In this one-time class, students will be provided with an overview of the most influential women philosophers of the 20th Century, then be asked pick one that they want to learn more about during the class.

The options will be:

Hannah Arendt
Simone Weil
Edith Stein 
Simone de Beauvoir (with Kathleen Hana)

If the students have no preference, the focus will be Weil.  If there is no consensus on which one, then I will try my best to address each student preference (just not in as much detail because of the available time of 55 minutes).   

The course can be repeated to learn more about the other philosophers, each in turn, if the student so wishes.

The class will be a seminar with a lecture presentation and student questions with me and the other students.  No background knowledge is required.  The PDF slides on the philosopher discussed will be provided for students to keep afterwards.  

More information on each philosopher is provided below.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

Arendt was German-Jewish philosopher, in the tradition of Heidegger.  Her most influential work is a 1963 book entitled, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  In it, she examines how inhumanity emerges when people defer ethical judgements in the presence of presumed authority: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”  Reference will be made to The Milgram Experiments by Yale researchers in the 1960s.

Simone Adolphine Weil (1909-1943)

Weil was a French existentialist philosopher, mystic, and political activist.  Her most important work is a posthumous collection in 1947 entitled Gravity and Grace: "The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical."  Reference will be made to her influence on Vatican II and the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. 

Edith Stein (1891-1942)

A German-Jewish phenomenological philosopher, who would convert to Catholicism and become Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross after her death in Auschwitz in World War II.  Her most influential philosophical work is her 1919 dissertation on ethical empathy: "Intellect is the light which illuminates its path, and without this light, emotion changes back and forth. In fact, if emotions prevail over the intellect, it is able to obscure the light and distort the picture of the entire world…. Emotional stirrings need the control of reason and the direction of the will."  Reference will be made to the arguments and events surrounding her canonization as a saint in 1998.

Simone de Beauvoir 
 
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (1906-1986) was a French existentialist feminist philosopher.  Her most influential work in the 1949 book entitled, The Second Sex.  In it, she examines the intersectionality of gender and power, becoming a foundational text for second-wave feminism: "Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth."  Reference will be made to the controversies surrounding her life, and the break with her work in third-wave feminism (Kathleen Hanna and Riot Grrrl).