Early Modern Women Philosophers

A Case Study

From about the mid-1990s, there has been a concerted effort by scholars both to rehabilitate the works of early modern women philosophers and to integrate at least some of these women into the philosophical canon. These efforts illustrate how a range of different feminist approaches to the history of philosophy can be integrated together.

 

While many contemporary philosophers have little knowledge of the women philosophers of the early modern period, there are in fact good historical records of these women and their works. This fact has made the doxographic task of retrieving these women thinkers a relatively straightforward one, even if labor intensive. O'Neill (1998) catalogs a long list of these women, and her doxographical work has provided a starting point for both expanding the list and interpreting the philosophical works of these women.

 

It is worth considering the context in which these women were writing and what it suggests about their feminist methodology in the history of philosophy. Though anachronistic, it seems appropriate to characterize at least some of these women, along with some of the their male contemporaries, as engaged in a feminist project. Many of these thinkers were self-consciously countering a recognized misogyny in philosophy but, insofar as they deployed philosophical methods, they would seem to reject the view that the problem was intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy itself. While the so-called querelle des femmes had been going on for centuries, the seventeenth century marked a turning point in the debate over the status of women as better or worse than men in virtue of their form or soul. (See Kelly 1988.) Both women and men thinkers of the period advanced egalitarian arguments. So, for instance, Marie De Gournay, in her “On the Equality of Men and Women,”(1622) deployed a skeptical method to argue for the equality of men and women (De Gournay 2002); Anna Maria van Schurman deployed syllogistic argumentation to argue for women's education both by demonstration and as evidence in her Dissertatio Logica (1638) (van Schurman 1998); in her Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1694) Mary Astell applied Descartes's sex-neutral account of the mind (insofar as mind is really distinct from body, rationality is not tied to sex) to argue for women's education (Astell 2002); François Poulain de la Barre in On the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673) also drew on Cartesian principles to argue for the social equality of men and women (Poulain de la Barre 2002) . (Clarke 2013 collects de Gournay, van Schurman and Poulain de la Barre together.) While the methods deployed by these thinkers are different, they all appropriate philosophical methods – skepticism, basic rules of inference, a new metaphysics – different from what was then the dominant Aristotelian paradigm to counter misogynist claims.

 

Contemporary scholars concerned to reintegrate these women into the philosophical canon have tended to adopt a strategy that does not assume that standard philosophical concepts or the canon itself are gender biased. Rather scholars aim (1) to make long out-of-print texts accessible again; (2) to develop interpretations of these texts that (a) bring out their philosophical content and (b) demonstrate the involvement of these women in the philosophical debates of the period. The bibliographical appendix to this entry can direct readers to some recent editions of writings by early modern women. The remainder of this section sketches out one way in which scholars have pursued the second aim, and suggests some others.

 

One of the central themes of early modern philosophy is the reconceptualization of causation. Scholastic philosophy largely understood causation on an Aristotelian model, on which all change was to be explained by a constellation of four causes: final, formal, material and efficient causes. Early modern thinking about causation began with a rejection of final and formal causes. Determining final causes involved a speculation that outstripped human understanding, while formal causes were dismissed as occult qualities, simple assertions that things worked without an intelligible explanation of how they did so. Several canonical figures in early modern philosophy – Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume and Kant – are often situated with respect to one another through their views on causation. In recent years, Malebranche, with his account of occasionalist causation, (a view on which neither bodies nor minds have causal power in themselves, and God is the only efficient cause), has been worked into the story. What Malebranche highlights is that understanding the nature of causation was a live philosophical problem: while there was agreement about dismissing final and formal causation, there was much disagreement about what should replace it, and in particular about the nature of efficient causation. Some early modern women thinkers were very much involved in this debate, and they are just as easily incorporated into the philosophical story as Malebranche. For instance, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, in her 1643 correspondence with him, questions Descartes about the nature of causation between mind and body. She can be read as insisting that an adequate account of causation must be applicable in all causal contexts. Margaret Cavendish, in her Observations on the Experimental Philosophy, develops a vitalist account of causation wherein motion is not transferred from one body to another, but rather one body comes to be in motion through a self-patterning in harmony with another body around it. (The SEP entry on Margaret Cavendish provides a more detailed summary of Cavendish's account of causation, along with guidance for further reading.) While Cavendish's account of causation did not carry the day, vitalism of one form or another was a dominant strand of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is worth noting that vitalism is also a position within contemporary philosophy of biology.

 

A similar strategy for incorporating women into the philosophical canon can be used with respect to such central topics as the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Emilie du Châtelet), free will (Cavendish, Damaris Masham, du Châtelet), and cosmology (Cavendish, Anne Conway, Masham, Mary Astell, du Châtelet; see Lascano (forthcoming)). The SEP entry on du Châtelet contains a helpful discussion on her position on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, as well as an array of secondary sources. The SEP entries on Cavendish, Masham and du Châtelet provide some detail as to their positions regarding free will.

 

However, one can also move to incorporate women into our philosophical history by rethinking the questions through which that history is structured. How the questions are framed influences who is taken to have interesting answers on offer. Within the early modern period, questions in epistemology are often about the nature of reason and rationality, and the limits of the human understanding. While women of the period sometimes address these questions theoretically, more often they are concerned with implications of such answers for training the human mind. That is, they are concerned with matters of education, and they directly relate positions on education to positions on the nature of human understanding and rationality. Already mentioned are the works of Anna Maria van Schurman and Mary Astell, but others including Madeleine de Scudéry and Gabrielle Suchon also wrote on education. While education is not today typically taken to be central to philosophy, a little reflection on the history of philosophy can destabilize this contemporary outlook. Descartes's Discourse on Method for Rightly Conducting Reason (1637) is arguably a work about education; John Locke wrote Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and On the Conduct of the Understanding (1706); and Rousseau's Emile (1762) also concerns education. Equally, education is a central concern of philosophers predating the early modern period (consider Plato in Republic) and after it (consider John Dewey). Reconsidering education as a central question of philosophy can facilitate seeing women thinkers as contributing centrally to philosophical projects.