<i>Ancient Women Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and New Perspectives</i> , edited by Katharine R. O’Reilly and Caterina Pellò
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a wonderful book: exciting, thoughtful, and provocative. It is a collection of articles on ancient women, mostly Greek and Roman, engaged in philosophy. As a volume it addresses both the challenges of recovering the ideas of ancient women, and the methods that might allow us to do so. Most importantly, perhaps, it also suggests new ways to think about ancient philosophy, and new approaches we might take to it. It convinced me that I have been wrong (more on that below), and at the same time gave me hope. The editors aim to ‘retrieve and re-evaluate’ the ideas of women philosophers from antiquity, which have remained largely ‘unrecorded and untaught’ (p. 1). The women in question belonged to different philosophical schools (Hippocratic, Platonic, Epicurean, Cyrenaic, Stoic, and Pythagorean) and different traditions (Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese), from the sixth century BCE to the fifth century CE. Many scholars have worked over the last thirty years or so to recover and assess the work of women in the history of philosophy (for recent discussions see Hutton and Hagengruber 2019, and Shapiro and Detlefsen 2023). Because, however, there is scant direct evidence of the philosophical views of ancient women, little of that research has focused on antiquity until recently (see Brill and McKeen 2024, and Pellò 2022). The process of recovery of neglected figures is often characterized as ‘re-writing the canon’ but many questions remain about just what the aims of that project might be, and what should motivate it. The editors of this volume, Katharine R. O’Reilly and Caterina Pellò, address those questions only briefly in their Introduction, but the collection provokes reflection on them, and suggests possible answers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".