Diotima de Mantinea, un caso de injusticia epistémica. La hermenéutica y su aplicación en la flosofía antigua

Résumé

Such as Mary Ellen Waithe points out, the nature of Diotima´s identity has been a very controversial issue within the philosophic tradition at least since the 15th century. That was when a thinker accounted for the unlikeliness of the historic existence of Diotima as a female philosopher due to the fact that she was a woman. Many opinions, some more reasonable than others, have been given since such androcentric interpretation began about whether she existed historically or whether she was simply a character created by Plato. In a History of Women Philosophers, we can fnd a register of those reading lines as well as a reasoning that contemplates them and contrasts them. As Waithe remarks, an epistemic androcentrism underlies all those diferent views, which determines not only our reading of the history of philosophy but also the status that we bestow to the thinking of these forgotten philosophers. In this study, those reading lines will be analysed in order to demonstrate its implicit misogyny in the way that they understand the presence of Diotima in the platonic thinking and tradition. Because of that, that interpretation will be linked to Miranda Fricker´s thesis so as to show that an act of deprivation of epistemic or testimonial autonomy can be understood as symbolic violence and, therefore, as a way of epistemic injustice. This idea will enlighten certain difcult of the criticism to some postures which consider Diotima is just a mere character invented by Plato to point them out as instances of epistemic injustices.