The Philosopher Queens: The lives and legacies of philosophy's unsung women

"What’s your last book choice? The Philosopher Queens by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting. It’s an edited volume and it’s about 20 biographies of women philosophers. And one interesting feature about this is the drawings that were done by Emmy Smith, who is an illustrator and usually does women’s poetry. You get a sense of these women. You have Mary Midgley and Mary Wollstonecraft , and so on. But you also have several non-Western women philosophers in there, and ancient philosophers like Hypatia. The pictures convey a sense of the tremendous range and diversity of these voices. Next to the pictures, you then have a short biography of each of these women philosophers by an expert in the field. So, for example, the one on Simone de Beauvoir was done by Kate Kirkpatrick who is a Simone de Beauvoir expert. It’s also written in a wonderfully accessible way, each of these contributions. So that is really nice. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But I want to think about these images. Could they have done this book without these bold images? I’m sure they could have. But I think there is a way in which it’s important to have these images, because when you think about philosophers, the default is still going to be the image of Socrates or Plato or Aristotle… But here we have these really monumental-looking women. The way they’re drawn is really wonderful. They’re done in a classic monumental style that really helps to give the idea that philosophy has been something done by women too, not just recently, but for a long time. The pictures really help to underscore that point. They are definitely not just like, ‘Oh, that looks nice. It’s got pictures, you can give it as a gift for Christmas.’ I think it’s genuinely that those pictures add something. That’s right. It’s great. And what you said about icons is just right. They do have this seriousness. I think it’s really well done. Also, the fact that they went with diversity in terms of ethnicity and geography and time also helps to make that narrative, I think. It’s an excellent book all round."

"This is the book of the year for me. Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting are both graduate students in philosophy and they’ve co-edited this amazing book, which is basically the book that they wish had existed when they started thinking about studying philosophy. It’s a book that has 20 short essays about significant women philosophers. It’s skewed towards political philosophy and ethics, which is where their interests lie, but not exclusively, and it goes from ancient Greece to more or less the present day. It’s a selection of philosopher queens, women philosophers who’ve been neglected by mainstream curricula in philosophy. It’s also an illustrated book, which is unusual in philosophy. Philosophy books with pictures are relatively rare; Hobbes’s Leviathan is an interesting exception with an amazing frontispiece . The illustrations are all portraits by Emmy Smith. They’re stylized and colourful, almost caricatures of the philosophers. Most covers of philosophy books, if they illustrate the people they’re about, are galleries of blokes with beards. It’s remarkable to see a cover of a book which is not only visibly all of women philosophers, but also including a significant number of women of colour. It’s quietly a radical book in its selection of the philosophers discussed. I think the illustrations make the point very nicely, a point that is made by the whole book explicitly, that there aren’t enough women discussed in philosophy, and there have been women that we could be discussing in the history of philosophy that have been neglected largely for sexist or perhaps political reasons. The’ve got some excellent authors for these short essays and they’ve managed to keep them very, very accessible. So, for instance, there are short essays by two eminent biographers: Claire Carlisle, who is writing on George Eliot here, but who has recently written a biography of Kierkegaard ; and Kate Kirkpatrick, whose brilliant biography of Simone de Beauvoir was one of my selections for best of the year last year . The quality of the essays is generally very high. They tend to be celebratory, they’re not as nit-picky as many philosophy summaries can be. It’s a very positive book. “I’m always drawn to biography, because I think that’s a very good way into ideas as well as contextualizing them” It was published by Unbound , which is a crowd-funding-based publisher, so it was made possible by supporters. I guess as a declaration of interest, I should say I made a small contribution and received a hardback book as a result of that. I love that they managed to get so many people supporting their project. That support and enthusiasm has continued after the publication of the book too. There has been huge interest in the press, particularly in France where they keep appearing on television discussing what they’ve done. It’s just an amazing achievement and a really beautiful book. What I like about it is it’s a book to be dipped into. I guess some people will read it from cover to cover, but I tend to just dip into it. It includes thinkers who less frequently appear in philosophy surveys, like Angela Davis, an important civil rights activist linked with the Black Power movement. Most philosophy books steer very far from including Angela Davis. I think one of the best illustrations in the book is of her. It’s a beautiful, very stylized illustration of a black woman with an ‘Afro’ in the thinker pose. It’s everything that philosophers traditionally aren’t: a woman, black and young. She’s radical, and against the Establishment. As I’ve already mentioned, the pictures make the argument of the book very well and that image is one that shows well what they’re doing. This is a political gesture as well as an informative book. You could give it to any 16-year old who is thinking of studying philosophy and they’d get a lot out of it. I’m very happy to recommend this as my top choice of the year’s books. It’d make a fantastic present. I’ve met four of the people who are illustrated and one that really struck me is of Mary Warnock. It captures something of her personality very well, even though it’s a kind of caricature of her, in some respects. Something in her expression just really is her. That’s the title, The Philosophy Queens . It’s taken from the Republic. Plato wanted his republic to be ruled by rational, independent, well-trained philosopher kings, but he had a place for women in that republic. There could be philosopher queens, and women in the army. He wasn’t as sexist as many of his contemporaries. Somewhere philosophy went wrong in terms of how women were treated as sources of ideas. The difficulty with this kind of book is not seeming to be tokenistic. You have to recognize this is just a selection. There are many other selections. There are many women who aren’t here who could have been. I mentioned this selection was skewed towards political philosophy and ethics, but there is a really interesting phenomenon in the 20th century of very strong women philosophers in the philosophy of science. None of them make it in here. So that’s an interesting omission. I think it just reflects their particular interests as editors. Another book could be written with a completely different cast list which could be very strong. Whether they’ll do it or not I’m not sure."