Chelsea Harry (Southern Connecticut State University): An Alternate Origin Story: Sappho of Lesvos and Ancient Greek Philosophy

Kris Mclain (Marquette University) (online): Theorizing Power: Ancient Greco-Roman Women Philosophers on the Maintenance of the State

Ancient Greco-Roman women philosophers, Perictione I, Aesara, Phintys, and Theano II, analyze the unique responsibilities and demands made by the state, family, and their own personal code of values particular to their subject position with respect to family- and state-based patriarchal power in their treatises and letters to others. Tracing the interplay between the home and the state present in their own written work, I foreground the language of the polis and state power to analyze their underlying philosophical commitments. Underneath their commitments, I attend to the possibility that power, especially women’s power, is contingent, temporary, and precarious. Often, in these works, reflections on domestic issues are seamlessly interwoven with descriptions of their own political positioning and understanding of the power of the state with the concerns of women front and center.

Elodie Pinel (Independent Researcher) (online): Mystics Women as Philosophers: Revisiting the History of Middle Ages Philosophy

Sina Menke (Independent Researcher): « Tacheles! » – Dialectical Self-Defense in Christine de Pizan’s La Cité des Dames

David Harmon (University of St. Andrews) (online): Images and imagination in Anne Conway’s Vitalistic Inversion of Mechanical Philosophy

Early modern European thought was dominated by mechanical philosophy, which purported to explain natural phenomena in terms of matter in motion: bodies with speeds, directions, figures, and mereological structures. Many even thought that life itself could be explained by mechanics. Anne Conway, however, advanced a vitalist alternative. I will clarify this alternative and demonstrate the role of imagination in her account. Conway thought that all creatures are most fundamentally spirits, and that each possesses an internal vital principle that it imagines for itself. This internal principle is an “image” in the creature’s imagination, corresponding to its moral status. When the creature takes on corporeal modes, it imposes this image onto its bodily parts, thereby assuming mechanical features expressing its imagined form. Conway thus held that the mechanical features of all things are derivative of life: mechanism serves vital capacities rather than explains them.

Juliette Morice (Université Le Mans): The concept of freedom in Gabrielle Suchon’s feminism

Björn Freter (Independent Researcher): Polite Insurrection. Johanna Charlotte Unzer’s Outline of Worldly Wisdom for Women

Pierpaolo Betti (Paderborn University): Du Châtelet’s Influence on Kant’s Natural Philosophy

Clara Carus (Harvard University): Du Châtelet’s Metaphysics: The Knowable and Unknowable

Ana Rodrigues (Paderborn University): Embodiment and Rational Agency in Du Châtelet’s Moral Theory

Jil Muller (Paderborn University): The Female Body in the Early Modern Period

Fabrizio Bigotti  (CSMBR) (online): Giovanni Marinelli on Women’s Illnesses

Julia Lerius (Independent Researcher):  Embodied Knowledge: Vision, Medicine, and Authority in Hildegard of Bingen; Rethinking Knowledge Beyond Scholastic Epistemology

This presentation reconsiders Hildegard of Bingen as a thinker of embodied knowledge rather than as a marginal visionary opposed to scholastic rationality. Focusing on Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum, and Liber divinorum operum, I argue that Hildegard expands medieval epistemology by presenting knowledge as sensory, rational, ethical, cosmological, and therapeutic. Her visions do not replace reason with private revelation; they disclose a disciplined mode of understanding in which visible and temporal realities make invisible order perceptible. Key concepts such as viriditas, speculativa scientia, rationalis sensus, and scientia boni et mali show that the human being knows through the living interplay of body, soul, moral discernment, and cosmic relation. This approach also illuminates Hildegard’s significance for the history of medicine: even beyond the contested medical corpus, her visionary works articulate a medical anthropology of vitality, disorder, diagnosis, healing, and embodied authority in ways that reshape how female intellectual authority can be understood.

Aristi Trendel (Université Le Mans); Theodora Tsimpouki (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens): Feminist Ecocriticism: From Mary Shelley to Han Kang

The presentation examines the intricate interaction between literature and the non-human environment through the theoretical lens of feminist ecocriticism. It is grounded in the critical view that “that there is a connection between environmental degradation and the subordination of women,” to quote Douglas A. Vakoch. The term feminist ecocriticism or ecofeminism was coined by the French feminist Françoise D’Eaubonne in 1974. As a theoretical framework, it aims to emphasize the interconnectedness between humans and non-human nature. Focusing on Anglophone prose in a variety of cultural, geographical and temporal contexts, the workshop will attempt to unravel the women-nature connections, analyzing the ways in which women authors are critical of the patriarchal logic of domination and hierarchy, leading to the exploitation of women and the instrumentalization of nature. Drawing on the resources of ecofeminist theories and criticism, we examine literary texts from early nineteenth century (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) to the twenty-first century (Han Kang’s Nobel Prize winning The Vegetarian), to challenge the twin dominations of women and nature and to explore an understanding of ethics based on relationality and affect.

