British Journal for the History of Philosophy

ISSN: 0960-8788 (Print) 1469-3526 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbjh20

Women philosophers and the canon

Jonathan Rée

To cite this article: Jonathan Rée (2002) Women philosophers and the canon, British Journal
for the History of Philosophy, 10:4, 641-652, DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2002.10383083

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British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10(4) 2002:641-652 Taylor & Francis Group

DISCUSSION

WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS AND THE CANON

Jonathan Rée

The fact that serious historical inquiry into the work of women philosophers
hardly existed before the 1980s is regrettable but hardly surprising: histori-
cally sensitive studies of male philosophers did not prosper much either.
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There were of course hundreds of textbooks and lecture-courses rehears-

ing a few familiar passages from grand old men like Plato and Aristotle,
Kant and Hegel, or Husserl and Wittgenstein, or re-enacting legendary
stand-offs between rationalism and empiricism, realism and idealism, or
scepticism and common sense. But genuinely historical investigations of
context, censorship and reception, or readerships, manuscripts and textual
variants were treated as tiresome pieces of intellectual housework which,
together with the laborious and ungrateful tasks of philosophical editing
and translation, were best left to non-philosophers or at least philosophers
of junior or menial status. In particular, as Michèle le Doeuff pointed out
over twenty years ago, they were jobs for women, for example philoso-
phers' wives. 'A woman can be trusted to perpetuate the words of the Great
Discourse', le Doeuff wrote: 'she will add none of her own . . . who better
than a woman to show respect, fidelity and remembrance?'1
Philosophy's powerful practitioners, so it seemed, had always been men,
and so had its classic authorities; and to make matters worse, the negligence
with which these male authorities were treated was counteracted only by
a handful of women who, as historians, translators, archivists and editors,
devoted themselves to tending the remnants of those who had cared
so little about them. Of all the intellectual disciplines, none appeared
more blatantly and unremittingly sexist than philosophy. From the homo-
eroticism of ancient Greece, through the manly virtuousness of Rome, to
the Latinate priestliness of medieval and renaissance universities and the
professionalised careerism of the twentieth-century academy, the entire
philosophical tradition seemed to function like a male club expressly
designed to keep women out.

1
Michele le Doeuff, 'Women and Philosophy', trans. Debbie Pope, Radical Philosophy 17,
Summer 1977, pp. 2-11, p. 10, reprinted with amendments in Michèle le Doeuff, The Philo-
sophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon, London, Athlone Press, 1989, pp. 100-28, p. 125.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

ISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online © 2002 BSHP
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09608780210164693
 642 JONATHAN REE
And not only women as individuals but the principle of femininity too.2
Take, for example, Walter Charleton's hefty Physiologia Epicuro-
Gassendo-Charltoniana of 1654, which began by sketching a method for
reducing 'Modern Philosophers' as a whole to 'four general orders'. The
greatest if smallest sect of philosophers, he said, comprised 'ASSERTORS
OF PHILOSOPHICAL LIBERTY' such as Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo,
Kircher and of course - 'the Epitome of all' - Descartes. Next came the
large, fair-minded but unoriginal group of which Charleton reckoned
himself a member, namely the 'ELECTING' sect, or the eclectics -
unassuming thinkers who avoided deference to 'Authority' by scrutinizing
the whole range of ancient and modern doctrines and choosing whatever
seemed to them closest to 'right Reason, or faithful Experiment'. Then there
was the honourable race of 'RENOVATORS', like Gassendi, Mersenne,
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and above all Ficino - selfless scholars who toiled amongst 'mouldy and
worm-eaten Transcripts' in order to restore ruined ancient texts to their
pristine 'splendor and integrity'.
Charleton's fourth group of thinkers was so inferior to the other three
that its members should count themselves lucky to be classified as philoso-
phers at all. They were described as the 'easie Sect' because, unlike the
Assertors, Renovators and Eclectics, they never made any attempt to
exercise independent intellectual judgement, preferring to 'stifle their
own native habilities for disquisition' and subordinate themselves to
philosophical dictators like Aristotle, Scotus, Lull, or even 'that Fanatick
Drunkard, Paracelsus'. These weak-minded philosophasters, Charleton
continued, 'become constant admirers of the first Author that pleaseth
them, and will never afterwards suffer themselves to be divorced from his
principles'; they 'believe all', he said, and 'examine nothing . . . as if the
Lamp of their own Reason were lent them by their Creator for no use at
all'. Charleton was gallant enough to refrain from identifying any of these
sub-philosophers, stating only that they 'may, without much either of incon-
gruity or scandal, be named . . . the FEMAL Sect'. He chose the epithet, he
said, 'because as women constantly retain their best affections for those
who untied their Virgin Zone; so these will never be alienated from immod-
erately affecting those authors, who had the Maidenhead of their minds'.3
If this casual sexism is typical of modern philosophy, and perhaps of
the philosophical tradition as a whole, then those who like to think of
themselves as liberal and progressive, not to say feminist, seem to have only
two options. The first is to give up on philosophy entirely, on the grounds

