New website aims to transform the philosophy canon by highlighting women
New website aims to transform the philosophy canon by highlighting women
"Madame du Châtelet at her desk," detail, Maurice Quentin de la Tour, mid-18th century
Project Vox is a new website that “seeks to recover the lost voices of women who have been ignored in standard narratives of the history of modern philosophy.”
Led by a Duke philosophy professor with a team of staff and students, along with colleagues at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, the site aims to intervene at a few different points in the “vicious cycle” that keeps early women philosophers’ work marginalized within the canon.
From Lady Masham, Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway in England to Émilie Du Châtelet in France, many women played significant roles in the development of modern philosophy, but their contributions have often gone unnoticed. The website has three primary goals. First, it seeks to provide students at all levels with the materials they need to begin exploring the rich philosophical ideas of Cavendish, Conway, Du Châtelet and Masham. Second, it aims to provide teachers with the material they need to incorporate these four figures into their courses. Third and finally, it aims to help transform our current conception of the canon.
This is an impressive and much-needed project that seems like it could make some real progress in transforming the dude-dominated discipline. It also has the happy side effect of making loads of information—biographies, out-of-print texts, sample syllabi—easily accessible to those of us who aren’t in academia. So if you want to get your self-taught Ph.D. in early modern women’s philosophy, get on it.
http://today.duke.edu/showcase/mmedia/features/finding-philosophys-female-voices/blind-spot/
http://feministing.com/2015/03/10/new-website-aims-to-transform-the-philosophy-canon-by-highlighting-women/
