For International Women's Day, we've asked established as well as up-and-coming contemporary women in philosophy to recommend the other women in the field that they admire most. According to HESA data, only 35% of philosophy PhD students in the UK are female, compared to 61% in English and 53% in history, and only 24% of permanent academic staff in UK philosophy departments are women. The situation is similar across the transatlantic and anglophone world. Yet female thinkers produce groundbreaking work across all fields of western philosophy, from metaphysics to political theory, and sometimes on the boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines such as biology, economics and law. Our hope is that this list will point our readers towards new ideas and thinkers that have transformed the intellectual landscape of the past few decades. And if there are other contemporary female philosophers you would like to recommend, or whose work you admire, then join the conversation and let us know in the comments.
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Elizabeth Anderson
A moral and political philosopher, Anderson has done groundbreaking work in the philosophy of economics in her most recent book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It) (2019). She is currently working on a history of egalitarianism.
Which of your works would you suggest to someone new to your ideas but would like to get a better sense of them, and why?
The Imperative of Integration (2010): This gives the best sense of how I think normative inquiry should be done: starting with real-world problems of our non-ideal world,
doing normative theory in close engagement with findings in the social sciences and history.
“What is the Point of Equality?”, which was published in Ethics 109.2 (1999): 287-337. That is my most influential paper, aiming to redirect the focus of egalitarianism.
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