Kristin Gjesdal: "Rebels, Romantics, and Revolutionaries: Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century".

Rebels, Romantics, and Revolutionaries: Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century

Rebels, romantics, and revolutionaries – the women in nineteenth-century philosophy were ready to cause trouble. In this presentation, Kristin Gjesdal (Temple University) examines the often-overlooked works of women in modern European philosophy. As she retells the history of modern European philosophy, there is room for the well-known figures of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, but also Germaine de Staël, Karoline von Günderrode, Bettina Brentano von Arnim, Hedwig Dohm, Anna Julia Cooper, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, and others. She shows how these women, who were excluded from academic positions, established a platform of their own, one that challenged the status quo of the dominant philosophical discourse. The talk also raises relevant questions about exclusion and inclusion in the history of philosophy and touches on a number of hermeneutic and methodological questions of relevance to the humanities at large.