Women in Philosophy: Three Data Points

The Oxford University Press has posted a timeline of women in philosophy.

In order not to go back to Hypatia, which would make for an unwieldy graphic, the Oxfordians have arbitrarily begun the timeline in 1678, when a woman was for the first time granted a doctorate degree in philosophy. The university that broke that particular cave ceiling? The University of Padua in Italy.

The woman involved? Elena Cornaro Piscopia.

Senora Piscopia is new to me. Here are two other facts from the timeline that are also new to me, arbitrarily selected:

Susanne Langer published a paper in the journal MIND (a leading British philosophy journal) in 1926. Langer is often regarded as the first woman "professional philosopher." Her 1926 paper was titled "Confusion of Symbols and Confusion of Logical Types." It expressed her interest in symbolic logic, which she would later put to work in the development of aesthetics.

Finally, for our brief survey, the first college course in feminist philosophy dates to the fall semester of 1971, and was taught by Alison Jagger at the University of Miami, Ohio.

You can connect such dots as you like, dear reader As for me, I prefer to end with a quote from Langer (whose image you see above). The quote gets to the heart of her message about aesthetics:

"Art is the objectification of feeling; and the subjectification of nature."

That's a nice line.

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