Abstract

Many philosophers would claim that sexual differentiation is irrelevant to philosophy. They would say that the philosopher is trying to understand the world and himself qua human being, not qua man or qua woman. While this may have been the intent, in ethics some curious results concerning women have occurred. In some cases, when one compares the analysis of what a philosopher considers to constitute a good person with what he says about the nature of woman, we must conclude that a woman cannot ultimately be good. In this paper I propose to show how two philosophers of widely differing traditions, namely Aristotle and Kierkegaard, have both maintained this.