The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy [1 ed.] 9781315450001, 9781138212756, 9781032496764

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF WOMEN AND EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy is an outstanding reference source for the wide range of philosophical contributions made by women writing in Europe from about 1560 to 1780. It shows the range of genres and methods used by women writing in these centuries in Europe, thus encouraging an expanded understanding of our historical canon. Comprising 46 chapters by a team of contributors from all over the globe, including early career researchers, the Handbook is divided into the following sections: I II III I V

Context Themes A Metaphysics and Epistemology B Natural Philosophy C Moral Philosophy D Social-Political Philosophy Figures State of the Field

The volume is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy who are interested in expanding their understanding of the richness of our philosophical past, including in order to offer expanded, more inclusive syllabi for their students. It is also a valuable resource for those in related fields like gender and women’s studies; history; literature; sociology; history and philosophy of science; and political science. Karen Detlefsen is Vice Provost for Education and Professor of Philosophy and Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is editor of Descartes’ Meditations: A Critical Guide (2013) and co-editor with Jacqueline Broad of Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays (2017). Lisa Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts at McGill University. From 2002 to 2022, she was professor in the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. She is translator and editor of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (2007), co-editor of Emotions and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (2013), editor of Pleasure: A History (2018), and co-editor of Modern Philosophy: An Anthology (2022).

ROUTLEDGE H A N DBOOKS IN PHILOSOPH Y

Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed, and important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems, themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research. All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned, and written by leading scholars in the field. Carefully edited and organized, Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy provide indispensable reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of new and exciting topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to textbooks, anthologies, and research-orientated publications. Also available: THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INDIAN BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY Edited by William Edelglass, Pierre-Julien Harter and Sara McClintock THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF BODILY AWARENESS Edited by Adrian J.T. Alsmith and Matthew R. Longo THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF AUTONOMY Edited by Ben Colburn THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF FORGIVENESS Edited by Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF IMPLICIT COGNITION Edited by J. Robert Thompson THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF WOMEN AND EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY Edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeHandbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF WOMEN AND EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY

Edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro

Designed cover image: St Catherine Among the Philosophers, oil on canvas by Ippolito Scarsella (1551–1620). Public domain, image kindly supplied by the National Museum of Sweden. First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Taylor & Francis The right of Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro to be identified as the author[/s] of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-138-21275-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-49676-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-45000-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of Contributors

x

1 Introduction Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro

1

PART I

Context 11 2 Women and Institutions in Early Modern Europe: Making Space for Female Scholarship Carol Pal

13

3 Canon, Gender, and Historiography Lisa Shapiro

29

4 Method, Genre, and the Scope of Philosophy Karen Detlefsen

41

PART II

Themes 57 Section A: Metaphysics and Epistemology

59

5 God, Freedom, and Perfection in Conway, Astell, and du Châtelet Marcy P. Lascano

61

6 Vitalistic Causation: More, Conway, Cavendish Tad M. Schmaltz

74

v

Contents

7 It’s All Alive! Cavendish and Conway against Dualism Marleen Rozemond and Alison Simmons

87

8 Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Catharine Cockburn on Matter Emily Thomas

112

9 Skepticism Martina Reuter

127

10 Ways of Knowing David Cunning

140

PART II

Section B: Natural Philosophy

155

11 Space and Time Geoffrey Gorham

157

12 Method and Explanation Anne-Lise Rey

164

13 Physics and Optics: Agnesi, Bassi, Du Châtelet Bryce Gessell and Andrew Janiak

174

14 Women, Medicine, and the Life Sciences Gideon Manning

187

15 Theories of Perception Louise Daoust

200

PART II

Section C: Moral Philosophy

213

16 Early Modern Women and the Metaphysics of Free Will Deborah Boyle

215

17 Friendship as a Means to Freedom Allauren Samantha Forbes

228

18 Managing Mockery: Reason, Passions and the Good Life among Early Modern Women Philosophers Amy M. Schmitter

vi

240

Contents

19 Virtue and Moral Obligation Sandrine Bergès

254

20 Men, Women, Equality, and Difference Marguerite Deslauriers

267

PART II

Section D: Social-Political Philosophy

281

21 Autonomy and Marriage Kelin Emmett

283

22 Slavery and Servitude in Seventeenth-Century Feminism: Arcangela Tarabotti and Gabrielle Suchon Hasana Sharp

297

23 Race and Gender in Early Modern Philosophy: How Amo and Astell Wrote behind the Veil Margaret Watkins

311

24 Early Modern European Women and the Philosophy of Education: Van Schurman, Pascal, Maintenon and Astell Michaela Manson

324

25 Critical Perspectives on Religion Charlotte Sabourin

337

26 Beauty, Gender, and Power from Marinelli to Wollstonecraft Patrick Ball

350

27 Theories of the State Alan M. S. J. Coffee

361

PART III

Figures 379 28 Italian Women Philosophers in the Sixteenth Century: From a Critique of the Aristotelian Gender Paradigm to an Affirmation of the Excellence of Women Sandra Plastina 29 Teresa de Ávila on Self-Knowledge Jorge Secada

381 396

vii

Contents

30 (Self-)Portraits between Two Gowns: Marie de Gournay Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin

409

31 Madeleine de Scudéry: Moral Philosophy in a Gendered Key John J. Conley, S.J.

422

32 The Unorthodox Margaret Cavendish Tom Stoneham and Peter West

435

33 Anne Conway Christia Mercer and Olivia Branscum

450

34 Gabrielle Suchon on Women’s Freedom Julie Walsh

465

35 The Socratic Pedagogy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica

479

36 Mary Astell (1666–1731) Jacqueline Broad

493

37 Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn: Agency, Virtue, and Fitness in their Moral Philosophies Patricia Sheridan 38 Du Châtelet and the Philosophy of Physics Katherine Brading 39 The Real Consequences of Imaginary Things: Louise Dupin’s Critique of Sexist Historiography Sonja Ruud and Rebecca Wilkin

506 519

533

40 Catharine Macaulay’s Philosophy and Her Influence on Mary Wollstonecraft Karen Green

546

41 Phillis Wheatley and the Limits of the History of Philosophy Aaron Garrett

558

42 Mary Wollstonecraft Lena Halldenius

571

43 Remorse and Moral Progress in Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy 584 Getty L. Lustila

viii

Contents

44 Mary Shepherd (1777–1847) Antonia LoLordo

597

45 Women and Philosophy in the German Context Corey W. Dyck

610

PART IV

State of the Field

621

46 What Difference? The Renaissance of Women Philosophers Sarah Hutton

623

Index 631

ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Patrick Ball studied for his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote a dissertation on the relationship between individual freedom and social structures in the thought of early modern women philosophers. He now teaches high school in Kyoto, Japan. Sandrine Bergès is Professor of Philosophy at Bilkent University in Ankara. Her publications include Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy (2019, with Eric Schliesser), The Wollstonecraftian Mind (2019, with Eileen Hunt Botting and Alan Coffee), Women and Autonomy (2018, with Alberto Siani), The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (2016, with Alan Coffee), A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics (2016), and The Routledge Companion to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2015). Deborah Boyle is Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, USA. She is author of Mary Shepherd: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2023), The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Descartes on Innate Ideas (Continuum, 2009); she edited Margaret Cavendish: Philosophical Letters, Abridged (Hackett Publishing, 2021) and Lady Mary Shepherd: Selected Writings (Imprint Academic, 2018); and she has published articles and book chapters on Cavendish, Shepherd, Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Descartes, and Hume. Professor Boyle is also editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. Katherine Brading is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. She specializes in philosophy of physics from the late sixteenth century to the present day. Her book Emilie Du Châtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science was first published in 2019 by Routledge. Olivia Branscum is Postdoctoral Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. Olivia specializes in the history of early modern philosophy and maintains particular interests in Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, panpsychism in the early modern period, varieties of ontological monism, and the philosophy of art. Jacqueline Broad  is Professor of Philosophy and Head of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University, Australia. She is author of Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (2002), A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (with Karen Green, 2009), and The Philosophy of Mary Astell (2015). x

Contributors

Adriana Clavel-Vázquez is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Tilburg University. Her main research focuses on embodied imagination, the role imagination plays in our social interactions and our engagement with art, and the interaction of ethical and aesthetic values. Alan M. S. J. Coffee teaches Global Ethics and Human Values at King’s College London. He is author of Mary Wollstonecraft (Polity, 2023) and co-editor of the Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019). Rev. John J. Conley, S.J. holds the Henry J. Knott Chair in Philosophy and Theology at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore. A specialist in women philosophers in early modern France, he has previously published Adoration and Annihilation: The Convent Philosophy of Port-Royal (2009) and The Other Pascals: The Philosophy of Jacqueline Pascal, Gilberte Pascal Périer, and Marguerite Périer (2019). David Cunning is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. His primary research is on free will, the history of conceptions of mind and body, the nature of cognition, the rhetoric of inquiry, and agency and authority. He is author of Cavendish (Routledge), Argument and Persuasion in Descartes’ Meditations (Oxford), and Descartes (Routledge). Louise Daoust is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Eckerd College. Her research focuses on issues in the history and philosophy of psychology, and the philosophy of perception. Marguerite Deslauriers is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. She is author of Aristotle on Definition (Brill, 2007) and Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics (OUP, 2022), and co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics (CUP, 2013). She is currently working on a short monograph on Lucrezia Marinella, to appear in the Cambridge Elements series Women in the History of Philosophy (ed. Jacqueline Broad), and a volume of translations of pro-woman works from the Renaissance, Equality and Superiority: Texts from Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. Karen Detlefsen is Vice Provost for Education and Professor of Philosophy and Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She publishes on a wide range of figures in the early modern period across metaphysics, natural philosophy, and value theory. She is editor of Descartes’ Meditations: A Critical Guide (2013) and co-editor with Jacqueline Broad of Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays (2017). Corey W. Dyck  is Professor of Philosophy at Western University. He is author of Kant and Rational Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2014), translator and editor of Early Modern German Philosophy: 1690–1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), and editor of the collection Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2020). He has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, and the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he was also recently an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow. Kelin Emmett is an Instructor in the Department of Philosophy at Langara College. She was previously post-doctoral fellow with the SSHRC Partnership Development project ‘New Narratives in the History of Philosophy.’ Her research and teaching interests are in ethics and social and political philosophy, and she is especially interested in examining the social and material conditions for autonomy and how these have been theorized historically. xi

Contributors

Allauren Samantha Forbes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and faculty in Gender and Social Justice at McMaster University in Canada. Her research focuses on the feminist works of early modern women philosophers such as Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de Scudéry, Mary Astell, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at John Jay College. He received his Ph. D. at the GC-CUNY and B.A. at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). His research and teaching interests cover Early Modern Philosophy (focusing, in particular, on Novohispanic Philosophy), Contemporary Latin American Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Feminist Philosophy, and Philosophy of Race. His work has appeared in Philosophy Compass, Synthese, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Hypatia, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society and Critical Philosophy of Race. He is currently working on a book manuscript on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s villancicos.  Aaron Garrett teaches at Boston University. He works on the history of modern philosophy, and particularly the history of ethics. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Modern Philosophy. Bryce Gessell  is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Virginia University, where he teaches philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and the history of science. His research is on the foundations of psychology and neuroscience and on Christian Wolff. Geoffrey Gorham is Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College and Resident Fellow at the University of Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. His articles on contemporary and early modern science and metaphysics have appeared in journals such as Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the History of Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and Philosophy of Science. Karen Green is Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is author of A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, with Jacqueline Broad (Cambridge University Press, 2009). She recently edited The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (Oxford University Press, 2019) and her most recent book is Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment (Routledge, 2020). Lena Halldenius  is Professor of Human Rights Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She is a political philosopher and author of Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism (London, 2015) and numerous essays on Wollstonecraft’s political writings. Sarah Hutton  is Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK. She has published extensively on women in the history of philosophy. Her publications include Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, and Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Historical Context (co-edited with Sabrina Ebbersmeyer) as well as articles on Margaret Cavendish, Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Macaulay, Émilie du Chatelet, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Formerly director of International Archives of the History of Ideas, she is currently President of the International Society for Intellectual History. Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University, where he co-leads Project Vox with Dr. Liz Milewicz. He is author of Newton as Philosopher (Cambridge, 2008) and Newton (Wiley, 2015), co-editor of Interpreting Newton (Cambridge, 2012), and editor of Space: A xii

Contributors

History (Oxford, 2020). He is presently finishing a book on Émilie Du Châtelet and the formation of the early modern European canon in the eighteenth century. Marcy P. Lascano is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. She is co-editor with Eileen O’Neil of Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought (2019), and author of The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway: Monism, Vitalism, and Self-Motion (2023). Antonia LoLordo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. She is co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Modern Philosophy. Her publications include Mary Shepherd (Elements on Women in the History of Philosophy; Cambridge, 2022), Mary Shepherd’s Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (Oxford, 2020), Locke’s Moral Man (Oxford, 2012), and Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007), in addition to papers on a variety of topics. Getty L. Lustila is Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University. His research concerns eighteenth-century European moral philosophy. Getty also writes and teaches Indigenous philosophy. He is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Gideon Manning is Associate Professor of History of Medicine and Humanities at the CedarsSinai Medical Center, USA, where he is also Director, Program in the History of Medicine. His research focuses on the history of medicine, science, and philosophy, especially in the early modern period. His most recent publications include “Circulation and the New Physiology” (2022) and the volume Collected Wisdom of the Early Modern Scholar (2022), which he co-edited with Anna Marie Roos. Michaela Manson  is an Extending New Narratives Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She received her doctorate from the University of Toronto (2023). Her research focuses on early modern philosophy of mind, moral psychology, education, and friendship. Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, editor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts, and co-editor with Melvin Rogers of Oxford New Histories of Philosophy. She created and directs Just Ideas, a program in Metropolitan Detention Center, a maximum-security federal prison. Carol Pal teaches history at Bennington College. She is author of Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize by the American Historical Association. She is currently editing a sourcebook on the history of medicine, and preparing a volume on Marie du Moulin for the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Her next monograph is an analysis of one of Samuel Hartlib’s manuscripts in the British Library. Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin  teaches at the Faculty of philosophy of Jean Moulin-Lyon III University (France). Specialist in Descartes and Malebranche, she provided the first complete annotated edition of the feminist Cartesian Poulain de la Barre (Vrin, 2011). She is currently working on women philosophers (Elisabeth de Bohême, Marie de Gournay), editing with D. Kolesnik-Antoine, Élisabeth de Bohème face à Descartes: deux philosophes? (Vrin, 2014). It leads her research to the question of the corpus and the historiography of modern philosophy. Recently, she directed a special issue of the journal Dix-septième siècle (Repenser la philosophie du XVIIe siècle. xiii

Contributors

Canons et corpus, no. 3–2022). Her latest book is entitled Pensées du corps et différences des sexes à l’époque moderne (ENS-Editions, 2020). Sandra Plastina  is Associate Professor of History of Philosophy in the Department of Education, Culture and Society (DICES) of the University of Calabria. Her work focuses on the history of early modern philosophy, broadly understood from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Her research interests include Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, and women writers and philosophers, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Since June 2021 promoter of a European research partnership MUSAE (Mulieris utopica sapientia europea) among Università della Calabria, Université de Tours, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad Siviglia, Istituto del Lessico Intellettuale Europeo (CNR-Roma). Martina Reuter is Docent of Philosophy and Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She specializes in the Cartesian tradition with a focus on the feminist philosophy of François Poulain de la Barre and in Enlightenment discourses on gender. Her publications include Mary Wollstonecraft (Elements on Women in the History of Philosophy; Cambridge, 2022). Anne-Lise Rey  is Full Professor in the Philosophy Department, Nanterre University, Paris, France. She works on Leibniz, Newton, and Emilie du Châtelet. She has published numerous articles on the natural philosophy of the classical age. She is also working on the historiographical issues of natural philosophy in this period. She has edited Méthode et Histoire (Classiques Garnier, 2014), a French translation commented of the correspondence between Leibniz and De Volder: La correspondance entre Leibniz et De Volder. L’ambivalence de l’action (Vrin, 2016), What Does It Mean to Be an Empiricist? (Springer, Boston Studies, 2018), and soon will be published Philosophies: féminin pluriel, (Classiques Garnier, 2023). Marleen Rozemond’s research focuses on the material-immaterial divide in the early modern period, and she is currently interested in the role of dualism in pro-woman arguments in the period. She is author of Descartes’s Dualism (Harvard University Press, 1998) and various articles on Suárez, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and the Clarke-Collins correspondence. She is Professor at the University of Toronto. Sonja Ruud holds a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute. She began researching Louise Dupin’s “Work on Women” in 2011 through an undergraduate research fellowship with Dr. Rebecca Wilkin (Pacific Lutheran University), and continued this work for ten years in parallel to her graduate studies in Anthropology. Originally from Washington State, Sonja is currently based in Brussels. Charlotte Sabourin  is faculty member in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Douglas College. Her work engages with feminist interpretations of Kant and with seventeenthto eighteenth-century feminist philosophers. Tad M. Schmaltz is Professor and James B. and Grace J. Nelson Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has published articles and book chapters on various topics in early modern philosophy, and is the author of Malebranche’s Theory of the Soul (1996), Radical Cartesianism (2002), Descartes on Causation (2008), Early Modern Cartesianisms (2017), and The Metaphysics of the Material World: Suárez, Descartes, Spinoza (2020). xiv

Contributors

Amy M. Schmitter  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. She is executive editor and board secretary for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and recently stepped down from the co-editorship of Hume Studies. She specializes in the history of early modern philosophy, with particular interests in mind, metaphysics, passions and sentiments, and sense-perception, as well as in the philosophy of art. Jorge Secada is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is author of Cartesian Metaphysics (Cambridge, 2000), Meditaciones sobre el Perú (Huacachina, 2023), and several articles on early modern philosophy. He is also a regular contributor to public discussion in his native country, Perú. Hasana Sharp is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. She is author of Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago, 2011) as well as articles on Spinoza, political theory, feminism, and environmental thought. She is currently completing a manuscript on Spinoza and ideas of slavery. Patricia Sheridan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. She works on early modern philosophy, with a specialization in women philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her work centers mainly around moral philosophy in the period. She has published articles on Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy and on the moral philosophy of John Locke. Lisa Shapiro  is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of Philosophy at McGill University and was until October 2022 Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on accounts of human nature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is author of numerous articles on early modern philosophy, and has edited multiple volumes including with Marcy Lascano the teaching anthology Modern Philosophy (2022), Pleasure: A History (2018), Emotions and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (2013) with Martin Pickavé, and she is translator and editor of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth and René Descartes (2007). She is PI on an SSHRC Partnership Grant Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy (2020–2027). Alison Simmons  is the Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She works on early modern theories of mind and body, including in the philosophical works of women. She is also Co-founder of Embedded EthiCS@Harvard. Tom Stoneham is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and President of the International Berkeley Society. Recent articles include ‘Berkeley and Collier’ in the Oxford Handbook of Berkeley (OUP, 2022) and ‘Locke on Cognitive Bias’ (with Elisabeth Thorson) in The Lockean Mind (Routledge, 2022). He also writes on perception, dreaming, and consciousness. Emily Thomas is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. She is author of Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (2018, Oxford University Press), The ­Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2020), and Victoria Welby (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Julie Walsh is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on theories of human and divine freedom in the early modern period. She has a special interest in what women in that era were writing about the conditions for women’s freedom. xv

Contributors

Margaret Watkins is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at Providence College. She specializes in early modern ethics and aesthetics, with a particular focus on the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. She is President of the International Hume Society and author of the Philosophical Progress of Hume’s Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She has published articles on Hume’s ethics, philosophical psychology, and aesthetics in journals such as Hume Studies, Inquiry, and History of Philosophy Quarterly as well as articles on Montaigne and on the resources of Jane Austen’s novels for ethical theory and pedagogy. Rebecca Wilkin is Professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University where she teaches in the French & Francophone Studies and the International Honors Programs. She has published on Descartes, Cartesianism, and early modern women philosophers (Elisabeth of Bohemia, Gabrielle Suchon) and is currently interested in how early modern feminist philosophy (François Poulain de la Barre, Louise Dupin) influenced the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. With Angela Hunter (University of Arkansas at Little Rock), she has produced the first English translation of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women (1745–1750), which they reconstructed from manuscripts (published by OUP). Peter West  is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities in London. His work focuses on early modern theories of mind and cognition, in figures like Cavendish, Shepherd, Amo, and Berkeley. His research also covers the history of analytic philosophy, especially the work of Susan Stebbing.

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1 INTRODUCTION Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro

This handbook participates in a broad-based project of expanding our understanding of our philosophical past by recovering the works of hitherto neglected philosophers. Historians of philosophy have become increasingly invested in this Recovery Project. Our focus here is on one piece of this larger project: the philosophical work of European women of the early modern period. Our primary goal is to introduce advanced undergraduate majors in philosophy, graduate students, and scholars in the discipline (both those working in the early modern period, and more broadly) to the extraordinary richness of the philosophy produced by women working in Europe from about 1560–1780 (more on this period below). But in the process of realizing this introduction, we have another goal, namely, to expose the breadth of philosophical themes tackled by the women in this era – many of which have been unfairly sidelined in our discipline’s history – as well as the range of genres and methods employed by women philosophers as they investigated these philosophical themes. This volume approaches these goals through its organization. It opens with three chapters (Chapters 2–4) that grapple with historical context (Carol Pal), canon and historiography (Lisa Shapiro), and method and genre (Karen Detlefsen) in order to make clear the range of obstacles women of this period faced in their production of philosophy, how they grappled with those obstacles, and thus, the ways in which the contemporary philosophers ought to approach their work to appreciate fully their philosophical contributions. The next section deals with Themes, and this section is further subdivided into four subsections – Metaphysics and Epistemology (Chapters 5–10), Natural Philosophy (Chapters 11–15), Moral Philosophy (Chapters 16–20), and Social and Political Philosophy (Chapters 21–27). Each chapter in the Themes Section deals with a small number of philosophers writing on the topic at hand. One overall goal of the chapters is to show how women philosophers engaged both with philosophical themes we have tended to associate with the early modern period (e.g. causation, physics, freedom, and the like) and with philosophical themes we have tended to forget or treat less seriously in our history of philosophy (e.g. marriage, beauty and embodiment, friendship, and the like). A second goal of this section is to expand our list of women philosophers to include not only those represented in the next section of this volume but also many others. This next section (Chapters 28–45) includes chapters that focus on specific figures of the period, and these figures were chosen for their current status as philosophers who have enjoyed relatively significant prominence in scholarly activity of the past few decades. Some – Cavendish, Du Châtelet, Wollstonecraft, for example – can fairly be thought of as already canonized. Others

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-1

1

Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro

are well on their way. Two of the chapters discuss several women practicing philosophy in Italy (Chapter 28) and Germany (Chapter 45) in this period. We should note that the choices made for figures to be included in this section were anything but easy, and our expectation and hope is that a volume similar to this one published in a decade or so would have an exponentially more expansive list of names in such a section. That said, one can also hope that recognizing and appreciating the role of women in the history of philosophy of early modern Europe might make a volume such as this one redundant in a decade or so, were such philosophers to be thoroughly integrated into our history of philosophy. Our volume closes with an eye to the future, how the current focus on women philosophers in early modern Europe can be seen as a modern-day Renaissance, and where we might go from here. This is “What Difference: The Renaissance of Women Philosophers” (Chapter 46) written by a scholar – Sarah Hutton – who was among the first visionaries who broke open the field of study that centered the study of women philosophers in early modern Europe. To understand much of the thinking behind this handbook, and the expansion project of which it is a part, there is no better place to start than its title. There are four key concepts in play in that title: the early modern period; the geographical center of Europe; the place of women in the philosophy of that time and place; and the very idea of philosophy. In this Introduction, we discuss each of these key concepts.

1.1  ‘Early Modern’ and Issues of Periodization Historians of philosophy and contemporary philosophers alike are accustomed to referring to the “Early Modern Period.” Philosophy curricula often have courses in Early Modern Philosophy. The temporal boundaries of the period are thought to be roughly 1560–1780. The start date allows us to include such thinkers as Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais, and in particular, his Apology for Raymond Sebond, are often identified as reintroducing skepticism and thereby influencing shifts in epistemology. And the end date marks Kant as the culmination of an intellectual historical movement. These dates also partly overlap with an event of a sort: the Scientific Revolution, which became an organizing idea that was especially powerful near the middle of the twentieth century, during the development of the professional discipline of the History of Science. According to the general account developed around this idea, the early modern period was key – perhaps singularly so – in the history of science, a history which stretches for much of the duration of human history itself. This period was deemed so important because it marked an era of revolution, of rapid and wholesale change, in which science as we now know it emerged from science in its Medieval Scholastic form. The high points of this transformative change, according to the narrative of the Scientific Revolution, are as follows. Copernicus was the starting point and affected a revolution in astronomy which was incompatible with the then-reigning Aristotelian physics. Galileo attempted to address the ensuing crisis with his work in mechanics and with his attempt to develop a new physics to supplant Aristotle’s, and which could account for the Copernican proposal of a moving earth. Newton synthesized the advances of these early revolutionaries (while also assimilating Kepler’s laws of planetary motion), and the result was modern science – observationally-based, grounded in mathematically-expressed laws, and completing the “mechanization of the world picture” (Dijksterhuis 1950). These four figures along with a handful of others – typically Tycho, Bacon, Vesalius, Harvey, Descartes, Leibniz, and Boyle – form the standard cast of characters in the Scientific Revolution narrative. Of course, as we now understand it, this history is really one of natural philosophy, and this narrative has come under significant fire in recent centuries for a range of reasons; nonetheless, that it was such a powerful historiographical theme for some decades

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Introduction

helps to explain why the “early modern period” in Europe, and scientific revolution that tracked that period, is anchored so firmly in our philosophical history. There are, however, reasons to take pause when thinking about the notion of the “early modern” period. First, scholars of European Literature and History mark the period differently, having the early modern period start with the Protestant Reformation, say, and end in the early eighteenth century before the new literary form of the novel is perfected and a more secular culture of the Enlightenment takes hold. Second, the scope of the philosophical historical period, in highlighting the real scientific achievements of Galileo, Descartes, Harvey, Boyle, and Newton and their philosophical impact, discounts the philosophical impact of critical transformative social and political events in Europe that include the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, the Fronde, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. Many essays in this volume do respect the standard scope of the philosophical early modern period. However, some essays, such as Gideon Manning’s “Women, Medicine, and the Life Sciences,” Marguerite Deslauriers’ “Men, Women, Equality and Difference,” and Sandra Plastina’s “Italian Women Philosophers in the Sixteenth Century: from a critique of the Aristotelian gender paradigm to an affirmation of the excellence of women,” consider philosophical work earlier in the sixteenth century. Other essays consider figures writing after 1780, including Karen Green’s “Catharine Macaulay’s philosophy and her influence on Mary Wollstonecraft,” Lena Halldenius’ “Mary Wollstonecraft,” Aaron Garrett’s “Phillis Wheatley and the Limits of the History of Philosophy,” Getty L. Lustila’s “Remorse and Moral Progress in Sophie de Grouchy,” Corey W. Dyck’s “Women and Philosophy in the German Context,” and Antonia LoLordo’s “Mary Shepherd.” Sandrine Bergès, in her “Virtue and Moral Obligation,” extends beyond the typical scope of the period at both ends, discussing Christine de Pizan at the early end and Wollstonecraft at the later one. What defines the Early Modern Period as it is articulated in this volume? We have left the periodization itself untheorized. However, one way to think about the early modern period is in terms of the development in Europe of new institutions and modes for engaging in intellectual activity. Carol Pal details some of these changes in her “Women and Institutions in Early Modern Europe.” Michaela Manson’s chapter “Early Modern European Women and the Philosophy of Education: van Schurman, Pascal, Maintenon and Astell” touches on changes in educational institutions, and Charlotte Sabourin’s chapter “Critical Perspectives on Religion” touches on religious institutions. Some chapters on individual women also detail how the women on whom they focus fit into these changing institutions. These include the chapters on Margaret Cavendish by Tom Stoneham and Peter West, on Louise Dupin, by Rebecca Wilkin and Sonja Ruud, and on Phillis Wheatley, by Aaron Garrett. Another way to think about this period is in terms of the shape of the answers to philosophical questions that come to be central in the period. Some of these are the topics in metaphysics and epistemology that frame the canonical narrative of the period. Several thematic chapters demonstrate how women thinkers engage with these familiar topics even while they intervene in these discussions in original and as yet underexplored ways. See for instance these chapters: “God, Freedom, and Perfection in Conway, Astell, and Du Châtelet” by Marcy P. Lascano, “It’s all Alive! Cavendish and Conway against Dualism” by Marleen Rozemond and Alison Simmons (on the metaphysics of the human being), “Causation” by Tad M. Schmaltz, “Cavendish, Conway, and Cockburn on Matter” by Emily Thomas, “Skepticism” by Martina Reuter, “Ways of Knowing” by David Cunning, “Theories of Perception” by Louise Daoust, and “Early Modern Women and the Metaphysics of Free Will” by Deborah Boyle. Additional discussion of these canonical topics can be found in the chapters dedicated to several individual women philosophers, including Jorge Secada’s “Teresa de Ávila on Self-Knowledge,” Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando

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Gallegos-Ordorica’s “The Socratic Pedagogy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” “The Unorthodox Margaret Cavendish” by Tom Stoneham and Peter West, “Anne Conway” by Christia Mercer and Olivia Branscum, and “Mary Shepherd” by Antonia LoLordo. In the late twentieth century, this period also has been characterized by the particular attention it gave to natural philosophy and the emergence of more specialized sciences. A set of thematic chapters show women’s contributions to debates around the nature of space and time, scientific method and explanation, as well as to emerging theories of biological life and health, and to physics and the emerging science of optics. See these chapters: “Space and Time” by Geoffrey Gorham, “Method and Explanation” by Anne-Lise Rey, “Women, Medicine, and the Life Sciences” by Gideon Manning, and “Physics and Optics: Agnesi, Bassi, Du Châtelet” by Andrew Janiak and Bryce Gessell. Additional discussion can be found in the chapter on Émilie Du Châtelet by Katherine Brading. Philosophers of the period also discuss topics in moral philosophy. More often than not the moral philosophy of the period is a virtue ethics. And women are no exception here. Sandrine Bergès’ chapter, and Amy M. Schmitter’s “Managing Mockery: Reason, Passions and the Good Life among Early Modern Women Philosophers” address overarching issues in women’s theorizing about virtue ethics. However, just as with the topics in metaphysics and epistemology mentioned above, women’s contributions are distinctive, as is evident in the title of Amy M. Schmitter’s contribution. Jacqueline Broad’s “Mary Astell,” Patricia Sheridan’s “Agency, Virtue, and Fitness in the Moral Philosophies of Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn,” John J. Conley S.J.’s “Madeleine de Scudéry: Moral Philosophy in a Gendered Key,” and Getty L. Lustila’s paper on Sophie de Grouchy each show how individual women philosophers bring new insight to fundamental topics in moral philosophy. In reading about women thinkers of the period, and men thinking about the status of women, we discover a central concern with equality and difference as Marguerite Deslauriers details in her chapter. Sandra Plastina’s paper on Italian women enriches the context of these discussions. This topic not only is at the center of discussions of the metaphysics of sexual difference, but it also informs discussions of both moral and personal autonomy as it is realized in the social institutions that define women as of lesser status. The discussions of Kelin Emmett in “Autonomy and Marriage” make evident the link between women’s critical discussions of marriage and the development of the concept of autonomy. Michaela Manson’s chapter on the philosophy of education shows how educational institutions are sites both for asserting women’s fundamental metaphysical equality with men and for addressing conditions of inequality through the cultivation of reason. Allauren Samantha Forbes’ “Friendship as a Means to Freedom” demonstrates how discussions of friendship forge new ways of understanding individual power. Patrick Bell’s “Beauty, Gender, and Power from Marinelli to Wollstonecraft” argues how the feminized institutions of beauty are used to leverage power. These themes are also reflected in the discussions of particular women, for instance, in Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin’s “(Self-) portraits between two gowns: Marie de Gournay,” which thematizes the gap between a woman’s self-understanding as intrinsically powerful and the way the social world positions her; and in Julie Walsh’s “Gabrielle Suchon on Women’s Freedom.” Many women of the period frame their discussions of women’s condition in terms of slavery and servitude, without directly referencing the clearly more violent enslavement of African peoples. Hasana Sharp discusses the intellectual context of the use of those terms in “Slavery and Servitude in 17th Century Feminism: Arcangela Tarabotti and Gabrielle Suchon.” These discussions of equality and difference intersect with the social upheavals of the period, and so lead naturally to discussions of political philosophy. Alan M.S.J. Coffee’s “Theories of the State” surveys women’s contributions to how to think about political community. These ideas, and their intersection with moral philosophy are explored further in Karen Green’s chapter on Catharine Macaulay and Lena Halldenius’ chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft. 4

Introduction

1.2  ‘European’ and Marking the Geographical Focus No matter which events or topics we take as most defining, the Early Modern period is rooted in historical events that are associated with the European continent. That is, the periodization that is typically used in academic philosophy, and that is at the core of this volume, makes sense most obviously (and perhaps even exclusively) in a European context. This may seem obvious, but all too often it goes without saying. If we take “European” to be a term strictly about geography, focusing on thinkers from Europe might seem unproblematic, and in some senses it is unproblematic. The figures covered in this volume lived and worked in Europe for most, if not all, of their lives. Nonetheless, we think it is important to make that geographical focus explicit. If we recognize, as we should, that philosophy is practiced globally, including in the years represented by this volume, then were we to center traditions other than the European tradition, the historical events central to those traditions might well give rise to radically different periodizations. As such, it is critical that we acknowledge that the significance of years 1560–1780 has been defined in reference to one geographical place, namely Europe. Furthermore, there are at least two ways in which this volume, as a volume focused on Europe, is unusual. First, traditional histories of early modern philosophy do not even focus on all of Europe, but rather on intellectuals in a handful of countries: France, the Netherlands, England, Germany, and Scotland. There is little mention of the philosophical work going on in Italy and Spain, let alone the Nordic countries. A truly European philosophy would embrace the whole of intellectual work across the whole continent. We start this work here, with discussions of Italian women, German women, and a Spanish and a Novohispanic woman. Chapters discussing Italian women include: Gideon Manning’s, Marguerite Deslauriers’, Hasana Sharp’s, and Sandra Plastina’s chapters; Corey W. Dyck’s paper introduces German women; Jorge Secada discusses a Spanish philosopher, and Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica discuss a philosopher who lived and wrote in New Spain, what is now Mexico. However, even this broadening of geographical perspective is too simple, for the years represented by the “early modern” of the title were ones of significant global travel and exploration, including travel and exploration by Europeans. These global movements included the chapters of European colonization and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, both with racism at their core. Events in Europe thus impacted other global regions. This interaction, including the connections between colonialism, slavery, and racism, is reflected in Margaret Watkins’ “Race and Gender in Early Modern Philosophy: How Amo and Astell Wrote behind the Veil” and Aaron Garrett’s “Phillis Wheatley and the Limits of the History of Philosophy.” Both Anton Amo and Phillis Wheatley were displaced African philosophers. They may have lived many years in Europe, and may have produced much intellectual work while living and thinking in Europe, but their identities are more complex than being simply construed as “European.” And Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the focus of the chapter by Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica, had significant ties to Europe, even while being based in a colony and part Nahuatl. These figures immediately problematize the often-unspoken assumption that the history of philosophy is a history of European philosophy. These considerations intimate that there is not necessarily a unified European philosophy, and this point has been undertheorized (though for one example of extended discussion on a closely related theme, see Appiah 2016).