Tentative list of texts to be analysed

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Chopin, “The Storm”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Rachael Carson Silent Spring

Alice Walker Am I Blue

Linda Hogan, Solar Storms

Barbara Kingsolver Prodigal Summer

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

Arundhati Roy ‘Walking with the Comrades’

Han Kang, The Vegetarian

Anastasia Guidi (Federal University of ABC, Brazil) (online): Anne Conway in Brazil: vitalist ontologies, ecofeminism and successor science to keep the forest standing

In this talk, I address the subject of successor science, arguing that compatibility with Amazonian perspectivism can work as an epistemic value in post-capitalist, life-oriented successor sciences developed in Brazil. Climate change, the accelerated destruction of the biosphere, the proliferation of wars and the corrosion of democracies around the globe are all aspects of a deep, systemic crisis forcing us towards successor science projects.

In the first part of the talk, I broadly define Amazonian perspectivism in order to propose how it might work as an epistemic value. Then, in the second part, I set a philosophical example to show how such a criterion could be applied, turning my attention to the vitalist theory of matter advanced by British philosopher Anne (Finch) Conway (1631-1679). Following the ecofeminist tradition which views Conway’s theory of substance as less compatible with capitalist exploitation of Nature than Hobbesian materialism or Cartesian dualism, I propose that this philosophy is compatible with Amazonian perspectivism in at least two respects: animal intelligence and the view according to which all matter is, to some extent, alive. Finally, I argue that Conway’s reception in contemporary ecofeminist circles might be justified by these aspects of her philosophy which seem compatible with Amazonian perspectivism.

Namita Herzl (University of Hildesheim): Philosophies of Women Beyond the Canon

Abosede Ipadeola (University of Hildesheim): African Storytelling as Philosophical/Feminist Practice

Rutte Andrade (University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony, UNILAB): African Feminist Epistemologies: Philosophical Foundations of Batuku and Tina

Julia Mühl (Independent Researcher): Gerda Walther – Between Social Determinism and Free Will

Antonio Calcagno (King’s University College, Western University) (online): The Negation and Background of the I and Their Constitutive Possibilities in Gerda Walther’s Phenomenology

Gerda Walther (1897–1977) occupied a unique place in the early phenomenological movement. One of the few foundational women in the movement, she was also one of the few philosophers who moved between the Freiburg phenomenological circle of Edmund Husserl and the Munich branch of phenomenology guided by the important work of Alexander Pfänder. Among the significant philosophical contributions of Walther to phenomenology is her unique and original account of the not-I as well as her concept of embedment (Einbettung). Both of these elements condition deeply the very function and being of the ego in phenomenology. Unlike her teachers Edmund Husserl and Edith Stien, Walther does not posit an irreducible phenomenological or transcendental ego. The ego in Walther is not the master of its own sphere of ownness. Nor is the ego marked by an absolute sense of self-identity. In fact, for Walther, the ego encounters in and through its own position and background (Einbettung) points at which the ego is conditioned by data or content from this very background (a tergo, Walther says) and when it confronts its own not-I. In this paper, I argue that such possibilities challenge the claim of the ego as being a zero point of orientation of consciousness. The implication is clear: sense-making and sense-building, that is the constitutional work of phenomenology, are not only I-acts, for Walther’s analysis shows that the senses of certain objects come to us already formed and constituted, for example, the personal God of mystical encounters. The I receives these already constituted senses and learns to recognise them. This is made possible by the unique forms of sociality taken up in Walther’s social ontology.

Katrin König (Paderborn University): Faith Seeking Experience. The Question of Divine Presence in Female Perspectives

Aurélien Chukurian (Université Catholique de Louvain) (online): The Principles of Conway in light of its theological scope

Federica Giardini (Università Roma Tre) (online): Gender and Economics: Regimes of Visibility, Regimes of Value

Gabriele Schimmenti (Università Pegaso) (online): Women Philosophers and Emancipation in Nineteenth Century Germany

From a term of Roman law to a utopian concept of modernity, the notion of emancipation was profoundly reconfigured and rearticulated by German women philosophers from the nineteenth century onwards. Several male philosophers of the nineteenth century, while conceiving emancipation as a practice of liberation from below, nevertheless did not extend this concept to women. My paper will reconstruct, in broad terms, the critique developed by nineteenth-century German women philosophers against these positions, and will examine the specificity of their own rearticulation of the concept of emancipation.

