Feminist Philosophy of Religion in Eisler and Archaic Greece

Abstract

The neglect of women’s perspectives by presocratic scholarship since its inception, as well as the misunderstanding of the beginning of western philosophy by feminists which has resulted from this neglect, have prevented many from appreciating both that Nietzsche’s discovery of the presocratics was a significant contribution to feminism and that contemporary feminists can, in turn, contribute to Nietzsche’s vision of the philosopher as a cultural physician by discovering at the dawn of western culture a form of religion that is the inverted image of the patriarchal dogmatism that most people associate with institutional religion, a female-centered religious tradition grounded in the love of learning … a.k.a. democracy.