1.3 “Women” As noted at the beginning of this Introduction, with its focus on early modern European women, this volume contributes to the Recovery Project, a project that aims to recover, write about, and 5

Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro

disseminate the ideas of women with an eye to gaining a fuller understanding of our philosophical history. Though this Recovery Project is now several decades old, it is in many respects in early stages. First, while several women philosophers of the past have received significant scholarly attention – for instance, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Mary Shepherd—there are many, many more with whom scholars are only starting to engage and still others to be re-discovered. Many chapters in this volume include some of the first (or very few) scholarly philosophical engagements in English with the following figures: Maria Gondola, Camilla Greghetta Erculiani, Margherita Sarrocchi, Louise Dupin, Frances Reynolds, Marguerite Buffet, and Olivia Sabuco. Second, the Recovery Project began to get a grip in the history of philosophy by noting the connection between newly rediscovered women and canonical or well-known male philosophers: Elisabeth corresponded with Descartes, Conway was connected to Cambridge Platonists and Henry More in particular, Masham corresponded with Leibniz, Du Châtelet translated Newton into French, and Shepherd targeted Hume and Berkeley. However, scholarship has moved from treating these women as ancillary to canonical male figures to recognizing them as philosophers in their own right, with their own agendas and views. Occasionally in this volume, an author draws on the philosophy of a male thinker to highlight a point made in their chapter. However, where men are included, they are so in order to illuminate something about the women’s philosophies. One exception here is Watkins’ comparison of Mary Astell and Anton Amo to make a point about double-consciousness. The vast majority of the papers in this volume focus exclusively on the work of women thinkers. Third, as we detailed above, in focusing on the work of women philosophers, we can discover innovative philosophical perspectives on familiar themes from early modern European philosophy. It is also often the case that women philosophers have chosen to focus on different philosophical questions, ones which have fallen out of fashion in part because of the dominance of the canonical history of philosophy. Often, as several papers in this volume make clear, the philosophical interests of many of these women are intimately connected to their lived experience as women, a connection that inflects their philosophical writing in a variety of important ways. This has hopefully come out in the sketches of the topics covered by the chapters in this volume. It is perhaps worth highlighting one theme that emerges again and again – women aim to articulate and to theorize their position as authors, with associated authority, even while they are deprived of authority in their social situations. That is, these authors are not only aware of their complicated positions of epistemic authority, but they also make a point of inserting their position into their writing. Margaret Watkins’ paper on Amo and Astell, and Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin’s chapter on Marie le Jars de Gournay are explicit about this point. But it is also addressed in Michaela Manson’s chapter, John J. Conley S.J.’s paper on Madeleine de Scudéry, Jacqueline Broad’s paper on Mary Astell, Rebecca Wilkin’s and Sonja Ruud’s “The Real Consequences of Imaginary Things: Louise Dupin’s Critique of Sexist Historiography,” and Lena Halldenius’ chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft. Karen Detlefsen’s “Method, Genre and the Scope of Philosophy” argues that figures such as Cavendish and Du Châtelet play with the genre of the preface to navigate this complex issue.

1.4 “Philosophy” The ways in which women of the early modern European period think and write about philosophy leads us to think anew about the philosophical enterprise in early modern Europe, and how the recovery project expands and deepens our understanding of the very nature of philosophy itself. We can begin with the points we just noted regarding women’s philosophical interests. 6

Introduction

Many women were interested in many of the standard topics in metaphysics and epistemology that the standard history of early modern philosophy puts front and center, and contributed their own insights into these topics. From this perspective, the nature of philosophy looks very familiar, yet in being confronted with the unfamiliar positions on familiar topics taken up by these women, we are reminded that doing philosophy well requires an openness to the full range of logical possibilities and attentiveness to work through the details. Yet it is also the case that many women of the period focused their attention on topics that have not been centered within our histories of philosophy, even if they were topics of intensive philosophical interest at the time. We are thus reminded that philosophy is not defined by a narrow set of topics or questions, but rather almost any topic can be approached philosophically. Some topics rise to the fore at certain historical moments. Interestingly, many of the topics in which early modern women engaged and were set aside by history are emerging again as central topics in contemporary philosophy. Currently, there is a renewed interest in equality, in the emotions, and in the nature and value of education, to name just a few. Yet because our history of philosophy has omitted these topics, contemporary philosophers not only do not recognize that their topics of interests have a history, but they also do not benefit from the insights that a historical perspective can provide. We noted that many early modern women’s philosophical contributions are informed by their lived experiences as women. The recovery of these women thinkers thus reveals a history of feminist philosophical thought, one that begins long before the so-called First Wave of feminism and the struggle for women’s suffrage of the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. However, the centrality of lived experience to their philosophy also highlights a feature of philosophy that is obscured from view by canonical histories of philosophy. Canonical histories of philosophy present us with philosophical views that are abstracted from any particular context. They highlight the idea that philosophical positions strive to capture timeless truths. But, as Lisa Shapiro notes in her paper, “Canon, Gender, and Historicity,” while the truths of philosophy may well be timeless, the search for those truths is anchored in very human efforts to understand them. These efforts are undertaken in a particular context in which the philosophical questions that motivate them arise. Canonical histories of philosophy mask that context: they make it seem as if philosophical questions are asked from nowhere. The philosophical works of early modern women highlight that philosophical inquiry, even if it strives for an understanding of timeless truths, emerges from somewhere. A philosopher becomes interested in the philosophical questions they do because they matter to them in some way or another. This is easily seen in the cases of philosophical questions about human relationships, like friendship and marriage, and about autonomy and self-determination. But it is also true of philosophical questions in metaphysics and epistemology. Early modern women’s work in metaphysics, perhaps because it is more unfamiliar, makes it clear that getting the metaphysics right matters. It is not a mere logical exercise, nor is it simply a matter of understanding nature correctly. How we understand nature impacts how we live, not simply in our day-to-day practical decision-making but most centrally in how human beings are distinguished from one another and from other parts of nature. Many of the women philosophers discussed in this handbook often deploy genres of writing other than the treatise, the genre that has been held up as a philosophical standard for some time. This may well be because these women were excluded from the intellectual elite, and so did not have either the training or the resources to write in that vein. It is worth noting that many canonical figures of the period also did not write treatises: Montaigne is thought to have invented a new genre of writing, the essay, to capture what he had to say; Descartes expressed his philosophy in stylized meditations, an equally stylized discourse, and a textbook; Spinoza appropriated the geometrical method to put forward an ethics; Leibniz wrote prolifically in many different forms, 7

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including short essays and a long dialogic response to Locke; Locke appropriated the empirical methods of Bacon and Boyle to transform the essay genre; Berkeley used the dialogue to great effect; and Hume was self-conscious about the challenges of writing philosophy in a way that moved his readers. And indeed Margaret Cavendish and Gabrielle Suchon stand out as having written treatises to express their views. As Karen Detlefsen notes in her paper, the ‘alternative’ genres of expression of these women thinkers might well not have been borne of constraint but rather a positive choice they made to best express themselves. Perhaps they recognized the complexity of, at one and the same time, engaging in the abstraction of philosophy and representing the salience of their own lived experience to their philosophy and appropriated genres from poetry to plays to polemics to the emerging genre of the novel, as well as prefaces to their works to capture this complexity.

1.5  Putting It All Together Let’s now return to the whole title ‘Women and Early Modern European Philosophy.’ This handbook starts from the basic fact that the history of European philosophy as it has been told since at least the middle of the nineteenth century has effectively made the philosophical contributions of women disappear. The number of women discussed in the handbook and the breadth of the philosophical topics on which they write demonstrates just how massive the loss has been, and this handbook only begins the process of recovering the philosophical work of women in this period, as Sarah Hutton exposes in her chapter. Now that the process of recovering the philosophical work of women is underway, there is an imperative to reflect on how we write the histories of philosophy to ensure that we do not fall prey to the exclusionary impulse that has characterized the history of philosophy we inherited. In this introduction, we have strived to demonstrate that reflective spirit. Following a point made by historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his Silencing the Past, we need to recognize that histories of philosophy, just as histories of events, are told by people with perspectives and interests, which inevitably lead to some exclusions. We need to be attuned to and make explicit our own assumptions and subject them to criticism. The tellers of the tales of the history of philosophy are us, historians of philosophy and philosophers, human beings with interests, attempting to better understand the world we inhabit. In order to truly change the history of philosophy, we need to find ways of writing the history of philosophy that acknowledges both its and our own partiality, and to be open to the partiality of others. We need to find ways of writing histories of philosophy that acknowledge that even the timeless questions that we take to be at the core of philosophy are raised from a particular perspective and that answers to these questions are all the richer with the full array of different perspectives as part of the conversation. We can perhaps learn from the experimentation with genre we find with many of the authors discussed in this volume. This handbook includes 51 authors (or co-authors), but there are many others who are also currently involved in recovering the philosophical work of early modern European women. In addition, we are all part of a much larger project to rethink the history of philosophy more generally and with it what counts as philosophy itself in a contemporary context. Not only are others working to recover the philosophical work of women in other periods (in particular the Medieval period and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) in the European context, but there are also robust projects that are aiming to look at the history of philosophy in a global context. This includes work to position European philosophy as one of many rich philosophical traditions. These might be cast as part of religious traditions – for instance, Islamic philosophy, Jewish philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, Hindu philosophy – or they might be cast geographically – for instance, Persian philosophy, African and Africana philosophy, Indian philosophy, South American philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and so on. It includes work writing Black intellectual history; and 8

Introduction

it includes work to articulate an Indigenous philosophy that is rooted in oral traditions. And it also includes work to recover women philosophers in non-European traditions, and in particular Indian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese philosophy, that have their own canons that have obscured if not erased the women philosophers of those traditions. While these efforts have been and rightly are in many ways independent of one another, together we are all working to transform the ways in which the history of philosophy is currently practiced, to build a new community of practice, and in so doing change the nature of philosophy.

Acknowledgments This Handbook has benefited from the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are indebted to the Research Assistants who assisted us in assembling the final manuscript: Zach Agoff, Talia Ferreira, Luis Eduardo Melo de Andrade Lima, Lauren Perry, Mary Purcell, Sara Purinton, and Maja Sidzińska. We knew that this volume would take a fair amount of time to come together, because of the labor involved in coordinating a large number of authors. The disruption of the COVID pandemic in 2020, and the lockdown that occurred just a week before our scheduled NEH-supported conference to bring the authors together, further extended the timeline. We thank the authors for their perseverance and their patience as the volume came together. We are especially grateful to our editors at Routledge, Andrew Beck and Marc Stratton for their patience and continuing support of the volume.

References Appiah, K. (2016) “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilisation,” The Guardian. Available at: https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiah-reith-lecture. Dijksterhuis, Eduard Jan. (1950) The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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PART I

Context

2 WOMEN AND INSTITUTIONS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE Making Space for Female Scholarship Carol Pal Placing early modern women philosophers in their historical context has proven to be a complicated task. They are an awkward fit, since they were, by definition, exceptional. Yet male philosophers of the same period must also be considered exceptional, and new research is uncovering evidence of far more early modern female scholars than we could have expected. We are faced, then, with a quandary: given the formidable array of barriers they faced, how did so many women manage to flourish intellectually within a system designed to prevent this from happening? That system was composed of two powerful, ubiquitous, and enduring institutions that worked together in a deeply interlocked fashion to shape the lives of everyone living in early modern Europe: the family and the Church.1 Despite their ostensibly disparate purviews, these two institutions – which were in turn bolstered by interlocking systems of law, custom, and education – operated to reinforce and uphold the same underlying concept: a universally ordered, hierarchical, and interdependent structure that laid out specific roles for everyone and everything. From angels to earthworms, from the cosmos to the family hearth, each entity and element had its place, and systems large and small were molded on the same overall pattern. Macrocosm and microcosm worked seamlessly together within a structure often referred to as the Great Chain of Being.2 And in every one of these interlocking structures, the female element was of necessity below the male. The concept of equality was no less destabilizing than the concept of inversion, and there was no arguing why or whether this had to be. Whether spiritually, intellectually, or instinctively, early modern people would have been to some degree aware that no single part of the system could be challenged without threatening the entire structure. Both directly and indirectly, that structure had governed Europe for two millennia; a vision of life without that structure was a vision of chaos. For female scholars, this picture would seem pretty grim indeed. Yet a growing body of scholarship is showing us that despite this universal agreement regarding the necessity of women’s inferiority, a great number of women managed to construct intellectual lives of excellence, erudition, and power. Moreover, their achievements were not necessarily hidden, or without support from men who were also prominent proponents of these self-same institutional structures. Clearly, then, a simple verdict of widespread oppression peppered with individual miracles of resistance does not make sense. So how might we take this burgeoning knowledge, and use it to more accurately and usefully parse the relationship between women and institutions in early modern Europe? We will not find the answers by investigating institutions and early modern female scholars as enemy combatants. In this chapter, I argue instead that the key to understanding this complex relationship is to see it as an ongoing negotiation for space. The stakes were high on both sides. DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-3

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For the two interlocking institutions of family and Church, the stakes were of course bound up in issues of power and control; and the platform upon which they both stood was fundamental – the maintenance of a bulwark between order and chaos. For intellectual women, what was at stake was their scholarly souls. They needed safe spaces wherein they could thrive and continue being the scholars and thinkers they already were, without simultaneously destroying the less controversial parts of their lives. Intellectual women knew the rules. And for the most part, they accepted that – in general – institutional hierarchies and limitations were necessary.3 The question was whether there might be room within that general case to accommodate the specific and unusual case of female scholarship. In their written work, their correspondence, and in the lives they lived, we can trace that ongoing negotiation for a space for learning. And, in their repeated encounters with the eventual “that’s too much,” we can also see early modern institutions at work to maintain the status quo. We begin with the illustrative example of the Dutch scholar Anna Maria van Schurman ­(1607–1678). Her prominence in two important areas – learning and religion – demonstrates how a push for the special case of a space for female scholarship co-existed with the eventual acknowledgment that it was, in fact, a threat.4 In 1629, the poet and scholar Caspar Barlaeus began hearing about Anna Maria van Schurman, a young woman of tremendous intellectual achievement.5 Impressed by her accomplishments, he wrote about her in a letter to Constantijn Huygens, telling him about the maiden of 22 who could converse in Latin “just like a Roman.”6 Barlaeus and Huygens, along with many other scholars in early modern Europe, were becoming well aware of Van Schurman. She was a linguist, rhetorician, poet, and classicist; she had an excellent command of mathematics, astronomy, theology, history, poetry, and music; she had mastered the learned languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and she was proficient as well in Chaldaic, Arabic, Ethiopian, Flemish, German, French, and Italian. As Van Schurman’s fame spread, she corresponded with some of the foremost scholars of the age: René Descartes, Claude Saumaise, Daniel Heinsius, André Rivet, and Pierre Gassendi, to name a few. She was “the Star of Utrecht,” and “the Tenth Muse.” It was even said that, “To have been in Utrecht without having seen Mademoiselle de Schurman was like having been to Paris without seeing the king.” (Yvon 1715: 1264–65). Yet Van Schurman was also deeply modest, deferential, and devout. She was so devout, in fact, that she had consecrated herself to a life of celibacy while still in her teens, and kept true to that vow until her death in the religious community she co-founded with Jean de Labadie.7 Thus her modesty demanded that she pursue certain studies in secret – in particular, her Hebrew studies with Voetius.8 That secrecy went away with the opening of the new University of Utrecht in 1636, when Voetius invited Anna Maria van Schurman to write an inaugural ode for the opening ceremonies. This extremely public ode, wherein “Anna Maria van Schurman congratulates the Glorious and Ancient City of Utrecht on having recently been bestowed with a New Academy,” gave high praise to both the city and its new school. However, it also rather pointedly criticized the university for allowing everyone except women to enter and imbibe the Nectar of Knowledge. But what (perchance you ask) are those concerns that trouble your heart? These sacred precincts cannot be penetrated by the virgin chorus.9

It was a thinly-veiled critique. Yet either despite or because of this poem, the directors of the university responded by allowing Voetius to smuggle his most famous pupil into his lectures. A small cubicle with a latticed opening was created for Van Schurman at the rear of Voetius’ classroom. There, able to see without being seen, she could benefit from lectures without endangering her modesty. Van Schurman thereby became the first woman to “attend” university in the 14

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Netherlands.10 This stealthy scholarship was in fact an open secret in the Republic of Letters, and while Van Schurman’s achievement was admired, jokes proliferated almost immediately. But was the situation really funny? Van Schurman had very publicly criticized the new university for being impenetrable to women, and had then gone on to engineer that penetration herself. Apart from the obvious juvenile teasing, then, what might this woman’s unprecedented presence in the lecture hall actually portend for the relationship between women and institutions? Only one month later, Barlaeus wrote to Huygens on this very subject. The tone was playful, as he pointed out how much more sensible life would be if only the famously modest and celibate Van Schurman were a man. Among the reasons he enumerates is the fact that she would no longer have to hide behind the lattice at the back of Voetius’ classroom: [T]here are many reasons why I would wish to make her into a man. The first is because she writes poetry, which will bring dishonor upon men. Second, because then there will not be the danger that a good man might become inflamed with love for her…Third, so that access to her might be accomplished more freely and easily…Fourth, if she were a man, she could attend the lectures of professors in safety, and sit among their learned sex. Now, shamefaced, she listens to the professor teaching through an aperture, or little window, so that she cannot be seen by impudent youths. Fifth, if she were a man, she could give public orations, either of her poetry, in which she is strong, or Hebrew writing, which she reads with no trouble.11 There is a progression here in Barlaeus’ list of reasons why Van Schurman should really be a man. He begins with the most trivial. Van Schurman’s poetry is putting male poets to shame; men are falling in love with her, to no avail; it’s far too difficult to find a way to talk to her; the cubicle at the back of Voetius’ classroom is ridiculous; and the public is being unnecessarily deprived of further public displays of her marvelous erudition. But as the list goes on, things get more serious: Sixth, if she were a man, she could be moved up to the helm of the Republic, and teach by her example, and besides, the Republic would do better to be ruled by a woman from time to time, rather than always being ruled by men. (Huygens 1911: II, 164) Here, Barlaeus has backed himself into a corner. His point is that Van Schurman has all the skills and moral authority necessary to become a leader in public life – the only thing preventing this from happening is her gender. But then he had gone even further, musing on the possibility that women might, in fact, be good leaders for the Dutch Republic, where leadership was not hereditary. And at this point, Barlaeus realized that he was treading on treacherous – perhaps heretical – ground. So he stopped himself there, and begged Huygens to tell no one what he had just said: But truly, Huygens my friend, let these jests be buried between the two of us. For it would not be to the honor of that most respectable and dignified virgin to know a great deal about how much we use her name in a familiar way in order to revere it. (Huygens 1911: II, 164) By this point, however, he has gone too far, and we realize that his “just kidding” has a hollow ring. Because it contains so many veiled references to Van Schurman’s seemingly impenetrable virginity, this letter has sometimes been seen as an extended obscene joke, while in feminist analyses, it has been described as misogynistic and cruel.12 I would suggest a third approach. The jokes are 15

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certainly there, but they are not at the expense of Van Schurman – they are rather aimed at the situation. The reasons why Barlaeus contends that Van Schurman would do better to become a man are all solidly grounded in the discrepancies between her abilities and her opportunities, all of which arise from social and cultural limitations imposed on her gender. Barlaeus, in fact, makes clear his belief that without these artificial limitations, she would be unstoppable. However, since Van Schurman was so modest, there was also no doubt that she would have been offended by the discussion; thus keeping her from seeing it would have been a very good idea. This letter, therefore, is neither misogynistic nor obscene – it is merely accurate. In the event, of course, Van Schurman did not become a man. Nor, as a woman, was she installed at the helm of the Dutch Republic. In fact, even her lattice-veiled presence in the lecture hall must have been discontinued within months, since by May 1640 Descartes was already referring to Van Schurman’s cubicle in the past tense.13 The most likely explanation is that a woman’s presence in the lecture hall – even a hidden one – had proved to be too much of a presence after all. In this example, we see the institutional structures that governed early modern European life operating to do what they normally did. They preserved order, and preserving order meant that women could not occupy male-only institutional spaces. So Van Schurman would no longer attend university lectures, or give public orations – and leading the Republic (a role that she would certainly have found appalling) was out of the question, even as a joke.14 And yet…she certainly had attended the lectures, and she had given a public oration, and both events were well known at high levels. And despite an educational system that denied higher learning to women, she had excelled in a spectacular way. This episode thus provides us with a useful introduction to the ways in which early modern women female scholars negotiated with institutions – the process of official prohibition, followed by case-specific accommodation, and then the closing of doors. The following sections look in turn at these major institutions – family and the Church – in order to understand how they shaped the lives of early modern women: their official mandates and their ideal functions. We then turn to look at the ways in which female scholars created spaces for their work within and alongside those prevailing structures. We begin with the most basic institution of all: the family.

2.1  Women and the Family In early modern Europe, the family was first and foremost an economic unit. This is not to say that it was not also an affective unit, wherein love, care, and growth took place. However, these emotional benefits were secondary to its purpose.15 The family was the basic building block in the interlocked institutional system that enabled life in pre-industrial Europe, the entity that produced necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. From there, the production of individual families was aggregated into the products of villages, communities, shires, duchies, and states. Within the household – from the time they were no longer toddlers until the moment age rendered them unable to help – women worked alongside men in fields and family workshops. They took care of animals, sold goods in the markets, spun and wove and dyed.16 Apart from working alongside men throughout their productive lives, women also had their gender-specific duties within the household. First, there was basic domesticity – the cooking, cleaning, harvesting, brewing, child-rearing, and sewing that proceeded in a relentless dawn-todusk cycle for rich and poor women alike.17 In addition, from the cottages of peasants to the manors of nobles, women were the primary healers in the family. They grew and gathered medicinal herbs, tended to the sick, collected, preserved, and adjusted medical recipes, and compounded the salves and elixirs in their kitchens.18 Most crucially, however, the family was the entity that produced future generations – thus for women, their primary role in the productive unit of the family was reproduction itself. This 16

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meant that their intrinsic worth was inherently tied up with their bodies, and with their life stages; and their reproductive lives, from the onset of menarche to the onset of menopause, were also the focus of their productive lives. Women’s bodies were therefore a precious resource, requiring protection and control. This was due in part to low life expectancy, and the difficulty of maintaining a viable and stable population. Life expectancy hovered around 30 years throughout this period (slightly higher for women), although it is important to unpack this number. Once a person made it to adulthood, they could reasonably expect to live to a ripe old age; however, accidents, disease, and malnutrition took their toll, and approximately half of the children born alive died before adolescence.19 Thus given this high child mortality rate, and the ever-present possibility of miscarriage, most fertile women would have to have been pregnant every two years or so – or seven to ten times during their childbearing years – in order for the family to have a reasonable chance of having two children live to adulthood, so that they might take over the family work. Clearly, the institution of the family could not survive without making enormous demands on women’s bodies and time – demands that were burdensome, pivotal, and unavoidable. Where, in that scenario, was there room for female scholarship? The answer must be: nowhere. And although it was possible for women to avoid this fate by choosing not to become wives and mothers, the status of a single woman in early modern Europe was precarious indeed. Prior to the establishment of social structures and institutions for people who were indigent, aged, or ill, it was crucial for a woman to produce children who could later be relied on to support her if and when required. Without this support, a woman could find herself needing to beg for food and shelter. Churches might be able to provide limited assistance, but this was variable; thus without vast reserves of land or money, a woman’s choice to live alone might strike us as ill-considered at best. Yet we now know that between 15% and 25% of women in early modern Europe never married (WiesnerHanks 2019: 64, 90–92; Bennett and Froide 1999). For some, this was a choice arising from sexual preference or religious vocation.20 For others, it had not been a choice at all; they might have been young women who had moved to cities to find domestic work, or older “spinsters” who had not been able to marry for reasons ranging from lack of partners to lack of dowries. However, within all these categories, we might consider the space created by women who had deliberately chosen singleness in order to devote time to scholarship rather than domestic duties. Some examples are useful here. We have already encountered Anna Maria van Schurman’s early oath of lifelong celibacy, a choice that enabled her to pursue scholarship in her youth, and religious pursuits in later years. Van Schurman was also associated in a loose but well-documented network with six other female scholars; and despite the risks that accompanied singleness, four of those seven scholars – Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), Marie du Moulin (c.1613–1699), Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680), and Van Schurman herself – remained single throughout their lives.21 And if we look at earlier generations of female scholars, we can see a similar pattern.22 This is not to say that the pursuit of scholarship was impossible for wives and mothers, but it was much more difficult, even for women with supportive spouses; there simply was not enough room in the day for both. Thus despite the fact that this choice could only work for very few women – most particularly, those with ample resources of their own – single women are disproportionately prominent among the population of early modern female scholars.