Pedro Pricladnitzky (Pontificia Universidad católica de Chile) (online): Press and Political Power: Women Writers, Education, and Suffrage in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Andrea Reichenberger (Technical University Munich): Hidden Voices and Gendered Spaces in the History and Philosophy of Science

This lecture course examines how canon formation in the philosophy of 20th century science was an active process driven by epistemic injustice, political upheaval, and historiographical traditions that privileged dominant narratives. Through the case studies on Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider (1891–1990) and Grete Hermann (1901–1984), I will explore how gendered spaces, institutional constraints, interdisciplinary work, and political contexts affected both recognition and transmission of their ideas. A key methodological feature that I will employ is the use of rediscovered audio recordings, which will make these thinkers’ voices audible. The course lecture concludes with reflections on the challenges of archival work and the risks of perpetuating bias. It also points to digital and audiovisual tools as new ways to restore visibility and reshape the formation of the philosophical canon by considering the multidimensional aspects of recovering intellectual history.

Michele Vagnetti (Independent Researcher): Wilma Papst on Frege

Ma Theresa Payongayong (University of the Philippines Diliman): EcoTechGender and the Politics of Women’s Space

This presentation examines the politics of women’s space using EcoTechGender as a research tool that recognizes the intersection of ecology, technology and gender. While both technology and the environment have the potential to provide opportunities for women and other marginalized groups, these are overridden by several technological and environmental problems that put them in a disadvantaged position. Drawing on critical acceptance as a frame of thought, the presentation shows how women’s contributions relate to their theoretical and practical knowledge of ecology, economics, technology, and gender that merits careful consideration. Their roles and status in society are testimonies to their emancipation from the male-imposed culture that has long relegated them to the background as inferior and emotional beings who had to stay in the periphery. The presentation emphasizes that critically accepting women’s contributions to society is a critical juncture to reclaim their spaces and to give due recognition to their worth and value as a human being.

Aurélie Knufer (Université Paul Valéry): A queer history of philosophy? Methodological reflections based on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft 

Mary Wollstonecraft’s work contains certain passages that are highly problematic from a queer or lesbian perspective: indeed, some commentators have not hesitated to point out the ‘heterocentric’, or even ‘lesbophobic’ (to use anachronistic terms) biases in certain passages of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Yet, at the same time, her fictional works depict very powerful friendships between women, forms of intense emotional relationships that appear to be describable using Adrienne Rich’s concept of the ‘lesbian continuum’.

This presentation will revisit the debates generated by these ambiguities and demonstrate their centrality to understanding and interpreting Mary Wollstonecraft’s work and her contribution to the history of feminist philosophy. In doing so, we will outline the method of what might be called the queer history of philosophy.

Kristin Käuper (University of Leeds) (online): Two Sides of the Same Coin? A Conceptual Analysis of Asexuality and Aromanticism

Feminist critiques have long pointed out how relationships reinforce and exacerbate gendered inequalities. Still, our intimate lives continue to be governed by both compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity: social norms which assume that sexual and romantic desire are universal and that a romantic relationship is central to a good life. The emerging identity categories of asexuality and aromanticism – describing people who experience little to no sexual or romantic attraction respectively – challenge these assumptions. Thus far, however, aromanticism has remained undertheorised and has often been subsumed under asexuality. This talk offers a conceptual analysis of asexuality and aromanticism and argues that they are not simply ‘two sides of the same coin’: aromanticism provides a distinct critical standpoint from which to deconstruct the power of amatonormativity in contemporary social life and its gendered consequences for the way we live and value intimacy.

Luka Borsic and Ivana S. Karasman (Institute of Philosophy Zagreb, Croatia) (online): From Helene Druskowitz to Valerie Solanas

Radical Feminism examines some of the most uncompromising and provocative critiques of patriarchy in modern feminist thought, with particular emphasis on Helene Druskowitz and Valerie Solanas. At the center of Druskowitz’s work lies the figure of the educated woman as a critical standpoint from which to expose and dismantle a world shaped, in her view, by male violence, domination, and spiritual decay. Druskowitz argues that genuine liberation requires not reform but a radical restructuring of society, even imagining separatist female communities devoted to intellectual and spiritual flourishing. Valerie Solanas likewise advances feminism as a total refusal of patriarchal order, using an abrasive and confrontational style to reveal the depth of structural injustice and to challenge the limits of liberal reform. Historically and philosophically, the course explores radical feminism not simply as provocation, but as a serious critique of power, social organization, and the possibilities of emancipation. It asks what these extreme visions can still tell us today, in a moment marked by persistent gendered violence, renewed struggles over bodily autonomy, anti-feminist backlash, and intensified debates about the future of feminist politics.

Vera Grund (Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom): tbc

Lena Frömmel (Paderborn University): The first female composer! – Again?

Daniela Zumpf (Paderborn University): Some suggestions on teaching Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy in middle school classes

Henning Vreyborg (Paderborn University): tbc

Pierpaolo Betti (Paderborn University): tbc