The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century Women Philosophers

This Oxford Handbook engages with the work of women philosophers spanning the long nineteenth century in the German tradition. It investigates women’s contributions to key philosophical areas such as epistemology and metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, ecology, education, and the philosophy of nature and examines their role in the formation and development of major philosophical moments, including romanticism and idealism, socialism, Marxism, Nietzscheanism, feminism, phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism. Through thirty-one newly commissioned chapters, the volume explores how women often took philosophical premises and positions in innovative and radical directions, and thereby sheds new light on the major movements of the period and their continuing philosophical potential. As the contributors demonstrate, women were generally excluded from academic discourse and therefore had to seek alternative means by which to carry out their philosophical research -- often by bringing philosophy to a wider public, and allowing fundamental existential, social, and political questions to determine their philosophizing.

By investigating the works, influence, and legacy of a number of understudied and overlooked philosophers, the Handbook contributes to the ongoing effort to revise our knowledge of the history of philosophy, deepen our grasp of the philosophical potential of various arguments, positions, and movements, and critically rethink the narratives by which the discipline understands itself. This volume will serve as a crucial addition to our understanding of nineteenth-century philosophy and the movements that made it up.

Kristin Gjesdal is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. She works on the history of modern German philosophy (with a special focus on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophy), aesthetics, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. She is the author of Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Cambridge, 2009/2011), Herder’s Hermeneutics (Cambridge, 2017/2019), and The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche (Oxford, 2022). She is the editor and co-editor of eight further volumes in her areas of scholarship. With Dalia Nassar, she is the editor of the recently published Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition (Oxford, 2021).

Dalia Nassar is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She works on the history of modern German philosophy (with a special focus on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophy), aesthetics, the philosophy of nature and environmental philosophy. She is the author of The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy (Chicago, 2014) and Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (Oxford, 2022) and with Kristin Gjesdal, she is the editor of Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition (Oxford, 2021).