2
For a pioneering exploration of this claim, see Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason,
London, Methuen, 1984.
3
Walter Charleton (1654), Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana: or a fabrick of
science Naiurall upon the hypothesis of Atoms, founded by Epicurus, repaired by Petrus
Gassendus, augmented by Walter Charleton, Dr. in Medicine and Physician to the late
Charles, Monarch of Great-Britain, London, pp. 1-5.
 WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS AND THE CANON 643
that - like freemasonry or badger-baiting - it does not deserve to survive
in a fair and democratic world; the second is to declare that philosophy, like
politics, has remained too long a masculine preserve, and that women have
a right and indeed a duty to make themselves heard within it at last.
The trouble with both these responses is that, despite their anti-sexist
good intentions, they perpetuate a blatantly sexist oversight: they totally
neglect those women - not numerous perhaps, but not negligible either -
who have actually played a part in philosophy's past. Ironically, it is a
mistake which many old-fashioned male philosophers would not have
made. Walter Charleton himself recognized several philosophical women
as capable collaborators and intellectual companions, and indeed he dedi-
cated his Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana to Elizabeth Villiers:
'Acuteness of Wit and Soundness of Judgement', he told her, 'are as
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Eminent in you, as in any that I know of either Sex'.4 He also counted

Margaret Cavendish amongst his circle of philosophical friends, and when
she indulged in conventional rituals of feminine self-deprecation (claiming
that 'it cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily as men, being
of the Effeminate sex', for instance, and that 'Women have no strength nor
light of Understanding, but what is given them from Men'),5 he will surely
have demurred. Indeed his book, despite its preposterous Latin title, was
written in a robust plain English specifically designed to be intelligible to
those who were literate but not in Latin - which in practice of course meant
mainly women.
The same openness to female colleagues can be found in other dominant
males of early modern philosophy. Leibniz, for instance, made Philalethe -
the Lockean character in the Nouveaux Essais - acknowledge the intellec-
tual inspiration he drew from Damaris Masham and Catherine Trotter-
Cockburn, though he rather spoiled the compliment by presenting them as
appendages to men. (Masham was praised for the support she gave to
Locke, and her 'meditative spirit and . . . love of fine knowledge' were said
to have been 'inherited' from her father Ralph Cudworth; while Catherine
Trotter-Cockburn, though 'a lady of great wisdom and spirit', is treated as
a defender of Lockean doctrines rather than the creator of something of
her own.) On the other hand, the Leibnizian character Theophile gives
unqualified praise to Anne Conway as an original thinker in her own right,
superior to both Cardano and Campanella, and not a mere follower of
Plato.6

