional philosophy into the USA. Women were part of this group. They had articles published in the first professional philosophy journal in the country.

For an alphabetical list of the women philosophers to be found on this site, go to the Name Index page.  There you will see that the women are indexed by their FIRST names. This is not done out of familiarity or less than adequate respect. It is done because, for women in many cultures, it only their first names that they keep through out their lifetime. Social convention in many cultures requires that women change their last name to that of their husband's family if and when they marry.  When time permits we will index them also by their surnames.

For a chronological list of the women philosophers to be found on this site, go to the Date Index page. There you will see that the women are indexed according to when they are believed to have lived.  This is useful if you want to compare and contrast views held by philosophers during a particular time period, or, if you want to compare early views on a topic (like logic, or feminism, or virtue ethics) with later developments on that topic.

When you click on a philosopher's name, her page will soon also indicate whether she is represented in the photo album "Busted!! A Pictorial History of Women Philosophers from Antiquity to the Twenty-first Century," or in the  4-volume DVD series "Busted!! A Pictorial History of Women Philosophers 2300 BCE - 2012.