This chapter extends work on the under-representation of women in philosophy by bringing insights from the social sciences about the role of time in exclusionary practices into current debates. Arguing that the time of social life needs to be more widely understood as normative and politicised, I analyse a number of key issues that have already been highlighted, including embodiment, gender schemas and the narrowness of the canon, in order to draw out the way particular assumptions about time compound these issues further. Questioning the seeming ‘common-sense’ notion of time as singular, successive and all-encompassing, I instead show how linear accounts of time actively hide the multiple processes, expectations, responsibilities and histories that must be negotiated by minority philosophers. I argue that a more representative philosophy would recognise, and actively support, the multiple and contradictory temporalities that characterise it.
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