4
Walter Charleton (1654), Epistle Dedicatory in Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-
Charltoniana, London.
5
Margaret Cavendish (Lady Newcastle) (1655), The World's Olio, London, J. Martin & J.
Allestrye, sigs A4V, A4r.
6
G. W. Leibniz (1882), Nouveaux essais sur I'entendement humain, in Pliilosophischen
Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt, vol. 5, Berlin, pp. 62-4.
 644 JONATHAN REE
Anne Conway's treatise on the Principles of the Most Ancient and
Modern Philosophy was unpublished at the time of her death in 1679, but
Henry More and Francis Mercury van Helmont published a Latin trans-
lation in 1690.7 They also sent a copy to Leibniz, who said he preferred
Conway to Locke and expressed approval for her attempt to find a compro-
mise between other-worldly Platonism and the mechanistic atomism of
Democritus.8 Conway's Principles was soon translated back into English,9
but after that, it was thoroughly forgotten for nearly three hundred years,
suffering in what appears to have been a general philosophical defeat for
the female sex. There were of course plenty of male philosophers - includ-
ing Charleton, Cudworth, Cardano and Campanella, Henry More and
Francis Mercury van Helmont - who were neglected too; but Conway,
Cavendish, Masham, and Trotter-Cockburn were consigned to an even
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darker oblivion, and there can be little doubt that their sex had something
to do with their fate.
The scotomizing of women who have played some part in philosophy's
past is not, however, a simple act of unfairness of the kind that might be
corrected by an equally voluntaristic act of reparation - by talking up
women's philosophical achievements and hoping that they might turn out
to be at least as interesting as those of the well-known men. The roots of
the difficulty about women and the history of philosophy reach far deeper
down, into the subterranean regions where philosophical canons are
formed.
'Canon' is a complicated word for a complicated phenomenon. It enjoyed
a vogue in the 1980s in the midst of bitter debates about the identity of
'English literature'. The argument which carried the day was that the
traditional roster of literary works prescribed for study in English courses
in schools and universities was rigged in favour of white European males,
and the upshot was that numerous women and minority authors were
quickly added to the curriculum. The change may have weakened the old
unity of 'English' as an academic discipline, but it has now been generally
accepted as a natural and necessary development rather than the revol-
utionary rupture which some earnestly hoped for and others desperately
feared. In retrospect, it is hard to see what the fuss over literary canons was
all about.
The ease with which those reforms of English studies were accomplished
suggests, however, that 'canon' may not have been quite the right word, or
at least that the canon of English literature was a peculiarly soft and

7
Francis Mercury van Helmont et al. (Anne Conway) (1690), Principia philosophiae anti-
quissimae et recentissimae, Amsterdam, translated anonymously from English.
8
G. W. Leibniz, Letter to Thomas Burnett, 24 August 1697, in Gerhardt, ed. (1887),
Pliilosophisclien Schriften, vol. 3, Berlin, p. 217.
9
Anne Conway (1692), Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, translated
back into English by J. C. (Jodocus Crull, John Clark?), London. This version is printed
along with the Latin translation in an edition by Peter Loptson (1982), The Hague, Nijhoff.
 WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS AND THE CANON 645
tractable one. The cohesiveness of any cultural and intellectual discipline
does of course require agreement on a more or less definite list of works
which, for the time being, can be accepted as paradigms, models or stereo-
types, and necessary starting points for further development. But this kind
of imaginary museum or communal reading list is very different from a
canon in the hard old ecclesiastical sense of a set of. books taken to be
divinely inspired. The question whether Aphra Behn, Emily Dickinson, and
Sylvia Plath should be regarded as canonical for English literature along-
side or even ahead of Chaucer, Milton and Dickens, has been discussed
with passionate conviction on both sides, but the stakes were never very
serious, and certainly not as high as they would be if Christians were
debating the canonicity of Isaiah or St John's Gospel or the Book of
Revelation. The selection of canonical holy works is a serious matter, and
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revisions may entail changes in theology and perhaps in fundamental points

of religious faith, rather than mere matters of cultural taste. It is sometimes
said that Shakespeare has been made into the object of a kind of religion
of Englishness, but even the most fanatical Shakespeareans back up their
devotions with arguments about acknowledged literary quality rather than
appeals to the mysteries of divine inspiration.10
Secular canons may not be as rigid as ecclesiastical ones, but they are not
infinitely flexible either. We can amuse ourselves by compiling lists of our
favourite works in any given discipline - the ones we would prescribe in the
University of Utopia, or rescue from a shipwreck to make up our desert
island library - but in doing so, we would not be defining a canon, even in
the softest and most attenuated sense of the word. Canons are formed by
more or less weighty historical traditions handed down from generation to
generation, rather than by any judgements of merit or taste we might
choose to make of our own accord. The main thing that makes a work
canonical, indeed, is the fact that it has traditionally been regarded as
canonical; and its canonicity will become more and more entrenched as long
as it continues to elicit responses, if only dissident or negative ones, in the
subsequent development of the discipline to which it belongs. Clearly such
a stockpile of recirculated judgements cannot be shifted very much in the
space of a generation, or by the efforts of a few individuals. You may think,
for example, that Samuel Richardson has always been grossly overrated,
but given the imitations and variations he inspired amongst later gener-
ations of novelists, it will never be possible to remove him from his place
in the canon of literature in English. Even the softest of literary canons,
lacking all theological sanctions, are sustained by a tremendous force of
historical inertia.
The main feature that distinguishes secular canons from ecclesiastical
ones is that they have a more highly developed internal structure.

