On the recovery of nineteenth-century brazilian women philosophers

Resumo

Our aim in this paper is to analyze the challenges and propose a strategy for the recovery and recognition of 19th-century Brazilian women philosophers. To this end, in the first section we begin from the controversy surrounding the very existence of a Brazilian philosophy and show how this impasse is intensified in the case of women, due to the topics they addressed, the textual genres they used, the forms of publication of their writings, as well as the barriers of gender and geography. In the second section, we present our strategy which consists of two interrelated movements: a metaphilosophical reflection, that seeks to review and expand the criteria for what counts as philosophy, and a hermeneutical reading, capable of reinterpreting their works on their own terms. If a less biased history of philosophy also depends on the inclusion of women philosophers, we argue that a revision of the political and methodological criteria that define philosophical practice is one of the paths to enable such inclusion and to correct the bias.