1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is an essential reference source for cutting-edge scholarship on women, gender, and philosophy in Greek antiquity. The volume features original research that crosses disciplines, offering readers an accessible guide to new methods, new sources, and new questions in the study of ancient Greek philosophy and its multiple afterlives.
Comprising 40 chapters from a diverse international group of experts, the Handbook considers questions about women and gender in sources from Greek antiquity spanning the period from 7th c. BCE to 2nd c. BCE, and in receptions of Greek antiquity from the Roman Imperial period, through the European Renaissance to the current day. Chapters are organized into five major sections:
I. Early Greek antiquity – including Sappho, Presocratic philosophy, Sophists, and Greek tragedy – 700s–400s BCE
II. Classical Greek antiquity – including Aeschines, Plato, and Xenophon – 400s–300s BCE
III. Late Classical Greek to Hellenistic antiquity – including Cyrenaics, Cynics, the Hippocratic corpus, and Aristotle – 300s–200s BCE
IV. Late Greek antiquity to Roman Imperial period – including Pythagorean women, Stoics, Pyrrhonian Skeptics, and late Platonists – 200s BCE to 700s CE
V. Later receptions – including Shakespeare, the European Renaissance, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Harrison, Sarah Kofman, and Toni Morrison
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is a vital resource for students and scholars in philosophy, Classics, and gender studies who want to gain a deeper understanding of philosophy’s rich past and explore sources and questions beyond the traditional canon. The volume is a valuable resource, as well, for students and scholars from history, humanities, literature, political science, religious studies, rhetorical studies, theatre, and LGBTQ and sexuality studies.
1. Introduction
Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen
Part I: 700-400s BCE
2. The Way Up and Down: Liminal Agency in The Homeric Hymns and Presocratic Philosophy
Jessica Elbert Decker
3. Sappho of Lesbos and the Time of Erosophy
Chelsea C. Harry
4. Sex, Family, and Chthonic Justice: On the Cosmology of the Choephoroi
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
5. Euripides on Epistemic Injustice? Interpreting the Fragments of Melanippē Sophē and Desmōtis Dorota Dutsch
6. On Not–Believing: A Gorgianic Reading of the Tragic Cassandra
Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho
7. The Correctness of Grammatical Gender in the Sophistic Tradition
Chloe Balla
Part II: 400s-300s BCE
8. Eis gynaikos andra: Aeschines on Women, Eros, and Politics
Francesca Pentassuglio
9. “By Zeus,” Said Theodote: Women as Interlocutors and Performers in Xenophon’s Philosophical Writings
Carol Atack
10. Women in Xenophon’s Socratic Works
David M. Johnson
11. Socrates’ Laughing Bodies: Women and Comedy in Plato’s Phaedo
Sonja Tanner
12. Plato’s Argument for the Inclusion of Women in the Guardian Class: Prospects and Problems
Emily Hulme
13. Women, Spirit, and Authority in Plato and Aristotle
Patricia Marechal
14. Plato on Women and the Private Family
Rachel Singpurwalla
15. Plato’s Scientific Feminism: Collection and Division in Republic V’s "First Wave"
John Proios and Rachana Kamtekar
16. Weaving Politics in Plato’s Statesman
Jill Frank and Sarah Greenberg
17. Socratic Midwifery
Marina Berzins McCoy
18. Divine Names and the Mystery of Diotima
Danielle A. Layne
19. Sex Difference and What it Means to be Human in Timaeus
Jill Gordon
Part III: 300s-200s BCE
20. Cyrenaics on Philosophical Education and Gender
Katharine R. O'Reilly
21. Wives or Philosophers? Hipparchia and the Cynic Criticism of Gendered Economics
Malin Grahn-Wilder
22. Diagnosing Aristotle’s Sexism
Charlotte Witt
23. Women in Ancient Medical Texts as Sources of Knowledge in Aristotle
Mariska Leunissen
24. Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconsidered Through Aristotle’s Account of Generation
Adriel M. Trott
25. The Role of Females in Aristotle's Teleology of Reproduction
Ana Laura Edelhoff
26. Aristotle on Women’s Virtues
Sophia Connell
27. What is Wrong with Women. Aristotle’s Paradigm of Gender, and its Anomalies
Giulia Sissa
Part IV: 200s BCE-700s CE
28. Pythagorean Women: An Example of Female Philosophical Protreptics
Caterina Pellò
29. Women in the Household and Public Sphere: Two Contrasting Stoic Views
Jula Wildberger
30. Pyrrhonian Skepticism on Gender and Virtue
Christiana Olfert
31. The Reception of Diotima in Later Platonism: Clea, Sosipatra and Asclepigeneia
Crystal Addey
32. The Place of Women in the Neoplatonic Schools
Alexandra Michalewski
33. The School of Hypatia and the Problem of the Gendered Soul
Aistė Čelkytė
Part V: Later Receptions
34. The Worth of Women: The Reception of Ancient Debates in the Renaissance
Marguerite Deslauriers
35. Philosopher Queens and a Female Prospero(a): Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Tempest
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
36. "Possessed, Magical, and Dangerous to Handle": Jane Harrison, Nietzsche, and the Maenad Chorus
Laura McClure
37. Women’s Work: Exploring a Tradition of Inquiry with W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Aristotle
Harriet Fertik
38. Sarah Kofman: Socratic Lover
Paul Allen Miller
39. Decolonial Ruminations on a Classic: Medea, Sethe, and la Llorona
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro
40. Eros, the Elusive? A Dialogue on Plato’s Symposium, Diotima, and Women in Ancient Philosophy
Mariana Ortega and Danielle A. Layne
Biography
Sara Brill is Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT, USA. She works on the psychology, politics, and ethics of Plato and Aristotle, as well as broader questions of embodiment, life, and power as points of intersection between ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary critical theory. She is the author of Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life (Oxford UP, 2020) and Plato on the Limits of Human Life (Indiana UP, 2013), and co-editor of Antiquities Beyond Humanism (with Emanuela Bianchi and Brooke Holmes; Oxford UP, 2019).
Catherine McKeen is a philosopher whose work engages questions about women, gender, and community in Plato’s political philosophy. She teaches at Bennington College in Bennington, VT, USA.