10
On secular and ecclesiastical canons, see Frank Kermode, 'The Argument about Canons'
(1986), in An Appetite for Poetry (1989), London, Collins, pp. 189-207.
 646 JONATHAN REE
Ecclesiastical canons are simply lists of approved books, perhaps in a
preferred sequence (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, for instance), whereas
secular canons comprise not only the canonical list itself, but also interpre-
tations of it - what might be called schematizations of the canon. Schema-
tizations of a canon take the form of internal discipline-histories, or
traditional stories about the discipline's past, and they involve more or less
complex taxonomies of genres, tendencies and national types, articulated
with schemes of periodization which allocate works to distinct epochs, all
defined by their characteristic styles, and succeeding each other in accord-
ance with some more or less compelling narrative logic.
Schematizations will also assign their canonical works to their places in
a system of ranks. Top honours will go to the discipline's big classics - works
which have been unanimously praised over the generations, inspiring joy,
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anxiety or resentment amongst subsequent practitioners and getting

encrusted with layer upon layer of critical commentary. But these 'major'
classics will be surrounded by numerous less daunting works, the 'minor'
classics; and these in turn by a mass of still more negotiable canonical minor
works, whose status - unlike that of the major and minor classics - can be
challenged or even revoked without casting any doubt on the identity of the
discipline as a whole.
It is possible to envisage a new sub-discipline within intellectual history,
which would concentrate not on works, authors or movements but on the
development of secular canons. The task of such a history of canons would
be to trace the fluctuating repertories of major classics, minor classics and
minor works associated with any given discipline and to record the different
taxonomies and narratives by which they have been schematized in
different places and times. Instead of trying to capture the meaning of a
work in an instantaneous snapshot, a canonical history would explain how
it brought together various strands from its canonical past and wove them
into a new textual tapestry which in its turn gave shape to the canonical
future. The horizon of canonical interpretation, in other words, would not
be individual authors or movements or texts, but rather the canonical
matrix from which they arise and which they may hope to influence in their
turn.
One of the first findings of such a history would be that different disci-
plines schematize their canons in different ways. The articulation of scien-
tific disciplines, for example, is always severely monistic, in the sense that
differing treatments of a topic will always be thought of as competing with
each other. The very idea of scientific progress requires that when one such
work becomes canonical, others will have to be discarded on the grounds
that they have become obsolete. Poems, plays and novels, on the other
hand, are not supposed to challenge each other, at least not in the same
direct way. One work may of course be directed polemically against
another, and may or may not succeed in undermining its interest or appeal;
but there is no actual incoherence in canonizing both Aphra Behn and Ben
 WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS AND THE CANON 647
Jonson, for instance, or Rudyard Kipling and Christina Rossetti. It might
well be thought desirable, in fact, to cultivate a sensibility versatile enough
to accommodate many different kinds of literary work; and even if literary
canons have provoked some pretty noisy skirmishes, in the long run they
characteristically settle back into a state of peaceful pluralism.
Philosophy, in the sense of the attempt to think connectedly about the
whole world and how we interpret it, entails a style of canonicity that falls
somewhere between those of literature and science. Like science, of course,
it tries to propound truths and expose errors. On the other hand it is not
committed to any rigorously monistic notion of intellectual progress, and,
like poetry, it can countenance the co-habitation of rival works under a
single canonical roof. Aristotle or Descartes have remained canonical for
philosophy, for example, though they were declared obsolete in physics
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long ago. And even when a philosophical work goes out of fashion, or
comes to be seen as catastrophically misconceived, it will not be automati-
cally decanonized; indeed it may even have its position in the canon
confirmed (as has happened on various occasions with Aristotle and
Descartes) on account of the patience with which it submits to edifying
scoldings and refutations.
There are several different ways of construing philosophical inquiry - as
a search for solutions to a definite set of problems, for instance, or as a
confrontation with fundamental choices between incommensurable world
views, or an endless series of reflexive meditations on the ways in which we
interpret our existence in the world. Each of these construals will imply a
different list of canonical works and a distinct way of schematizing it. Styles
of canonicity will also vary from one epoch to another, and in the case of
philosophy, there was a particularly radical rupture around the end of the
eighteenth century, with profound consequences not only for the practice
of philosophy in general, but also for its canon and particularly for the
representation of women within it.

