Searching for evidence of women's presence in the canon of philosophy, I found that the Cambridge Companion Series, an extensive and prestigious set of 110 volumes offering the “most convenient and accessible guides to the major philosophers available” (from their Website), has only two such volumes devoted to women philosophers. The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt was published in 2000, The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir in 2003. Jane Duran, in contrast, has found eight women philosophers to study (seven in addition to Beauvoir), and her book offers a rich introduction to important themes in the work of Hildegard of Bingen, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor Mill, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Feminist scholarship engaged with the history of philosophy has proceeded on at least three fronts in the past two decades. First, there has been an effort to examine what were said to be universal categories, to unearth gendered thinking, and to critique the canon of male philosophers from a feminist perspective. As part of this scholarship, feminists have exposed the masculinity of many of philosophy's categories, and noted that even when women are absent from male theorizing, their absence speaks volumes about gendered assumptions. Second, feminists have been keen to add women to the canon of philosophy, rediscovering the work of women philosophers, some of whom were famous in their own day but ignored by subsequent generations (such as Mary Astell), some of whom were overshadowed by their male philosophical counterparts (such as Harriet Taylor Mill in her partnership with John Stewart Mill), and some of whom may not have claimed their work to be categorized as philosophy (such as Simone de Beauvoir). And third, feminists have sought to discover whether there is anything different that women contribute to philosophy, because of their exclusion from male intellectual endeavors, their status as the Other, or some inherent difference in thought patterns or epistemology.

Duran engages with the latter two projects in attempting to place women in the canon, as well as to discover what might be different about the contribution that women make. She is careful to examine each thinker's contribution to philosophical debates on ontology and metaphysics, to place each thinker's work in her own historical context, to discuss the relevant philosophical and historical debates as well as thinkers (especially other women thinkers) with whom the philosopher engaged, and finally, to search for any relevance that the thinker's work may have for feminist theories of knowledge and third wave feminist concerns. Not surprisingly, this approach works better for some of the thinkers than for others. Because Duran so diligently sticks to this pattern, first looking at philosophical contributions, then context, and finally feminism, the rich and varied differences in style, approaches, and contributions distinct to each thinker are less highlighted than are the comparisons among the thinkers.

As an introduction to each thinker's work, this book is a valuable and useful resource. I can imagine using it successfully as a complementary text in my Women Political Thinkers course, for example, where I have students read the work of Astell, Wollstonecraft, Arendt, and Beauvoir. Undergraduate students would appreciate Duran's structured argument, her strict comparisons, and her clear style of writing. As she points out in the preface to the work, each chapter on each individual thinker (comprising eight central chapters) can be read alone. The introduction and conclusion to the book attempt to carve out more general questions and comparisons about the importance of gender categories and philosophical categories within historical periods.

As a feminist scholar hoping for a more probing analysis of each thinker's work as well as what women philosophers contribute to the canon, I often found Duran's book frustrating. The author says in the conclusion that “exclusion, in terms of numbers and activity, is not the only force driving the categorization of ‘women.’ There is ample reason to believe that there are differences in thought patterns, and the work that we have done here tends to bear this out” (p. 262). While there is scattered evidence for this conclusion in the book, the implications of these “differences in thought patterns,” and whether they relate to something more than “exclusion,” remain significantly undertheorized. How do these women understand themselves, if they do, as distinctly women philosophers? Do they theorize their embodiment, their potential for freedom, their engagement with others in the world in ways that undermine or destabilize philosophy's categories of truth, knowledge, and the self? I would have liked to see Duran engage these questions of embodiment, alternative interactions between self and other, and the impact of material conditions in the lives of each woman philosopher. These are the questions that male philosophers tend not to take on explicitly, although feminist theorists have pointed to each of these issues as underlying and implicit themes in the work of many canonical male thinkers. Though Duran looks for links to “feminist epistemology” and relevance for third wave feminism in each thinker's work, the themes are at one and the same time too forced and too vague to make any significant comparisons on philosophical questions such as the ones I suggest here.

These criticisms, however, are slight in comparison to the contribution of the book. This work offers a wealth of material on each thinker, links each of them up with the historical currents of her time, and asks each to contribute to contemporary feminist debates. In a book whose thinkers span more than 900 years and for which the scholarly literature is vast and unwieldy, Duran's organization of the material and her headway toward restoring the voices of these women to canonical as well as feminist debates are remarkable.