2.2  Women and the Church Writing in 1942, Lucien Febvre argued for the ubiquity of Christianity, identifying it as the defining mentalité of the early modern world: Christianity was the very air one breathed in what we call Europe and what was then Christendom…Whether one wanted to or not, whether one clearly understood or not, one found 17

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oneself immersed from birth in a bath of Christianity from which one did not emerge even at death. (Febvre 1982: 336) In this lucid and beautiful passage, Lucien Febvre alerts us to the fact that Christian ideas and norms – from morning until night, from birth until death – dictated the rhythms and patterns of early modern lives. Although Jews and Muslims shared the continent with Christians, and kept their own faiths and customs vital throughout these centuries, they were still inhabiting Christendom; and it was Christianity that would determine which spaces they could inhabit, and how much safety or freedom they might find within them.23 For women all over Europe, from all walks of life, the surrounding culture of Christendom meant that their subservience to men had been ordained from the beginning of time by God himself. The Bible provided the evidence for this gendered hierarchy, and the umbrella institution of the Church – whether Catholic or Protestant – constructed theologies and doctrines to reinforce it. Drawing on a blended inheritance from the patriarchal structures of Judaism and the scientific reasoning of Aristotelianism, Christendom was built on a solid platform of man above woman.24 Yet the Bible itself is not clear on this point at all. In fact, while the institution of the Church was completely consistent in mandating female subservience, the supporting scriptures are contradictory at best. The scriptural discrepancies begin immediately, with the account of Creation in Genesis. In Genesis 2, Eve is created from Adam’s rib in order for the first man to have a partner and helpmeet, and this story has been cited over the centuries as the absolute bedrock of woman’s secondary status. However, this was in fact the second version of the creation of Eve. In Genesis 1, man and woman were created in the image of God, at the same time, by the same act: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”25 Thus there was no man first, woman second. However, the Church as an institution would consistently use the second version as its reference point with respect to women. The contradictions continue – although not, interestingly enough, in the words and actions of Jesus. According to the gospels, Jesus rejected the patriarchal conventions of the Judaism in which he had been raised, and chose instead to raise up, welcome, and affirm the women who came to him. It was to Mary Magdalene that Jesus chose to reveal himself when he rose from the dead; he then told her to go to the brethren with the news, singling her out as an apostle to the apostles ( John. 20:17, KJV).26 After the crucifixion, however, the fledgling faith of Christianity became the creation of his followers – and, most importantly, that new faith was the creation of Saint Paul. Paul was a Roman citizen from Tarsus, in Asia Minor, and never met Jesus while he was alive. Instead, Paul saw a vision of the resurrected Christ while on the road to Damascus. The risen Christ was arguably quite a different entity from the living Jesus, and the faith Paul established as a result of this vision was also quite different from the ideas that Jesus had explored while he was alive. Paul established an organization that was strongly influenced by his Greco-Roman heritage, and although most scholars now agree that Paul probably wrote only 7 of the 13 Pauline letters in the Bible, all those letters reflect a man tirelessly struggling to keep various scattered groups of Christians in order; he is constantly reminding them of how they should behave, of what is central to their new faith, and which old practices must now be discontinued (Barton and Muddiman 2001: 1078–83; MacCulloch 2009: 97–102). From these letters, it also appears that Paul was very concerned about women. His primary goal was the establishment of order and organization in order to promote the survival and growth of the new faith. This entailed dealing with appropriate roles, and here is where things got complicated for women in Christianity. Paul’s letter to the Galatians presented a breathtakingly open vision of the equality of souls: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, 18

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there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians. 3:28, KJV). However, that vision was quickly subsumed into the hierarchical requirements of a fledgling institution. And, as with the choice of the second, “rib” version of the creation of woman, the Pauline text constantly referenced with regard to women came not from Galatians, but from the first letter to the Corinthians: Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church. (I Corinthians 14:34-35, KJV) According to Paul, then, women must not speak, except to ask their husbands what, if anything, they need to know; and even then that asking must be done in the home. The reason given is one that is already familiar to us – a reference to the Great Chain of Being, and to human interactions as a microcosm of God’s macrocosm: Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. (Ephesians 5:22-23; I Corinthians 11:3, KJV) The reasoning couldn’t be clearer; the family was a microcosm of God’s creation, thus men ruled over women just as God ruled over mankind. Legal systems throughout early modern Europe also supported this hierarchical resonance of family and religion, since Church and state were deeply interlocked structures. Despite variances of time, place, and confessional affiliation, the need to maintain man over woman existed throughout. In English law, this was mandated through a doctrine known as “coverture,” under which a woman ceased to have legal existence once she got married. She was a feme covert, literally covered by her husband’s legal personhood, and could own no property – an umbrella condition which included her dowry, her children, and herself.27 The reasoning supporting this legal status was the Bible, and Eve’s greater punishment after the Fall. Despite the fact that Adam had readily joined in, it was Eve who had been the first to eat the forbidden fruit; her extra punishments would be the pain of childbirth, and the sexual desire for her husband which would ensure the arrival of those pains. The icing on the cake was permanent subservience to her husband: “and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 4:16, KJV). Thus when dealing with women, the task of the law in early modern Europe was to ensure that contemporary life reflected these biblical mandates. As the French jurist Jean Bodin wrote in 1576: The power, authority, and command that a husband has over his wife is allowed by both divine and positive law to be honourable and right. (Bodin 1955: 1) Bodin’s argument for the interweaving of divine and earthly law was mirrored in English jurisprudence, as demonstrated by an anonymous pamphlet published in England in 1632. Although its intent was completely different – it was written for women, in order to help them understand their rights under the law – the information provided by the jurist was the same. Human law was 19

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based on divine law, which followed upon God’s decision that women’s bodies would forever be the ones to bear the brunt of punishment for Adam and Eve’s shared transgression: See here the reason of that which I touched before, that Women have no voyse in Parliament, They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to bee married and their desires or subject to their husband…. The common Law here shaketh hand with Divinitie. (The lawes resolutions of womens rights 1632: 9) The point was inescapable – the Church and the law were mandating how families worked, and Church, family, and law all worked together to ensure a woman’s subservient status. This set of agreements also worked at the very highest levels, with rulers of the realm. In the early modern era, the unpredictable workings of reproductive biology – exacerbated by dynastic strategies of inbreeding – resulted in what had previously been considered unthinkable: a string of female rulers, leading the most powerful realms in Europe. Between the Renaissance and the French Revolution, an estimated two dozen women ruled European states – not as the wives of kings, but as sovereigns in their own right.28 This was precisely the sort of situation that laws and customs had been designed to prevent; rule by a female sovereign upended biblical directives, created intolerable vulnerabilities through their future marriages to foreign kings, and opened the door to every kind of chaos. It was a slippery slope. The Scottish theologian John Knox (c.1514–1572), writing in 1557, was one of those who felt the draft as this door was opened to potential doom. Mary Tudor ruled in England, and Mary of Guise ruled in Scotland as regent for her daughter, the future Mary Queen of Scots, so Knox felt the need to alert the world to this danger in a pamphlet entitled The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women: To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finalie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice. (Knox 1558: 9) Nature, nation, God, order, justice, equity – all could and would be undone should women be allowed to rule. Then in 1558, as soon as his pamphlet was published, Knox’s worst fears were apparently borne out; Mary Tudor died childless, and the English throne passed to the only other surviving legitimate child of Henry VIII – Mary’s sister, now Queen Elizabeth I. Yet somehow, the early modern world survived this onslaught of female kings, just as the University of Leiden had survived Anna Maria van Schurman’s invasion of the lecture hall. And despite Barlaeus’ anxiety, the fury of John Knox, and the admonitions of Saint Paul, perhaps the early modern world was less surprised by this than we might have thought – because despite the constant reiteration of the interlocked values of Church and family, the actual operation of these processes had always included accommodation of the special case. Female scholars were one of those special cases, and their negotiations had already been going on for centuries. We turn now to examine how this worked.

2.3  Making Space for Female Scholars As we have seen, the institutional structures governing life in early modern Europe simply could not give female scholars the time and space their work required, because there was no

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way – economically, socially, doctrinally, or legally – that this pursuit could be construed as either necessary or useful. So in order to explain the successful scholarly lives achieved by so many early modern women, we need to observe how they managed to do it: and that was by creating alternative scenarios and spaces within these already-existing structures. The details and contexts differed; however, whether we are talking about families, royal courts, the Church, or the law, the essential element driving each of these space-making alternatives was consistent across the institutional spectrum – and that essential element was education. Education is always a form of preparation for life; and in early modern Europe, this meant that the form and extent of one’s education were determined by the life one was born to lead. It was not an open-ended endeavor aimed at personal growth and self-improvement; instead, it was entirely practical, a “preparation for carrying on societal roles” (Whitehead 1999: xii). Where those societal roles differed, the education differed, too. Thus although gender was certainly an important constitutive element in the intellectual lives of early modern female scholars, it was only one of many factors. In fact, if one were to choose the most salient factor determining the shape and scope of women’s learning, it would have been their social rank. The demands of survival on one end of that scale, and of political and social obligations on the other, were usually quite effective in precluding the pursuit of learning. This held true for men as well as for women, and to think of education otherwise was a political act – because, as formulated by the educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius, universal education would have entailed educating all children, regardless of sex or social rank: “Not the children of the rich or of the powerful only, but of all alike, boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and towns, villages and hamlets, should be sent to school” (Comenius 1923: 66–68).29 For women, however, this was also complicated by the need to epitomize the Christian virtue of modestia.30 Thus in addition to dealing with the same hurdle faced by non-elite men – that of nonutility – women pursuing higher learning needed to avoid any perceived transgressions of feminine modesty. This was a complex negotiation; however, early modern women did not tackle it on their own. And for many female scholars, the alternative space necessary for that education was first given to them at home by attentive and encouraging fathers. 31 For instance, when he deemed the French school in Utrecht to be too worldly, Frederik van Schurman had decided to include his daughter Anna Maria in the education he was providing for his sons in the family home (Schurman 1998: 4–5; Eukleria 80–82). Other female scholars, whose families were less wealthy, benefitted from growing up with fathers who were educators, and who had noticed their daughters’ abilities. Bathsua Makin’s father Henry Reynolds was a schoolteacher, whose prize pupil was his daughter; presumably, the education he provided at home enabled her to develop as a scholar while also giving her the tools she would need throughout her life to support her family. 32 The classicist Anne Dacier (1651–1720) was the daughter of the educator Tannegui le Fevre, a professor of Greek and Latin at the Protestant academy of Saumur (Farnham: 1976; Bury: 1999). In a story that is mirrored in Van Schurman’s own autobiographical account, the beginning of Dacier’s education is described as a consequence of the lessons her father was providing to someone else: He had a son, whom he was educating with great care. Anne le Fèvre, the girl with whom we are concerned, was eleven years old at the time. While he was giving lessons to his son, she was usually present. One day it happened that this young schoolboy gave a wrong answer to one of his father’s questions. His sister, while still continuing to work on her embroidery, whispered to him, and suggested the answer he should give to their father. Their father overheard, and delighted by this discovery, he resolved to extend his care to her, and to educate her in letters.33

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Later, as Dacier gained a reputation throughout Europe as a classicist and professional translator, her father’s pedagogical methods would gain credibility through being associated with her success – an example that resonates powerfully with Bathsua Makin as her father’s most famous pupil. Other negotiations for educational space involved female scholars making alterations to the concept of the family itself. One of those ways was historical – the creation of an intellectual genealogy of exemplary women; and the other was contemporary – the construction of an intellectual family, or famille d’alliance. For female scholars, an intellectual genealogy constituted a diachronic family. It was a line of memory, in which their names – even if they did not have children – would not disappear. For the fifteenth-century humanist Laura Cereta, female scholars constituted a “noble lineage”. They were a respublica mulierum whose members were accomplished, virtuous, and scholarly women: I am impelled to show what great glory that noble lineage which I carry in my own breast has won for virtue and literature – a lineage that knowledge, the bearer of honors, has exalted in every age. For the possession of this lineage is legitimate and sure, and it has come all the way down to me from the perpetual continuance of a more enduring race…the republic of women, so worthy of veneration. (Cereta 1997: 76–80)34 Cereta’s respublica mulierum was a lineage of female scholars and teachers bound together through time by common intellectual interests – it was her own version of Christine de Pisan’s City of Ladies, with its own genealogy and history.35 In The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), de Pisan had recounted being visited in a dream by three noble Ladies named Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who authorized her to construct a city by and for virtuous women. She had been feeling isolated and despondent over misogynist attacks; however, Lady Reason told Christine that she need not feel alone, because in fact she was not alone – there were and had been other learned women like her.36 This was followed by a catalogue of exemplary women throughout time – over 165 women, mythical, biblical, and historical. That genealogical catalogue would continue to be remembered, embellished, and invoked by female scholars throughout the early modern era; and in 1673, we find it again in Bathsua Makin’s Essay, where the name of Anna Maria van Schurman was now added to the list (Makin 1673). The other alternative family institution for female scholars was the famille d’alliance. The famille d’alliance was a form of mentoring that appears to have been both profoundly meaningful on an emotional level, and quite strategically successful in the intellectual formation of the female scholar (Pal 2009). One of the earliest documented uses of this term comes from 1588, when the philosopher Michel de Montaigne offered to make Marie de Gournay his fille d’alliance, or unofficial adoptive daughter and intellectual protégée. This was a well-known relationship – both to the Republic of Letters and to Montaigne’s actual wife and daughter – and it was often referred to in learned correspondence. Yet what is less well-known is that this arrangement gave birth to another generation; Gournay became the mère d’alliance of Anna Maria van Schurman, who in turn had a père and soeur d’alliance in André Rivet and Marie du Moulin. Moreover, apart from fathers, mothers, and daughters, there were also brothers in the abstract intellectual family. The use of these terms was specific, explicit, and repeated; thus the intent of intellectual kinship is quite clear. However, the conventions of the intellectual family were also quite singular in providing a profound and multivalent level of mentorship and an alternative family for the formation of the early modern female scholar. Education also worked as an adaptive mechanism for women with respect to the institution of the Church. The practice of cloistering was complex, and represented a wide spectrum of women’s experience. On one end was the undeniable fact that many young women, despite having 22

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no religious vocation, were warehoused in convents because their families could not afford the dowries that would enable them to make worldly matches.37 And on the other end of that spectrum, we see convents ruled by learned and active abbesses who embraced their vocations, and had careers of erudition and influence. An outstanding example here is the twelfth-century nun Hildegard von Bingen, who lived in a convent from the age of eight, and later wrote texts on natural history and medicine, in addition to creating works of art, music, and theology.38 Outside the convent, female scholars were able to envision alternative cloisters. They imagined protected environments in which women could pursue lives of learning and devotion, and where they, not the Church, would be in control. Christine de Pizan’s 1405 City of Ladies was one of these visions, and it had a descendant in Mary Astell’s 1692 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. In her Proposal, the deeply Protestant Astell sought funds to establish an all-female enclave, a women’s “Retreat from the World.” Although she called her institution a “Seminary,” its purpose, she assured her female readers, was to communicate knowledge; it was “rather Academical than Monastic” (Astell 1697: 286; 42).39 Thus despite the ways in which the institutions of the family and the Church worked to preserve the hierarchical structures that restricted women’s achievements, these examples demonstrate how that ideal was consistently subverted by the real – and that reality included the ways in which female scholars managed to attain education by creating alternative structures.

2.4 Conclusion In 1928, Virginia Woolf addressed the students at Newnham and Girton, the two colleges for women at Cambridge University.40 In those lectures, she discussed the paradox one immediately encountered in looking for basic historical evidence of women’s life and work. What she had wanted to find was “a mass of information” about real women in the past; what she had encountered instead was an impossible woman-creature who pervaded poetry from cover to cover, but was “all but absent from history”. So she remained stymied by her inability to find any documentation of scholarly women from the early modern era: …what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. (Woolf 1935: 66–69) Documentation of the lives of early modern women was something that Woolf not only wanted – she in fact felt that she needed it. Like Christine de Pizan in 1405, she needed to know that there had been other learned women before her, and she was not alone. She needed a lineage, a model, and some archival validation. This essay has attempted to address the historical void that Woolf deplored. Not by finding the early modern women she sought – it is no longer the case, as it was in 1928, that “nothing is known” about them – but by investigating the nature of the void itself. The problem for Woolf, as for us, is that the evidence was not recorded where one would first look to find it, in the institutional records of the family, the Church, and the university. And of course, this makes perfect sense. Early modern institutions existed to preserve order – social, cultural, religious, and domestic – and female scholars represented a potential threat to each one of these interlocked systems. As Bathsua Makin wrote in 1673, “A Learned Woman is thought to be a Comet, that bodes Mischief, when ever it appears” (Makin 1673: 1). So by looking for these learned women in the archives of those very institutions that were most threatened by their success – universities, churches, and scientific societies – we were looking in the wrong places. 23

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The women Woolf was seeking had always been there. Despite the intertwined institutions mandated to prevent women’s scholarship, these women had managed to accomplish lives of learning, and they had done so by constructing alternative versions of those same institutions. Thus it is in the historical traces of those alternative institutions – the Republic of Letters, the famille d’alliance, the imagined Cities of Ladies, the intellectual genealogies – that the lives and work of female scholars will be found. And the next step, perhaps, might be to reconstruct our concept of early modern intellectual culture based on the assumption that the women were always part of it, rather than the assumption that they were not.

Notes 1 In this essay, the word “Church” is capitalized when referring to the umbrella institution, while “church” will refer to a physical place of worship. 2 The Great Chain of Being was a concept that began with Aristotle’s scala naturae. It was codified, multiplied, illustrated, and adapted over time, becoming particularly important in Neoplatonism and Renaissance philosophy. 3 A notable exception to that general acceptance was Marie de Gournay. In 1622, in Égalité des hommes et des femmes, she pointed out that, “nothing more resembles a male cat on a windowsill than a female cat.” (Gournay 1993: 49). 4 On Anna Maria van Schurman see, most recently Larsen (2016) and Pal (2012). 5 In the Republic of Letters, the name of Caspar van Baerle (1584–1648) was Latinized as Barlaeus. He was a poet, érudit, melancholic, and Professor of Logic at the University of Leiden. He lost his position in the purge that followed the triumph of orthodox Calvinism at the Synod of Dort in 1619, after which he was befriended by Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) and moved to Amsterdam. On Barlaeus, see (Blok 1976). 6 Original in Latin. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Caspar Barlaeus to Constantijn Huygens, 8 January, 1630 (Huygens 1911: 1, 273). Huygens was a scholar, courtier, and poet who called his scientist son Christian “my Archimedes.” On Huygens, see (Bots 1973; Jardine 2008). 7 Van Schurman swore this oath at her dying father’s bedside in 1623, when she was 16. She repeated it to the Quaker William Penn when he visited her in 1677, saying she “desired to be found a living sacrifice, offered up entirely to the Lord.” (Penn 1835: 99). According to Pierre Yvon, Van Schurman’s youthful choice was one in which both parents concurred. On the doctrinally peripatetic Jean de Labadie; see (Saxby 1987). 8 Gisbert Voët (1589–1676) was Latinized as Voetius in the Republic of Letters. He was a Dutch Calvinist theologian, a professor of Oriental Sciences at the University of Utrecht, and a mentor for Anna Maria van Schurman. He was also a staunch opponent of René Descartes. On Voetius, see (Ruler 1995; Goudriaan 2006). 9 From Inclytae & Antiquae Urbi Trajectinae Nova Academia nuperrime donatae gratulatur Anna Maria a Schurman… (Schurman 1648). 10 According to an 1899 history of the University of Utrecht, this cubicle was to the north of the rostrum in the hall designated for theological lectures. It endured until 1825, when it was replaced by a staircase (Cohen 1920: 536 n.4). 11 Caspar Barlaeus to Contantijn Huygens. 30 April, 1636 (Huygens 1911: II, 164). 12 Blok locates these sorts of writings within a longstanding humanist tradition of using Latin exclusively when writing anything obscene, since it was “their own male language, Latin, which was generally neither used nor understood by women, even those of some education.” In this case, however, Van Schurman’s Latin proficiency would certainly have rendered this linguistic screen completely meaningless. Agnes Sneller, on the other hand, sees the letter as a demonstration of Barlaeus’ complete disrespect for Van Schurman’s choice of a celibate life. (Blok 1976: 6–7; Sneller 1996: 148–49). 13 When Voetius arranged for the dangers of Cartesianism to be formally debated at the University of Utrecht, Descartes joked to his friend Regius that he himself would come audit the proceedings, but only if he could do it in secret: “…but for now let no-one know, and I will be able to lie hidden in that cubicle from which Mlle. van Schurman used to listen to lectures.” Descartes to Regius. Leiden 24 May, 1640. (Descartes 1975: III, 70). Regius (Henri le Roy 1598–1679) was a physician, natural philosopher, and Professor of Medicine at the University of Utrecht.

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Women and Institutions in Early Modern Europe 14 Van Schurman’s Dissertatio (1641) was a disputation on: “A Practical Problem: Whether the study of letters is fitting for a Christian woman.” While Van Schurman argued forcefully for the appropriateness of women’s access to learning, she did so within certain constraints. One of these was, “that a woman’s vocation is confined within narrow boundaries, certainly within the limits of private or domestic life.” (Schurman 1998: 36). 15 Due to high infant mortality and the lack of written evidence for non-elite families, it has not infrequently been assumed that in the case of love, a lack of evidence constituted an evidence of lack. This unfounded assumption has since been challenged. As E.P. Thompson noted in a review, this interpretation is in fact “the most unlikely answer of all,” since “for the vast majority throughout history, familial relations have been intermeshed with the structures of work. Feeling may be more, rather than less, tender or intense because relations are ‘economic’ and critical to mutual survival.” (Thompson 1977). 16 For an excellent overview, see (Wiesner-Hanks 2019). 17 For a sense of the nonstop daily procession of tasks for early modern women at every social level, see the excerpts from women’s diaries and correspondence in: (O’Faolain and Martines 1973: 234–43). 18 On this widespread phenomenon, see: (Fissell, 2008; Leong, 2018; Rankin, 2013). 19 This number is an average; it therefore flattens out considerable variances across time and place in early modern Europe (Hajnal 1965; Konnert 2006: 22–23). 20 New scholarship is analyzing the realities of same-sex preference in early modern Europe. See (Brown 1989; Traub 2016). 21 The other three – Bathsua Makin (c.1600–c.1681), Dorothy Moore (c.1612–1664), and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615–1691) – were or had been married, and all had children. On this network, see (Pal 2012). 22 For instance: The sisters Anna Roemers and Maria “Tesselschade” Visscher were artists, poets, and inspirations for Van Schurman; they were active until they were joined to wealthy but unexceptional husbands, and at this point they disappeared from the literary scene. In Renaissance Italy, the Venetian scholar Cassandra Fedele (c. 1465–1558) was a public phenomenon from the age of 12, giving public orations in Latin and Greek; her scholarly career ended when she got married at the age of 34. See (Parente 1994; Fedele 2000). 23 A growing body of scholarship, together with new source translations, is addressing the complex subject of these interrelationships and oppressions. See, for example: (Hsia 1992; Franklin et al. 2014; Glikl of Hameln 2019). 24 Aristotle (384–322 BCE) analyzed nature as a series of opposites. The male principle was hot, dry, and active; the female was cold, moist, and passive. A male baby represented reproductive success; a female was Nature’s failure. The physician Galen of Pergamon (c.129–216) turned Aristotelian theory into a complete medical system of humors. This system dominated medicine until finally challenged by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. (Allen 1985). 25 Genesis 1:27, King James Version, emphasis mine. The “rib” account is found in Genesis 2:18–23. 26 The gospels speak of a number of women named Mary, and they are often conflated. It was one of those conflations that resulted in Mary Magdalene being recast as a prostitute, identified with the “sinful woman” in Luke 37:50. However, the non-canonical Gospel of Mary (considered a gnostic text) describes her as having received teachings directly from Jesus and then relaying them to the other apostles – which gets a very negative reaction from Peter (Di Caprio and Wiesner 2001: 87–89). 27 This is of course the ideal case of the law, and multiple court cases provide evidence for the ways in which women could defy and manipulate the system, especially if and when they became widows. 28 William Monter refers to these sovereigns as “female kings.” ( Jansen 2002; Monter 2012). 29 Comenius was the Latin name given to Jan Amos Komensk ỷ (1592–1670) in the Republic of Letters. On Comenius, see (Čapková 1994). 30 Modesty was the public performance of a woman’s private virtue; and, for a woman, the word “virtue” was almost synonymous with “chastity.” Theoretically, a modest woman could preserve her chastity by controlling her own behavior – her carriage, clothing, gestures, and glances – in order to avoid inciting men to unchaste thoughts and immoderate actions. 31 For an analysis of the role played by fathers in early modern women’s intellectual accomplishment, and the development of “household academies”, see (Ross 2009). See also: (Smet 1997). 32 For a contemporary’s view of Makin and her father, see (D’Ewes 1845: 63–64, 94–96). 33 Original in French. Interestingly, this anecdote comes from Queen Christina of Sweden’s first biographer, because the two women had been in touch. See (Arckenholtz 1751: II, 187–89, and Appendix LXXXIII).

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Carol Pal 34 Born in Brescia in 1469, the learned Cereta was married at 15, widowed at 16, and died at the age of 30. 35 Christine de Pisan (c.1365–1430) was an educated woman and a widowed single mother, who supported her three children, her mother, and herself through her writing. City of Ladies was a powerful defense of the female sex against the misogyny of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung’s Roman de la Rose (c.1275), and it was de Pisan’s entry into the querelle des femmes. 36 “If it were customary to send daughters to school like sons, and if they were then taught the natural sciences, they would learn as thoroughly and as well as sons. And by chance there happen to be such women.” (Pisan 1982: 63). 37 It has been estimated that in seventeenth-century Venice, for instance, 60% of upper-class women were in convents, “many against their will.” (Wiesner-Hanks 2019: 254). 38 On Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), see (Bingen 1994–2004). 39 On Astell, see (Perry 1986; Sowaal and Weiss 2016). 40 Girton College was founded in 1869, and Newnham in 1871. Woolf published these lectures in 1929 as A Room of One’s Own.

Bibliography Primary Sources Anonymous. (1632) The lawes resolutions of womens rights: or, The lawes prouision for woemen. A methodicall collection of such statutes and customes, with the cases, opinions, arguments and points of learning in the law, as doe properly concerne women…, London: John More. Arckenholtz, J. (1751) Memoires Concernant Christine Reine de Suede, Pour Servir d’eclaircissement a l’histoire de son regne et principalement de sa vie privee, et aux evenemens de l’histoire de son tems civile et literaire, Amsterdam and Leipzig: Pierre Mortier. Astell, M. (1697) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, in Two Parts. By a Lover of her Sex, London: Richard Wilkin. Bingen, H. V. (1994–2004) The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, 3 volumes, ed. and trans. J. L. Baird and R. K. Ehrman, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bodin, J. (1955) Six Books of the Commonwealth, abridged and trans M. J. Tooley. Oxford: B. Blackwell. Originally published in 1576. Cereta, L. (1997) Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, transcribed, trans and ed. D. Robin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comenius, J. A. (1923) The Great Didactic: Setting forth The Whole Art of Teaching all Things to all Men, etc., ed. and trans. M. W. Keating, London: A. & C. Black. Originally published in 1657. Descartes, R. (1974–1989) Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. D’Ewes, Sir Simonds. (1845) The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Bart., during the Reigns of James I. and Charles I, ed. J. O. Halliwell, London: R. Bentley. Fedele, Cassandra. Letters and Orations. Edited and translated by Diana Robin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Glikl of Hameln. (2019) Memoirs, 1691–1719, ed. C. Turniansky, trans. S. Friedman, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Gournay, M. de. (1993) Égalité des hommes et des femmes. Grief des dames. Suivis du Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne, ed. C. Venesoen, Genève: Droz. Huygens, C. (1911–1917) De Briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens 1608–1687, 6 vols, ed. J. A. Worp, Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, nos. 15, 19, 21, 24, 28, and 32, Martinus Nijhoff. Knox, J. (1558) The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, Geneva: J. Poullain. [Makin, B.] (1673) An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues. With an Answer to the Objections against this Way of Education, London: [no publisher] Penn, W. (1835) William Penn’s Journal of his Travels in Holland and Germany in 1677, in the Service of the Gospel, London: Darton and Harvey. Pisan, C. de. (1982) The Book of the City of Ladies, ed. and trans. E. J. Richards, New York: Persea Books. Schurman, A. M. van. (1648) Nobiliss. Virginis Annae Mariae à Schurman, Opuscula Hebraea, Graeca, Latina, Gallica: Prosaica & Metrica. (1998) Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated: and Other Writings from Her Intellectual Circle, ed. and trans. J. L. Irwin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Woolf, V. (1935) A Room of One’s Own, London: Hogarth Press.

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Women and Institutions in Early Modern Europe Yvon, P. (1715) “Abregé sincere de la vie & de la conduite & des vrais sentimens de feu Mr. De Labadie,” in G. Arnold (ed.), Forsetzungen und Erläuterungen, Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, Frankfurt am Main. Secondary Sources Allen, P. (1985) The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250, Montreal: Eden Press. Barton, J. and J. Muddiman. (eds.) (2001) The Oxford Bible Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennett, J. M. and A. M. Froide. (1999) Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Blok, F. F. (1976) Caspar Barlaeus: From the Correspondence of a Melancholic, Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Bots, H. (ed.) (1973) Constantijn Huygens: Zijn Plaats in Geleerd Europa, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Brown, J. C. (1989) “Lesbian Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in M. B. Duberman et al. (eds.), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, New York: New American Library, pp. 67–75. Bury, Emmanuel. (1999) “Madame Dacier,” in Colette Nativel (ed.), Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes: du crépuscule de la Renaissance à l’aube des Lumières, Geneva: Librairie Droz, pp. 209–20. Čapková, D. (1994) “Comenius and His Ideals: Escape from the Labyrinth,” in M. Greengrass, M. Leslie, and T. Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, G. (1920) Écrivains français en Hollande dans la Première Moitié du XVIIe Siècle, Paris: Librairie Ancienne Édouard Champion. Di Caprio, L. and M. Wiesner. (eds.) (2001) Lives and Voices: Sources in European Women’s History, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Farnham, F. (1976) Madame Dacier: Scholar and Humanist, Monterey: Angel Press. Febvre, L. (1982) The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais [1942], trans. B. Gottlieb, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fissell, M. (ed.) (2008) “Special Issue: Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82(1). Franklin, A. E. et al. (eds.) (2014) Jews, Christians and Muslims in Medieval and Early Modern Times: A Festschrift in Honor of Mark R. Cohen, Leiden: Brill. Goudriaan, A. (2006) Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625–1750: Gisbertus Voetius, Petrus van Mastricht, and Anthonius Driessen, Leiden: Brill. Hajnal, J. (1965) “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (eds.), Population in History. Essays in Historical Demography, Vol. I, Chicago: Aldine Publishing. Hsia, R. P. (1992) Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial, New Haven: Yale University Press. Jansen, S. L. (2002) The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jardine, L. (2008) Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, New York: Harper Collins. Konnert, M. (2006) Early Modern Europe: The Age of Religious War, 1559–1715, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Larsen, A. R. (2016) Anna Maria van Schurman, ‘The Star of Utrecht’, London and New York: Routledge. Leong, E. (2018) Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacCulloch, D. (2009) Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, London: Allen Lane. Monter, W. (2012) The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300–1800, New Haven: Yale University Press. O’Faolain, J. and L. Martines. (eds.) (1973) Not in God’s Image, New York: Harper & Row. Pal, C. (2009) “Forming familles d’alliance: Intellectual Kinship in the Republic of Letters,” in J. Campbell, G. Eschrich, and A. Larsen (eds.), Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, Farnham: Ashgate. (2012) Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parente, J. A. Jr. (1994) “Anna Roemers Visscher and Maria Tesselschade Roemers Visscher,” in K. Aercke (ed.), Women Writing in Dutch, New York and London: Garland Publishing. Perry, R. (1986) The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rankin, A. (2013) Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Carol Pal Ross, S. G. (2009) The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ruler, J. A. van. (1995) The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and Change, Leiden: E.J. Brill. Saxby, T. (1987) The Quest for the New Jerusalem: Jean de Labadie and the Labadists, 1610–1744, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Smet, I. A. R. de. (1997) “‘In the Name of the Father’: Feminist Voices in the Republic of Letters (A. Tarabotti, A. M. van Schurman, and M. de Gournay),” in M. Bastiaensen (ed.), La femme lettrée à la Renaissance: Actes du Colloque international, Bruxelles: Peeters, pp. 177–96. Sneller, A. A. (1996) “‘If She Had Been a Man…’: Anna Maria van Schurman in the Social and Literary Life of her Age,” in M. de Baar et al. (eds.), Choosing the Better Part: Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), Dordrecht: Kluwer A.P. Sowaal, A., and P. Weiss. (eds.) (2016) Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, Re-reading the Canon, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. The Bible, King James Version. Available at: https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/ Thompson, E. P. (1977) “Happy Families: Review of Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800,” New Society, 499–501. Traub, V. (2016) Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Whitehead, B. J. (ed.) (1999) Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe. A History, 1500–1800, New York: Garland Press. Wiesner-Hanks, M. (2019) Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 4th edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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3 CANON, GENDER, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY Lisa Shapiro

If any period in the history of philosophy has a philosophical canon, it is the period from roughly 1580–1780, or the early modern period. While the situation on the ground is rapidly shifting, it is still the norm within the English-speaking world for both the teaching and continuing scholarship of early modern philosophy to focus on seven key figures: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.1 These seven figures constitute the early modern philosophical canon. For quite a number of years now, historians of philosophy have recognized that this canon excludes women.2 The remedy for this exclusion is my particular concern here. More recently, there has been a recognition that this is the European early modern philosophical canon. While I will not be able to address the fact that this canon is distinctly European (or even Western European) here,3 by reflecting upon this canon, I suspect we can learn something not only about the history of European philosophy but also about philosophical canons more generally. What we learn may well help us in moving beyond this canon but also prove instructive about the norms of historiography of philosophy more generally. I begin by setting out tacit assumptions of a philosophical canon and so reasons for calling those assumptions into question. One of those reasons is the way in which women were written out of the history of philosophy in the nineteenth century. In Section 3.2, I turn to consider some remedies for that exclusion, and the prospects for their success. I argue that to successfully redress the injustice of excluding women from European intellectual history, we need to recognize that while some women were interested in the questions that dominate our current history of philosophy, others were interested in different, yet no less central, questions. Moreover, for many women philosophers, no matter what questions moved them philosophically, philosophy was not an idle intellectual exercise but rather addressed questions that were very much alive in the contexts in which they were writing. Recognizing their legitimacy as philosophers aligns with recent critiques of contemporary philosophy. I conclude by suggesting that our histories of philosophy would be more inclusive if we moved from a philosophical canon dominated by a very limited set of figures to one that was framed by a set of questions. We might call these questions timeless questions, as they arise again and again; yet nonetheless, we pose them in a particular place and historical context, and they move us to the reflection that constitutes the practice of philosophy.

