From symposium to research community

Last week was the 220th anniversary of the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Lena Halldenius (Lund) and Martina Reuter (Helsinki) organised a one day symposium at Lund University: Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophy and Enlightenment. This blog is a product of our conferencing.

Some of the talks were recorded and we’re hoping to be able to post podcasts at a later stage. In the mean time, here is a list of the papers presented with some abstracts:

Karen O’Brien (Birmingham)

Mary Wollstonecraft, Enlightenment thinker

Martina Reuter (Helsinki and Jyväskylä)

Rousseau, Macaulay and Wollstonecraft on Negative Education

Abstract: In her Letters on Education, Catherine Macaulay adapts J.-J. Rousseau’s notion of negative education, emphasizing that the primary task of education is to protect children from harmful impressions. There is a certain tension in Macaulay’s use of the notion. Her belief in the active power of reason is much stronger than Rousseau’s and she does not seem to realize that Rousseau introduced the notion of negative education as an explicit critique of John Locke’s theory of education. In my presentation I will first examine Macaulay’s adaption of negative education and then, in the second part of the paper, I will argue that Mary Wollstonecraft seems to be less influenced by the idea of negative education than Macaulay. I suggest that Wollstonecraft’s slightly lesser worry about harmful impressions does not primarily follow from her belief in reason, which she shares with Macaulay, but rather from her conception of the imagination. According to Wollstonecraft’s notion of creative imagination, the imagination is not merely passively inflamed by impressions, but also able to create impressions and combine reason with passion.

Sandrine Berges (Bilkent)

Wollstonecraft on the Virtue of Chastity

Abstract: In the Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft offers one of the very few existing philosophical discussions of the virtue of chastity.  I argue that her account is Aristotelian, focusing as it does on the idea that chastity is a firm character trait rather than a natural disposition, and that it is a mean between a vice of excess and one of deficiency. Her account is somewhat complicated by the fact that she explains chastity as a derivative of modesty, not understood as a sexual virtue, but a just understanding of one’s own worth. In that sense her account is very close to an account of modesty offered by Irene McMullin in her 2010 paper. The linking of modesty and chastity enables Wollstonecraft to give an account of chastity different from those of her predecessors, such that a feminist would be comfortable accepting it, but it also raises some potential worries about whether concerns of chastity place an unreasonable burden on women. I will argue that responding to these worries by further developing the account in fact gives us some of the tools we need to combat oppressive prejudices and related practices traditionally born of concerns for chastity.

Alan Coffee (Birkbeck)

Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing of Life

Abstract: The importance of independence is a central and recurring theme within Wollstonecraft’s work. As she uses the term, independence is not equated with contemporary notions of ‘autonomy’ and should not be understood as an individualistic ideal that is in tension with the social and relational aspects of her writing. Rather, independence is a rich and complex concept that not only protects an individual from all forms of arbitrary power, but which requires that all others in society are also protected to a comparable extent. This guarantees political, economic and, crucially, social equality for both men and women. More significantly, the on-going collective input of both sexes on equal terms is required to ensure that the conditions for independence are maintained. Independence, then, demands an effective and extensive social equality which is backed up by a high degree of social cooperation. Understood in this way, independence is a powerful concept in Wollstonecraft’s hands for showing how women’s subjection can be brought to an end.

Lena Halldenius (Lund)

Drawing from the Original Source. Wollstonecraft on Morality and Nature

Abstract: My aim here is to analyze what acting morally means and requires in Wollstonecraft’s thought. This is usefully done partly by identifying what it is that makes moral agency so difficult. I argue that there are three components to Wollstonecraft’s theory of moral agency: an internal intellectual struggle, acting on a universal motive, and the activity of freely disposing of one’s person. The sometimes overwhelming difficulty of acting on the duty to be moral – despite a person’s very best intentions – makes up the stuff of Wollstonecraft’s novels. I will use her novels here to investigate how she lets ‘nature’ and its counterpoint ‘artifice’ serve to show of what this difficulty is made.