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Why are the voices of women, foreigners, and other less-than-privileged people in Antiquity almost entirely absent from ancient philosophical and scientific texts? In this class, we will study representations of gender, racial identity, and socially marginalized groups in ancient Greek philosophy and medicine. One of our goals will be to examine how these views were used to promote, maintain, justify, and occasionally challenge the exclusion and silencing of women, foreigners, and other oppressed groups. We will also reflect on how ancient views on these issues influenced conceptions of gender and racial identity afterwards and may remain current today.
Some of the questions we will address are: What explanations and arguments did ancient Greek authors provide for the supposed differences between humans and animals, women and men, slaves and free men, foreigners and Greeks? What role did notions such as racial origin play in Greek theories of ethnic superiority? How did ancient Greeks understand sex, gender, and racial identities? In what ways did medical views about gender, race, and ethnic origin influence philosophy during this period? How were philosophical and medical theories used to promote, challenge, or maintain the oppression of women, foreigners, and other groups? |