3.1  The Uses and Disadvantages of the European Philosophical Canon Often when philosophers talk of our canon, we ignore the origins of the term. Per its primary definition, a canon is a rule or law, decreed by the Church, typically, by a small subset of those DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-4

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in authority, (i.e., the pope or a Council charged with developing the law). A canon in this sense is sacred. Also in a religious context, a canon can refer to a set of books identified by the Church as having authenticity as divinely inspired. These works are canonized, and in at least some instances, the authors of those books are sainted; others who are deemed as authentically having divine inspiration are also canonized and placed in the calendar of saints. This ecclesiastical sense of ‘canon’ is then secularized to mean a law or rule, or a fundamental principle governing a body of knowledge, or more loosely a standard of taste. Now it might seem easy to take this etymological point cavalierly and claim that in the European philosophical tradition, our canon is secular and not tied to any authentic divine inspiration. However, this dismissal is not as easy as it might appear. The European early modern period in particular is marked by wars of religion, and the effort to set philosophy apart from theology. This might lead us to wonder whether the idea of a canon of early modern European philosophy is in fact designed to be a secular alternative to a philosophical tradition tied to theology.4 Second, and more importantly for my purposes, the key feature of an ecclesiastical canon is its authentic connection to the divine. Once it is established that an individual is divinely inspired, there can be no questioning of their privileged status, nor of the place of their words and works. Canonical religious figures and their works carry an unchallengeable authority in virtue of their connection to the divine, and in so far as their authority is unchallengeable their views are taken as necessary truths. Secular philosophical canonical figures have come to carry a similar unchallengeable authority. Our early modern canonical philosophers derive their authority not through a particular connection to the divine but rather from their connection to reason, which is often imagined to be an abstract universal ideal. These figures are deemed to be great minds.5 It is, however, unclear just what that means. It cannot be because they managed to decisively answer philosophical questions, for the very storyline that ties the canonical figures together depends on their having made errors. It cannot be because they are remarkably effective at conveying their philosophical views; though some are great stylists, others could well have used an editor. Of course, they are taken to be great in part because they made an impact in their own day. Nonetheless, having had an impact at one point in time guarantees neither greatness nor the enduring judgment of their greatness. At the very least, we take these canonical figures to have great minds because the answers they offer to a set of philosophical questions in metaphysics and epistemology inform discussions of the same questions that are still alive today: the ontology of substance and mode, and whether what exists are substances and if so their essence; the nature of causation; the nature of mental representation and of how our ideas can enable us to have knowledge of things. These are good philosophical questions, but we take these questions to be agenda-setting, as necessary to address.6 I want to suggest that we canonize a philosopher as a secular saint of philosophy insofar as we take them to offer answers that make progress in answering these questions understood as necessary. Further, in being so canonized, even though their answers may be mistaken, their mistakes appear necessary for us to have made further progress and to get closer to definitive answers. While the early modern European philosophical canon may seem to have an elevated status, the reality is that it is deeply contingent that we ended up with these seven philosophers. For one, which philosophers count as canonical very much depends on the linguistic community in which one finds oneself – there are differences between the American, English, French, and German canonical program. Further, Bruce Kuklick (1984) has shown that in the American context, the canonization of these seven thinkers is in part a function of the late nineteenth-century development of university textbooks, and the related effort to develop a distinctively American philosophical program, with all its associated internal politics. That is, it “depends on disorder, on luck, on cultural transitions that if not random certainly do not reflect overriding purpose, on scholarly power-plays, and on the sheer glacial inertia of the institutions of higher education” 30

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(Kuklick 1984: 137).7 More recently, the work of Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Sabrina Ebbersmeyer demonstrate in detail that in other locales too, there are complex political considerations involved in establishing a philosophical canon in the first place. Antoine-Mahut, in her L’Autorité d’un canon philosophique. Le cas de Descartes, aims to show that the role in which a canonical figure plays in a history of philosophy is something that shifts with interpretations that are highly sensitive to the contexts in which those interpretations are developed. In a certain respect then the very identity of a given canonical figure is contingent. In an article (Antoine-Mahut 2020) that anticipates the monograph, she provides a snapshot of how this works in Joseph-Marie Degérando’s shifting readings of Descartes in the two editions of his Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie (1804 and posthumously published 1847). Both histories of philosophy have in mind the role of philosophy in French education, and the role that education was to play in the post-revolutionary French republic. That vision of that role shifts from 1804 to 1847, and with it so too does the way in which Descartes’s philosophy is characterized. There is, thus, not a fact of the matter about the Descartes ensconced in the philosophical canon. As Antoine-Mahut puts it, writing the history of philosophy can, in general, be seen as comparable to a battle … [one which] opens up the possibility of broadening the canon to include more figures but also for broadening the understanding of the canonical figures themselves, or pluralizing the canonical figures. (Antoine-Mahut 2020: 548) 8 While Antoine-Mahut is concerned to demonstrate how our understanding of particular canonical figures is contingent on social and political aims, and so to “pluralize” them, Ebbersmeyer (2020), in her “From a ‘memorable place’ to ‘drops in the ocean’,” looks at the writing of German histories of philosophy in the nineteenth century to show just how, from generation to generation, women became more and more marginalized from the history of philosophy, until there were simply no women in it. What is at one and the same time unsurprising and remarkable are the justifications for the exclusion of women: one’s work was derivative; another did not rise to the same level of greatness as the sainted few; of still others, it was denied they were even doing philosophy. Ebbersmeyer highlights that these efforts intensified at just the moment that arguments were being leveled for women’s suffrage and entitlement to attend university, and women’s exclusion from the history of philosophy came to be naturalized, justified by the supposed “natural inaptitude of women for philosophy,” conveniently aligning with political efforts to quash women’s right to political representation and to higher education (Ebbersmeyer 2020: 460).

3.2  The Exclusion of Women and Strategies for Inclusion It is worth comparing contemporary canon-driven history of philosophy (albeit one that is changing rapidly) with the histories of philosophy presented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For there were histories of philosophy that included women. The Renaissance and early modern period saw the reintroduction of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, of which printed editions began to circulate in 1472, with a complete text published in 1533. The edition of 1692, edited by Marcus Meibomius, inaugurated the conventions still in use today. That work does not simply allude to the wives, daughters, and even mothers of eminent philosophers, it also recounts their lives as philosophers in their own right, as with Theano (Pythagoras’ wife), Themistoclea (with whom Pythagoras studied), Damo (Pythagoras’ daughter and student); and it includes other women philosophers such as Hipparchia.9 31

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Perhaps following the style of Diogenes Laertius, a number of women (and men) authors engaged in the querelle des femmes provided their own catalogs of women philosophers and intellectuals from across history to bolster their arguments that women are indeed fully rational and capable of real intellectual achievement.10 The lists of names of strong, successful women leaders in Lucretia Marinella’s On the Excellence and Nobility of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (1601), in Marie de Gournay’s On the Equality of Men and Women (1622/1641), and later in Poulain de la Barre’s On the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673) not only support arguments for women’s intellectual abilities, they are also effectively notes for histories of women philosophers. Perhaps for this reason, Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655) included 24 women philosophers and Gilles Ménage compiled 65 women in his History of Women Philosophers (Historia Mulierum Philosopharum) (1690), an appendix to editions of both Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch. Other seventeenthcentury works by Jean de la Forge (1663) and Marguerite Buffet (1668) included both historical and contemporary women thinkers. This practice of including women in the histories of philosophy continued into the eighteenth century, not only through re-editions of Stanley but also in works like Mary Hays’ Female Biography (1803). It is not until the nineteenth century that women start to be written out of the history of philosophy. As we work to reintroduce women into the history of philosophy there are a number of strategies to take. One obvious step is to find the names of those who have gone missing from our intellectual history, along with their works. We can go back to those histories of philosophy that do mention women and gather those names once again. Mary Ellen Waithe in the three volumes of her History of Women Philosophers brings to the fore 21 women philosophers in Greek and Roman antiquity, another 15 from the medieval and Renaissance periods, and 31 women from 1600 to 1900.11 The catalog of the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, which is edited by literary historians, includes a large number of women philosophers from the Renaissance, a period largely ignored by historians of philosophy. Eileen O’Neill, in her agenda-setting piece, “Disappearing Ink” enumerates more than 55 women whose intellectual labor demands our attention, and that is only in one 200-year stretch.12 Of course, these resources may well also omit many names. This is a bit of an archaeological project.13 As O’Neill recognizes, uncovering all these names also leaves us with a real practical problem. In order to truly recover these women thinkers, someone (more than one person!) has to recover, read, and understand what is philosophically interesting about their works. This is a challenge for a number of reasons. First, there are only so many hours in a day, and there are a lot of works to be read. Moreover, identifying what is philosophically interesting in a work for which there is literally no body of scholarly literature is just difficult.14 It requires the reader to have an openness to the text that allows them to hear the philosophical issues it engages. We historians of philosophy are simply not accustomed to reading texts that are new to us, and doing so takes time, patience, and, perhaps most importantly, the opportunity to receive feedback (which can be hard when others have not read the works under discussion). There are added hurdles: women philosophers often wrote in genres that have fallen out of fashion,15 and they were interested in philosophical questions that became gendered, and then downgraded, and in some cases have disappeared from philosophy.16 There are a number of ways to try to address this practical problem. Being mindful of these challenges, I want to focus on three. First, we can prioritize attending to women philosophers whose own philosophical work engages with and intersects that of canonical philosophers. This approach can work to some extent. Princess Elisabeth’s extant philosophical work consists in her correspondence with Descartes. Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham corresponded with Leibniz in defense of her close friend Locke’s philosophical program. Catherine Trotter Cockburn also wrote in defense of Locke. Nonetheless, this strategy has (at least) two limitations.

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The first limitation of this approach is that it inevitably positions women philosophers as subordinate to their canonical counterparts, for the women are read primarily as responding to the work of great thinkers rather than putting forward ideas of their own. This limitation might be overcome by looking to women who did develop their own original philosophies as an alternative to those advanced by canonical figures. Margaret Cavendish, for instance, certainly aimed to do this in developing her natural philosophy. Her Philosophical Letters consists of an imagined correspondence between herself and Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, and Jan Baptist van Helmont, and that work shows just how her own natural philosophy is developing in response to shortcomings of those advanced by others. This philosophy reaches maturity in her Observations upon the Experimental Philosophy in which she advances a vitalist metaphysics17 that affords its own ontology, as well as accounts of causation, perception, and knowledge. Insofar as she is addressing the philosophical questions put on the agenda by the early modern philosophical canon, she can be brought into conversation with our seven canonical figures relatively seamlessly. Similar strategies can be and are being deployed with other women of the period. For instance, Anne Conway’s distinctive metaphysics can be put to be into conversation with Spinoza’s, which is, of course, in conversation with that of Descartes and Leibniz, and Emilie du Châtelet’s natural philosophy and philosophy of science directly engages with that of Newton and Leibniz and can also be set into conversation with Kant’s philosophy. The second limitation of the first strategy to reintroduce women into the history of philosophy is that even while it does allow for restoring some women their places in the history of philosophy, it selects for the philosophical agenda of the existing canon. These women are taken to be worth attending to because they are focused on central questions of metaphysics and epistemology. It is certainly true that these are important, and even core, philosophical questions, but the canonical narrative of early modern history of philosophy presumes that these are the most central questions of philosophy, those necessary to address, and pushes us if not to exclude then to ignore other important philosophical questions. The second strategy for addressing the practical problem effectively asks us to filter through the large number of women philosophers looking for greatness that has been missed, and greatness is understood as making contributions to the canonical philosophical agenda that have not been adequately recognized. I have concerns about this strategy. Most trenchantly, simply expanding the canon in this way leaves an exclusionary structure very much still in place. The appearance of the necessity of the philosophical agenda is left solidly in place, and while a handful of women may well gain some recognition, there will still be many who will continue to be neglected. It might end up being even worse. For although one might take the canonical philosophers to be great because they made progress on the most central philosophical questions, one might also take it that the philosophical questions become so central – become the philosophical agenda – because those were the questions these canonical figures asked. That is, the canon might be substantively self-reinforcing: once canonical figures get recognized as great – because they manage to make some progress in addressing some questions, perhaps – the importance and centrality of the questions in metaphysics and epistemology are validated by their being the focus of these great minds, and then greatness of their minds is further revealed in their framing and prioritizing these questions in metaphysics and epistemology, and so on. Reactionary forces might push back that while these women might have given particularly astute answers to these questions, they were not themselves agendasetters.18 That would inevitably lead to diminishing the contributions of these women, and thus to them once again being moved to the shadows. However, we need not concede this standard of greatness that seems to drive the early modern European canon. In the introduction to What Makes a Philosopher Great?, Stephen Hetherington

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suggests that philosophical greatness, rather than a property of an individual thinker, provides a window into what philosophy is like at its best. He suggests that great philosophy, (or a great philosopher, might well be somewhat like a great artwork (or great artist), reorienting us, enabling us to see both the world and ourselves in a new way (Hetherington 2018). This suggestion reminds us that philosophy is a humanistic inquiry, which aims not simply to reveal truths about the world, but also, in doing so, to facilitate our understanding of ourselves in that world. In keeping with these humanistic aims, a great philosopher does the work of jarring us to re-examine what we have been brought up to uncritically assume and demonstrates how doing so makes a difference in the world in which we live. In that same volume, Karen Detlefsen argues that Du Châtelet’s greatness consists not only in her contributions to metaphysics and philosophy of science, which were very significant, but also in the original ways in which Du Châtelet “engages with questions surrounding human minds, ownership of one’s mind, and the role that education plays in such ownership,”19 the precision with which she does so, and the concern that she holds to improve the lives of human beings, and in particular those who are more socially disadvantaged than others. For Detlefsen, Du Châtelet’s greatness is certainly tied to the original contributions she makes in philosophy, and the lucidity of her writing, but it is not separable from the social significance of those contributions. Detlefsen’s interpretation of Du Châtelet brings me to the third strategy for approaching the large number of early modern women who have been neglected. While philosophy of mind has long been counted among the canonical topics of early modern philosophy, the focus has largely been on mental representation and related epistemic questions: What is an idea? Does having an idea entail awareness of its content? What is the nature of awareness or consciousness? What is the connection between the content of the idea and its actual object in the world? Detlefsen, however, focuses on Du Châtelet’s attention to a different dimension of early modern accounts of mind – the ownership of one’s own thoughts. This ownership of thought is related to the canonical question of consciousness, but it adds texture to it. When we own our thoughts, we are not merely aware of them, but have appropriated them.20 While, for Detlefsen, part of Du Châtelet’s originality is her shifting of a central question, Detlefsen situates Du Châtelet within a discussion that had been going on long before her, one about equality of women as rational creatures, and so about the importance of educating women. So, Du Châtelet’s greatness is not in her special insight or identification of a question. Detlefsen argues that Du Châtelet is a great philosopher in that she rejects appeals to biblical and religious authority to ground rationality, and thereby sets self-ownership of thought on solid secular ground, and in doing so, she opens up the possibility of rejecting the social customs and structures that subjugate women in a new way, one that is not ultimately constrained by religious authority, even if she does not herself fully advocate for those changes. Du Châtelet thus helps to create the intellectual conditions that enable there to be more substantive equality between people and so to more just societies. Essential to Du Châtelet’s philosophical greatness is her commitment to principles that make knowledge a good that is accessible to all and her re-conception of education such that through education that good can be equitably distributed.21 Part of the reason the contributions of women philosophers have been neglected, or even erased, is because the philosophical questions in which they are most interested were not and have not been on the canonical agenda. Du Châtelet is one in a long line of women thinkers who are particularly concerned with education, and women’s education in particular, to argue that women are fit to be educated and so ought to be educated, and to consider the form that education ought to take. And yet, until very recently, these works were not read by historians of philosophy.22 There are other philosophical questions that historical women thinkers were interested in and yet are not taken seriously within the history of philosophy. Some women were concerned to work out how there could be equality between individual human beings despite their differences – for 34

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instance, the equality of the two sexes. Others were concerned to distinguish true friendship from the superficial relationships that sometimes pass for friends. Others were concerned with religion and distinguishing what was sometimes referred to as true religion from a feigned religious authority. Others considered the challenges the marital contract visited upon women under conditions of real inequality, and so raised questions about the nature of contracts more generally. These considerations of marriage were often also connected with evaluations of familial structures. More standard philosophical questions about the passions, and their regulation, virtue, and autonomy were also of interest to these historical women philosophers. O’Neill suggests that women whose philosophy is centered on these topics drop out of the history of philosophy because the questions themselves become gendered and diminish in value insofar as they are deemed “feminine.” While, as Ebbersmeyer’s work shows, this is undoubtedly the case, there is another dimension to the philosophical questions in which women thinkers have been historically interested. For these women, philosophy is a means of both coming to explicate and understand important aspects of the particular situations in which they find themselves and providing direction for how to live in those situations. Two critiques of contemporary moral philosophy can help us to understand how this intertwining of philosophical theorizing with the practical significance of that philosophy has also led to their historical exclusion. First, G.E.M. Anscombe in “Modern Moral Philosophy” takes aim at the impoverished sense of “moral” in play in contemporary moral philosophy, and in particular the way in which the moral has become divorced from a good that, as Aristotle well-recognized, is inseparable from human flourishing. Many women philosophers of the past developed their own philosophical views with human flourishing very much at the fore. They are less concerned with developing abstract theories that provide mechanisms for drawing distinctions of what is owed or desirable or permissible than with providing arguments for principles that both hold and must be implemented to improve human life. Their work thus does not fit easily into the dominant discussions of contemporary ethics. Second, contemporary philosopher Charles Mills draws a distinction between two approaches in ethics and political philosophy: ideal theory and nonideal theory. Ideal theory privileges developing idealized descriptions, which are then deployed as models to the exclusion of considering actual cases.23 These idealized models are meant to help us articulate the norms of decision making to which we ought to be committed. The classic example of a contemporary ideal theory is that articulated at the beginning of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, in which we are asked to consider a group of individuals in an original position, behind a veil of ignorance about where they are situated in the world, and determine which principles they would all agree to. But ideal theory certainly predates Rawls. Through its privileging of idealized models in this way, ideal theory not only ends up abstracting away from the messiness of human life, but also from the contexts and situations that move us to ask question about the human good and how it ought to guide decision making and about a just society in the first place.24 Nonideal theory, however, recognizes human agents in the complex situations they are in, replete with varieties of lived experiences and in messy and inequitable social relations, and aims to articulate general principles and norms to guide human action and interaction that respect these complexities. Many historical women’s approach to philosophy is akin to that of nonideal theory. They are concerned with understanding and addressing the particular challenges they confront as women within a social context that denigrates their intellectual capacities, mocks their social relationships, and gives them very limited options for structuring their own life paths. Their philosophical efforts aim to articulate new conceptions of personhood that affirm their status as persons and of the equality between persons that puts them on level ground; to reflect on the purpose of education and articulate norms to guide educational practices and institutions; to articulate normative standards to shape social interactions, for instance, by distinguishing true friendship from 35

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superficially friendly relationships, or by articulating the norms that ought to guide marriage and similar contractual agreements; to develop accounts of authentic faith and belief in God; as well as to develop accounts of the passions, virtue, and autonomy that both reflect and are responsive to social reality. Just as philosophy moved toward valorizing ideal theory, so too did the writing of the history of philosophy move toward excluding those who assumed a nonideal theoretic approach. Mogens Laerke argues that for Martial Gueroult, the very influential twentieth-century French historian of philosophy, philosophy ought to be defined as “any systematic concern for a-temporal truth” (Laerke 2020: 602). Laerke shows how this conception of philosophy, rooted in a Kantian transcendental project, arises out of a search for a principle through which points of commonality between the work of philosophers of the past and the work of contemporary philosophy can be recognized, even though the work of the two might look quite different. It is through this principle that, according to Gueroult, a history of philosophy can be written. Thus, ­Gueroult’s own interpretive work aims to demonstrate the systematicity of philosophers like Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza. That it is hard to imagine how these thinkers might have been read in a way that wasn’t as systematizers shows just how deep Gueroult’s influence has been, and how it is in the present almost uncritically accepted. However, as innocuous as Gueroult’s definition of philosophy might seem – he countenances any systematic effort to arrive at timeless truths – the privileging of systematicity and the pursuit of atemporal truth effectively excludes the intellectual work of women in the history from being philosophical. Truly recovering the work of women philosophers of the past will involve recognizing that there are philosophical questions that are best addressed by attending to the context in which the questions arise and looking for answers that take the form of a nonideal theory that is embedded in those contexts.25 Insofar as philosophical engagement is sensitive to historical situation, we should also expect that what counts as a philosophical system might well look very different than what we are accustomed to. While we might continue to expect internal consistency and even the articulation of fundamental assumptions or principles,26 to be philosophical a program need not aim to explain the totality of things. It need only aim to make sense of elements of lived experience that are of particular moment.27

3.3  Lessons for the Historiography of Philosophy I have been focused on criticizing the early modern European philosophical canon, and so canons in general, but it should also be noted that there are some advantages to having a canon. The early modern philosophical canon in so far it sets an agenda of philosophical questions provides a background to contemporary philosophical discussions and helps to connect the philosophical present with the philosophical past. This connection helps to justify contemporary philosophical interests.28 It also has afforded philosophers with different specialized interests to share a background in common, making it easier to have a broader philosophical community. In teaching, a canon helps in structuring curriculum, and so affords a degree of continuity from one institution to another. We aim to disrupt the canon because it is exclusionary. Can we retain these advantages even while we work to make the history of philosophy more inclusive? Noting these advantages can provide helpful additional guidance as we set about reconceiving both the history of philosophy and how we write this new history. First, while undertaking the doxographic labor of retrieving the work of many women philosophers is essential, we need to be mindful that the doxography not be simply for doxography’s sake. That is, the philosopher’s project is not identical to a philologist’s. In doing this philosophical archaeology, we need to look not only for artifacts, but also for points of potential commonality that can help to lend a degree of cohesion to our discipline. 36

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Second, while we like to think of the early modern canon as providing students, and even more mature philosophers, with a set of common texts that bind us all together, it is less the authors and their works that allow us to enter into conversation with one another but rather the common interest in the philosophical questions that structure the canonical agenda.29 We are gripped by the questions that are front and center in the early modern canon, and through our interest in getting clear about the nature of things and about how we know things we are primed to engage with one another, in many cases in quite animated ways. This grip the questions have on us is what some people describe as a philosophical instinct or a motivation to understand ourselves and our place in the world, to reflect on the world around us, and our place in it. While we might well have a shared interest in canonical questions of metaphysics and epistemology, we do so because we have a shared inclination to ask philosophical questions in the first place – to take up a reflective stance. Indeed, philosophy matters precisely because of the reflective stance it cultivates. Philosophy asks us to identify assumptions, evaluate those assumptions, look for consistency, for pressure points. The idea is that doing this actually helps to improve our lives. Notably, that is what these historical women philosophers think. Women thinkers in the history of philosophy are interested in philosophical questions because they believe that articulating our fundamental assumptions and getting them right can make a real difference in the quality of their lives but also those of women, both their contemporaries and of the future. As we rewrite the history of philosophy, we ought to ensure that this reflective spirit is front and center, for it is through our shared interest in asking questions and interacting with one another to seek answers to them that we can find the commonality the canon provides rather than through a limited set of figures and texts. We might be tempted to characterize these as timeless questions, for they arise again and again, and insofar as they are philosophical, we engage with them intellectually and abstract from the contexts in which they arise. Nonetheless, while the questions pique our natural human curiosity, interest in them is sustained through a resonance in the context in which they arise. To sustain the presence of women – and indeed other neglected figures – in the history of philosophy, we need to find a way to write histories of nonideal philosophies. Doing so will involve reflecting on and making explicit our own interests and aims in undertaking the history of philosophy itself. The failure to do just that is what has left us with a small set of canonized philosophical saints.30

Notes 1 Over the past five years, at least, the British Journal for the History of Philosophy has made a concerted effort to build scholarship on a wide range of non-canonical figures, publishing 61 articles (19%) on noncanonical figures across historical periods. Other scholarly journals that publish in English are lagging behind, though 2019–2020 has seen progress in journals such as Journal for the History of Philosophy and Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. 2 This recognition can be dated at least to the dates of publication of Mary Ellen Waithe’s three volume series of A History of Women Philosophers (1987, 1989, and 1991). 3 We might also note that the “early modern” time period is somewhat arbitrarily defined. Not only is the time period itself marked by events in European history, the disciplines of History and of English actually define “early modern” differently than does Philosophy. 4 The dispute between Descartes and Voetius at Utrecht is one very clear example of a very public struggle between a philosopher currently regarded as canonical and theologians who saw themselves as having the authority to prescribe the discipline of philosophy. See Verbeek (1992). 5 See for instance Kuklick (1984): “If a philosopher in the United States were asked why the seven people in my title comprise Modern Philosophy, the initial response would be: they were the best, and there are historical and philosophical connections among them” (125) and “We do not write the (or ‘a’) history of philosophy; what we write are histories of philosophers whom we think, or others think, are great” (137). 6 Waithe (2015) following Witt (2006) characterizes these as “burning questions” and rightly recognizes the limitations of understanding the canon in these terms. In Shapiro (2016) I began to highlight central

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Lisa Shapiro questions that the current canon omits. In what follows I offer a diagnosis of how some questions come to seem necessary while others disappear from view. 7 Alberto Vanzo (2016) fleshes out details about how the standard narrative of the history of philosophy is a dialectic of competing doctrines of Rationalism and Empiricism and their ultimate synthesis. 8 The expression “pluralizing” an historical philosopher can seem a bit mysterious. As I understand Antoine-Mahut, the way an author is incorporated in the history of philosophy is far from univocal; there is no single Descartes who figures in the history of philosophy. How we position a philosopher’s views in intellectual history is highly contingent on the role that history plays in a larger educational program. The case of Descartes is particularly instructive because the same historian of philosophy positions Descartes differently in different editions of his history. 9 Plutarch also names a number of women, apparently a result of great labor. See Bremmer (1981). 10 The discussion of this paragraph draws on O’Neill (1997). 11 See Waithe (1987, 1989, 1991). 12 O’Neill (1997). 13 Karen Green and Jacqueline Broad’s History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe 1400–1700 (2009) and Green’s History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe 1700–1800 (2014) add more names to the list. See also Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Britain (2009), and Meredith Ray, Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (2015); Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (2003); Doris Kadish, Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves: Women Writers and French Colonial Slavery (2012) for additional figures. We historians of philosophy need to be vigilant about seeking out the work of historians who are the ones digging through archives and libraries finding long buried intellectual treasure. As I am finalizing this text, Cambridge University has announced the discovery of Mary Astell’s personal library, with important marginalia, among the holdings of Magdalene College. 14 O’Neill (2006) is an illustration of this point. There is a separate challenge of creating a body of secondary literature out of nothing. Publication decisions are made on the advice of expert referees. But what if there are very few such experts in philosophy? 15 See Karen Detlefsen’s chapter in this volume. A workshop at McGill University in November 2016 organized by Marguerite Deslauriers focused on issues of genre and methodology in the history of philosophy. Waithe (2015) makes a similar point. 16 O’Neill (1997) argues for this explanation. 17 Here I follow the norm of characterizing Cavendish’s metaphysics as vitalist, but it is important to recognize that vitalism refers to a range of views, which are not always compatible with one another. Thanks to Karen Detlefsen for pressing this point. 18 Notably, this response also fails to recognize that because of dominant prejudices and power structures the intellectual contributions of some of these women may have been discounted in their own time, despite what we can now recognize as their originality and potential to be agenda setters. Thanks to Karen Detlefsen for this point. 19 Karen Detlefsen (2018: 130). 20 Detlefsen is building on a theme articulated in Shapiro (2016). 21 Detlefsen notes in conversation that there are strong inegalitarian strands in Émilie du Châtelet, and in her Discourse on Happiness in particular. Du Châtelet does not in the end see the implications of her own principles. 22 Amelie Oksenberg Rorty’s Philosophers on Education (1988) does not allude to any of these writings. 23 Mills introduces language of a contract in a nonideal society in The Racial Contract (Mills 1997); he helpfully distills the central principles of nonideal theory in Mills (2005). “But ideal theory either tacitly represents the actual as simple deviation from the ideal, not worth theorizing in its own right, or claims that starting from the ideal is at least the best way of realizing it” (Mills 2005: 168). 24 As Mills notes, within the domain of ideal theory agents have near perfect human capacities, and lack implicit biases; contexts of systematic oppression are ignored; and social institutions function well. 25 In this respect, it is worth noting that contextualist history of philosophy, insofar as it aims to interpret works of philosophy through their significance to active debates in the history of science, already effectively treats metaphysics and epistemology as nonideal theory. 26 We need not always even expect internal consistency. For instance, we recognize that Leibniz has an early, a middle and a late period. And we note too the willingness of contemporary philosophers, i.e., Hilary Putnam, to change their views, without diminishing their stature. Thanks to Karen Detlefsen for this point. 27 On this view, it is somewhat less important that the boundaries between philosophy and other forms of humanistic inquiry be hard and fast. The same figures can be studied by historians of philosophy, literary

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Canon, Gender, and Historiography historians, and intellectual historians. What distinguishes us are the questions we ask of the texts and the ways in which we relate the past to the present. Indeed, I take it as a benefit of this way of thinking about the history of philosophy that it opens up spaces for these cross-disciplinary conversations. O’Neill (2003) highlights Michèle LeDoeuff’s identification in Hipparchia’s Choice of operative philosophy as an alternative to systematic philosophy. 28 Rorty (1984) makes this point. 29 Shapiro (2016) develops this point more fully. 30 I have benefited from comments by Silver Bronzo, questions from participants in an online workshop on philosophical canons at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and an email exchange with Daria Drozdova and Daniel Garber arising from that presentation, as well as from discussion with the Philosophy Department at Carleton University.

Bibliography Anscombe, G. (1958) “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in M. Geach and L. Gormally (eds.) Human, Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe (2006), Luton: Andrews UK. Antoine-Mahut, D. (2020) “Philosophizing with a Historiographical Figure: Descartes in Degérando’s Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie (1804 and 1847),” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28(3): 533–52. (2021) L’Autorité d’un canon philosophique. Le cas de Descartes, Paris: Vrin. Bremmer, J. (1981) “Plutarch and the Naming of Greek Women,” American Journal of Philology 102(4): 425–26. Buffet, M. (1668) Nouvelles observations sur la langue françoise, où il est traité des termes anciens & inusitez, & du bel usage des mots nouveaux. Avec les Eloges des illustres sçavantes, tant anciennes que modernes, Paris: Jean Cusson. Cavendish, M. (1664) Philosophical Letters: Or Modest Reflections upon Some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, London: s.n. (2001) Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. E. O’Neill, New York: Cambridge University Press, originally published 1668. Detlefsen, K. (2018) “Émilie du Châtelet on Women’s Minds and Education,” in S. Hetherington (ed.) What Makes a Philosopher Great? Thirteen Arguments for Twelve Philosophers, New York/London: Routledge. De Gournay, M. (2002) “On the Equality of Men and Women,” in R. Hillman and C. Quesnel (eds. and trans.) Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, originally published 1641. Diogenes, L. (2013) Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. T. Dorandi, New York: Cambridge University Press. Ebbersmeyer, S. (2020) “From a ‘memorable place’ to ‘drops in the ocean’: On the Marginalization of Women Philosophers in German Historiography of Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28(3): 442–62. Forge, J. (1663) La Cercle des Femmes sçavantes, Paris: Pierre Trabouillet. Green, K. (2014) History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe 1700–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. and J. Broad. (2009) History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe 1400–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hays, M. (1803) Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries, Alphabetically Arranged, London: R. Phillips. Hesse, C. (2003) The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hetherington, S. (2018) “Introduction,” in S. Hetherington (ed.), What Makes a Philosopher Great? Thirteen Arguments for Twelve Philosophers, New York: Routledge. Kadish, D. (2012) Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves: Women Writers and French Colonial Slavery, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kuklick, B. (1984) “Seven Thinkers and How they Grew: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz; Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Kant,” in R. Rorty, J. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laerke, M. (2020) “Structural Analysis and Dianoematics: The History (of the History) of Philosophy According to Martial Gueroult,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 58(3): 581–607. Le Doeuff, M. (1989) Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc., trans. T. Selous. Oxford: Blackwell. Marinella, L. (1999) On the Excellence and Nobility of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, ed. and trans. A. Dunhill, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, originally published 1601.

