Pythagorean Women Philosophers

About this book

"Greek sources, postdating Pythagoras by hundreds of years, suggest that women played an important part in his school. Pseudonymous texts attributed to Theano, Pythagoras' disciple or wife, and other female Pythagoreans, have also come down to us. Such testimonies are usually discussed as evidence for life in Pythagorean communities. Pythagorean Women Philosophers maps an entire web of textual tradition to offer something more complex: a rewriting of Greek philosophical history so as to include female intellectuals.0Bringing together little-known testimonies to women's contributions to Pythagorean thought, this book shows what modern readers may learn from them. Such testimonies first surface in fragments of Peripatetic writers, and continued to shape the reception of Pythagoreanism until the seventh century CE. They include sayings, philosophical treatises, and letters attributed to Pythagorean women, and form a vital undercurrent of the Pythagorean tradition. Against the tendency to discuss these0testimonies in terms of their validity as historical accounts of the life in Pythagorean communities, Dutsch contends that their value lies not in what they may represent but in what they are-accounts of Greek philosophical history that emphatically include women. Consequently, the book shifts attention from texts as historical testimonies to texts as literary artefacts engaged in creating a vision of the past, producing meaning in dialogue with other texts, especially the dialogues of Plato. Pythagorean women emerge from this overview not as individuals but as potent cultural icons that exist in the Greek culture's evolving imaginarium, challenging us to rethink our own accounts of Greek philosophical history."--