2024.12.13 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Katharine R. O’Reilly and Caterina Pellò (eds.), Ancient Women Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and New Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 290pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781316516188.
Reviewed by Emily Hulme, The University of Sydney
This is an important book. It gathers the fruit of recent research on women in ancient philosophy, and across twelve chapters (all very well-written) offers the reader food for thought on a huge range of topics. We meet scientists and Cyrenaics, Epicurean sex workers and neo-Platonist mathematicians. Two chapters take us outside the standard story of Mediterranean antiquity, and we learn much from these perspective-shifting chapters. For example, Ban Zhao stands out as what, in the Greek tradition, we’d call a phronima: a woman who uses her practical wisdom to write philosophical texts even against the backdrop of difficult cultural headwinds that would seem to make a woman in philosophy an impossibility. While readers might be tempted to skip to the chapters that serve their current…
Read the full article which is published on Notre Dame's Philosophical Reviews (external link)
