Lecture: ‘Who is Philosophy For?’

On Tuesday 15 of March, Dr Rebecca Buxton and Ms Lisa Whiting gave a Kitcher Society talk entitled ‘Who is Philosophy for?’, going into depth about representation in philosophy, especially with regard to women, and speaking about the conception of their book The Philosopher Queens.

The talk really helped inform people on why philosophy, especially in branches like logic and metaphysics, was dominated mainly by white men. Throughout history it was only wealthy white men who had the luxury to just sit down and think. They also talked about how it took women to transcribe the ingenious, yet somewhat muddled, thoughts of male philosophers into comprehensible academic documents, and that these fantastic academic minds seem to be left out of history. The Philosopher Queens was written to educate people about all the amazing, yet often forgotten philosophers through history, such as Hypatia, Diotima and Ban Zhao.

Dr Buxton and Ms Whiting went on to eloquently answer a wide range of questions about representation in philosophy, their own experience in philosophy, handling controversial philosophers and what we can do to get more women and marginalised groups into higher level, academic philosophy.