From the beginning of the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth

century, the dominant method of schematizing the philosophical canon
was provided by the endlessly reprinted and retranslated Lives of the
Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius. For Diogenes, philosophy was to be
understood in terms of idiomatic individual personalities, and its canon
was like a renaissance gallery crowded with sculptures and casts. It offered
diverting portrayals of hundreds of great dead philosophers, each with
their characteristic ways of life, and grouped them together on the basis of
their personal connections and the loyalties of students to their teachers.
The Laertian scheme altered somewhat over time, thanks for example to
Georg Horn's Philosophical Histories of 1655 (which added post-classical
authors to the philosophical canon and gave a pivotal role to Jesus Christ),
and to Brucker's Critical History (1742-4) which established a three-
act plot with ancient philosophical wisdom at the beginning, medieval
 648 JONATHAN REE
scholastic darkness in the middle, and modern eclectic enlightenment at
the end.11 But throughout all these changes, the basic form in which the
philosophical canon was schematized remained the same: it depended on
contingent relations between individuals, bound loosely into loyalty-
groups and conversing with each other in a spirit of open-ended sociability.
The strength of the philosophical commonwealth, it was assumed, lay in
the untrammelled heterogeneity of its citizens.
This approach to the philosophical canon was by no means inhospitable
to philosophical work by women. Diogenes Laertius himself had included
a chapter on Hipparchia (who 'fell in love with the discourses and the life
of Crates, and would not pay attention to any of her suitors') and he made
passing reference to several other female philosophers.12 The point was not
lost on Pierre Menage, a gallant Abbe in seventeenth-century Paris who
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managed to act as tutor and philosophical protector to such talented women

as Mme de Sevigne, Mme de Lafayette and Queen Christina of Sweden.
(Victor Cousin was to say that Menage's work 'had its sweetness for him',
adding that his dedication to his charges was 'more platonic than he would
have liked'.)13 The insufferable Menage was also an editor of Diogenes
Laertius, and in 1690 he brought out a History of Women Philosophers as
a supplement to his version of the original text. Menage's female history is
addressed particularly to women readers, and its dedication, to Mme
Dacier, graciously points out that although most scholarly women have
been content to confine their study to sweet things (amoenitata), he has
decided to celebrate those brave few who decided to dedicate themselves
to the 'more severe' disciplines of philosophy instead.14
Menage's short and profoundly unintelligent book belongs firmly to the
tradition of Diogenes Laertius. It collects together sixty-five philosophical
women drawn both from ancient Greece and Rome and from Christian
traditions down to Theodora, St Catherine and Heloise, but it makes no
attempt to analyse or interpret their doctrines. It simply groups its philo-
sophical heroines according to sectarian allegiances conventionally defined:
Platonic, Academic, Dialectic, Cyrenaic, Megaric, Cynic, Peripatetic,
Epicurean, Stoic and Pythagorean. Menage's survey turned up a remark-
able twenty-seven women amongst the Pythagoreans, alongside another
twenty women 'of indeterminate sect'. But it revealed only three female
Stoics, which led Menage to reflect, predictably enough, that apatheia is a
rare thing in a woman. But he did not try to draw any general conclusions
about women and philosophy, preferring to concentrate on anecdotes
designed to fix the womanliness of his women in the memory of his readers.

