A discussion of Wollstonecraft on God and Nature

It’s good when the history of women philosophers gets an airing on general philosophy blogs! Go read Eric Schliesser’s excellent post on NewApps: Wollstonecraft’s Spinozism, and join in the debate!

Upon re-reading the Vindication in preparation for a class discussion, the second epigraph to this post, which we may loosely translate as Natura sive Deus, startled me. Could Wollstonecraft, who so often sounds like a Deist, be a kind of Spinozist? For, Wollstonecraft is quite clear that “propriety” is just “another word for convenience.” (106) So, the substitution of “Nature” by “God” is really an act of social expedience. Yet, could this really be so? For, so much of Wollstonecraft’s argument seems to rely on commitments that require commitment to immortal souls and, presumably, a judging God (and one can find other Deist commitments).

Eric’s posted about Wollstonecraft on NewApps before: go see his post on Wollstonecraft and Adam Smith.

Wollstonecraft Conference in London – May 30

The authors of this blog are getting together again, with some illustrious companions, to discuss the social and political philosophy of Wollstonecraft.

Here is the advert, below.

Please come and join in the discussion!

The Cambridge Philosophers – including early modern women’s writings.

I’ve just received a message on this project from Philos-l:

REVISIONING CAMBRIDGE PLATONISM

The work of the Cambridge Platonists has been gravely neglected due to a combination of scholarly misapprehensions, a lack of accessible textbooks, and good critical editions of their major works. The central aim of this interdisciplinary project is to begin addressing this neglect by bringing together the major established UK and overseas researchers as well as early career academics who work on, or have a close interest in, Cambridge Platonism. This will advance research on this pivotal intellectual movement. These discussions will take place at a series of workshops at Clare College, Cambridge. Contributors will be drawn from the disciplines of Philosophy, Theology/Religious Studies, and English Literature. Topics covered by the project will include, but not be limited to, the formation and sources of Cambridge Platonism, their key philosophical and religious ideas, and their reception in the areas of (i) aesthetics; (ii) ethics; (iii) metaphysics (iv) early-modern women’s writing; (v) secularisation and the origins of atheism.

The project is spearheaded by Douglas Hedley (PI) and Sarah Hutton (Co-PI), and it is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The women writers associated with the Cambridge Platonists were (as far as I know) Damaris Cudworth Masham, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, and  Catherine Trotter Cockburn. Of these, only Anne Conway has had her texts published in an accessible format: in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series.

One of the two people heading the group, Sarah Hutton, is known for her work on early modern women writers, especially Anne Conway. Hopefully, her commitment to working on women philosophers, and publishing their work will act on the project, and we’ll see more   books by the women Cambridge Platonists in the not-too-distant future.

A proposal for an early modern philosophy society that includes women

This proposal sounds like it should be of interest to people working on women philosophers of the Early Modern period. Lewis Powell over at The Mod Squad thinks there should be a society for early modern philosophy, along side the big name societies, like the Kant or Hume societies. One merit of such a society is that it would create a forum for people working on not-so-big names from that period. This would of course affect people working on women philosophers. As Lewis notes:

I could be wrong, but it seems like Hume scholars just have a vastly greater number of opportunities to present work, get feedback, and interact with other scholars compared to, say, Locke scholars. And that’s talking about Locke, who is thought of as a central figure in the early modern period; this is even more pronounced for someone working on figures like Malebranche, Cavendish, Astell, and so on.

So if you’re interested, please go over to his post on the Mod Squad and leave a comment.

Cfp: The History of Women’s Ideas

Just saw this on Philos-l:

98:2 April 2015 
The History of Women’s Ideas

Deadline for Submissions: April 30, 2014 
Advisory Editors: Karen Green <Karen.Green@monash.edu>, Ruth Hagengruber <ruth.hagengruber@upb.de>

The history of Western philosophy has been almost exclusively a history of the ideas of men. Occasionally women thinkers have played a minor role, often as adjuncts to men, whose key works make up the visible stepping stones taking us from the late Mediaeval mind set of Dante, through the Early Modern revolution of Montaigne, Descartes, Locke and Leibniz, to the Enlightenment of Voltaire, Kant and beyond. Recently the works of some of these adjuncts—such as Christine de Pizan, who disseminated Dante in France, Marie de Gournay, Montaigne’s editor, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Descartes’s correspondent, Damaris Masham, Locke’s friend, or Emilie du Châtelet, lover of Voltaire, to name but a few—have begun to emerge from the shadows. In this issue of The Monist we invite papers treating of the philosophical works of female participants in the intellectual history of the West. We also invite contributions addressing the broader question: do the contributions of women thinkers such as those listed above allow us to distinguish what we might think of as a history of women’s ideas?

 

On forgetting, and forgetting again, and being reminded.

When I posted about the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcasts, commenting that they did in fact have some – women-shaped – gaps, a discussion started about who, if anyone, was to blame for systematically leaving women out of the history of philosophy.

One of our authors, Lena, pointed out that it certainly wasn’t the case that a only a few, male, philosophers were to blame. As students, most of us didn’t even ask ourselves why all the ‘classics’ we read were written by men, swept up as we were by the ideals of rationality, the thought that reason is universal and unaffected by gender. Certainly I still believe those things, as a Wollstonecraft scholar would, but I’m no longer so impressed with them that I fail to notice that most of those representants of human ungendered rationality offered to us as undergraduates had beards and penises. It’s no longer something I can overlook.

Yet I still do, regularly. It did not occur to me to propose the inclusion of female philosophers in our history of philosophy service course until my male colleagues suggested it. I did not think Christine de Pizan, whose name I’d been familiar with since childhood, might be a philosopher until I met someone who’d edited a book on her. And then there was Sophie de Grouchy whose book was given to me by a Montreal philosopher. The book’s title was: Lettres sur la Sympathie, Lettres d’amour. I had never heard of her. I doubted this could be a proper philosophy book: love letters?

Thankfully I know better now. The Letters on Sympathy are a philosophical commentary on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which de Grouchy translated into French. The love letters are added because the editor liked them. But who publishes private love letters alongside a work of philosophy? You don’t read Kan’t love notes to his housekeeper at the back of the Critique of Pure Reason, and even Wollstonecraft kept her private letters to Imlay separate from the ones she chose to publish on her travels in Sweden, Denmark and Norway!

These are the sort of mistakes we make, the kind of things we have to look out for. If we really do care about women being reinstated in the history of philosophy, we need to keep reminding each other not to forget, to keep bringing out authors and texts which are kept in the dark, and to state the obvious regularly: yes, she was a philosopher. Yes, you should read her texts, teach them, write about them.

This blog is one of the places where this can be done, for a start. So if there’s someone you’d like to write about, drop us a comment and we’ll get in touch.

A Book for International Women's Day.

Reblogged from Hesperus is Bosphorus:

Routledge just reminded me that my new book was a particularly good fit for today, so here is:

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the greatest philosophers and writers of the Eighteenth century. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Her most celebrated and widely-read work is…

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