The Australian philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker – writing in Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading silence (1998) – argued that making sense of the exclusion of women from Western philosophy required thinking beyond a ‘spatial logic of “inside” and “outside”’; the marginalisation of women’s voices ‘needs to be understood as something more than a simple exclusion’. In the case of institutional philosophy, at least, this is because there are logics found within it that work to silence women.

There are, as we know, structural and cultural barriers that have explicitly and implicitly excluded (and continue to exclude) women from intellectual institutions. Yet, gaining access against the odds does not guarantee that women will be heard – as Boulous Walker argues and is plainly demonstrated in Patricia Owens’s new book, Erased: A history of international thought without men.