Since ancient times, women have delved into the art of knowledge despite the challenges they might have faced. Axiothea was a Greek thinker from 300 BC, famous for her passion for philosophy. In order to join this all-male club she dressed as a man and attended lessons under Plato himself. Like her, other women have challenged the establishment and its imposed ideas on femininity, in order to become masters of freedom, love, and wickedness through the study of philosophy.
The mixture of reflections on essence, properties, causes and effects, humanity, and the universe, motivated a group of women to defend their ideas. From ancient Greece to the twentieth century, these women dared to defy their circumstances in order to publish works where humanity was stripped bared. Their goal was to understand the relationship with will, emotion, and truth.
María Zambrano
“Only in loneliness can one feel thirst for truth.”
Zambrano lived surrounded by philosophy. Her father was an important mind that inspired her to follow in his footsteps. Her work was made up of essays and poetry. “Man and the Divine” was one of her most acclaimed works, which led her exile. Today her legacy is considered a basic part of humanist studies and an exploration into what we call love.
Ayn Rand
“The ambition of power is a weed that only grows in the abandoned garden of an empty mind.”
Two of her most famous books, The Fountain and Atlas Shrugged, showed Rand’s analysis of metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, as the only way to live on Earth. Her publications placed her as one of the most lauded philosophers of the twentieth century. Man’s wickedness was one of her most explored subjects.
Rosa Luxemburg
“A world must be overturned, but every tear that flows is an accusation; and every man rushing to do something important who treads even on a worm through pure carelessness is committing a crime.”
Aside from being a philosopher, she was a Marxist theorist that was active in German politics. She wrote books such as Reform or Revolution and The Accumulation of Capital. She is such an important figure in her nation that she’s remembered every January in Berlin. Aside from delving into German history, she made it her life’s work to find sense to the true freedom humanity seems to disregard.
Elizabeth Anscombe
This Irish philosophr wrote Intention and Collected Philososphical Papers, among other works. Among her many achievements she transformed references points of moral philosophy and was able to make a complete shift in the framework of understanding human actions.
Simone de Beauvoir
“The nature of man is evil. Kindness is an acquired trait.”
This Parisian writer dedicated her life to teaching and studying philosophy. Through an existential and feminist point of view she worked in her famous works, The Second Sex, The Guest, and The Mandarins. Her repertoire was recognized by several important awards such as the Goncourt. Her legacy explores the true essence of love and wickedness that makes up human nature.
Hannah Arendt
“Forgiveness is the key to action and liberty.”
Arendt is one the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. She was also a journalist and professor. She focused her work on politics and published The Origins of Totalitarianism and On Revolution in order to capture in a literary way her interest for what inspires humans’ quest for freedom.
Edith Stein
“All we do is a means to an end, but love is an end in of itself, because God is love.”
Also known as Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, she was a Jewish convert to Catholicism that was beatified in 1947. Stein faced enormous odds in her pursuit for knowledge in the field of philosophy. She wrote The Woman and What is Philosophy? and through these publications she was able to portray her religious formation without compromising the theoretical reflections she discovered about love and evil. Her career was cut short due to being arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz were she was executed.
Simone Weil
“Evil is limitless, but not infinite. Only the infinite can limit the limitless.”
This French philosopher is praised for her literary works and is considered a Christian mystic. Among her works, all published posthumously, The Need for Roots and Waiting for God stand out as some of her best. Regardless of the themes, her works never stop being philosophical, since she used them to answer many of the questions that haunt human existence, as well as their origins and ends.
All these women are historically remembered as outstanding philosophers, writers, and poets and their analysis dug deep into the comprehension of human nature, which is undoubtedly made up of love, evil, and the hope for freedom.
Translated by María Suárez