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Lisa Shapiro Ménage, G. (1690) Historia Mulierum Philosopharum, Lugduni: J. Posuel and C. Rigauld. Mills, C. (1997) The Racial Contract, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (2005) “’Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” Hypatia 20(3): 165–84. O’Brien, K. (2009) Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, E. (1997) “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History,” in J. Kourany (ed.) Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, Princeton: Princeton University Press. (2003) “Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy,” Australian Journal of Philosophy 40(3): 257–74. (2006) “Justifying the Inclusion of Women in our Histories of Philosophy: The Case of Marie de Gournay” in E. Kittay and L. Alcoff (eds.) Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Poulain de la Barre, F. (2002) “On the Equality of the Two Sexes” in M. Welch (ed.) and V. Bosley (trans.), Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (2011) De l’égalité des deux sexes, ed. M. Pellegrin. Paris: Vrin, originally published 1673. Ray, M. (2015) Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, A. (1988) Philosophers on Education, New York: Routledge. Rorty, R. (1984) “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in R. Rorty, J. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (eds.), Philosophy and its History, New York: Cambridge University Press. Shapiro, L. (2016) “Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical Canon,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2(3): 365–83. Stanley, T. (1655) The History of Philosophy, London: Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Dring. Vanzo, A. (2016) “Empiricism and Rationalism in 19th Century Histories of Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77(2): 253–82. Verbeek, T. (1992) Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy 1637–1650, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Waithe, M. (1987) A History of Women Philosophers: Ancient Women Philosophers 600 B.C–500 A.D, Vol. 1, Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff. (1989) A History of Women Philosophers: Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment Women Philosophers AD 500–1600, Vol. 2, Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff. (1991) A History of Women Philosophers: Modern Women Philosophers 1600–1900, Vol. 3, Dordrecht: Kluwer. (2015) “From Canon Fodder to Canon Formation: How Do We Get From There to Here?” The Monist 98(1): 21–33. Witt, C. (2006) “Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31(2): 537–52.

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4 METHOD, GENRE, AND THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY Karen Detlefsen

4.1 Introduction Among the many lessons we can learn from the history of philosophy, here are two. First, philosophy as it is practiced in the current western, analytic-dominated academy is just one specific form of philosophy among many different forms. In Plato’s time and place, if his dialogues are any measure, chatting about philosophical topics with folks in public spaces was one common way of engaging with philosophy. For many centuries, across the globe, philosophy was integrated with and often emerged from investigations of the natural world that we would today call “science,” and this included investigations conducted in scientific laboratories (typically in venues of higher education or scientific societies closed to women; e.g. Gascoigne 1990) as well as in more private places such as households (e.g. Cooper 2006; on women and public versus private spaces in the history of science, see, e.g. Hunter 2005; Zinsser 2005; Detlefsen 2021). This integration of scientific study and philosophy still lives in some philosophical traditions (e.g. Cordova 2007). Philosophical engagement with themes of oppression and human rights is found in a wide range of genres, including polemical political tracts (Astell 2012), political movements (Ball 2021), texts intended to have a systematic impact on public life at least as much as for academic consumption (e.g. Freire 2007; Dussel 2003), fiction (see, e.g., de Beauvoir 1943, 1943, 1967; Gatens 2012) and much else. Philosophy—across many traditions, including the European tradition—is found in many genres, each of which utilizes its own methods to convey philosophical content; meditations (see, e.g., Descartes 2017; Avila 2020) and aphorisms (see, e.g. Confucius 1979; Laozi ca. 2018; Nietzsche 2018) are but two of many examples of this feature of philosophy. This small handful of examples of the ways in which philosophy has been practiced in our long history indicates that what counts as philosophical content is in flux, as are what counts as methods and genres in which philosophy is practiced. The second lesson that we can learn from the history of philosophy is that philosophers have a special penchant for reflecting critically on the very nature of our discipline; many of us like to engage, that is, in metaphilosophy, which itself has a long history and also continues into the present day across traditions (see, e.g. Williamson 2007; Nuccetelli 2021). One conclusion easily reached as we reflect metaphilosophically upon the wide variety of content, methods, and genres one finds in the history of philosophy is that what we today take philosophy to be is at least partly contingent. The genres—academic books, articles published in academic journals—and methods—primarily analytic reasoning and argumentation toward a conclusion— that one finds produced by those in western academic departments may currently DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-5

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dominate. But they do not thereby exhaust what philosophy is. A casual glance toward the contrast between contemporary analytic and continental philosophy—a contrast that plays out in both methods and genres—underscores the (at least partly) constructed and contingent nature of the philosophical enterprise. Another conclusion that follows easily from the metaphilosophical musings about the variety in content, methods, and genres one finds in the history of philosophy is that imposing currently dominant ideals of the nature of philosophy onto our past threatens to, at best, misrepresent or distort that past, and worse, due to our inability to even recognize philosophy as philosophy, excise much philosophy from our histories. These conclusions drive my interest in this paper. But my interests extend beyond the mere, albeit important, fact that philosophy in the past (and, for that matter, in the present) comes in many forms that range beyond the strictures of contemporary analytic philosophy. My interests extend to the fact that some philosophers, because of their identities, may be urged to write in specific ways, which deviate from dominant ways of writing philosophy. This is sometimes true, I shall argue, in the case of early modern European women philosophers. That is, because of their identities as women, these philosophers frequently found themselves disadvantaged in their capacities to produce knowledge, in the uptake of the knowledge they produced, or both. Women’s disadvantages as epistemic authorities came about for a variety of reasons, including being unjustly deprived of quality education and being discounted as knowers due to a bias against their gender. Whatever the cause, women often worked against their disadvantaged epistemic positions by writing in genres and by using methods that are often less easily recognized by us today as philosophy. Yet despite the genre or the method being atypical (at least to us today), these women were grappling with a philosophical question, and so the work ought to be treated as philosophy. For if we fail to acknowledge women’s philosophical output as philosophy, we not only excise that philosophical knowledge from our history. We also contribute to an ongoing injustice of failing to fully recognize the epistemic authority of women philosophers of the early modern period. This paper is inspired by the metaphilosophical project of thinking about different genres in which philosophy is produced—including in early modern Europe—and how different methods of practicing philosophy within those genres can do significant philosophical work. I do not, however, approach this project in the abstract. Rather, I look at two case studies of philosophy being produced in genres that the contemporary analytic philosopher might not easily recognize as philosophy, and using methods that depart from rational analysis and argumentation. Attention has been paid to fiction, meditations, rhetoric, and poetry as atypical genres (including in this volume in papers by Conley, Garrett, Haldenius, and Secada). Here, I expand the list by looking at two less appreciated philosophical genres: prefaces and translations (on translation, see Dyck in this volume). Examining how, in her prefaces, Margaret Cavendish uses methods that include autobiographical musings about her own lived experiences and anger at the fact that she is unjustly discounted as an epistemic authority, we see that genres that permit such passionate and pointed modes of expression are especially well-suited for conveying some philosophical content in an age when women’s philosophical capacities were called into question. The example I use is Cavendish’s Physical and Philosophical Opinions (1655 and 1663; hereafter PPO). Examining Emilie Du Châtelet’s theories about the act of translation and her own methods of translating with great liberty to change the meaning of a text, we see that Du Châtelet sees translation as a genre that women can engage with to produce original philosophy. The example I use is Du Châtelet’s translation of Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. Together, these two case studies underscore the importance of our reading broadly in our history to acknowledge that philosophical questions are interrogated in a wide range of genres using methods beyond rational analysis and argumentation, and that consequently, the scope of philosophy in early modern Europe is broad indeed. 42

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4.2  Cavendish’s Prefaces 4.2.1  The Central Chapters of the PPO and the Question of Women’s Intellectual Capacities Margaret Cavendish has been read by a number of scholars as endorsing hierarchical and unequal relations among creatures (e.g. Boyle 2018: passim), even as she has been read by others as endorsing non-hierarchical and equal relations among creatures (e.g. Walters 2014: passim; and Cunning 2016: passim). For example, a not insignificant amount of ink has been spilled to sort out her views on whether or not women and men are equal, especially with respect to their intellectual capacities (on Cavendish as a feminist, see, e.g. Smith 1982; Detlefsen 2017; on Cavendish as non-feminist, see Boyle 2004). I take this debate, specifically the question of women’s and men’s intellectual capacities, as a case study to explore her use of prefaces as a genre and various methods therein. I focus my investigation on PPO. When dealing with the text of PPO itself, I rely primarily on her much-changed second edition of this text (1663), although I occasionally do draw some contrasts between this second edition and the first edition of 1655. I start with the main text of PPO to show how Cavendish’s natural philosophy, particularly her theory of matter, invites both the reading that women and men have equal reasoning capacities, and the reading that there are natural, essential differences between women’s and men’s intellectual capacities, including that men are superior to women on this score. I then turn to Cavendish’s prefaces to the PPO—both to the 1655 and the 1663 editions—to show how Cavendish uses a range of techniques to show that the social context of men’s and women’s reasoning activities make it difficult for women to fully and fruitfully engage in knowledge production and uptake (for social context of knowledge production in Cavendish, see e.g., Brown 1991: 22; Leslie 1996: 7; Barnes 2009: 42 and 49; Walters 2014: 67–68). The central chapters of Cavendish’s text are fundamentally ambivalent in settling the question of whether or not women and men have equal intellectual capacities. Reading the prefaces, however, shows that this is neither an inconsistency nor a failure, but rather is to be expected given the lack of just and equitable practices of knowledge production and uptake. Until we benefit from the insights of men and women alike, we simply cannot have the evidence to settle the question. Physical and Philosophical Opinions is one of Cavendish’s texts squarely in the tradition of natural philosophy, both in terms of content and—more or less—in terms of genre (philosophical treatise), structure (sections and chapters addressing organized topics), and method (logical reasoning toward conclusions). One can take the second edition of the PPO (1663) as perhaps the pivotal moment in Cavendish’s natural philosophy, for almost all the hallmarks of her mature natural philosophy are first clearly articulated in this text.1 These include her rejection of atomism, which was already certainly in place by as early as 1655 (if not before), for the first edition of PPO contains her “Condemning Treatise on Atoms.” These hallmarks of her mature natural philosophy also include her distinctive theory of matter according to which matter is self-moved, sensing, and rational. Critically, all individuals are material and made up out of the same constitutive matter, specifically, matter as just described. Additionally, this view of matter—especially the position that matter is rational—undergirds another tenet of her mature view of nature, namely that all natural individuals are radically free in a libertarian fashion of being able to act other than as they actually do act (for example, Detlefsen 2007; Boyle 2018; but see Cunning 2016, passim against this view). Finally, the 1663 edition of the PPO includes the foundations for her mature theory of causation in nature—occasional cause (e.g. O’Neill 2001). One interesting way of reading the PPO—and Cavendish’s natural philosophy more generally—from the point of view of gender is to look at the various interpretations of men and women and their capacities that are made possible by Cavendish’s philosophy of nature, specifically her matter theory. On the one hand, the ontological sameness of the matter out of which 43

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women and men (and everything else) are constituted suggests that women and men are equal. On the other hand, when one grapples with what makes up an individual of a specific kind in Cavendish, the door is opened to the possibility of difference, and even inequality, between women and men. To show this, consider the following, two-pronged, conception of what makes an individual as found in the PPO. First, conceived of purely physically, an individual is a figured portion of matter within the one whole that is nature, a figure that more or less maintains itself through motions—especially sympathy among parts—which lend it stability. (Cavendish 1663a: 75f ) So, while all individuals are made up of the same sort of matter, there is nonetheless a tremendous variety among individuals depending upon the structures of their various stable figures. However, because these stable figures belong to a single body that is all of nature and that is in constant, destabilizing motion, they cannot endure forever and so disintegrate, only to re-organize with other matter into other stable figures thereby making other creatures. (Cavendish 1663a: 17) This first conception implies that an individual is a being that endures for some period of time, but not forever. Second, conceived of psychologically, the individual stable figure, as a unity of matter, achieves a certain type of rationality and ability to sense. So long as it retains its figure, the individual retains its reason and sense, and thus its individuality. According to this conception of the individual, it is a center of unified sense and reason, and therefore, a center of phenomenological self-awareness.2 As an individual, each of us knows what it feels like to have our own individual awareness, but the ubiquity of sense and reason throughout nature, and the variety of forms of sense and reason due to the variety of material figures, means that all individuals have a form of individual awareness appropriate to the kind of thing it is (Cavendish 1663a: 16, 52–53 and 114). A natural individual, then, is a physically stable figure with a specific kind of sense and reason, which give rise to self-awareness as an individual. The variety due to different structures of the stable figure is precisely what might give rise to difference, including potentially hierarchical differences, between women and men. This is because individuation depends on stable figures of matter, the specific nature of which also picks out the kind of individual one is. So, one can imagine a theory according to which the material structures that constitute women’s bodies are different from the material structures that constitute men’s bodies. Within the humankind, that is, there may also be room for female and male kinds—for sexed differences that indicate a kind of biological essentialism of females and males. From there, it is a small step to claim that women’s material natures produce lesser intellectual capacities, a mode of argument one does find in the history of philosophy (see Deslauriers’ paper in this volume). So, both conclusions—there are no inherent differences between women and men who are thereby equal in terms of intellectual capacity, and there are differences due to different structures between women and men who are thereby unequal in terms of intellectual capacity—are made possible by Cavendish’s matter theory. And, there is textual evidence for both views in the philosophical treatise portion of her text. Early on in the PPO, for example, Cavendish suggests there is an equality in creation due to the identical constitutive matter that makes up every creature, and this leans in the direction of non-hierarchy: Chapter 11 of Part I, for example, is titled “Of the Equality of Several Degrees and Changes of Infinite Matter and Motion” (Cavendish 1663a: 9–10). For my purposes, this is one significant difference between the first and second editions of PPO, for this chapter does not appear in the earlier text. In the idea that everything is equal because composed of the same kind of matter, we see a different kind of ontological equality than that which we see in some of Cavendish’s contemporaries—Descartes, for example—who maintain that the human essence is an immaterial, thinking soul. In both cases, however, the ontological sameness in the basic essence of individuals, including human individuals, undergirds the promise of equality, including in claims 44

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to intellectual capacities of men and women. Still, despite this early expression of equality, the case is far from settled in the main text of PPO. In favor of the other conclusion, for example, Cavendish claims that different kinds of animals, for example, are due to “the Nature or Kind of [their] Figure” (Cavendish 1663a: 32). Cavendish repeats this point a few pages further on in the context of a discussion of motion, which is the source of the different shapes that make up different animals (Cavendish 1663a: 38). Difference in shape, even while there may be sameness in underlying constitutive matter, is precisely the source of Cavendish’s possible endorsement of inequality, and thus hierarchy, including among men and women. For shapes or figures may be considered more complex and thus capable of more and better feats (of an intellectual nature, for example) than are other shapes or figures. There are moments throughout the PPO where Cavendish suggests exactly this, and these moments tend to be about inequalities within humankind. In her chapter on the mind in Part II of PPO, for example, she differentiates between the greater knowledge that adult humans have compared with children: “a Man hath more Knowledge and Understanding than a Child, by reason the Mind, as the Body, increaseth by degress” as the body develops. (Cavendish 1663a: 43) Furthermore, differences that ground inequalities are not just with respect to different shapes and complexities in shapes of the different individuals. Differences are also with respect to the operations of the underlying, constitutive matter that makes up all individuals, or to the relative proportions of the three degrees of matter. In her Chapter 15 of Part II—“Of the Ebbing and Flowing of Animate Matter”—for example, Cavendish writes: As I said, that the Sensitive Animate matter Lives in dull or Inanimate matter, and the Rational Animate matter in the Sensitive, yet there is more or less Quantity, for I do not think every Part or Degree of matter lies equally in every Figure or Parts of Figures, but sometimes some Parts or Figures have more, and sometimes less, although all have some…. (Cavendish 1663a: 55) And thus, Cavendish is open to claiming there are also intellectual differences among individual adult humans: All Men have not alike Degrees of Knowledge and Understanding…. [S]ome men… have some Defect either in the Sensitive parts or in the Rational motions… [O]thers have both their Sensitive and Rational motions Weak…. [O]thers, their Rational and Sensitive motions are Irregular, and that makes Fools and Mad-men. (Cavendish 1663a: 67–68) Still, as one might expect given the division among commentators on how to think about Cavendish on equality and inequality, on non-hierarchy and hierarchy, she offers statements that tell against inequality. One can have difference, for example, without this difference translating into superiority and inferiority. Different creatures have different-sized brains, she acknowledges, but this does not entail different degrees of knowledge or understanding (Cavendish 1663a: 263). Likewise, the different structures and complexities that attend different kinds of creatures need not translate into better and worse: “for example, Man may have a different Knowledge from Beasts, Birds, Fish, Worms, and the like, and yet to be no Wiser or Knowing than they…. for there is no such thing as Most or Least in Nature” (Cavendish 1663a: 113–14). With textual evidence on both sides, we are left with the open question as to which route Cavendish goes (if she makes a choice at all)—that which favors equality and non-hierarchy, or that which endorses inequality and hierarchy. How are we to adjudicate these divergent interpretations, each grounded in textual evidence, which in turn emerges from the different ways one 45

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can interpret Cavendish’s matter theory as it begins to emerge in its mature form in PPO? One way forward is to turn to Cavendish’s prefaces—a genre different from the philosophical treatise which is the main text of her PPO—and the methods she uses within those prefaces to gain a deeper understanding of her thinking on this issue.

4.2.2  The Prefaces of the PPO: Content, Genre, and Method in Cavendish Amy Scott-Douglas notes that “[t]hroughout her career, Margaret Cavendish wrote close to 100 prefaces” (2000: 30), and as she rightly points out, many scholars have relied upon the content therein to provide substantive support for various interpretations of Cavendish’s thinking. (Scott-Douglas 2000: 27–30) As Scott-Douglas’s discussion makes clear, the prefaces are especially helpful repositories of Cavendish’s views on gender, and commentators have used them for their arguments pertaining to gender (e.g. McGuire 1971; Jones 1988; Rogers 1996: 177–211). This is my goal, too, and I turn to the prefaces of PPO, most especially those of the 1655 edition which are replete with insights on gender and power, to draw out illuminating content on this front. We tend to read prefaces as not part of the philosophical text. I propose—and will show below—that they are crucial elements of the text doing important philosophical work, albeit in genres and using methods different from the more recognizably (to us) philosophical central chapters of the text. On this reading, the PPO is a multi-genre text. Throughout her prefaces, Cavendish considers whether nature or the social (here, access or lack thereof to excellent education occupies most of Cavendish’s consideration of social conditioning) is the crucial and fundamental determinant of reasoning capacities. Determining the answer to this would allow one to attribute existing inequalities between men and women either to unchangeable natural and essential differences in the material make-up of men and women or to differences in educational opportunities and other social differences that ought morally to be altered because of the cost to women. Yet, this issue is not settled by the prefaces. We do get the standard claim in her prefaces to natural female inferiority: “nature as made the active strength of the effeminate sex weaker than the masculine,” which is immediately undermined when she continues: “yet perchance she may elevate some fancies, and create some opinions, as sublime, and probable in effeminate brains as in masculine” (Cavendish 1663a: 19). Moreover, and again an approach she often takes, she situates herself as an example of one who naturally displays superior reasoning capacity despite being deprived of education (and despite being a woman, one might add; on this, see James 2018 on Cavendish’s discussion of “hermaphrodites”) suggesting at one and the same time that nature is the primary determinant of reasoning capacities and that even deprived social conditions cannot rob women (or at least one woman) of her natural and essential intellectual equality with men (see Scott-Douglas 2000: 36–37; Walters 2014: 34)3: … my head was so full of my own natural phancies, as it had not roome for strangers to board therein, and certainly natural reason is a better tutor then [sic] education; for though education doth help natural reason to a more sudden maturity, yet natural reason was the first educator…. natural reason produceth beneficial effects, and findes out the right and true, the wrong and the falsehood of things, or causes; but to conclude, what education hath not instructed me, natural Reason hath informed me of many things. (Cavendish 1663a: prefaces 6; c.f. 5) So as with the central chapters of PPO, the prefaces leave open the question as to whether Cavendish endorses natural equality and non-hierarchy or natural inequality and hierarchy between men and women. 46

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But the prefaces do, nonetheless, shed considerable light on this issue. It is crucial, at this juncture, to acknowledge what her prefaces, as a different genre, permit is not seemingly allowed by the material of PPO’s central chapters, which a contemporary analytic philosopher might take to be more squarely in the genre of philosophy proper. The prefaces, because they are not engaged in the business of transcendent, abstract, universal reasoning, allow Cavendish to engage in personal musings about her own individual experiences, her own lived experiences as a woman (on the role of autobiography in Cavendish see Mendleson 2003; Rees 2003; Barnes 2009). These autobiographical musings, replete with undisguised rage at the unfairness of her treatment as a women, are a method permitted by the prefaces but not as easily permitted by the abstract reasoning, which mark the central chapters. Such autobiographical reflections, however, contain significant philosophical content. Moreover, this content is key to our investigation of Cavendish’s views on men, women, and equality, and they expose Cavendish’s attunement to what contemporary philosophers would call “epistemic injustice.” Miranda Fricker (2007) has recently theorized about a range of phenomena that was clearly recognized by women of the early modern period (e.g. Forbes 2019), including Cavendish. These phenomena include what Fricker calls testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Both are forms of epistemic injustice whereby groups of people are deprived of the capacity to count as reliable knowers simply because of an identity marker—sex, for example—that cannot be separated from them. For example, if a woman’s claim to know something is devalued just because she is a woman, and if a man’s claim to know something—even the very same thing—is overly valued just because he is a man, these are cases of testimonial injustice. Similarly, if a woman cannot even make sense of her experience as a woman because she does not have the knowledge categories through which to make sense of those experiences, or because she has internalized erroneous “knowledge” claims inculcated by her cultural norms, for example, this is a case of hermeneutical injustice. That Cavendish is aware of these forms of epistemic injustice, even if she does not theorize about them or call them by those names, is clear in her prefaces. Moreover, understanding her awareness of these phenomena is enormously illuminating for the question at hand of the equality or otherwise of women and men, and what we can and cannot know about the subject. For example, in her first epistle “To the Reader” of the 1655 PPO, she notes the lack of charity in some of her readers, who thus do not properly understand her philosophy. In a highly personal moment, in which the reader gets a sense of her justified outrage (note the contrast with dispassionate, reasoned argumentation of a text more easily recognized by contemporary philosophy), she writes of those who “understand them [my Epistles, and the rest of my books] not, but that is not my fault, but their unjust natures, to censure and condemn before they examine or understand” (Cavendish 1655: prefaces, 5). Here is a clear understanding of her ideas being discounted, and the gendered context of her writing suggests her alertness to what would later be theorized as testimonial injustice, a point revisited in “An Epilogue to my Philosophical Opinions” where she explains that “wise learned men think it a discredit to discourse learnedly to ignorant women… thinking they understand not anything.” (Cavendish 1655: prefaces, 10) We get an even stronger example of this in her “To the Two Universities,” a preface from the earlier edition of the PPO, where she writes: I here present the sum of my works, not that I think wise School-men, and industrious, laborious students should value my book for any worth, but to receive it without a scorn, for the good encouragement of our sex, lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots, by the dejectedness of our spirits, through the careless neglects, and despisements of the masculine sex to the effeminate, thinking it impossible we should have either learning or understanding, wit or judgment, as if we had not rational souls as well as men, and we out of a custom or dejectednesse think so too, which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge 47

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being employed only in love, and pettie imployments, which take away not onely our abilities towards arts, but higher capacities toward speculations…. [T]hus by an opinion, which I hope is but an erronious one in men, we are shut out of all power, and Authority… our counsels are despised, and laught at, the best of our actions are trodden down with scorn, for the over-weaning conceit men have of themselves and through a dispisement of us. (Cavendish 1655: prefaces, 7) Three crucial points emerge from this impassioned plea for justice. First, as the closing lines indicate, women are shut out of positions of power and authority, not because of any true deficit within them, but because men have the power to do so despite women’s equal natural reason. Second, as the material at the outset of this passage underscore, men use their power and authority to dismiss the knowledge of women, thus engaging in testimonial injustice. Perhaps the most telling preface to Cavendish’s PPO on this score is the one not written by her, but the one written by her husband, defending the originality and brilliance of her work, for the degree to which his knowledge claims on this score are taken more seriously than Margaret Cavendish’s own claims, is the degree to which testimonial injustice infects the production and dissemination of knowledge. But worse, and third, these dismissive views loop back upon women, who then internalize these unjustly disparaging views of themselves, robbing them of the capacity to fairly estimate their own knowledge, and this is a variety of hermeneutical injustice. Together, these points underscore a crucial fact, namely, that the question of equality or otherwise of the sexes will be informed by highly partial evidence, which does not include the first-personal insights of one-half of those who are party to the issue, namely women. Moreover, precisely because Cavendish’s capacity to act as a knowledge producer whose knowledge claims enjoy serious uptake is dramatically undermined simply because she is a woman, considerable doubt is cast upon Cavendish’s own claims regarding women’s inferiority. For, if women internalize an erroneous and devalued conception of themselves, how can their claims about themselves be taken as conveying the truth? I rather suspect Cavendish herself was fully alert to this implication of the material in her prefaces. She may well have been exploiting the fact that some women (though perhaps not herself ) have internalized a devalued conception of themselves to playfully pretend to women’s inferiority, as if she herself had internalized this belief. If this is right, then her playful subversiveness is another example of a method made possible by the non-analytic nature of the prefaces. So, this is the place we are brought to. Neither the central chapters of PPO nor the prefaces with their own methods of delivering philosophical insights, settle the question of whether Cavendish believes in the natural equality or the natural inequality between men and women. But this is not necessarily an indication of inconsistencies within her thinking. For the reason may well be due to the fact that the social conditions of her time deprive men and women alike of the epistemological resources of women’s own, particular knowledge to properly begin interrogating that question, and this consideration comes powerfully to the fore in the genre of her prefaces through methods such as autobiographical expressions of considerable personal emotion. These methods have the power to convey philosophical content in a way that the rational argumentation of the main chapters cannot.

4.3  Du Châtelet on Women, Education, and Translation Cavendish’s interest, at least the one that I have focused on above, is with what happens to women as knowers when their status as such is routinely called into question. Du Châtelet has these concerns too. For example, in the preface to her translation of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, the

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text upon which I focus in this paper, she writes, “I am convinced that many women are either ignorant of their talents, because of the flaws in their education, or bury them out of prejudice or for a lack of bold spirit” (Du Châtelet 2009: 49). The latter reason Du Châtelet gives for women’s failure to call upon their intellectual talents resonates with the reason Cavendish explores. In this section, though, I will investigate the other reason Du Châtelet gives for women’s intellectual riches being lost: flaws in women’s education. For Du Châtelet maintains that sub-standard education results in women’s options for intellectual contributions to the world being narrower than those of men. One of those options is translation, and in this section, I will explore both Du Châtelet’s theoretical claims about the nature of translation as well as methods she uses in practice in her own translation of the Fable. I do so in order to make the case that Du Châtelet’s translation of Mandeville can be considered an example of original philosophy despite one view of translation according to which it is non-original or the mere mimicking of another’s original work. In the preface to her translation of the Fable, Du Châtelet identifies some classes of intellectuals as follows: Those who have received very decided talent from nature can give themselves up to the force that impels their genius, but there are few such souls which nature leads by the hand… Even fewer are sublime geniuses… …The vast majority of thinking men—the others, the geniuses, are in a class of their own—need to search within themselves for their talent…. Some are very busy removing the thorns that slow true geniuses in their course…. Others periodically report to the public all that happens in the Republic of Letters. Lastly, others [translators] convey from one country to another the discoveries and thoughts of great men, and remedy, to the best of their abilities, the misfortune of the multiplicity of languages, so often deplored by true lovers of learning. (Du Châtelet 2009: 44–45) So, amongst the ordinary contributors to knowledge are translators. In some moments in the preface, Du Châtelet seems to indicate that translation is a relatively lowly form of intellectual activity. In one of these moments, she connects this lowly occupation with biases regarding women’s capacities: …while it is true to say that a good translation requires application and labor, it is, nonetheless, at best, a very mediocre work. However mediocre this kind of work, it may be thought that it is audacious for a woman to aspire to do it. (Du Châtelet 2009: 48) Du Châtelet herself resists falling into this prejudicial thinking about women and their intellectual capacities, focusing instead upon the sociological facts surrounding women’s access to education. She writes: Let us reflect briefly on why for so many centuries not one good tragedy, not one good poem, one esteemed history, one beautiful painting, one good book of physics, has come from the hand of women…. I leave it to naturalists to find a physical explanation, but until that happens, women will be entitled to protest against their education. As for me, I confess that if I were king I would wish to make this scientific experiment. I would reform an abuse that cuts out, so to speak, half of humanity. I would allow women to share in all the rights of humanity, and most of all those of the mind. (Du Châtelet 2009: 48–49)

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Putting aside the hyperbole, which Du Châtelet may well have fully intended in order to underscore the ridiculousness of the anti-women position, Du Châtelet herself suggests that the question of women’s and men’s relative intellectual capacities cannot be settled because there is insufficient evidence to settle it. This resonates with the stance I have argued Cavendish takes in her prefaces. But here, Du Châtelet’s preferred way forward is to run the experiment of affording women equal educational opportunities in order to assess accurately their true intellectual natures as a gender. Turning to autobiography, she provides evidence of herself as a specific woman who has suffered due to deprived education, and who has moved forward as best as possible despite this deprivation: Chance led me to become acquainted with men of letters, I gained their friendship, and I saw with extreme surprise that they valued this amity. I began to think I was a thinking creature…. [But] I only believed in earnest in my capacity to think at an age when there was still time to become reasonable, but when it was too late to gain talents. (Du Châtelet 2009: 49) Immediately after this self-evaluation (which would certainly become less convincing less than a decade later with the publication of her highly original Institutions de physique), Du Châtelet connects her supposed paltry intellectual capacities—paltry due to the injustice of poor early childhood education—with her current, chosen intellectual activity, namely her translation of the Fable. The depiction of Du Châtelet’s reaction to translation just given is not, however, the only one we find in her preface. She offers a more nuanced approach when she considers the types of writing and the contents of writing that are the various subjects of translation. Of all works, those of discursive thought seem to me to be the most susceptible to a good translation. Reason and morals know no country. The genius of language, the curse of translators, is less to be felt in work where ideas are the only thing to be conveyed, and where the graces of style are not the main merit. By contrast, works of the imagination can rarely be transmitted from people to people, because to translate a good poet, one must be almost as good a poet as the author. (Du Châtelet 2009: 46) The distinction between discursive forms of writing which surely include philosophy on the one hand, and others forms of writing such as poetry on the other hand, is intriguing, especially when one considered the differences in translation of these forms of writing. The salient points for my purposes are as follows. First, Du Châtelet makes the claim here that some contents, including the decidedly philosophical content of morals, are universal and that there is no cultural translation that needs to occur alongside the linguistic translation of such contents. Second, Du Châtelet makes clear that some forms of language, such as poetry, are decidedly harder to translate well, and to do a good translation of such forms of language requires an intellect and talent almost as sophisticated and admirable as that of the original author. This second point leads to a third point, namely that Du Châtelet must take at least some translations—good translations of some forms of language—to be the product of admirable intellects, quite in contrast with the depiction above which has translation as a “mediocre” work. One might suppose, then, that Du Châtelet allows that translation can be itself original and creative work. It is telling that Du Châtelet explicitly says she will not translate the opening poem of Mandeville’s Fable precisely because of her lack of talent in the specific genre of poetry.