11
Jonathan Ree (1987), Philosophical Tales, London, Methuen, pp. 31-55.
12
Diogenes Laertius (1931), Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans, and ed. R. D. Hicks,
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, pp. 98-103.
13
See Victor Cousin (1853), Mine de Longueville: Nouvelles etudes sur les feimnes illustres du
XVIIe siecle, Paris, Didier, p. 22.
14
Pierre Menage (1692), Historia Mulierum Philosophanim (1690), Amsterdam, p. 3.
 WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS AND THE CANON 649
Thus Novella, daughter of a law professor in Bologna, is said to have
lectured in her father's place on occasion, but always from behind a curtain
so as to avoid distracting the students with her alluring body. Hypatia the
Platonic managed to put off one of her adolescent admirers by displaying
her soiled undergarments: 'see what it is that you love, poor youth', she
exclaimed, thus curing him of his amorous folly. And Hipparchia - as
Diogenes Laertius had already related - deliberately shocked the world by
her open sexual relationship with her teacher Crates.15
The way a canon is schematized affects the production of new works as
well as the interpretation of old ones. And it was within a broadly Laertian
sehematization that most philosophers up to the end of the eighteenth
century conceived and wrote their works. In her Principles of the Most
Ancient and Modern Philosophy, for instance, Anne Conway not only
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maintained the timeless necessity of God and his free acts, while exploring
the temporal predicaments of his mutable creatures and the mysterious
mediation of Christ; she also sketched a particular mapping of her opinions
onto their canonical background. When she affirmed that 'Spirit and Body
are originally in their first Substance but one and the same thing' she was
simultaneously arguing, intra-canonically, that 'it evidently appears that the
Philosophers (so-called) who have taught otherwise, whether Ancient or
Modern, have generally erred and laid an ill foundation'.16 In fact, she
devoted the whole concluding section of her brief treatise to explaining
how, in giving her own allegiance to Plato, she had passed over 'the
Cartesian philosophy' together with the doctrines of 'the Hobbists' and
Spinoza - 'for this Spinosa also confounds God and the creatures together,
and makes but one Being of both; all which are diametrically opposite to
the Philosophy here delivered by us'.17 The same point was made by
Leibniz, though more emolliently, when he claimed that Anne Conway had
managed to combine Plato with Democritus, Aristotle with Descartes, and
the scholastics with the 'moderns' - thus uniting 'the best elements on all
sides'.18
But this broadly Laertian eclecticism was to be put out of business a
hundred years later. After Kant's transcendental revolution, it was no
longer sufficient to have lived a memorable philosophical life or proposed
remarkable philosophical doctrines in order to win a place in the philo-
sophical canon. It was also necessary to have a rational function - if only
an ignominious one - in the great engine of transcendental philosophy as
sketched in the closing pages of the Critique of Pure Reason, The Kantian
idea of philosophical reason as essentially a priori did away with the

15
Historia Mulienim Philosopharum, pp. 43—1,25-7,31,37-8.
16
Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Peter Loptson,
p. 221.
17
Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, pp. 222-3.
18
Leibniz, Nouveaux essais stir I'entendement humain, p. 64.
 650 JONATHAN REE
colourful old image of philosophy's past as a set of all-too-human rivalries
and alliances between proliferating families of philosophical sects, replac-
ing it with a simple grid of issues that supposedly sprang spontaneously
from the dialectical structure of pure reason. Historians of philosophy had
to reinvent themselves as omniscient narrators, equipped by the transcen-
dental philosophy with a perfect map of the great mazes in which the
philosophers of the past had wandered in dialectical bewilderment. After
Kant, the task of interpreting the canonical works of the past reduced itself
to 'watching, or rather provoking, a conflict of assertions', and seeking to
'discover the point of misunderstanding' from which they arose.19
In Kant's first sketch of this kind of schematization, there were just two
great types of philosophy, based on the equal and opposite illusions of
Epicurean materialism and Platonic idealism. The object of philosophical
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reading was simply to observe Epicureanism and Platonism as they con-

