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Women and the History of Philosophy Nancy Tuana. 1992. Woman and the History of Philosophy. New York: Paragon House, paper $14.95. 140 pp.
This book is one in a new series, "Paragon Issues in Philosophy," designed to be used in teaching philosophy to undergraduates; it belongs to the subset of this series that will relate philosophy to other fields, in this case, women's studies. I approach this book from the latter point of view, as a teacher of Russian literature and language with a longstanding interest in women's studies and feminist theory. Although my experience as a college professor enables me to speculate about this book's possible uses in the classroom, my own disciplinary perspective puts me more in the position of a student reading the book. The book's context today is certainly different from that of my own brush with a college survey course in philosophy, which motivated me only to conclude that philosophy had little or no relevance to any of my own concerns. By now, several books have appeared devoted to women in philosophy, such as Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy (ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford), or the exciting journal Hypatia, which publishes articles with feminist approaches to philosophy. Nancy Tuana's Woman and the History ofPhilosophy is one step toward bringing the riches of these theoretical and practical movements in the field of philosophy to our students, and one that may well encourage female students to study and pursue philosophy.
The topic of this book is indicated by the title, which promises to treat "Woman" rather than women, and the "History of Philosophy" rather than philosophy. Tuana looks not at the work of women philosophers, but rather at the way that traditional philosophy has constructed the category of Woman. Tuana approaches this question in particular relation to the philosophical questions of rationality, morality, and political agency; the great philosophers she examines are Plate and Aristotle, Descartes and Rousseau, Rant and Hume, Locke and Hegel (in four roughly chronological chapters that each treat a pair). The principle of selection, clearly, is that these are the philosophers we have all heard of, who have had enormous influence on other fields of western scholarship and science, and who are still the backbone of many...