Thinking Outside of the Field of Feminism: Six Female Philosophers You Should Know

By Marianna Barcenas

After a discussion with a friend, a fellow ex-student of philosophy, I realised that the majority of female philosophers present in the public consciousness are exclusively feminist philosophers like Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. As important as feminist philosophy may be, women have and continue to make valuable and innovative contributions to all areas of philosophy. Therefore, I have decided to focus on philosophers in fields outside of feminism. This list is by no means comprehensive; the majority of women on this short list are respected and well-known in the academic philosophical community. My desire is that these prominent female philosophers across disciplines gain entry into the wider consciousness.

Iris Murdoch

Many will know Murdoch as an accomplished novelist, and writer of the Booker Prize-winning The Sea The Sea. She was also a unique and important figure in philosophy. Born in 1919 to an Irish protestant middle -class family and then studying at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1940s, she practised in a philosophical sphere entrenched with the values of the logical positivist movement, where the practice of metaphysics was sin and only problems solvable by logical analysis were meaningful enterprises of study. Philosophical England was not only male-dominated but staunchly analytical. Despite this, Murdoch embraced metaphysics as well as continental (non-analytic) and religious influences in her work. Although Murdoch denied deliberate links between her two worlds, her philosophy has a strong presence in her literary work. In philosophical circles Murdoch became known for her novel contributions to Moral Philosophy, notably her arguments in support of a type of Moral Realism, the idea that there are moral facts and values that are objective.  Murdoch's accomplishments in both philosophy and literature are reflective of her philosophy on philosophy itself; she is an advocate for the use of all forms of expression to build an understanding of the world.

Philippa Foot

The trolley problem, originally a thought experiment in applied ethics, has in recent years become a popular meme. Despite applied ethics making up the majority of my GCSE philosophy course, it wasn't until my post-secondary studies that I got to hear the name of its inventor.

Born in Lincolnshire in 1920 to an upper-class family, there was never the expectation that Foot (then Bosanquet) should be educated. Despite this, she was still able to win a place at Oxford to study PPE in 1942, alongside Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe. She became celebrated for her work in Moral Philosophy, especially for her work in applied ethics on abortion and euthanasia. She devised the trolley problem as a thought experiment to present a moral framework to oppose utilitarianism, a philosophy popular at the time. Through this problem, she introduces the concept of non-interference rights as justification for the intuition that pulling the lever is morally wrong.  

Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe

Considered to be one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Elizabeth Anscombe should earn a place on any list of influential philosophers. Born in Ireland in 1919, she attended Oxford with Murdoch and Foot. She became a student of Wittgenstein and the two developed a strong friendship despite the latter's misogyny. After his death in 1951, she became responsible for translating his writing into English.

Anscombe gained notoriety in a large number of philosophical disciplines including Philosophy of Action, Moral Philosophy and Philosophy of Mind. She gained controversy for her public opposition to Oxford University awarding Harry Truman with an honorary degree. She considered him a murderer for the intentional killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by deciding to drop the atomic bomb. Like Murdoch, Anscombe was a unique and independent philosopher and simply from the scope of her influential work, deserves a place in public consciousness beyond philosophical circles.

Nancy Cartwright

Moving on from Moral Philosophy to Philosophy of Science: the study of the methodology, foundations and implications of science. Nancy Cartwright, an American philosopher born in 1944, is a legend in the field. Being my own area of study, I felt compelled to include her in this list. She has gained acclaim for her work exploring laws of nature and objectivity in science. Her most famous book, How the Laws of Physics Lie deals with the role of fundamental laws (e.g. the law of gravitation) within science. She argues, using a number of examples from physics and biology, that fundamental laws in science fail to describe anything but highly idealised objects, and are not reflective of reality. Cartwright has also been a mentor to a number of prominent contemporary philosophers of science, furthering her relevance in the field. Despite the somewhat esoteric nature of her discipline, Cartwright's essays are accessible and even enjoyable, and I recommend them to anyone practising, or with an interest in, science.

Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum

Janina, born in 1899 in Warsaw, was an accomplished logician responsible for around 20 philosophical papers dealing with foundational problems in confirmation, inductive reasoning and probability. She is responsible for the first printed discussion of the Raven Paradox, an important problem used to highlight the contradiction between inductive logic and intuition, which should be familiar to all undergraduates of analytic philosophy. She was among the first women to be published in the analytic philosophy journal Erkenntnis in 1935 with an article on the work of Hans Reichenbach.

Like many other Polish Jewish Logicians (of which there were many), in 1941 Janina and her husband Adolf were arrested by the Gestapo, taken to separate camps and shot. There is an ongoing project, The Janina Project, dedicated to reviving, translating and studying her philosophical work.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt is among one of the most important and influential political thinkers of the 20th century. The German Jewish philosopher (although she rejected the title) wrote on a number of topics but is most well known for her work exploring Totalitarianism and for coining the term 'The Banality of Evil' in reference to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, one of the key organisers of the Holocaust. Born in Linden in 1906, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger (who also became her lover, despite his open antisemitism) in the 1920s, and then completed her doctorate in Heidelberg on the topic of love in the works of Saint Augustine.

Like many German Jews during the 1930s she was forced to flee, first to Paris and then eventually to New York, where she would remain for the remainder of her life. Despite her Jewish background and her wartime work helping European Jews flee to Palestine, she gained controversy for her writing on the trial of Eichmann for the New Yorker in 1963. She was accused of blaming the Jewish people for their experiences through her criticisms of Israel included in this report. The subheading, the banality of evil, gives reference to Eichmann's denial that he had done anything wrong, that his actions were not motivated by hate but indifference, and that he was simply following orders. Thanks to Arendt, this view has now become a staple component of our understanding of human evil.