Zeitgeist-Women Philosophers In History

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The term "Zeitgeist" is defined as "general intellectual & moral climate of an era.

Daily Mail Tuesday, 13th September 2016
Answers to correspondents
Compiled by Charles Legg

PROOF IT ISN'T A MAN'S WORLD
Are there any female philosophers ..
The history of philosophy -the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, Reality and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline - predominantly white and predominantly male, and topics deemed important by the discipline tend to ignore race, ethnicity and gender.
It has been claimed by some that women are less comfortable than men in inhabiting the cold, analytical space, in which philosophy exists.
Others claim that in contemporary philosophy there is too much focus on the history of Western philosophy-eg.
Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Russell, Wittgenstein and others, and not enough of Asian, African or Native American ideas about the nature of the mind.
But there is a history of women philosophers running through the ages.
Female philosophers of the Vedic period in India include Ghosha, Lopamudra , Maitreyi and Gargi.

Gargi, a Vedic prophetess, famously bamboozled male Verdic philosophers at a philosophic congress
with the question " The layer that is above the sky and below the Earth, which is described as
being situated between the Earth and the sky and which is indicated as the symbol of the past,
present and future, where is that situated ?"

Hypatia, the daughter of the philosopher Theon, was a famous teacher, mathematician and
astronomer who developed new-Platonism at Alexandria from AD 400 to her death in 415!
She was so well-known that correspondence addressed only to 'The Philosopher' is said to have
reached her.
Hypatia is thought to have taught ideas relating to different levels of reality and human ability to
understand them.

Hildegard of Bingham, a German Abbess (1098-1179) one of the greatest female figures of the medieval era, founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Elbingen in 1165, she was a fine
composer, a visionary , a phophet-known as The Sibyl Of The Rhine-and a pioneer who wrote
practical books on biology , botany,medicine, philosophy and the arts.
Ordo Virtutum is an early example of the liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality
play.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an English feminist and egalitarian, associated with Thomas
Paine and William Godwin(her husband).
The Vindication Of The Rights Of Men(1790) she argued against the slave trade.
A Vincication Of Rights Of Women(1792) was an early feminist tract, and she opposed the monarchy,
the church, the military and marriage, which she described as 'legal prostitutiins'
She died after giving birth to the future Mary Shelly.

Ayn Rand(1905-1982) was a Russian born novelist a philosopher who emigrated to America in 1924.
Beloved of the conservative rights, she developed a philosophy of individualism she called objection
(A philosophy for living on Earth!) and she is known for her philosophical novels, The Fountain Head
(1935) and Atlas Shrugged (1957),

Simone de Beauvoir(1908) is one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century.
Beauvoir developed an education in traditional philosophy (she wrote a thesis on Leibniz) into more
radical explorations of feminism and existence.
Her seminal work was The Second flower in which she argued that women have been held back
throughout history by the perception that they are a 'deviation' from the male norm.
She insisted that this as an assumption that must be broken if feminism were to succeed.

Simone de Beauvoir, Emma Goldberg and Rosa Luxembourg



Quote by Ayn Rand
''When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality
to be our final arbiter; If I am right, he will learn;
If i am wrong, I will; one of us will win,
but both wil profit''

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Rosa Luxembourg-known also as Red Rosa

Between the end of 1918 and the first days of 1919, Berlin is burning. Germany, who caused the war, is humiliated,
the Empire ended. What future is there? Republic, Revolution, soviet....? The answer is in a brief,dramatic civil war.
Rosa Luxemburg was a heroine of the socialist struggle against the war, she spent three years in prison for
organising strikes and anti military demonstrations. She created the Spartacus League and then the German
Communist Party. She was seen as a threat to all those who wanted a return to order while the country, restless,
licked its wounds, in early January 1919 the red flags wave in Berlin and the Communists occupy the offices of the
newspapers. It looks like the revolution. The social demonstrates are in government: Friedrich Ebert, the old party
fellow of Rosa Luxemburg, is the Prime Minister, but in defence of the nascent republic, Freikorps violence
paramilitary groups of volunteers that the government encourages, is unleashed against the Spartacist motto. On
January 15th, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were arrested and then killed. Rosa's body was thrown into
a canal and disappeared. She was a brave and brilliant woman, theoretical of a radical and open Marxism. Her body
(If it was her's) was found at the end of May 1919 and on the 13th June her funeral was held.

It was difficult to recognise the revolutionaries in the front rows of the procession, moreover, even in the cold days
of the Spartacist revolt, on the Unter den Linden boulevard there were both workers and men in dark overcoats
bracing their rifles. Now, the nineteenth-century revolutionaries wearing great cloaks and red skirts were gone.
The funeral of Rosa Luxemburg accompanies the end of all revolutionary perspective in Germany.
Bertolucci Brecht mourned Rosa with this epitaph:
Die rote nun auch vershwand/Wo side liegt, ist unbekannt/Weil sie den Armen die Wahrheit gesagt/Haben sie die
Reichen aus der Welt gejagt..in English..
Now also the Red Rose is gone/Where she buried we do not know/Because she told the truth to poor/The rich had her
sent into the afterlife.