ABSTRACT
What philosophers have had to say about women typically has been nasty, brutish, and short. A page or two of quotations from those considered among the great philosophers (Aristotle, Hume, and Nietzsche, for example) constitutes a veritable litany of contempt. Because philosophers have not said much about women,1 and, when they have, it has usually been in short essays or chatty addenda which have not been considered to be part of the central body of their work,2 it is tempting to regard their expressed views about women as asystemic: their remarks on women are unofficial asides which are unrelated to the heart of their philosophical doctrines. After all, it might be thought, how could one’s views about something as unimportant as women have anything to do with one’s view about something as important as the nature of knowledge, truth, reality, freedom? Moreover – and this is the philosopher’s move par excellence – wouldn’t it be charitable to consider those opinions about women as coming merely from the heart, which all too easily responds to the tenor of the times, while philosophy “proper” comes from the mind, which resonates not with the times but with the truth?