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The points above push the interpretation that translation of literary genres may be original work, but they also push the interpretation that the translation of philosophy as a supposedly discursive genre tackling supposedly universal content is not original work (for an accessible and thought-provoking discussion of translation and originality see Polizzotti 2019). To the degree that Du Châtelet is, in this work, engaging in translation of philosophy, explicitly eschewing the translation of the poetical elements of the work, is the degree to which she is displaying her supposedly mediocre intellectual abilities.4 Or so one might argue. But there is a second way in which Du Châtelet offers a more nuanced approach to the process of translation, and in particular, to her translation of Mandeville’s Fable. For she writes: I do not… have for my author the idolatrous respect of all translators. I acknowledge that his work is written badly enough in English. Parts of it are too long, and it sometimes goes too far…. And in many other places it advances several things that are not true and could be dangerous. I have taken care to add a corrective statement in those places in order to prevent them from having dangerous consequences…. I also took the liberty of adding my own reflections, when the material on which I was working suggested them to me, reflections that I believed deserved to be included. (Du Châtelet 2009: 50) Du Châtelet, that is, does not translate fully faithfully the philosophical text but rather changes it to produce, in her view, a better philosophical position. In doing so, I contend that she produces original philosophy insofar as she identifies a new way of thinking about what has been since called “the commerce and luxury debate” (for discussion of this debate in Mandeville, as well as how the debate played out in France, see, e.g. Horne 1981; Jack 1988; Hont 2008; Terjanian 2013). This conclusion deserves a focused, sustained treatment, and a strong start has already been produced by Felicia Gottmann (2012). Here I give the barest sketch of one problem centrally at stake in the debate, identifying one key element of Mandeville’s approach to that problem, and discussing Du Châtelet’s innovation related to this key element. In the process, I show how Du Châtelet carves a distinctive position in the commerce and luxury debate. This debate, at its core, is a debate about whether the pursuit of luxury, and the prideful, selfinterested acquisitiveness at the core of that pursuit, is good or bad. In favor of its goodness, advocates for the pursuit of luxury point to the fact that such pursuits drive human progress, creating overall greater wealth and comfort, and most especially, increasing the production and advance of arts and sciences for the overall betterment of humankind. Against its goodness, detractors from the pursuit of luxury point to the personal vice of self-interested acquisitiveness—a vice that leads to moral degradation. Mandeville occupies an interesting position in this debate (e.g. Hont 2008). While aligning on the side of luxury, he nonetheless admits that this is necessarily coupled with “private vice,” that is, morally degrading self-interest and pride. Moreover, private vice entails public damage in the form of the erosion of social cohesion. This comes about because of inequality and because of the corrosiveness of society’s material winners pridefully comparing themselves against society’s material losers. Mandeville seems to believe that human nature precludes altruism, which would put the benefit of the whole (or at least of some others) above one’s own selfish interests; that is, he seems to believe that true private virtue is impossible (and in any case, such altruism, if possible, would retard social progress on his view). And so, the way forward is to cultivate counterfeit private virtue in order to alleviate the public vice of social fracture. Counterfeit private virtue comes about when a “dexterous politician” artfully manages human’s natural viciousness to bring about publicly useful behaviors—behaviors which are publicly recognized as “virtuous,” thus feeding the individual’s true vice of pride.

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For my purposes, I shall focus on one feature of Mandeville’s fascinating theory, namely his hypothesis of humankind’s emergence from pre-civil state into civilization, and especially the central role of the dexterous politician in that emergence. He writes: This [standing in awe of the power of rulers] was (or at least might have been) the manner after which Savage Man was broke; from whence it is evident, that the first Rudiments of Morality, broach’d by skilfull Politicians, to render Men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contriv’d; that the Ambitious might reap the more Benefit from, and govern vast Numbers of them with the greater Ease and Security. This Foundation of Politicks being once laid, it is impossible that Man should long remain uncivilis’d: For even those who only strove to gratify their Appetites, being continually cross’d by others of the same Stamp, could not but observe, that whenever they check’d their Inclinations, or but follow’d them with more Circumspection, they avoided a world of Troubles, and often escap’d many of the Calamities that generally attended the too eager pursuit after Pleasure. (Mandeville 2007: 17) The crucial point is that morality, such as it is, emerges because the skillful politician manages human interactions to make people useful to one another. Du Châtelet’s addition at this point in her translation is telling. She includes Mandeville’s hypothesis as quoted above, but before this paragraph—and before the stage of human’s emergence from “savagery” as brought about by the politician, she includes another, new, paragraph, which identifies another, earlier, stage in humanity’s transition to civilization. She writes: Love seems to have been the beginning of all society. Humans, like all other animals, have an invincible inclination for the propagation of their species. A man, having fallen in love with a woman, will have had children. The care of their family will have kept their union even after their desire is gone. Two families will have a need for one another, and together they will have formed another group. These mutual needs will have given birth to society. So, Lucretius was right when he said to Venus: without you nothing emerges into the immense radiance of the world. Mutual needs, having brought together men, then the most skillful of them realizes that man was born with indomitable pride. This passion rules over him, and the first legislators drew the greatest help from it to achieve civilization among men. (Du Châtelet 1947: 142–43, my translation) With this addition, Du Châtelet departs radically from Mandeville’s overall philosophy. For Mandeville holds people to be naturally driven by pride and self-interest to the exclusion of true altruism, and he believes that so-called “altruism” in humans is merely manipulated self-interest which remains the driver of human behavior. Du Châtelet softens this view by holding that human love for family and close neighbors is instrumental in an early stage of humans living cooperatively together, and it predates the work of the skillful politician. Humans are prideful for Du Châtelet—she does remain in the pro-luxury camp. But there is room for at least some genuine altruism in her view. With this departure from Mandeville’s text—one among many—Du Châtelet’s innovative translation allows her to carve out an original philosophical position.

4.4  Conclusion The project of recovering lost European women philosophers, their works, and their ideas has been unfolding for several decades. As with all philosophy, this project evolves as it unfolds. Our 52

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recognition that philosophy has been produced in a wide range of genres and by using methods beyond analytic reasoning and argumentation holds great promise, not only for the history of philosophy in general (and for contemporary philosophy, too), but most especially for the history of women in early modern European philosophy given their artful uses of genres and methods in order to overcome the obstacles as producers of philosophical knowledge that they faced simply due to their gender.5

Notes 1 Because the second edition is so crucial in Cavendish’s maturing thought, I primarily use it. What follows shows the drawbacks in relying on an early text which Cavendish herself is at pains to revise for clarity and development. For a digital edition of the 1663 edition produced by Marcy Lascano, see (Cavendish 1663b). 2 This theory of individuation probably does not fully emerge until later in Cavendish’s thinking, for example, in Grounds (1996: 19ff ). 3 I should note that I disagree with Scott-Douglas that education is about claiming power and authority for Cavendish, since I believe it is much more about honing one’s rational capacities for her. 4 Interestingly, Mandeville’s philosophical text itself is a multi-genre piece of philosophy. 5 Appreciation to audiences at the Princeton-Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, the University of Pittsburgh Colloquium series, and the University of Copenhagen. I have also benefitted from discussion with and feedback from Lisa Shapiro.

Bibliography Astell, M. (2012) Political Writings, ed. P. Springborg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Avila, T. (2020) The Interior Castle, trans. K. Kavanaugh, Washington, DC: ICS Publications. Originally published in 1577. Ball, P. (2021) “Alternate Currents in Women’s Republicanism during the French Revolution,” Australasian Philosophical Review 3(4): 392–402. Barnes, D. (2009) “Familiar Epistolary Philosophy: Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters (1664),” Parergon 26(2): 39–64. Boyle, D. (2004) “Margaret Cavendish’s Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy,” Configurations 12: 195–227. (2018) The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, S. (1991) “Margaret Cavendish: Strategies Rhetorical and Philosophical against the Charge of Wantonness, or Her Excuses for Writing so Much,” Critical Matrix: Princeton Working Papers in Women’s Studies 6(1): 20–45. Cavendish, M. (1655) The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1st edition, London: Printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye at the Bell. (1663a) Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 2nd edition, London: William Wilson. (1663b) Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 2nd edition, Ed. M. P. Lascano. Available at: https:// cavendish-ppo.ku.edu/. (1996) Grounds of Natural Philosophy, West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press. Originally published in 1668. Confucius. (1979) The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau, London: Penguin Books. Cooper, A. (2006) “Homes and Households,” in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science. Volume 3: Early Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 224–37. Cordova, V. F. (2007) How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova, ed. K. D. Moore, K. Peters, T. Jojola, and A. Lacy, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cunning, D. (2016) Cavendish: Arguments of the Philosophers, Oxford: Routledge. de Beauvoir, S. (1943) L’invitée, Paris: Gallimard. (1945) Le Sang des autres, Paris: Gallimard. (1967) La Femme rompue, Paris: Gallimard. Descartes, R. (2017) Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. J. Cottingham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published in 1641. Detlefsen, K. (2006) “Atomism, Monism, and Causation in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy III: 199–240.

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Karen Detlefsen (2007) “Reason and Freedom: Margaret Cavendish on the Order and Disorder of Nature,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 89: 157–91. (2009) “Margaret Cavendish on the Relation Between God and World,” Philosophy Compass 4: 421–38. (2017) “Liberty and Feminism in Early Modern Women’s Writing,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 17–32. (2021) “The Rise of a Public Science? Women and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period,” in D. M. Miller and D. Jalobeanu (eds.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Du Châtelet, E. (1947) “Mme. du Châtelet’s Translation of the Fable of the Bees,” in I. O. Wade (ed.), Studies on Voltaire. With Some Unpublished Papers of Mme. du Châtelet, Princeton: Princeton University Press. (2009) Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, ed. J. P. Zinsser, trans. J. P. Zinsser and I. Bour, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dussel, E. (2003) Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology, ed. E. Mendieta, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Forbes, A. (2019) “Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice,” Hypatia 34(4): 777–80. Freire, P. (2007) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum. Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gascoigne, J. (1990) “A Reappraisal of the Role of Universities in the Scientific Revolution,” in D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–60. Gatens, M. (2012) “Compelling Fictions: Spinoza and George Eliot on Imagination and Belief,” European Journal of Philosophy 20(1): 74–90. Gottmann, F. (2012) “Du Châtelet, Voltaire, and the Transformation of Mandeville’s Fable,” History of European Ideas 38(2): 218–32. Hont, I. (2008) “The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury,” in M. Goldie and R. Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 377–418. Horne, T. A. (1981) “Envy and Commercial Society: Mandeville and Smith on ‘Private Vices, Public Benefits’,” Political Theory 9(4): 551–69. Hunter, L. (2005) “Women and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Different Social Practices, Different Textualities, and Different Kinds of Science,” in J. P. Zinsser (ed.), Men, Women and the Birthing of Modern Science, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, pp. 123–40. Jack, M. (1988) “Private Vices, Public Benefits. Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26(1): 153–55. James, S. (2018) “Hermaphroditical Mixtures,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–48. Jones, K. (1988) A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–73, London: Bloomsbury. Laozi ca. (2018) Dao De Jing in Clear English, trans. J. Pepper and X. H. Wang, Verona, PA: Image 8 Press. Leslie, M. (1996) “Gender, Genre and the Utopian Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World,” Utopian Studies 7(1): 6–24. Mandeville, B. (2007) The Fable of the Bees, ed. P. Harth, Harmondsworth: Penguin. McGuire, M. A. (1971) “Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, on the Nature and Status of Women,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 1(2): 193–206. Mendleson, S. (2003) “Playing Games with Gender and Genre: the Dramatic Self-Fashioning of Margaret Cavendish,” in L. Cottegnies and N. Weitz (eds.), Authorial Conquests: Essay on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish, Madison: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, pp. 195–212. Nietzsche, F. (2018) Aphorisms on Love and Hate, London: Penguin Publishing. Nuccetelli, S. (2021) “Latin American Philosophy: Metaphilosophical Foundations,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/ entries/latin-american-metaphilosophy/ O’Neill, E. (2001) “Introduction,” in E. O’Neill (ed.), and M. Cavendish (author), Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xiv–xxxvi. Polizzotti, M. (2019) Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, Cambridge: MIT Press. Reese, E. (2003) “Triply Bound: Genre and the Exilic Self,” in L. Cottegnies and N. Weitz (eds.), Authorial Conquests: Essay on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish, Madison: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, pp. 23–39.

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PART II

Themes

PART II Section A: Metaphysics and Epistemology

5 GOD, FREEDOM, AND PERFECTION IN CONWAY, ASTELL, AND DU CHÂTELET Marcy P. Lascano

5.1 Introduction In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers afforded God significant roles in their philosophical systems. They presented arguments for God’s existence and nature, his wisdom, goodness, and justice, to ground natural philosophy, morality, and social and political theories. In this chapter, I will trace a line of an essentialist perfectionism that emerges in the context of certain conceptions of our duty to God. According to these views, when God creates the world, he endows creation with some of his perfections. These God-given abilities, capacities, and powers, when properly cultivated and used, provide creatures with understanding, virtue, morality, and perfection. I will examine the views of Anne Conway, Mary Astell, and Émilie du Châtelet. All three philosophers believe that we have a duty to God to perfect our nature, although they differ with respect to the means and ends of this perfection. Conway holds that the perfection of creatures comes about through moral and metaphysical improvement ad infinitum. Astell believes that union with God is the aim, but that the development of generosity and the perfection of our individual talents is the means. Finally, du Châtelet claims that the development of our reason, understanding, and use of our freedom allows us to achieve a certain amount of perfection.

5.2  Conway on God, Freedom, and Evil Anne Conway’s philosophical system takes God’s existence and nature as its center. Indeed, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy can be read as a theodicy (Hutton 2004; Lascano 2016a; Mercer 2016). Here, instead of discussing Conway’s attempts to reconcile God’s goodness with the pain and suffering, I will focus on her account of freedom and metempsychosis, and how they tie moral and metaphysical perfection. According to Conway, “An essential attribute of God is to be a creator” (P: 2.5). God creates continually by emanating his perfect goodness to creatures. She writes, He is an infinite fountain and Ocean of goodness, charity and generosity. So, now, how could it be that this fountain would not be perpetually flowing and emitting from itself living waters? Would this Ocean not perpetually overflow by means of its emanation and a kind of continuous flowing to produce created things? God’s goodness by its proper nature is communicative and multiplicative. (P: 2.4) DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-8

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Conway holds, like Astell, that God creates a variety of things, each with their own degree of perfection (see Astell 2013: 103). It is the duty of each creature to increase in perfection, as Conway says, “to infinity” as there is no limit to their improvement. The means of achieving this perfection is the proper use of freedom and the development of goodness. Conway’s discussion of freedom in her text begins with God’s freedom. She writes, On the one hand, God’s will is the freest, in the sense that anything he does with respect to his creatures, he does without any external pressure, or coercion, or any cause coming from creatures. For this is being free: he does spontaneously (sponte) anything that he does. Yet, on the other hand, in no way should the indifference between acting or not acting be said to be in God. (P: 3.1) According to Conway, God is the exemplar of freedom in that he is determined by nothing but his own perfect nature, that is, he is determined to act in accordance with his wisdom and goodness. She contrasts God’s freedom with those who have mere indifference of will who act “based on mere choice, and not a true and solid reason or due to the guidance of wisdom,” and who are “like the cruel tyrants in this world, who do many things merely from their will, relying on their power, and in such a way that they can provide no other reason for their deeds than their mere choice” (P: 3.1). This indifference allows a creature to choose a lesser good over a greater good either through ignorance or through willfulness. Creatures can change for the better or worse because they are not determined by their nature to choose the good like God. “For this indifference of will is the basis of all mutability and corruptibility in Creatures, in that it would not be possible that there be any evil in Creatures unless there were mutability” (P: 3.1). For Conway, the way in which the will moves is determined by the nature of the being in question. God, as a perfect being, is incapable of any change, for any change in his will would result in either an improvement of his nature, which is impossible, or a lessening of his perfection, which is also impossible. Thus, since it is God’s nature to be perfect, and therefore immutable, his wisdom, goodness, and will are eternal and unchanging modes of God. She writes that “Wisdom and Will are in God. But they are not some entity or substance that is distinct from him; they are merely distinct modes, or properties of one and the same substance” (P: 1.7). Creatures, of course, are not perfect. It is the nature of a creature to be always in motion or changing. The freedom of created beings to will or choose either good or evil is the cause of continual change. God does the best for his creatures and gives them the power and natural desire to seek their own good. However, it is always possible for a creature to choose evil over good. Conway writes, …it is the nature of every creature to be in a continuous motion or operation, which with the greatest of certainty tends toward a further good as it tends to the reward and fruit of its own labor, unless Creatures hamper this good through a voluntary transgression and a misuse of the indifference of will that was created along with it by God. (P 6.6) Here, we see that Conway claims that we are directed toward our own good. But creatures are not necessitated by the good or the apparent good. For Conway, good and evil are relative terms. What is good for one type of being, a horse, for example, is to have the virtues of a horse (obedience, speed, calmness of nature, and so on). What is good for a human being is to have the virtues associated with our sort of being (piety, holiness, kindness, honesty, and so on. No creature can be completely evil as they must share in some of God’s goodness. Nevertheless, creatures can choose to act in ways that are unbefitting of their natures, and this seems to be what Conway refers to when she says that they will “evil.” For instance, she claims that to choose to act like a devil is to 62

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act with “hostility, malice, cruelty, fraudulence, and cunning,” and to choose to act like a beast is “to be in terms of pleasures and earthly desires beneath any other beast—nay, to become worse than every beast” (P: 6.10 and P: 6.8). Conway identifies evil with sin, which, according to Conway, is “ataxia, that is, an inordinate determination of a motion or power to move from one’s own obligatory place or state to another one” (P: 8.2). When we misuse our free will and choose to love that which is beneath us, we affect our moral status. For instance, if a human or an angel were to love and act as a devil or a beast, they would degenerate morally. After the death of the human or angel, their principal spirit will reform a new body for them that reflects the moral status of their past life––as a devil or beast (For Conway’s most detailed account of the process of transformation of the individual from one mode of existence to another, see P: 6.7). This metempsychosis, where the body reflects the moral nature of a being is the punishment for their sin. Likewise, a being can transform into a higher being for loving that which is above them.

5.3  Conway on Moral and Metaphysical Change According to Conway, each creature is differentiated by a principal spirit which is a bundle of spirits that remains constant in substance, but not in structure. Conway tells us that the principal spirit of an individual reflects her inner moral nature into the “dark spirit” which constitutes her body and forms it into the natural kind that is most appropriate to her place on the scale of being.1 The principal spirit is not only of a multitude of spirits, but of a multitude of kinds of spirits. Conway claims “human nature has in it the nature of all creatures, and hence it is called a microcosm” (P: 5.6). We should understand the principal spirit as hierarchical as she claims that every individual spirit contains intellectual spirits, brute or sensitive spirits, and vegetative or nutritive spirits. When these spirits are properly ordered, the intellectual rules over the sensitive and the sensitive rules over the nutritive. However, when one’s desires are disordered, the brute or sensitive spirit might rule the intelligent spirit. Conway explains that the principal spirit is ordered like an army. She writes, …the spirit of a human or beast is some innumerable multitude of spirits united together in the body, and they too have their own order and government, so that one of them is the primary ruler and possesses a higher position, and another has some other rulership under it, and so on through the whole, just as one is accustomed to finding in an army of soldiers. (P: 6.11) The principal spirit thus organized can account for how, for instance, the sensitive spirit could become dominant in an individual that acquires bestial tendencies, and that this would cause the superior spirits to become servants to the bestial. What we bring into ourselves is held in the body and through this assimilation is loved by the principal spirit. Conway writes, if a human is united to and joined with something, he becomes one with that thing, and that he who clings to the Lord, is a spirit one with him; and if he clings to a prostitute, he will be one flesh with her. (P: 6.8)

5.4  Conway’s Perfectionism Our choices determine our moral and metaphysical status. Conway tells us that we act properly when we act in accordance with, or surpass, the nature we currently enjoy. However, some have 63

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thought that Conway’s account of how we should act is not sufficient for attributing ethics to Conway. In a recent article, Sarah Hutton has argued that Conway’s account of goodness is “a central component of her philosophical system” and that her account of goodness is “primarily metaphysical rather than moral” (2018: 229–30). While I largely agree with Hutton, I think that Conway’s conception of goodness is equally metaphysical and moral, although the morality is not drawn merely from scripture. Instead, it seems that Conway holds that the moral and the metaphysical are inseparable aspects of God, and so also of his creation, and that the duty of every created being is to be as perfect as possible. Part of Hutton’s argument for the claim that Conway’s conception of goodness is not moral is that Conway does not provide an account of “the kind of behaviour that constitutes sin, and which incurs punishments” (2018: 232). Hutton acknowledges that Conway talks about “brutish” behaviour, “sin,” and transgressions of our freedom, but maintains that “there is an insufficient number of examples given of sin from which to infer a moral code or guide a life” (2018: 232). It is true that Conway does not provide a moral code, but she does think that sin is acting in a way that is unbefitting of the kind of creature that one is. “[Sin] is from the Creature who has abused this power and has determined it towards something other than it ought” (P: 8.2). What is it that creatures ought to do? Each creature should “work for themselves towards attaining an ever-greater perfection, as instruments of the divine wisdom, goodness, and power that is at work in them and with them (P: 9.6). This, admittedly, is not a complete moral theory, but it certainly is an answer to the question of how we ought to live—we ought to strive for the perfection of the nature that we currently enjoy. This is achieved by increasing one’s goodness, wisdom, virtue, and power as far as possible in accordance with one’s present state. Indeed, this view is supported by Conway’s discussion of the virtues of a horse. First, let us take as an example a horse, which is a creature bestowed by the creator with diverse levels of perfection, not only ones like bodily strength, but also, as I would put it, a certain notion of how it ought to serve its Master. In addition, it has courage, fear, love, memory, and various other qualities that are in humans and that are of the sort that we can also observe in a dog as well as many other animals. (P: 6.6) Horses, and the rest of God’s creatures, have their own virtues and powers (as degraded versions of God’s perfections emanated into creatures) that can be either increased or decreased through choice. These perfections, as Hutton notes, are “physical, moral, and emotional qualities” (2018: 243). Each sort of creature will vary with respect to the qualities that may be perfected, but as one moves up the ladder of being the qualities will be increasingly intellectual and moral. In achieving the perfections of one sort of being, an individual will rise to a level where more perfections are available ad infinitum.

5.5  Astell on God’s Nature Mary Astell holds that God creates by means of communicating his goodness, or perfections, into finite forms (for more on the existence and nature of God, see Lascano 2016b, 2017). She describes God as a “communicative being” and claims that he “Communicates an innumerable variety of Perfections to his Creatures,” and so he “must needs contain in himself all those Beauties and Perfections he is pleas’d to Communicate to Inferior Beings” (2002: 182). God creates human beings in order that they may freely perfect their natures in preparation for their ultimate happiness in union with God. She is particularly concerned that women develop the ability to make choices that will lead to their true happiness. In arguing that our free choices must be informed, not by 64

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custom and habit, but by reasoning and true principles, Astell provides an account of how we are free to reform our desires. She makes use of John Locke’s doctrine of suspension of desires to accommodate the better consideration of choices. According to Astell, it is the duty of every rational being to strive for the perfection of its nature. To do this, human beings must cultivate generosity and virtue. According to Astell, virtue “consists in governing Animal Impressions, in directing our Passions to such Objects, and keeping ‘em in such a pitch, as right Reason requires” (2002: 214). Generosity is a notion that Astell appropriates from Descartes (For a detailed account of Descartes’ views on generosity, see Shapiro 1999). According to Descartes, true generosity makes one’s self-esteem as great as it can be. He takes volition, or will, to be the only active power of the soul, and so the only power which we can control. Our power of volition is unlimited according to Descartes, and it is the way in which we are most like God. The two keys to the achievement of generosity are (1) to understand that our willings are free and are the sole determination of our moral worth, and (2) to be resolved to use our wills to do what we judge best. Generosity is necessary to attain virtue, and one needs virtue to be happy. So, the good use of our free will is key to virtue and happiness (Descartes AT XI: 445–46; CSM 1: 384). Astell, like Descartes, believes that generosity is necessary for the attainment of virtue and happiness. She is concerned with how the will and understanding can be improved to attain generosity. This is especially important for women, who have been denied education and are trained by custom to value only material things and appearances.

5.6  Astell on Freedom and Action Some commentators have held that Astell’s views on freedom are either indebted to Descartes, John Norris, or Malebranche (For Norris and Malebranche’s influence see Broad 2012, 2015: 41–42, 111–12; For Astell’s Cartesian influence, see Sowaal 2007; Detlefsen 2016). However, when it comes to understanding the nature of freedom and how we can reform our judgments, she seems to follow John Locke. Her definition of a free agent, what moves us to action, and how we can train our wills to avoid error and sin are indebted to Locke. The narrative that Astell saw Locke as her “lifelong nemesis” was popularized by Patricia Springborg’s influential work on Astell’s politics (2005: 40), and it is true that Astell is critical of some of Locke’s political views as well as his suggestion that matter might think. Yet it seems that Astell’s attitude toward Locke is more nuanced than previously thought. For instance, Jacqueline Broad (2014) has shown that Astell uses Locke’s definition of slavery and draws on his views on education in her 1706 edition of Some Reflections upon Marriage. In what follows, we will see more evidence of Locke’s influence. Astell provides only one clear statement of what she takes a free agent to be. It is found in The Christian Religion, and there she writes, Now the difference between a free and a necessary agent consists in this, that the actions of the former, or more properly the motions of his mind, are in his own power. He has the ability, as everyone of us is sensible, to determine them this way or that, according to his own pleasure, and as he is affected by the supposed agreeableness of the objects he pursues. This power or faculty is what we call liberty. (2013: 93) We can compare this to Locke’s definition of freedom: “so far as a Man has a power to think or not think; to move, or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a Man free” (Essay: II.xxi.8, 237). We can see that for both Astell and Locke freedom is a power to move the mind or body in one way or another according to one’s own preference or 65

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pleasure. Astell goes on to contrast her view of a free agent with that of a necessary agent who “does not determine itself, has no command over its own motions, but is absolutely governed by a foreign cause” (2013: 93). According to Astell, God has given us the power to determine ourselves and it is up to us to use it properly to choose the true and the good. While Astell’s remarks on the nature of freedom are brief, she spends quite a bit of time discussing the understanding and will and their relation to proper action. Astell’s most detailed account of human action is in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II where she gives a method for the improvement of the understanding. She begins with a Lockean definition of understanding and will. She writes, As the Capacity which we find in our selves of Receiving and Comparing Ideas is what we call the Understanding, so the Power of Preferring any Thought or Motion, of Directing them to This or That thing rather than another is what we mean by the Will (2002: 205) With respect to what determines the will, she writes, ‘Tis true the Will does always pursue the Good, or somewhat represented to it as such, but it is not always, or rather very seldom, determin’d to the Choice of what is in it self the greatest Good. And though I suppose we always Chuse that which in that Juncture in which it is propos’d seems fittest for our present turn, yet it is often such as we wou’d not prefer, did we impartially examin and observe the Consequences. (2002: 207) Astell and Locke share the worry that if God is the greatest good, and the will is determined by the good, then we should always do as God wills. Of course, we do not. Locke’s solution to this worry is two-fold. First, he claims the will is determined by uneasiness, which is the desire for a particular absent good. Second, we can suspend our assent to particular objects of desire to better determine their true worth (for more on Locke on suspension, see Rickless 2000, 2014, 2020). Astell adopts Locke’s understanding of what usually moves the will. She writes, An Inclination therefore after Happiness is that to which we shall at present reduce all the rest; which Happiness we pursue by removing as far as we can from that which is uneasie to us, and by uniting ourselves as much as we are able to some Good which we suppose we want. The former of these being indeed a pursuit of Good, tho not so directly as the latter. (2002: 205; emphasis mine) Astell claims that our “[perverse Inclination] fixes our Thoughts on a Present Uneasiness which it says must be remov’d, and our Desires gratify’d at any rate, without suffering us too weight the ill Consequences of doing so” (2002: 207). These uneasinesses of which she speaks are for earthly desires. For Astell, the only uneasiness we ought to experience is one that arises from a fear of losing eternal happiness in union with God. The question is how do we train our judgment so that we are made uneasy at the thought of lacking this distant good rather than present earthly goods? Like Locke, Astell thinks that we form bad habits through the repetition of choosing only apparent goods rather than our true good. She writes, But the misfortune is as has been once observ’d already, that we Will e’re we are capable of examining the Reasons of our Choice, or of viewing our Ideas so exactly as we must if we 66

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wou’d Judge aright. And the frequent repetition of such unreasonable Choices makes them Customary to us, and consequently gives a new and wrong bias to our Inclinations, which upon all occasions dispose the Will to the Choice of such things as we suppose, tho by mistake, to contribute to our Happiness. (2002: 206) According to Locke, we have the power to suspend our desires and particular actions to better examine and judge the true value of a particular end or action. The doctrine of suspension allows us to break the chain of judgments that have become habitual due to custom or education. Locke writes, To which, if, besides accidental harms, we add the fantastical uneasiness (as itch after honour, power, or riches, &c.) which acquired habits, by fashion, example, and education, have settled in us, and a thousand other irregular desires, which custom has made natural to us, we shall find that a very little part of our life is so vacant from These uneasinesses, as to leave us free to the attraction of remoter absent good. (Essay: 2.21.45) Suspension allows us to better align our desires with God’s will. Astell writes that “ignorance and a narrow education, lay the foundation of vice, and imitation and custom rear it up” (2002: 67). She claims that error and sin arise because we have an “inordinate thirst after a great reputation or the power and riches, the grandeurs and pleasures of this world” (2002: 163). She advises ladies to suspend their habituated assent to particular desires in order to further examine them lest they fall into error and sin. But we will not do that, chusing rather to Act by the Wrong Judgments we have formerly made, and to follow blindly the Propensities they have given us, than to suspend our Inclinations as we both May and Ought, and restrain them from determining our Will, till we have fairly and fully examin’d and ballanc’d, according to the best of our Knowledge, the several degrees of Good and Evil present and future that are in the Objects before us. (2002: 207) Astell claims, like Locke, that the will and understanding are closely connected powers of the mind. The best way to improve one is to improve the other. The causes of our corruption are largely prejudice – unexamined beliefs – and custom. She writes, “As Prejudice fetters the Understanding so does Custom manacle the Will, which scarce knows how to divert from a Tack which the generality around it take, and to which it has it self been habituated” (2002: 139). She then provides the cure: And the best way I can think of to Improve the Understanding, and to guard it against all Errors proceed they from what Cause they may, is to regulate the Will, whose Offense it is to determine the Understanding to such and such Ideas, and to stay it in the consideration of them so long as is necessary to the Discovery of Truth; for if the Will be right the Understanding can’t be guilty of any Culpable Error. Not to Judge of any things which we don’t Apprehend, to suspend our Assent till we see just cause to give it, and to determine nothing till the Strength and Clearness of the Evidence oblige us to it. (2002: 164; compare Essay: 2.21.47) Astell’s account of action blends Descartes’s account of the virtue of generosity, with Locke’s account of freedom. Our freedom lies in our power to direct our minds to this or that thought. 67

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The act of suspending our habituated desires allows us to reform them through reasoning about their true worth.

