The list of authors on the syllabus for aspiring French philosophy teachers was published on Thursday. It included Aristotle, René Descartes, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant.
But there were no women. “There never are,” said Elodie Pinel, who is herself a French philosopher.
Now Pinel, 41, has leapt to the forefront of a campaign to overturn centuries of prejudice in French intellectual circles when it comes to women practising philosophy.
In February she published a book, Moi aussi je pense donc je suis (Me Too, I Think Therefore I Am), which highlights women philosophers since antiquity and the way they are ignored or demeaned in France.
Her aim is to resuscitate figures ranging from Christina, the erudite 17th-century queen of Sweden, to Germaine de Staël, the Swiss writer hounded out of France by Napoleon Bonaparte at the start of the 19th century, and Donna Haraway, a contemporary American ecofeminist, who can all serve as role models for women held back by the notion that their gender is a bar to philosophical thought.
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The work has generated media interest and an upswell of public support but been met with a stony silence in French university philosophy departments, which remain a bastion of male domination, she says.
This week Pinel set up an association, Relecturhelp — Lire les femmes philosophes, to promote her cause and she plans to launch a petition calling for works by women philosophers to be taught at school.
The issue is of importance in a country where philosophy has enjoyed a central role since the Enlightenment in the 18th century sowed the seeds for the revolution of 1789, she says.
The subject remains obligatory for pupils in the final year of lycée (sixth-form college), for instance. Pinel, who teaches in the Paris region, said adolescents learnt to “think, to discourse, to espouse a point of view opposed to their own”. She said such lessons were a pillar of democracy. “Democratic culture demands a critical mind. You need to be able to debate and to dialogue in order to be a full citizen.”
But in a country that only gave women the vote in 1944, the struggle for full citizenship is arduous.
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For example, until 2019 the lycée philosophy syllabus only featured one woman: the 20th-century German-American Hannah Arendt. In that year the authorities buckled to criticism and added five more, all from the 20th century: France’s Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil, Jeanne Hersch of Switzerland, and the British philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch.
Non-western philosophers were also introduced for the first time, but the Association of Philosophy Teachers in state schools dismissed the additions as a “gadget” and said that in practice, nothing would change.
Nothing has, according to Pinel. The six women philosophers on a syllabus that features 78 men — from the ancient Greek Plato to the 20th-century French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre — are ignored, she says. She has urged school textbook publishers to devote space to women philosophers but has been told they have “no interest” in doing so.
A similar bias is in evidence in higher education, she claims, and is flagrant in the 2025 syllabus to be followed by students wanting to become philosophy teachers. Required to study notions like “logic and epistemology” or “aesthetics, metaphysics, morals, politics and social sciences”, they have been given a list of ten authors to read — all of them men.
Pinel notes the contrast with Anglo-Saxon countries such as Britain, where she says women philosophers have broken through a glass ceiling that remains intact in France.
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There is no French equivalent of the Oxford University Press’s Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England, for example, or of Ancient Women Philosophers, published by Cambridge University Press.
