There Are No Great Women Philosophers — Never Were, Never Will Be

Below is a long, dense, English-language essay — intellectual, ironic, left-psychoanalytic in tone — built around the thesis “There are no great women philosophers — never were, never will be.” It weaves extensive paraphrased and quoted material from Datsiuk’s text with interventions from Žižek, Butler, Irigaray, and Bataille, treating the question as a critique of the philosophical game itself, not of women per se. There Are No Great Women Philosophers — Never Were, Never Will Be “There are no great women philosophers,” writes Datsiuk, “and there never were.” Not because women are incapable of thought, but because philosophy itself, as he claims, “is born only where there is social risk and danger to life.” The philosopher must live outside comfort, outside group conformity; and, Datsiuk adds with deliberate cruelty, women rarely enter that existential hazard. They “prefer happiness to wisdom, harmony to truth.” The point is not misogyny — it is metaphysics. If philosophy is a wager with the abyss, then its absence of women merely reveals who declines the wager. The philosopher is not a “rational being,” but “a slightly non-philosophical creature — a poet, a carpenter, a fool.” Datsiuk’s irony cuts both ways: if the philosopher must risk madness, women have simply had the sense not to.