5.7  Astell on Happiness and Perfection As noted, our ultimate happiness is everlasting union with God, which is attained by obeying God’s will and developing our talents. Astell defines “good” as that which glorifies God, and “evil” as that which offends God (2013: 152). To glorify God is to perfect oneself by properly developing one’s talents. According to Astell, what offends God are the “hinderences which Rational and Free Agents put in their own, and in each others way, towards the attainment of that Happiness which the Wisdom and Goodness of God originally design’d for them” (2013: 152). Astell maintains that God wants us to be happy, which is evident by the incessant desire for happiness he has placed in us. But our desire for happiness cannot be satisfied with what can be achieved in Earthly life. We not only desire happiness—we desire endless happiness (2013: 54). Astell posits that this desire is not an “improper” or “irregular” desire since her reason does not reproach her for having it. This desire for endless happiness provides proof of our immortality. In this life “our duty to ourselves consists in making the best use of our talents, and hereby aspiring to the highest degree of happiness and perfection of which we are capable” (2013: 179). We owe this to God since the perfection of each individual increases the perfection of the world as a whole. There is a natural progression toward perfection for each sort of being, but several factors can thwart this progression. For humans, who are rational beings, our perfection is achieved through the development of our intellectual and moral abilities. However, our passions and irregular desires can impair this development. Astell writes, But in whatever Degree of Being a Creature is plac’d, whether it be a Free or Necessary Agent, there must be a certain measure of Perfection belonging to its Rank, which it cannot attain but by some certain and stated Progressions or Methods, suitable to the Nature that God has given it, and in the same manner as a Seed becomes a Plant, or a Plant a Tree. Some actions therefore do naturally and necessarily tend to the Perfection of Mankind, and others as naturally and necessarily drag us down into Misery. (2013: 93) The obligation to perfect one’s nature, for rational human beings, consists in the perfection of understanding and will through the good use of reason. The more a person’s actions are guided by reason, the more virtuous their intentions and actions will be, and thus they will better conform to God’s will. Astell writes, “For what is it that God requires of us? No very hard task one would think, for it is only a sincere and constant endeavor after our own perfection” (2013: 102). She claims that there is “no way to be happy but by being perfect,” and that God has made us “rational and free agents” who are “capable of enjoying the happy effects” of following his will (2013: 102). For Astell, a perfect God created us with the power to reflect on our choices to break habits brought about by bad custom and prejudice. When we use these capacities and powers correctly, we increase the perfection of our nature and secure true happiness.

5.8  Du Châtelet on God and Creation According to du Châtelet, God chooses to create this world because his perfect nature determines him to the best, and this world contains the greatest amount of perfection. She claims in On Liberty, that to be determined to action by the good is the greatest perfection (2021: 7). While God 68

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is always determined to act in this way, humans, as finite and imperfect beings, must take care to use their limited reason and understanding to determine what is best. According to du Châtelet, God in creating wanted to communicate his perfections. He chooses our world because in creating it, God maximizes this communication. She writes, God, being the most perfect of all beings, none of his actions can be without a sufficient reason. So he had his own reason for determining to create a world, and this reason is the satisfaction he found in imparting a portion of his perfections, and the reason that determined him to give actuality to this world rather than to any other was the greater perfection he found in this one. (2009: 43) Du Châtelet describes God as good, simple, eternal, intelligent, powerful, and as one who always chooses the best (for more on God’s nature and existence, see Lascano 2011, 2019; Detlefsen 2014). While God creates the best of all possible worlds, this world does not require his day-today involvement. Like Conway, du Châtelet believes that God must act in accordance with his wisdom and goodness, nevertheless, she maintains that he is free in his creation choice. She writes, The choice that God made among all possible worlds of the world we see is proof of his liberty…he chose the succession of things that constitute this universe to make actual, because this succession pleased him the most: He was the absolute master of his choice. The necessary Being is thus a free Being; for to act following the choice of one’s own will is to be free. (2009: 143)

5.9  Du Châtelet on Freedom Like Astell, du Châtelet’s views on freedom were influenced by Locke’s account. She holds that our freedom is freedom of action rather than freedom of will (for alternative accounts of du Châtelet’s views on liberty, see Jorati 2019; Wells 2021). In the Foundations of Physics, she writes, “to act following the choice of one’s own will is to be free” (2009: 143). She elaborates in On Liberty, “I call freedom the power to think a thing, or to not think, to move or to not move, according to the choice of one’s mind” (2021: 1). Her definition is close to a direct quote of Locke, who writes, “so far as a Man has the power to think, or not to think; to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a Man free” (Essay II.xxi.8; for the French, see du Châtelet 1989: 485; Locke 1714: 277). We are free so long as we can act in accordance with our judgments, but we are not free to determine our will, desires, or choices. In many accounts of freedom, whether we are free or not, turns on how the will is determined or not determined. However, like Locke, Du Châtelet, denies that our freedom consists in an ability to determine our will. Rather, she claims, again like Locke, that willing and judging are two functions of the same understanding, and both are passive powers (2021: 6). It is the active power of moving our bodies and minds that constitutes freedom. She argues that the will, being merely an “abstract notion,” cannot affect our active power of moving. We choose to move or act when we judge that doing so is the best course of action. Those who attribute libertarian accounts of freedom to du Châtelet seem to ignore that one of her main arguments for compatibilism is that it is the sort of freedom that God has, and therefore is the best freedom possible. She argues, God can only be free in this way. The moral necessity of always doing the best is even greater in God, because his infinitely perfect existence is above ours. Hence, the true and the only 69

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freedom is the power of doing that which one has chosen to do; and all the objections that have been raised against this type of freedom destroy equally that of God and that of man. As a result, if it were to follow that man is not free, because his will is always determined by the things that his understanding judges to be best, it would also follow that God is not free, and that everything in the universe would be effect without cause, which is absurd. (2021: 7) Du Châtelet’s views about God’s freedom, as was noted, are like Conway’s views. If God is perfect and the sort of freedom that he has is one where he is determined to do what he judges best, then this sort of freedom must be the most exemplary. But while Conway holds that creatures have freedom of indifference, du Châtelet holds that we are moved to act by whatever most pleases us, that is, whatever we judge is the best. She writes, Man is, by his quality of being intelligent, necessitated to want what his judgment has presented to him as the best. If it were otherwise, he would be subject to the determination of something other than himself, and he would not be free; for to will that which is not most pleasing, is a real contradiction; and to do what we judge best, which is the most pleasing, is to be the most free. (2021: 8) According to du Châtelet, freedom comes in degrees. God is the freest being since he always can do what pleases him. Humans have imperfect freedom. She writes, God was able to give his creatures a small portion of freedom, just as he gave them a small portion of intelligence. …The freedom God gives to man is a low power and is limited to the operation of certain movements and the application of a few thoughts. (2001: 10) We have an imperfect freedom because we are not always able to use our power to think or move. In addition, we also have imperfect intelligence. With respect to our understanding, she writes, “The more our determinations are founded on good reasons, the more we approach perfection; it is this perfection, in a more eminent degree, which characterizes the liberty of beings more perfect than us, and even of God” (2021: 7). And she notes that “to be determined by what seems to us to be best, is as great of a perfection as the power to do what we have judged to be such” (2021: 7). Du Châtelet thinks that we can improve upon our understandings and thereby become more perfect. She writes, Freedom in man, is the health of the soul. Few people have this health entirely and unalterably. Our freedom is weak and limited like all our other faculties: we can strengthen it as we become accustomed to reflecting and managing our passions; and this exercise of the soul makes it a little stronger. (2021: 4) The mechanism that du Châtelet adopts for accomplishing this is Locke’s doctrine of suspension; she writes, We have the faculty of suspending our desires and of examining that which seems best to us, so as to be able to choose it: this is one aspect of our freedom. The power to then act in

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accordance with this choice makes this freedom full and whole. When we misuse this power to suspend our desires and determine ourselves too quickly, that is when so many mistakes are made. (2021: 7) The doctrine of suspension is an exercise of our freedom because it involves the power to think further on some option (rather than acting without reflection). When we reflect on our options, we can determine whether we would be acting in accordance with reason or acting from passion or prejudice. With practice, we can become accustomed to reflecting on our choices to determine whether we have sufficient reasons for doing as we will before we act. According to du Châtelet, we are always free insofar as we have the active power to do what we will. However, it is also in our power, as intelligent beings, to make good use of this power by choosing to reflect more thoroughly on our reasons for acting.

5.10  Du Châtelet on Human Perfection Du Châtelet’s views on freedom and perfection have implications for her views on morality and happiness as she tells us that the “contemplation of perfection is the source of pleasure in intelligent beings” (2009: 143). However, it seems that it is the study of the natural world that brings us closer to perfection. As she notes, The study of nature raises us to the knowledge of a supreme Being; this great truth is, if possible, even more necessary for good physics than for ethics, and it must be the foundation and the conclusion of all the research we make in this science. (2009: 138) It is by means of studying God’s creation that we see the perfection in the world and understand the order of the universe and the interconnection between all things. The success of science in unveiling the workings of the world demonstrates the progress that human beings may achieve through the strengthening of their reasoning and understanding. In studying nature, one discovers some part of the intentions and the art of the Creator in the construction of this universe. Thus Virgil was right to say Felix qui potuit, rerum cognoscere causas, since the knowledge of causes raises us to the level of the Creator and allows us to enter into the mystery of his designs by showing us the admirable order that prevails in the universe and the relationships of its different parts. (2009: 144) We are able to succeed in understanding our world because an all-good creator has made it regular, predictable, and intelligible. According to du Châtelet, God creates the world “where the greatest variety exists with the greatest order, and where the largest number of effects is produced by the simplest laws” (2009: 144). The establishment of order and intelligibility is evidence of God’s goodness. This gives us reason to think that nature includes final causes and that all things are endowed with purpose. She writes, The Creator has Intended, In The least of his works, purposes that he always achieves and that Nature unceasingly works to carry out. Thus, this universe is not in chaos, it is not a disordered mass without harmony and without connection, as some ranters would persuade us; but

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all its parts are arranged with infinite wisdom, and none could be transplanted or removed without harming the perfection of the whole. (2009: 144) Of course, as was noted before, this does not mean that creatures can achieve complete perfection as God grants “to each thing in particular as much essential perfection as it could receive,” but no finite being can attain perfection without becoming God (2009: 146). However, du Châtelet does not think we should “renounce the faculties of man” for not being like God. Man is a finite being, bounded and limited in all by his essence. How many evils happen to us because our understanding is limited, because we cannot know everything, understand everything, or be wherever our presence is necessary? But these are faculties the creature could not have without becoming a God; thus, the imperfections in the creature, a succession of his limitations, are necessary imperfections. (2009: 146) As finite beings we are limited, and these limitations are the cause of errors and of evil in the world. So, while du Châtelet does not think that humans can achieve the perfection of God, she does hold that we can achieve the perfection of our kind. To do this, we must strive to improve our reason, understanding, and make the best use of our freedom. In doing so, we increase the overall perfection of the world.

5.11 Conclusion For the three philosophers considered here, the fact that God creates by communicating his perfections into the world implies that creatures are meant to be as perfect as they are capable of being. This perfection might be achieved by developing certain virtues, strengthening our understanding and reason, or contemplating the order of the universe. God’s creation, in an imperfect imitation of the creator, strives to bring themselves closer to his perfect being through this moral, intellectual, and metaphysical development. Through this process, creatures play a role in the perfection of God’s creation.

Note 1 According to Conway, everything is spirit. That which we call ‘body’ is merely dark and dense spirit. I do not take Conway to be an idealist. Instead, I believe she posits an unique single spiritual substance that has all the properties usually associated with mind and body. See, Lascano 2013 and 2023.

References Astell, M. (1996) “Some Reflections upon Marriage,” in P. Springborg (ed.), Astell: Political Writings, ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 7–80. (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II, ed. Patricia Springborg, Peterborough, ON/ Orchard Park: Broadview Literary Texts. (2013) The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, ed. Jacqueline Broad, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Broad, J. (2012) “Impressions in the Brain: Malebranche on Women, and Women on Malebranche,” Intellectual History Review 22(3): 373–89. (2014) “Mary Astell on Marriage and Lockean Slavery,” History of Political Thought 34(4): 717–38. (2015) The Philosophy of Mary Astell, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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God, Freedom, and Perfection Conway, A. (forthcoming) The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, trans. A. Arlig, ed. A. Arlig, C. Mercer, and J. Reid, Oxford: Oxford New Histories of Philosophy. Cited as ‘P’ followed by Chapter and section. Descartes, R. (1964–1976) Oeuvres de Descartes, (revised edition, 12 vols), ed. C. Adam, and P. Tannery, Paris: Vrin/CNRS. Cited as ‘AT’ by volume number and page number. (1984) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. R. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited as ‘CSM’ by volume number (in Roman) and page number (in Arabic). Detlefsen, K. (2014) “Emilie du Châtelet,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2016) “Custom, Freedom, and Equality: Mary Astell on Marriage and Women’s Education,” in P. Weiss and A. Sowaal (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 74–92. Du Châtelet, E. (1989) “Sur la liberté,” in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 14, ed. W. H. Barber, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, pp. 484–502. (2009) The Foundations of Physics, ed. J. Zinsser, trans. I. Bour, and J. Zinsser, Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 115–200. (2018) The Foundations of Physics, trans. K. Brading, et al.. Available at: www.kbrading.org. (2021) “On Freedom,” in W. H. Barber (ed.), Jorati, J. (trans.) Project Vox, Durham: Duke University Libraries. Hutton, S. (2004) Anne Philosopher Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2018) “Goodness in Anne Conway’s Metaphysics,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 229–46. Jorati, J. (2019) “Du Châtelet on Freedom, Self-Motion, and Moral Necessity,” Journal of the History of ­Philosophy 57(2): 255–80. Lascano, M. P. (2011) “Emilie du Châtelet on the Existence and Nature of God: An Examination of Her Arguments in Light of Their Sources,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19(4): 741–58. (2016a) “Anne Conway on Liberty,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 163–77. (2016b) “Mary Astell on the Existence and Nature of God,” in A. Sowaal and P. A. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 168–187. (2017) “Arguments for the Existence of God,” in D. Kaufman (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy, New York: Routledge, pp. 505–535. (2019) “Early Modern Women on the Cosmological Argument: A Case Study in Feminist History of Philosophy,” in E. O’Neill and M. P. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 23–48. (2023) The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway: Monism, Vitalism, and Self-Motion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Locke, J. (1714) Essai Philosophique Concernant L’Entendement Humain, trans. P. Coste, A La Haye: Chez Pierre Husson. (1985) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mercer, C. (2016) “Anne Conway’s Metaphysics of Sympathy,” in E. O’Neill and M. P. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 49–72. Rickless, S. (2000) “Locke on the Freedom to Will,” Locke Newsletter (now Locke Studies) 1: 43–67. (2014) Locke, Malden: Wiley Blackwell. (2020) “Locke on Freedom,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Shapiro, L. (1999) “Cartesian Generosity,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 64: 249–76. Sowaal, A. (2007) “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom,” Philosophy Compass 2(2): 227–43. Springborg, P. (2005) Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, A. (2021) “Du Châtelet’s Libertarianism,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 38 (3): 219–241.

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6 VITALISTIC CAUSATION More, Conway, Cavendish Tad M. Schmaltz

6.1 Introduction One prominent topic in scholarly discussion of early modern accounts of causation is the emergence of the doctrine of occasionalism, according to which God is the only genuine causal agent. In an old textbook view, this doctrine arose as a response to a problem deriving from Descartes’s mind-body dualism. The problem, in particular, is how Cartesian minds, which are unextended thinking things, could causally interact with Cartesian bodies, which are extended non-thinking things. Later Cartesians are seen as addressing this “problem of heterogeneity” (Richardson 1982) by holding that it is God who is the source of the correlations of mental and bodily states. As Steven Nadler has summarized the bottom line of this narrative, “occasionalism is first and foremost an ad hoc response to the mind-body problem as it is faced by Cartesian dualism” (Nadler 1997: 75). One point that Nadler raises in response to this narrative is that the Cartesian occasionalists were not focused exclusively on the issue of mind-body interaction (Nadler 1997: 76–77). There is a line of argument that emphasizes rather the case of body-body interaction, where the problem of heterogeneity simply is not relevant. For example, there is the claim in the Search after Truth of the Cartesian occasionalist Nicolas Malebranche that since “the motor force of bodies is […] not in the bodies that are moved, for this motor force is nothing other than the will of God,” it must be the case that “bodies have no action” and that they serve merely as “an occasional cause, which determines the Author of nature to act in such and such a manner in such and such a situation” (Malebranche 1997: 448). As in the case of other Cartesian occasionalists, Malebranche endorses mechanistic explanations of material nature that appeal only to redistributions in motion “occasioned” by collisions among parts of matter. What Cartesian occasionalism adds to such explanations is the claim that God alone can produce such changes when prompted by occasional causes. This new narrative has come to replace the old view in the literature. However, I propose to focus here on another, and less familiar, strand of thought in the early-modern period that emphasizes problems with the explanation of body-body interaction. In particular, I emphasize a difficulty concerning the transfer of motion in collision that Henry More (1614–1687) raised in an important correspondence that he had with Descartes, as well as its later manifestations in the work of Anne, Viscountess Conway and Killultagh, née Finch (1631–1679) and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, née Lucas (1623–1673), two women with connections to More. Though both Conway and Cavendish defend versions of a monist account of the natural world in opposition to the sort of mind-body dualism that More endorsed in his later writings, 74

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both embrace a kind of vitalism towards which More himself was earlier inclined.1 This vitalism is supposed to serve as an alternative to the more mechanistic understanding of matter that one finds in Descartes and in the later More. In focusing on Conway and Cavendish, my discussion reflects an interest in recent scholarship on the contributions of women to early modern philosophy. As Sarah Hutton has noted, however, one challenge here is that “to include women in the history of philosophy requires changing not just the canon, but the grounds on which the canon is selected” (Hutton 2015: 7). The cases of Conway and Cavendish provide a clear illustration of this point. A primary source for their views on the topic of causation was More, a decidedly noncanonical figure. Moreover, the vitalism that serves to connect them to the early More is out of line with the sort of mechanism that is often emphasized in standard narratives about the development of early modern philosophy. If we are to allow the voices of Conway and Cavendish to be heard, then, we will need to expand our view of early modern philosophy, providing room for the unfamiliar positions they defend that are drawn from unfamiliar sources. In trying to provide room for Conway and Cavendish, my discussion in this chapter begins with the problem of the transfer of motion in the Descartes-More correspondence and its connection to More’s early vitalism. More ultimately turned away from this vitalism, leaving it to others to develop as a systematic alternative to mechanism. Next, I turn to one of these others, Conway, who had a significant personal connection to More, and whose work bears the influence of More’s early vitalism. Under this influence, Conway offers a monistic form of vitalism for the created world that has a pronounced theological basis. She also responds to the problem raised by More concerning the transfer of motion by appealing to the fact that creatures can act only as “instruments” of God. It turns out, however, that this response is in some tension with her vitalism. Finally, I consider a different form of vitalistic monism in the work of Cavendish. In marked contrast to Conway, Cavendish eschews appeals to the supernatural in the explanation of natural events. Cavendish’s rejection of mechanism appeals rather to a self-contained infinite nature, each portion of which is capable of some degree of self-motion, sense perception, and rationality. In further contrast to Conway, but similar to the early More, Cavendish provides a response to the problem of motion transfer that clearly draws on her vitalistic alternative to mechanistic causation.

6.2  Henry More In the 1648 letter that initiated his correspondence with Descartes, More notes that “though I am madly in love with the splendid body and essence of your Philosophy, I admit nonetheless that in the second part of your Principles, there are certain details that escape me” (AT V: 238). The polite suggestion here is that More is satisfied with the basic features of Descartes’s system, but merely wants to pursue some more minor points. However, the “certain details” that More raises hardly count as minor. Among the details of Descartes’s physics that More considers are the identification of matter with extension, the denial of the possibility of atoms and the void, and the claim that the extension of the material world is “indefinite” rather than infinite: hardly peripheral issues! What concerns us here, however, is More’s challenge to the implication in Descartes’s Principles that bodily collision involves a transfer of motion. When discussing the law that governs collision in this text, for instance, Descartes claims that if a body that collides with another “has greater [force], it moves this other body and gives to [the other] as much of its motion as it loses [ei dat de suo motu, tantundem perdit]” (AT VIII: 1.65). Likewise, a few lines later Descartes holds that when God created matter in the beginning, he not only moved different parts in different ways, but also at the same time brought it about that some impel others, and transfer motion 75

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to them [motusque in illas tranferrent]. […] He conserves motion that is not something always fixed in given parts of matter, but something that occurs as being mutually transferred from some to others [ex unis in alias prout sibi mutuo occurrunt transeuntem]. (AT VIII: 1.66) In response to passages such as these, More introduces a problem for Descartes concerning “the nature of motion”: Since motion is a mode of body, as shape, the disposition of parts, etc., how can it be that it passes [transeat] from one body into another, being nothing other than a mode of body? And in general, my imagination does not grasp how it can be that what cannot be outside of a subject (as are all modes) migrate [migret] into another subject. (AT V: 382) More is drawing here on a common (though as we will see, not universally accepted) view of “modes” in the early modern period. According to this view, modes are distinct in reality from what they modify, but nonetheless depend asymmetrically on them: the subjects of the modifications can exist without them, but the modifications cannot exist without their particular subjects. Insofar as the mode of motion depends on its subject in this way, it cannot detach from one subject and migrate to another. The point that motion, as a mode, cannot migrate from one subject to another was not unique to More; one finds it also in early modern Cartesian occasionalists.2 What is distinctive, however, is the alternative to the migration view that More offers to Descartes: I am more inclined, for my part, to the opinion according to which nothing is transferred in motion, but that through the impulsion of a body, another body awakens motion in itself so to say, as the soul awakens thought in itself on such or such occasion; and that the body does not receive motion but rather when warned by another body, sets itself in motion; and […] that motion is related to body as thought to mind, in the sense that neither of the two are received, but both arise from the subject in which they are found. (AT V: 383–84) The alternative is not the view in Malebranche that God is the “motor force” solely responsible for the redistribution of motion after collision. It is rather that a colliding body “warns” a body with which it collides to “awaken motion in itself.” According to More, then, a body begins to move not by receiving motion from an external source (whether a colliding body or God), but by internally producing its own motion when prompted. The tenet that bodies are sources of activity was central to More’s conception of the material world at this time. Thus in a 1647 edition of Democritus Platonissans published in his Philosophicall Poems, More refers to “vitall Atoms that may be wakened into divers tinctures, or energies,” which serve as “the reall matter of which all supposed bodies are compounded, and this matter […] is form and life, so that all is life and form what ever is in the world” (More 1976: 160a). These atoms are not passive receptors of motion, but have living forces capable of being “wakened” into activity. This more vitalistic conception of body is reflected in More’s claim to Descartes that what is called a body is really a stupified and drunken life, that is to say, the last and faintest shadow or image of the divine essence, which I take to be the most perfect life, destitute however of sense and attention. (AT V: 384) 76

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Descartes’s response to this line of thought in More is included in an incomplete letter that he never sent, and that More saw only several years after Descartes’s death. To the objection concerning the impossibility of the migration of a bodily mode, Descartes agrees in that letter that such a migration is impossible, but protested: “that is not what I have written.” As he understands it, his claim in the Principles that “there always remains as much motion in matter” indicates only that what remains constant is “the force that sets [the] parts [of matter] in motion, which force is applied sometimes to some parts of matter, sometimes to other parts” (AT V: 405). Whereas Descartes is concessive with respect to More’s migration objection, however, his reaction to the vitalist view of the material world that underlies it is decidedly dismissive: What you add, that it seems to you that body is alive with a stupified and drunk life, etc., I consider as a fine phrase. But in the name of the candor that you permit me, I will say once and for all that nothing takes us further from the discovery of truth than when we hold as true of which no positive reason has persuaded us, but only by our own will, that is to say, which we have invented or imagined and afterwards take pleasure in what we have invented, as you do with your corporeal angels, your shadow of the divine essence, and other similar things. No one should entertain any such thoughts, because to do so is to bar the road to truth against oneself. (AT V: 405) For Descartes, the suggestion that body is directed by internal vital forces that are themselves quasi-divine is simply too far from his own mechanistic understanding of the material world for him to take seriously. At this point, we reach a fundamental impasse in the exchange between More and Descartes. After he gained access to Descartes’s unsent letter fragment sometime around 1655, however, More began to move away from the vitalist position he expressed in his correspondence with Descartes and in the roughly contemporaneous Democritus Platonissans. There are two complementary forces leading More away from this position: the first, his desire to distance himself from the materialism of Thomas Hobbes, which leads him to emphasize the need for the activity of immaterial entities in nature, and the second, his desire to distance himself from what he perceived to be the “atheistic” monism of Baruch Spinoza, which leads him to deny that matter has an internal source of motion. Both forces result in More’s mature position that matter is wholly devoid of life and activity. Such a position is reflected in the definition of body he provides in the Enchiridion metaphysicum (1671): a material substance devoid in itself of all perception and life, and indeed all motion, or thus, that body is a material substance coalescing into one thing by an alien life, and participating in life and motion from it […] since we have so solidly proved above that matter is endowed with no perception, no life, and no motion from its own nature or from itself. (More 1995: I.117–18) To be sure, More was always concerned to distinguish matter from our immaterial soul. Thus in Democritus Platonissans we find the warning that “vitall atoms” that are “form and life” are also “neither Plasticall, Sensitive or Rationall; so farre are they from proving to be the humane soul” (More 1976: 160a). Nevertheless, by the time of the Enchiridion metaphysicum, he had totally abandoned his suggestion in his correspondence with Descartes that insofar as matter is itself “the last and faintest shadow or image of the divine essence,” it must also be infused with vital activity and life. However, it is this same suggestion that Conway adopted and developed beyond anything found in the early More. 77

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6.3  Anne Conway Anne Conway (then Anne Finch) was introduced to More around 1650 by her half-brother, John Finch, who was More’s pupil at Christ’s College, Cambridge. More initially became a kind of informal tutor to Conway, studying with her the “physick” of Descartes’s Principles (see Gabbey 1977). Through their long association, however, More came to consider her as his intellectual equal in discussions of philosophical and theological issues. More dedicated his Antidote against Atheism (1653) to Conway, and his Of the Immortality of the Soul (1659) to her husband, Edward. The friendship was strained but not broken by Conway’s late conversion to Quakerism, which More tended to equate with unorthodox, and therefore dangerous, religion (see Hutton and Bretau 1995). After the death of Lady Conway, More worked with her close friend Francis Mercury van Helmont (who joined Conway in converting to Quakerism) to arrange for a Latin translation of a text based on some notes that she had left behind.3 That translation was not published until a decade later in Van Helmont’s posthumous Opuscula philosophica (1690). In 1692, as part of a set of English translations of Van Helmont’s works, Conway’s treatise was published in London with the title, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Thus the one work of Conway that we have is an English translation of a Latin translation of a now-lost original manuscript deriving from notes written in English. There clearly was a close personal connection between More and Conway. That Conway was also drawn to the views of the early More is indicated by the fact that in her exchanges with him during the 1670s, she tended to favor his Philosophicall Poems, which includes Democritus Platonissans (see Reid 2012: 266–68, 273–74). In 1675, she asked More to send her a new copy of the book since she had given her copy to George Keith, with the thought that More would send her a new one (Conway 1992: 408). We can in fact find a reflection of More’s claim in Democritus Platonissans that matter is “form and life” in the vitalism of Conway’s Principles. In her text, Conway speaks of “the most excellent attributes” of matter and body as spirit or life and light, by which I mean the capacity for every kind of feeling, perception, or knowledge, even love, all power and virtue, joy and fruition, which the noblest creatures have or can have, even the vilest and most contemptible (P: 66) Conway explicitly distinguishes this conception of matter from that found in Descartes and Hobbes, who identify matter with extension and impenetrability, and thus “only touch the surface, never glimpsing the center” (P: 66). However, she must also have in mind the stipulation of the later More that body is “a material substance devoid in itself of all perception and life, and indeed all motion” (More 1995: I.117) when criticizing those who hold that body “is merely a dead thing lacking life and the capacity for life” (P: 51). Interestingly, however, Conway’s rejection of the position of the later More draws on the view of the earlier More. I have noted More’s claim to Descartes that body must be living insofar as it is “the last and faintest shadow or image of the divine essence” (AT V: 384). So also in Democritus Platonissans—the work, recall, that Conway especially admired—we find the claim: “Whatever is, is Life and Energie / From God, who is th’ Originall of all” (More 1976: 92a). A similar sentiment is reflected in one of the arguments from Conway’s Principles against the existence of “dead matter”: For since God is infinitely good and communicates his goodness to all his creatures in infinite ways, so there is no creature which does not receive something of his goodness, and this as 78

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fully as possible, and since the goodness of God is a living goodness, which possesses life, knowledge, love, and power, which he communicates to his creatures, how can any dead thing proceed from him or be created by him, such as mere body or matter, according to the hypothesis of those who affirm that matter cannot be changed into any degree of life or perception? (P: 44–45) The theological premise that all creation derives from an infinitely powerful God of “living goodness” provides the basis for Conway’s conclusion that the material world is thoroughly infused with “life, knowledge, love, and power.” I have spoken of Conway’s “monism,” but in fact, her monistic account is limited to the created world.4 It would be more accurate to say that she affirms a “trialism” that includes an immutable God, a mutable created world, and a “middle nature,” identified with Christ, through which God is connected to creatures (P: 24). With respect to the created world, however, the term ‘monism’ applies insofar as Conway explicitly rejects the dualism of material and spiritual substance found in Descartes and More. In her view, “body is nothing but fixed and condensed spirit, and spirit is nothing but volatile body or body made subtle” (P: 61). Since “anything can approach more or less from the condition of a body or spirit” (P: 42), it must be the case that bodies and spirits exist on a continuum. Conway indicates a need for a monistic conception of the created world when she highlights the fact that spirits are able to love and unite with bodies. But since both love and union require “the similarity or affinity between their natures,” one cannot follow the view of the dualists that the “attributes of body and spirit […] are so far from having any similarity to each other or of having any natural affinity […] that they are opposite” (P: 48–49).5 Conway indicates that the issue of unity is related to the issue of causal interaction when she refers to that intimate union or bond which exists between spirits and bodies, by means of which spirits have dominion over bodies with which they are united, so that they move them from one place to another and use them as instruments in their various operations. (P: 56) In suggesting that spirits must be similar to bodies in order to move them, Conway broaches the “problem of heterogeneity” that is prominent in the textbook view concerning the development of theories of causation in the early modern period. However, in the final chapter of her Principles, Conway considers the very difficulty concerning body-body interaction that More had raised in his correspondence with Descartes. Conway may well have this exchange in mind when she writes: It is a matter of great debate how motion can be transmitted from one body to another since it is certainly neither a substance nor a body. If it is only a mode of the body, how can this motion pass properly from one body to another since the essence or being of a mode consists in this, namely, that it inheres or exists in its own body. (P: 69) We have encountered the vitalistic solution in More, according to which a body is “awakened” by impact to produce motion in itself. However, Conway offers a very different solution, one that verges on occasionalism. In particular, she proposes: Therefore the way motion is communicated is through real production or creation, so to speak. Just as God and Christ alone can create the substance of any thing, since no creature 79