tinuously re-enacted their inevitable collapse into self-contradiction, and to
draw comfort from the assurance that 'each of the two types of philosophy
says more than it knows'. (Or, as Kant said of Plato: 'we understand him
better than he understood himself'.)20
The implications of the Kantian method of schematizing the canon were
worked out by the next generation of philosophical discipline-histories
by Tiedemann (1791), Tennemann (1798) and de Gerando (1804), who
collectively transformed the philosophical canon from a chaotic gallery of
philosophical lives into a systematic encyclopedia of philosophical
doctrines.21 Philosophical authors whose works would not fall in with the
Kantian drill became anomalies whose works could no longer be treated as
classics. The varieties of dialectic could be illustrated from a small selection
of classic texts, and there was no philosophical point in reading any others;
indeed there was not much need to read the classics at all, given that it was
clear in advance that their essential message could be summarized in an a
priori Kantian digest. The mere living of a philosophical life, which had
delighted Diogenes Laertius and his readers and imitators, was no longer a
qualification for canonization.
In a word, the Kantian schematization of the canon replaced the contin-
gent old groupings of individual thinkers into 'sects' with a systematic
organization of philosophical thought into 'schools'. Indeed, the word
'sect' seems to have changed its meaning at about this time: instead of
referring to loose groups of followers of a given teacher, it began to signify
tightly-knit bands of dogmatists who had severed all connections with
rational debate by making a cult of their own imagined purity; indeed it

19
Immanuel Kant (1933), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman K e m p Smith, London,
Macmillan, A 423-4, B451-2, p . 395.
20
Critique of Pure Reason, A 472, B500, p . 428; A314, B370, p . 310.
21
See Lucien Braun (1973), Histoire de Vhisloire de la philosophic, Paris, Ophrys.
 WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS AND THE CANON 651
began to acquire a new derivation, in which its Latin root was no longer
sequor 'follow' but seco 'cut off or 'separate'. By an etymological sleight
of hand, the old Laertian sectarians were cast out of the new philosophical
settlement.
The only philosophers who would need to be remembered in the post-
Kantian canon were those who could provide instructive illustrations of the
errancy of pure reason. As far as ancient philosophy was concerned, Plato
and Aristotle sufficed, together perhaps with Epicurus, while the rest of
Diogenes's unruly bunch could all be safely forgotten. And in modern phil-
osophy, the only characters worth retaining were those whom Charieton
would have defined as 'assertors of philosophical liberty', such as Bacon and
Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza, Locke and Leibniz, and Berkeley and
Hume. Thinkers like Democritus and Pyrrho dropped out of the picture, as
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did Cicero and Seneca, Helmont, Gassendi or Mersenne. And there was
one group on which the cull fell with particular severity: the early modern
women who, given their educational situation, and especially their
exclusion from the Latin-speaking world of the universities, had scarcely
even had the ambition of becoming 'assertors' and thus winning themselves
a chance of surviving the coming transition to a Kantian schematization of
the canon
There is therefore no need to postulate a peculiarly virulent strain of
sexism amongst dominant philosophers in order to explain the almost
complete absence of women from the modern philosophical canon. The
thoroughness of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy
(particularly in comparison with their role in literary canons) is more likely
to be a result of the peculiar historical evolution of the schematization of
the philosophical canon. The story can be summarized in terms of what
might be called the triple incidence of canonicity. If a canon functions, in
the first place, to give a present identity to an intellectual discipline by
defining the past of which it takes itself to be the inheritor, it also serves,
secondly, to shape its sense of its intellectual options for the future, and
hence to determine the kinds of works that get written, and indeed the
kinds of thoughts that get thought. But in the third place, changes in forms
of canonicity can have retroactive effects, entailing wholesale changes in
conventional interpretations, alterations in traditional rankings, and even
the deletion of whole ranges of works that were previously well-regarded.
In the case of philosophy, most of the writings produced between the
Renaissance and the end of the eighteenth century, and probably all the
works by women, were conceived within a canonical matrix based on the
old Laertian idea of the jostle of opinions amongst differing philosophical
sects, and such works did not lend themselves to being reformatted to fit in
with Kantian parallelograms of philosophical schools. If we want to tackle
the extraordinary bias against women in the history of philosophy, then a
policy of positive discrimination is not going to be anything like enough. It
 652 JONATHAN REE
will be necessary either to revive the hospitable eclecticism of Diogenes
Laertius, or to move forward from the a priori regimentations imposed by
omniscient Kantian historians. Either way, it will require a reconfiguration
of philosophical inquiry itself and a systematic reworking of its relations to
its future and its past.22
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22
This is the modified text of a paper delivered at a conference on 'Seventeenth-Century
Women Philosophers' organised by the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, 7-9 November 1997.