After reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, in Paris in 1970, I decided to attempt to become a female philosopher, a category which, in those days, was rarely recognized and certainly not studied. In the seventies, when feminists were rejecting logocentrism and criticizing the male orientation of philosophy, I took the rather more conventional path of going to Oxford to do a BPhil. It seemed to me that, since I did not understand what reason was, I should not prematurely reject it on the grounds of its purported maleness. The questions 'What is reason?' and 'How is a priori knowledge possible?' remain for me central to philosophy. Thes…

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