Women and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of Science in the German Tradition

Abstract

Abstract The formative period of modern science and its philosophy during the nineteenth century coincided with women being barred from institutionalized higher education, and limited to informal networks in their participation in philosophical as well as scientific debates. There were nevertheless several different, and compelling avenues for women to realize their intellectual ambitions. This chapter examines women’s contributions to the philosophy of science throughout the nineteenth century, and brings into view the gendered social organization of the sciences and their philosophy as a factor in the constitution of the philosophy of science as an academic discipline. The discipline’s focus on primarily epistemological and methodological problems reflects a legacy not only of the end of Kant’s systematic ambitions to articulate the relation between problems of theoretical and practical philosophy, but also of the lack of academic credentials for challenges to scientific arguments for the nineteenth century’s gendered social order.