Abstract:
Why have we never heard of a female Plato or a female Confucius? The absence of women from traditional histories of philosophy reflects not only ancient inequalities in education and authorship but also the ways modern scholars have read the surviving archive. This keynote proposes a different approach to recovering women’s intellectual labor in antiquity. Beginning with Penelope’s weaving in Homer’s Odyssey, famously interpreted by Hannah Arendt as a metaphor for thinking carried out under conditions of exclusion, the lecture explores how women’s thought could emerge in forms not always recognized as philosophy. A contrasting example appears in the work of the Han-dynasty scholar Ban Zhao, who compared intellectual reflection to needlework—an activity that patiently connects disparate elements into a durable fabric of knowledge. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the archive as a living field of discourse, the talk argues that inscriptions, biographies, dialogues, and pseudonymous works preserve recoverable traces of women’s participation in ancient philosophical traditions.
About the Speaker:
Dorota Dutsch, Professor of Classics, has an MA from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland) and a PhD (2000) from McGill University (Canada). She has taught at the Jagiellonian University, Université de Montréal, and worked as exchange scholar at the Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). Professor Dutsch’s research focuses on the interface of gender and knowledge in literary texts ranging form Greek philosophical prose to Roman comedy.
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Interested in seeing the Lecture live? Then sign up here for the Libori Summer School 2026: https://indico.uni-paderborn.de/event/157/
If you want to participate actively in this or other sessions, please consider our call for applications: https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/call-for-applications-libori-summer-school-2026/
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