Women in Analytic Philosophy: Past and Present, University of Warsaw, February 12–14, 2024

In February 2024, the conference “Women in Analytic Philosophy: Past and Present” was held at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw. It was organised jointly by the University of Warsaw, University of Vienna, and the Humboldt University of Berlin, and supported by the Central Network for Teaching and Research in Academic Liaison. Its main organiser was Anna Brożek: thanks to her efforts, the conference boasted an extensive and varied program full of speakers going well beyond the original three participating institutions.

The three days were packed with presentations dedicated exclusively to female philosophers working in the very broadly construed analytical tradition in the past 120+ years. The main body of the program consisted of talks focusing on individual philosophers, ranging from short student presentations serving as an overview of a particular philosopher’s life and work, to in-depth discussions with a much narrower focus. It is still an unusual thing to see multiple presentations about the same female philosopher in one event. In this conference, this sort of thing happened as a matter of fact, and I found this aspect particularly satisfying, as proof of a certain momentum building up in historical scholarship on some of these philosophers.

Frederique Janssen-Lauret opened her presentation with general remarks about the reasons for the lack of recognition of women’s contributions in the history of early analytic philosophy. While such reasons might appear numerous, they are really variations on the same theme: sexism. Janssen-Lauret then made an argument for Constance Jones’s primacy in the discovery of the sense-reference distinction. Earlier that same day, Maria van der Schaar together with Jeanne Peijnenburg argued for a yet different interpretation of Jones’s work, highlighting some important differences between Jones’s and Frege’s concepts.

While not in direct dialogue with each other, Silke Körber and Andreas Vrahimis discussed two very different topics in Susan Stebbing’s work, highlighting the latter’s broad philosophical scope. Körber focussed on Stebbing’s intellectual exchange with Otto Neurath, while Vrahimis talked about Stebbing’s critique of instrumentalism.

The work of some of the well-known female members of the Lvov-Warsaw School was also often presented in virtual tandems. When it came to talks about Polish philosophers, there was a broad understanding of the analytic tradition: one could say this is in the spirit of the Lvov-Warsaw School, which was unified by its methods and general approach to philosophy, rather than sharing any specific views. Together with the researchers, a number of MA and graduate students presented at the conference as well, showing the results of the work they did as participants of Anna Brożek’s graduate seminar on the female members of the Lvov-Warsaw School, which she is teaching in Warsaw in this academic year.

Anna Brożek gave a broad overview of Maria Ossowska’s work, while Joanna Dudek provided an in-depth discussion of Ossowska’s project of sociology of morality. Joseph Ulatowski engaged with Izydora Dąmbska’s ideas about truth and language and Krzysztof Andrulonis talked about her efforts to maintain and protect the legacy of the School. Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum’s philosophy of inductive reasoning was examined in detail, with the focus on her early publications (Marta Sznajder) and her work on the psychology of inductive reasoning (Zuzana Rybaříková).

Very importantly, thanks to this event, a number of philosophers whose work is not often discussed at international conferences on the history of philosophy, could be presented to the wider public. Jasmin Özel and Andrea Reichenberger’s talk about Wilma Papst, a German philosopher who was an early interpreter of Frege, belonged to this category. Yet, this was particularly true in the case of Polish philosophers. Here the examples include the historian of philosophy Daniela Gromska (in a talk by Krzysztof Nowicki), the phenomenologist Eugenia Ginsberg-Blaustein (by Aleksandra Gomułczak), the theoretician of induction Halina Mortimer (by Karolina Tytko) and the logicians Helena Rasiowa (by Bartłomiej Uzar) and Seweryna Łuszczewska-Romahnowa (by Zuzana Rybaříková). Magdalena Matusiak-Rojek talked about Janina Kotarbińska, who in the past had often been seen mostly as the wife of her famous husband. The strong presence of psychological research in the Lvov-Warsaw School was also reflected in the program, with talks on Irena Schiller and Estera Markinówna (by Witold Płotka) and Aniela Meyer Ginsberg (by Anna Smywińska-Pohl). Finally, the talk by Ewa Szumilewicz on the work of her grandmother Irena Szumilewicz-Lachman, added a moving personal touch and the sense of living history. This blending of past and present was also evident in the presentation by Dawid Góras, who talked about a long-running and only recently completed book project of Halina Taborska.

The (re-)discovery of female analytic philosophers of the last 120 years in many cases still involves archival work. In most cases, there are no specific collections of documents focussed on the women philosophers, and the researchers try to collect sources – like correspondence – scattered through a number of institutions. Alicja Chybińska talked about such a specific set of documents in her presentation about her work on translating the letters that Maria Kokoszyńska wrote to Kazimierz Twardowski during her studies abroad. Yet, sometimes a substantial archive dedicated to a specific female philosopher is available, but simply has not been studied in detail so far. The latter was the case with Christine Ladd-Franklin’s papers. In her talk, Sara Uckelman briefly presented the wealth of this completely under-researched material, which she is currently processing together with a team of collaborators. She also presented the breadth of Ladd-Franklin’s ouvre, showing how it can be seen as conceptually united through the lens of philosophy. Finally, Katarina Mihaljević took a broader approach to the archival sources issue, using the example of her research on Rose Rand’s academic career as a starting point for a discussion of the issues of preparation of archives for diverse usage by the academic community.

A couple of the presentations touched on the very tangible historical circumstances that some women philosophers and academics found themselves in during the early 20th century: Elżbieta Pakszys talked about the devastating effects that the Holocaust had on the Polish philosophical community, while Austen van Burns focused on the lives of those women who managed – or tried to – escape out of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

Beside the talks, the conference included some additional elements. On the first day, a panel discussion took place, featuring Sophia Connell, Clare Mac Cumhail, Elżbieta Pakszys, Maria van der Scholar, Friedrich Stadtler, and Jan Woleński, with Anna Brożek, Marta Sznajder, and Silke Körber as moderators. The discussion covered a lot of ground. Stadtler and Woleński mentioned the presence and situation of women in the Vienna Circle and Lvov-Warsaw School, respectively. Elżbieta Pakszys offered some historical insights into the reasons why women could not and would not become recognised philosophers in the past, while Maria van der Schaar stressed how important pre-university education is for getting young women into philosophy. Sophia Connell talked about her experiences as a philosophy lecturer today and ongoing efforts to include more texts by women philosophers in courses. Claire Mac Cumhail presented the current state of the “In Parenthesis” project, which grew from the work she did on the Oxford Quartet with Rachel Wiseman – highlighting at the same time how important philosophical collaboration and philosophical friendships are, especially for women.

In the months leading to the conference, Anna Brożek coordinated a video project “Lovers of Wisdom”, which will consist of a series of short videos talking about the life and work of a few dozen women related to the Lvov-Warsaw School. While the whole production, due to appear on the YouTube channel of the Copernicus Center in Kraków (https://www.youtube.com/@CopernicusCenter) later this year, is yet unavailable, during the conference we had the opportunity to watch the introductory video.

The conference ended with taking some tangible action. The meeting room in which the conference was held is adorned with rows of portraits of “scientific philosophers”, originating from the collection of the late Jerzy Perzanowski. The conference concluded with an informal ceremony of hanging some portraits of female philosophers in this portrait gallery, which up to now included only a small handful of women. It was quite the literal updating of the canon, and one can hope that the new look of the walls will indeed inspire some students who spend their time there.