This chapter, which serves as the introduction, outlines the objectives and key questions of the volume, reviews existing scholarship on ancient women philosophers, and highlights the original philosophical contributions of each chapter. A substantial section is devoted to the specific challenges in the study of ancient women philosophers, with special focus on source issues, as well as the methods the contributors of the volume have adopted to face these challenges and approach these female thinkers philosophically. We argue that the study of ancient women philosophers has a special value for our understanding of the history of philosophy. While at first daunting, this unique set of thinkers and the available evidence both enrich our insight into the methodology of the history of philosophy and re-introduce philosophical contributions which would otherwise be lost.

Arete of Cyrene was daughter and disciple of the founder of the Cyrenaic school and mother and teacher of the figure who codified its principles. Our sources emphasize her as a link in the intellectual chain connecting the school it its Socratic roots, to the detriment of preserving her own philosophical ideas. In this chapter, I make a case for her philosophical contribution to the Cyrenaics, as revealed in a careful reading of the few sources we have. I follow this with methodological reflections on how we might access a figure like Arete. I argue that this task requires and licenses the adoption of severed methodological strategies related to an added open-mindedness to source material. I reflect on how these methodological points contribute to a wider project of recovering the thought of marginalized figures.