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can create or give being to any substance, not even as an instrument, likewise a creature gives existence to motion or vital action not from itself, but only in subordination to God as his instrument. And this is all that a creature can do to move itself or its fellow creature, namely as an instrument of God. Through these motions a new substance is not created but only new kinds of things, so that creatures are multiplied in their own kind while one acts on another. And this is the entire work of the creature or creation as an instrument of God. (P: 69–70) The solution appears to be that motion arises not from transfer, but rather through “real production and creation” by God and Christ. Whether this solution is fully occasionalistic depends on what Conway means by the claim that creatures act as “instruments of God.” Elsewhere in the Principles, she indicates one way of understanding such a claim when she holds that motion itself comes from God, through whose will all motion occurs. For such as a creature cannot give being to itself, so it cannot move itself. […] Therefore motion and being come from the same cause, God the creator, who […] is equally present everywhere and bestows motion on creatures. But it is a very different case when the soul moves the body, for the soul is not the author of motion but merely limits it to this or that particular motion. (P: 57–58) Given that Conway accepts a monistic account of the created world, her reference to the fact that the soul plays a special role in moving the body may seem to be problematic. However, she suggests that the difference here is merely one of degree, with body being “more passive” and the soul “more active” (P: 42).6 On the basis of this suggestion, we can take her to hold that to the extent something is a soul, it is a mover, whereas to the extent that it is a body, it is receptive of motion. The view in the previous passage would then be that though God alone can produce motion, something that acts as a soul merely “limits” this motion in a particular manner. Such a view Conway could have picked up from the Cartesian tradition, for several later followers of Descartes indicated that the soul can only “direct” or “determine” motion that God alone can create (see Schmaltz 2017: 191–96). Even if this proto-Cartesian position is both consistent with monism and allows for some sort of activity on the part of souls, it bears a tenuous relation to Conway’s vitalism. After all, one point of her vitalism is that bodies are not determined from the outside, but have an internal “vital principle of motion.” Conway’s insistence that God alone can create motion, and that souls can only limit this motion in certain ways, seems to deprive bodies of their internal vitality. To be sure, Conway herself attempts to connect her solution to the problem of motion transfer to her vitalism when she notes, after presenting the former, that a body can transmit its vital actions wherever it wishes, provided it has a suitable medium, and that if it lacks this, it can extend itself through the subtle emanation of its parts, which then become the most fitting and appropriate medium for receiving and transmitting its vital action. (P: 70) But the “vital action” she posits in place of motion transfer is rather thin insofar as it consists simply in determining the motion that God has created. Moreover, this action is supposed to be restricted to something insofar as it acts as a soul, with the moved body being a merely passive receptacle for the joint activity of God and souls. This sort of solution may work for Cartesian

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dualists who insist on the passivity of matter, but is hardly suitable for the sort of monistic vitalism that Conway is concerned to defend.7

6.4  Margaret Cavendish In 1665, More wrote to Cavendish to thank her for sending him some “noble Volumes” of her work that he politely indicated are “fitter for the Colledge, or at least to some more worthy and considerable person than myself ” (Conway 1992: 241). However, he was considerably less polite about the gift in a letter reporting it to his friend Conway. Noting that one of the volumes included criticisms of his own views, More writes that Cavendish “may be secure from any one giving her the trouble of a reply,” and advises Conway not to provide one (Conway 1992: 237). In fact, neither More nor Conway deigned to engage the views of Cavendish. Cavendish no doubt had this slight in mind when she referred in her Blazing World to More as one of the “more famous modern writers” who are “fine ingenious writers, but yet so selfconceited that they would scorn to be scribes to a woman” (Cavendish 1991: 306). In contrast, though, Cavendish engaged the views of More. In one of the works she sent him, the Philosophical Letters (1664), Cavendish provides a critique of various positions in More’s Immortality of the Soul and Antidote against Atheism.8 In fact, more space is devoted to More in her text than is devoted to Descartes and Hobbes combined. Cavendish is particularly critical of More’s defense of dualism and his appeal to an immaterial “Spirit of Nature” to explain the workings of nature. In Cavendish’s alternative view, “there is nothing in Nature but what is material” (PL: 149). To be sure, she was careful to allow for the belief in the existence of God and the immortality of immaterial human souls. However, she insisted that such belief depends on faith alone, and should not be a matter for consideration in natural philosophy. As she explains in Philosophical Letters: I shall merely go upon the bare Ground of Natural Philosophy, and do not mix Divinity with it, as many Philosophers use to do […] for I think it not onely an absurdity, but an injury to the holy Profession of Divinity to draw her to the proofs of Natural Philosophy; wherefore I shall strictly follow the guidance of Natural Reason […]. (PL: 3) We have a marked contrast here with not only the appeal in More to the need for immaterial principles in nature, but also the emphasis in Conway on God’s exclusive production of motion.9 But though Cavendish’s opposition to the later More is clear, it is nevertheless the case that her account of the material world has some affinities with the vitalism of the early More.10 We have seen the emphasis in More’s Democritus Platonissans on the fact that in matter “all is form and life.” So also, according to Cavendish, material nature is thoroughly infused with life. Indeed, she goes beyond More. Whereas even the early More denied that matter is capable of sense and reason, Cavendish insists that “all the several Parts of Nature are Living and Knowing, and that there is no part that has not Life and Knowledge, being all composed of rational and sensitive matter, which is the life and soul of nature” (PL: 143–44). There is in nature a thorough “blending” that ensures that each material part is composed of three “degrees” of matter: inanimate, animate sensitive, and animate rational. Such blending thereby also guarantees that each part, however small, has some capacity for sensation and rationality. The two kinds of animate matter also involve self-motion, which, according to Cavendish, “is the only cause of all natural effects” (Cavendish 1991: 281). As in the case of Conway, Cavendish endorses a monistic conception of the material world.11 Whereas Conway tends to “spiritualize” matter, however, Cavendish tends to “materialize” life, sensation, and reason.12 Thus she holds in Philosophical Letters that nature “is corporeal, and

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partly self-moving, dividable and composable; that all and every particular creature, as also perception and variety in nature, is made by corporeal self-motion […]” (PL: n.p.). The monism suggested here is further reflected in her claim that there is a single matter that composes everything in nature. Although she speaks of different degrees of matter, Cavendish warns that “I do not say that they are three distinct and several matters; for as they do make but one body of nature, so they are also but one matter” (Cavendish 2001: 206). Cavendish notes at one point that her material monism agrees with the view in Descartes that “all bodies of this universe are of one and the same matter, really divided into many parts, and that these parts are diversely moved” (PL: 107).13 Yet Cavendish rejects not only the implication of Descartes’s dualism that matter is devoid of any sort of sensory perception and ratiocination, but also his claim that God is required to set inert matter in motion. As in the case of the early More, Cavendish’s vitalistic conception of nature provides the basis for her rejection of a mechanistic account of natural change in terms of transfer of motion in collision. In Philosophical Letters, she offers the following reflections on this problem in comments directed to her fictitious female correspondent: Neither doth it agree with my reason, that one body can give or transfer motion into another body; and as much motion it gives or transfers into that body, as much loses it. […] For how can motion, being no substance, but only a mode, quit one body and pass into another. One body may either occasion, or imitate another’s motion, but it can neither give nor take away what belongs to its own or another body’s substance, no more than matter can quit its nature from being matter […]. (PL: 97–98) Here Cavendish follows More in appealing to an accepted conception of modes to undermine the position that motion is transferred in collision. However, her own alternative involves a rejection of any distinction in reality between motion and the body that is moved: therefore my opinion is, that if motion doth go out of one body into another, then substance goes too; for motion, and substance or body, as aforementioned, are all one thing, and then all bodies that receive motion from other bodies, must needs increase in their substance and quantity, and those bodies which impart or transfer motion, must decrease as much as they increase: Truly, madam, that neither motion nor figure should subsist by themselves, and yet be transferable into other bodies, is very strange, and as much as to prove them to be nothing, and yet to say they are something. (PL: 98) Whereas More accepted the dominant view that a mode is distinguished in reality from what it modifies, Cavendish offers the more “nominalist” position that modes are “nothing” in the sense that they are simply ways in which substances are conceived.14 She explicitly rejects the stipulation in Descartes that motion is “only a mode of a thing, and not the thing or body itself ” on the grounds that there can be no abstraction made of motion from body, neither really, nor in the manner of our conception, for how can I conceive that which is not, nor cannot be in nature, that is, to conceive motion without body? Wherefore motion is but one thing with body, without any separation or abstraction whatsoever. (PL: 97)

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Cavendish concludes on the basis of her alternative conception of motion that if there were any transfer of motion in collision, there would have to be a transfer of a portion of a moving body. With respect to some kinds of natural change, Cavendish is in fact willing to allow for this sort of transfer, as for instance in the case of generation (see James 1999: 239–44). However, in the case of perception, she finds it absurd to say that a portion of the sensible object is transmitted to the sense organs, thus decreasing the size of the object and increasing the size of the organs. Cavendish offers as an alternative the view that “the Object is not the cause of Perception, but is only the occasion” (1668: 56). In particular, the object provides the occasion for the sense organs themselves to “pattern out” an image of the object. We have here applied to the case of perception an occasionalist version of the view of More that a body “awakens” in another body the capacity to produce its own motion, with the important difference that in Cavendish the awakened capacity to produce internal motion involves the sensitive and rational powers of animate matter. Cavendish’s talk of occasional causation may well derive from views in the work of the alchemist Jan Baptista van Helmont (father of Conway’s friend Francis Mercury van Helmont) of which she was otherwise rather critical. According to Van Helmont, the generation of animals as well as vegetables and minerals is governed by an “Archeus” that serves as an “inward worker or agent” (Van Helmont 1662: 29). In generation, the father “hath the reason of nought but an external cause and occasionally producing,” whereas the efficient cause of generation is the Archeus, an immaterial internal vital force (1662: 29). In Philosophical Letters, Cavendish objects to Van Helmont’s position on the grounds that it appeals to immaterial entities to explain material change (PL: 238). What seems to remain in Cavendish, though, is Van Helmont’s view that in some cases, at least, external “causes” merely provide the occasion for an object to produce a change in itself by its own vitalistic powers.15 Cavendish’s account of occasional causation is linked not only to her vitalism but also to her distinctive view that the parts of matter freely produce motion in a libertarian sense.16 It is because the internal production of motion is free in this sense that it cannot be causally determined by the external change that occasions it. Though Cavendish does refer to Nature as an infinite whole, it is clear that she does not subscribe to the Spinozistic tenet that Nature imposes a plan “top-down” that necessitates the interaction of its parts (see Detlefsen 2006: 234). Steven Nadler has drawn from the Cartesian tradition a notion of “occasional causation” that is to be distinguished from a more familiar “occasionalism” (Nadler 1994: 36–41). In the case of transeunt efficient causation, an object A produces an effect B in another object C by means of a power in A. In contrast, Nadler holds that there is occasional causation in the case where an object A “induces,” but does not efficiently cause, another object C to produce an effect B by means of a power in C. Occasionalism is merely the special case of occasional causation in which C is God. Nadler finds evidence in the work of Descartes and La Forge of the possibility of occasional causation in cases where C is something other than God. However, we have in More and Van Helmont a different vitalistic source for the early modern notion of occasional causation. It is this source, rather than the Cartesian one, that is linked to the conclusion in Cavendish that external objects serve as the occasion for sense organs to produce internal changes by means of their own completely self-determined power.17

Notes 1 In her discussion of Conway, Carolyn Merchant links monism and vitalism in her definition of the latter as the view that “affirm[s] the life of all things through a reduction of Cartesian dualism to the monistic unity of matter and spirit” (1979: 255). Yet though this definition works for Conway and Cavendish, it does not for More since, as we discover, his early writings include an endorsement of both vitalism and (a non-Cartesian version of ) dualism.

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Tad M. Schmaltz 2 See, for instance, the claim of the Cartesian occasionalist Géraud de Cordemoy that when one body drives another from its place, it cannot be said that the motion of one should pass into the other, because it is evident that the motion of each one respectively is nothing but a way of being [ façon d’estre] which, not being separable from it, cannot in any way pass into the other. (1666: 133) 3 Van Helmont notes that the text was constructed from “Writings abruptly and scatteredly, I may also add obscurely, written in a Paper-Book, with Black-led Pen, towards the latter end of her long pain and sickness; which she never had the opportunity to revise, correct, or perfect” (quoted in P: 3). For a defense of the hypothesis that the translation itself was the work of the German Cabalist Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689), see Reid (2020). 4 Even with respect to the created world, the discussion in the Conway literature raises the question of whether she is an “existence monist,” who holds that only one created thing exists, or rather a “type” monist, who holds merely that there is only one type of created thing. For a discussion of this question, see Gordon-Roth (2018). For a response to this article that argues that Conway is a “priority monist” who holds that the whole of the created world is prior in nature to the parts that compose it, see Thomas (2020). I discuss this issue further in Schmaltz (forthcoming). 5 For more on the argument from love against dualism in Conway, see Borcherding (2019). 6 On Conway’s conception of the relation between soul and body, see Lascano (2013) and Broad (2018). 7 For the claim that Conway’s solution to the problem of motion transfer does not provide a basis for her vitalism, see Reid (2012: 259–60). I am going farther in arguing that the solution in fact is in some tension with her vitalism. 8 Another work Cavendish sent More, Poems and Fancies (1653), is similar to More’s own Democritus Platonissans in providing an exposition of atomism in verse, and it may well have been modeled on More’s text. For more on the Canvendish–More relation, see Hutton (2003). 9 Cavendish does allow for the appeal to God in the case of supernatural operations, such as the creation of matter. But for the argument that even this sort of appeal to God is problematic for her, see Detlefsen (2009). For a discussion of Cavendish’s view of the relation between God and Nature that takes issue with some of Detlefsen’s critical claims, see Boyle (2018: 80–87). 10 To be sure, it is unclear whether—and if so, to what extent—Cavendish was aware of More’s early vitalism. Her discussion of More in her published writings focuses on the views in his later (post-1650) writings. I have mentioned the possibility that Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies was modeled on More’s Democritus Platonissans (see note 8). If this were the case, there would be a connection of Cavendish to a text that includes an expression of More’s early vitalism. However, it must be admitted that this connection remains conjectural. 11 I have observed that, strictly speaking, Conway is a trialist insofar as she allows that God and Christ are substances distinct from material nature. So also, Cavendish’s admission of God and immaterial souls on the basis of faith indicates that she is not a thorough-going substance monist. 12 There is some question, however, whether this difference is merely one of emphasis or rather more substantive. What makes it difficult to answer this question is that the contrast between “matter” and “spirit” tends to lose its grip with respect to the views of both Cavendish and Conway. I discuss this issue further in Schmaltz (forthcoming). 13 In note 4, I have indicated the issue in the literature over whether Conway is an “existence” or “type” monist. Detlefsen raises the similar issue of whether Cavendish is a “token” (that is, existence) or “type” monist; see Detlefsen (2006: 227–40). Detlefsen’s own conclusion—which I endorse—is that Cavendish’s account of “occasional causation” indicates that she accepts only type and not token monism. 14 One can find such a position, for instance, in Hobbes, who in De corpore defines an accident as “a mode of conceiving a body” (1655: 63). For a discussion of this position in Hobbes, see Pasnau (2011: 116–17, 261). Hobbes worked for the Cavendish family, but apparently had little interaction with Margaret. However, we know that she did carefully read the 1656 English translation of De corpore. 15 O’Neill (2013: 321) traces J.-B. Van Helmont’s notion of occasional causes to the Stoic notion of “antecedent causes” (prokatarktika). She also notes that Cavendish herself likely had independent access to the latter notion through her study of Thomas Stanley’s A History of Philosophy (1678), which includes a paraphrase of the discussion of Stoic antecedent causes in Cicero’s De fato (O’Neill 2013: 317). 16 In particular, Cavendish appeals to the fact that the internal production of motion can be free in this sense in order to explain irregularities and disorders in nature. For further discussion of this point, see Detlefsen (2007: 180–87).

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Vitalistic Causation 17 Thanks to Deborah Boyle and Karen Detlefsen for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. It is also worth noting that prior to her untimely death, Eileen O’Neill had agreed to contribute the chapter on causation to this volume. I was honored to be asked to take her place by providing such a chapter. Over the years I have learned much from her work on early modern philosophy in general, and on the philosophical contributions of early modern women in particular. Indeed, her article on Cavendish’s account of occasional causation (O’Neill 2013) prompted (dare I say occasioned?) me to include a consideration of that topic in this chapter.

References 1 Abbreviations AT: Descartes 1964–74. P: Conway 1996. PL: Cavendish 1664. 2  Primary Texts Cavendish, M. (1653) Poems, and Fancies, Written by the Right Honourable, Lady Margaret Newcastle, London: J. Martin and J. Allsetrye. (1664) Philosophical Letters, or, Modest Reflections Upon Some Opinions in Natural Philosophy Maintained by Several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age, Expressed by way of Letters by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, London: n.p. (1668) Grounds of Natural Philosophy, London: A. Maxwell. (1991) “The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World,” in P. Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2001) Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. E. O’Neill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1668. Conway, A. (1992) The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642–1684, ed. M. Nicolson, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1996) Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. A. P. Coudert and T. Corse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1692. Cordemoy, G. de (1666) Le discernement du corps et de l’âme en six discours, Paris: Floretin Lambert. Descartes, R. (1964–1974) Œuvres de Descartes, 11 Vols., ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Paris: Vrin. Hobbes, T. (1655) Elementorum Philosophi sectio prima: De corpore, London: Andrea Cook. More, H. (1976) The Complete Poems of Dr. Henry More (1614–1687), ed. A. B. Grosart, New York: AMS Press. Originally published 1647. (1995) Manual of Metaphysics [translation of Enchiridion Metaphysicum], 2 Vol., trans. A. Jacob, Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Originally published 1671. Van Helmont, J. B. (1662) Oriatrike or Physick Refined, the Common Errors therein Refuted and the Whole Art Reformed and Rectified, London: Lodowick Loyd. 3  Secondary Literature Borcherding, J. (2019) “Loving the Body, Loving the Soul: Conway’s Vitalist Critique of Cartesian and Morean Dualism,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 9: 1–35. Boyle, D. (2018) The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broad, J. (2018) “Conway and Charleton on the Intimate Presence of Souls in Bodies,” Journal of the History of Ideas 79: 571–91. Detlefsen, K. (2006) “Atomism, Monism, and Causation in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 3: 199–240. (2007) “Reason and Freedom: Margaret Cavendish on the Order and Disorder of Nature,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 89: 157–91. (2009) “Margaret Cavendish on the Relation between God and World,” Philosophy Compass 4: 421–38. Gabbey, A. (1977) “Anne Conway et Henry More: Lettres sur Descartes (1650–1651),” Archives de philosophie 40: 379–88.

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Tad M. Schmaltz Gordon-Roth, J. (2018) “What Kind of Monist is Anne Finch Conway,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4: 280–97. Hutton, S. (2003) “Margaret Cavendish and Henry More,” in S. Clucas (ed.), A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Aldershot: Ashgate. (2015) “‘Blue-Eyed Philosophers Born on Wednesdays’: An Essay on Women and History of Philosophy,” Monist 98: 7–20. and J.-L. Bretau. (1995) “Anne Conway critique d’Henry More: l’esprit et la matière,” Archives de Philosophie 58: 371–84. James, S. (1999) “The philosophical innovations of Margaret Cavendish,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7: 219–44. Lascano, M. (2013) “Anne Conway: Bodies in a Spiritual World,” Philosophy Compass 8: 327–36. Malebranche, N. (1997) The Search after Truth, ed. and trans. T. M. Lennon and P. J. Olscamp, with Elucidations of the Search after Truth, ed. T. M. Lennon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merchant, C. (1979) “The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz’s Concept of the Monad,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 17: 255–69. Nadler, S. (1994) “Descartes and Occasional Causation,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 2: 36–41. (1997) “Occasionalism and the Mind-Body Problem,” in M. Stewart (ed.), Studies in Seventeenth-­ Century European Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Neill, E. (2013) “Margaret Cavendish, Stoic Antecedent Causes, and Early Modern Occasional Causes,” Revue philosophique de la France et de letranger 138: 311–26. Pasnau, R. (2011) Metaphysical Themes, 1274–1671, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reid, J. (2012) The Metaphysics of Henry More, Dordrecht: Springer. (2020) “Anne Conway and Her Circle on Monads,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 58: 679–704. Richardson, R. (1982) “The ‘Scandal’ of Cartesian Interactionism,” Mind 91: 20–37. Schmaltz, T. (2017) Early Modern Cartesianisms: Dutch and French Constructions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (forthcoming) “English Alternatives to Dualism: Hobbes, Cavendish, Conway,” in S. Howard and J. Stetter (eds.), The Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thomas, E. (2020) “Anne Conway as a Priority Monist: A Response to Gordon-Roth,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6: 275–84.

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7 IT’S ALL ALIVE! CAVENDISH AND CONWAY AGAINST DUALISM Marleen Rozemond and Alison Simmons

Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway are both known for their rejection of dualism, that is, the view that the world contains both material and immaterial substances. Both replace dualism with a form of vitalist monism, a view according to which the world contains only one type of substance that is essentially alive or self-moving. It is tempting to see their views as profoundly different. Cavendish writes that all is matter, inviting us to interpret her as a kind of materialist. Conway, by contrast, insists that the kernel of reality is spirit, inviting us to interpret her as a kind of immaterialist. What is more, their approaches to the nature of reality are very different: Cavendish is firmly focused on natural philosophy, while Conway has in sight the moral order of the universe. These two differences might even seem to go hand in hand. We argue, however, that in the end, their metaphysical views are quite similar (see Borcherding 2022 for a further defense of this claim). Both Cavendish and Conway attribute to their one type of substance properties that dualists distribute across their two types of substance, including extension, divisibility, impenetrability, self-motion, sentience, and knowledge. And both insist that nature has no place for either immaterial spirits or purely mechanical bodies. In exploring their arguments against dualism and in favor of vitalist monism, we pay particular attention to the ways in which Cavendish and Conway engage with two of dualism’s traditional motivations: (a) the philosophical demand to explain the orderly workings of nature and (b) the theological demand for human exceptionalism among God’s creatures. Descartes, the seventeenth century’s most famous dualist, insists that he can explain most of the orderly phenomena of nature through the mechanical properties of matter, from the motion of planets to animal learning. Only human thought and free action require appeal to immaterial entities. But Descartes is an outlier in his extreme optimism about the explanatory scope of mechanism. Henry More, an even more important dualistic target for both Cavendish and Conway, invokes immaterial entities to explain not only human thought and free action, but also the sentience of animals, the vital operations of plants, and even orderly motions found in inanimate nature. Cavendish and Conway both argue that a dualistic metaphysics of mechanical matter and immaterial entities will inevitably fail in its attempt to explain nature. Either it will fail entirely, as Cavendish argues, or it will fail in part, as Conway argues. Only a vitalist monism, they contend, can succeed in accounting for the full range of orderly natural phenomena. But explaining the order of nature is not the only motive for dualism in the period. Human exceptionalism is another. Christian doctrine states that among God’s creatures, human beings, and only human beings, have immortal souls. This form of human exceptionalism finds especially strong expression in Descartes’ position that human beings are the only creatures with immaterial DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-10

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souls at all. The soul’s immateriality, he suggests, entails that its existence is not threatened by the destruction of the material body. As we noted above, Henry More finds immaterial entities throughout nature. His argument for human exceptionalism thus turns not on the human soul’s immateriality, but on its rationality. In this he is closer to the Aristotelian scholastic tradition than to Descartes. Cavendish and Conway have striking responses to these arguments: they both reject the doctrine of human exceptionalism.

7.1  More’s Dualism Cavendish and Conway engage with the dualisms of both Descartes and More, but the latter occupies a more prominent place in their criticisms. Since these dualisms are importantly different, and since More’s is not terribly well known, we begin with a short primer on More (for details, see Reid 2012, 2019). For More, the crucial distinction between the material and immaterial is not the contrast between extension and thought, as it is for Descartes. First of all, More holds that all substances are extended. The difference between material and immaterial substances lies elsewhere: So that two Substances, Matter and Spirit, stand opposite one to another, specifically distinct, by their immediate, essential and inseparable attributes, the one being really discerpible and impenetrable, the other penetrable, and indiscerpible, sufficiently thus to be discriminated before we consider any Principle of Activity in either. (Saducismus Triumphatus, 196, quoted in Reid 2012: 69; see also More 1659: I.2 ax. ix)1 Matter is impenetrable while immaterial spirit is penetrable. And matter is “discerpible,” that is really divisible, while immaterial spirit is indivisible, or to be precise, it is “intellectually divisible, but Physically indiscerpible” (More 1995: I.xxviii.10). As he indicates in the previous quotation, More also distinguishes material and immaterial substance in terms of their “Principle of Activity”: The precise notion of substance is the same in both [matter and spirit], in which, I conceive, is compris’d Extension and Activity, either connate or communicated. For matter itself once moved can move other matter. (More 1659: I.3.2, italics added) Immaterial spirits have “connate” activity; that is, they are self-moving and can initiate motion. Matter, by contrast must be moved by an external agent, though once moved it can communicate motion to another bit of matter. Strikingly, like others in the period, More often casts this contrast in terms of life and perception: spirit is “immaterial substance intrinsically endowed with life and the faculty of moving” (More 1995: I.xxviii.3). By contrast, “body is a material substance devoid in itself of all perception and life, and indeed all motion” (More 1995: I.xxviii.2). The use of the term “life” as interchangeable with self-motion is in line with the Aristotelian idea that beings endowed with life have a kind of internal principle of motion or change, a capacity to initiate change that inanimate beings don’t have. The conjunction of self-motion (or life) and perception is thought-provoking, and it will come up below, but since our focus is on self-motion, we will here leave it aside. For More, unlike for Descartes, immaterial entities are needed not only to explain human thought and free action (the features that for both make human beings exceptional in nature), but also a much broader swath of events within the natural world, including the orderly movements of inanimate bodies. Many of these movements, More insists, require what he calls a “Spirit of 88

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Nature” or “Hylarchic Principle” (as well as “plastic powers” of souls). More describes the Spirit of Nature as follows: A substance incorporeal but without Sense and Animadversion, pervading the whole Matter of the Universe, and exercising a Plastical power therein, according to the sundry predispositions and occasions in the parts it works upon, raising such Phaenomena in the world, by directing the parts of the Matter and their Motion, as cannot be resolved into mere Mechanical powers. (More 1659: III.12.1) As the above quote clearly indicates, More does not introduce the Spirit of Nature as a subject of mental states, but in order to explain non-mental phenomena within the physical world. But why does More think there is a need for such an entity? More thought that many natural phenomena within the physical world simply cannot be explained through the mechanical properties of matter alone. And like most early moderns, More held that the order of nature is the result of a divine plan, divine commands. But what explains the efficacy of these commands, that is, of the laws of nature? In More’s view, matter cannot execute these laws by itself, and God does not do so himself (Reid 2012: 329–44). He argues that their execution requires an immaterial entity in nature: it is the role of the Spirit of Nature to execute God’s plans. But how does this immaterial Spirit of Nature execute God’s laws? What features must it have that matter lacks in order to fulfill this role? As we will argue, this is an issue that is central to Cavendish’s disagreements with More. One possibility is that the Spirit of Nature obeys God’s commands. This would suggest that it must have mental states, so that it can comprehend these commands and execute them by issuing orders to matter. This understanding might be suggested by More’s claim that the Spirit of Nature operates by “directing the parts of the Matter and their Motion” (More 1659: III.12.1 emphasis added). The same expectation arises when his friend Ralph Cudworth introduces his “Plastick Nature,” his version of More’s Spirit of Nature, to implement divine commands to explain order in nature. Cudworth argues that the efficacy of divine commands cannot be understood without appeal to an immaterial entity; it cannot be explained in terms of just bodies because “Inanimate Things are not Commandable nor Governable by such Laws” (Cudworth 1977: 147). The inability of inanimate bodies to obey laws suggests that the solution lies in an immaterial entity that can obey them and so has mental states. But both Cudworth and More instead think in terms of “blind executioners” (Cudworth’s phrase); they rely on the need for self-activity, but not mindedness. More clearly does not see the role of his Spirit of Nature in terms of it having mental states; we saw above that he asserts that the Spirit of Nature does not have “Sense and Animadversion.” Elsewhere he adopts a more guarded position, confidently setting aside freedom and rationality, but expressing hesitation about sense perception: That the Spirit of Nature hath Life, and that both Plastical and Omniform, I dare more confidently aver: but as to Sense and Animadversion, I hold it a more rash business to determine any thing either negatively or affirmatively. But that it is devoid of Reason and Freewill is with me an establish’ed Point. (More 1659: III.12.1 note. See also More 1966: II.2 sch.) While More thinks that his Spirit of Nature may or may not have some sort of mindedness, it seems clear that obedience is not his model: otherwise, one would expect him to be firmly committed to his Spirit of Nature having mental states. Instead, he saw it as an internal, self-active, or vital entity 89

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in which God installed laws on analogy with, say, a computer program that is installed by humans in a machine. The internal principle is programmed, one might say, to execute a plan, divine laws in matter. Thus More writes, in rejecting his own previous optimism about mechanism: But now I perceive all things, which are made in the free course of Nature, are not only approv’d of by Divine Wisdom, but that their Laws were implanted in the spirit of Nature, by the help of God. (More 1966:, 2.2.1 sch.)

7.2 Cavendish We focus on two prongs in Cavendish’s rejection of dualism. (1) Cavendish agrees with More, against Descartes, that mechanical matter cannot explain all natural corporeal phenomena. She argues against the introduction of immaterial entities as a solution, however; what is needed instead is a radically different conception of matter. (2) On the issue of human exceptionalism, Cavendish is more complicated. She holds that Nature is qualitatively the same throughout: everything is material, and all bodies are self-active, sensing, and rational. This position still allows for human exceptionalism, however; there are several forms of exceptionalism in play in her thought that are compatible with her overall view of the natural world. (1) In one version, human beings are special because unlike other creatures, they have immaterial souls. In line with her view that Nature is the same throughout, Cavendish rejects the idea of immaterial souls that are parts of Nature. But she repeatedly claims that there are supernatural immaterial souls. (2) Another version of exceptionalism focuses on the notion of rationality. Her view of the natural world as rational throughout rules out that human beings alone are rational. But she also vigorously rejects the view that they are more rational than other creatures. As we shall see, Conway offers yet a different version of human exceptionalism.

7.2.1  The Order of Nature A good point of entry into Cavendish’s natural philosophy is her critique of the mechanistic conception of body-body interaction.2 This critique is crucial for understanding her position on the fundamental ontology of the natural world; she uses it against a purely mechanistic materialism, and it leads her to the conclusion that matter is self-active, or alive. Her argument assumes a model of mechanistic interaction in terms of the literal transmission of motion, which, in agreement with the dominant view (“accidents don’t migrate”), she rules out. A motion cannot be separated from its body and be “given to” another body; it would require that some of its matter travel with the motion (Cavendish 1664: I.xxx, 97–98). Instead, she favors “occasional causation,” and this is where she invokes self-activity: a body starts to move itself on the occasion of a prompt from another body, in virtue of its own self-activity (Detlefsen 2007; Boyle 2018: 97–104; Shaheen unpublished manuscript). Furthermore, she argues that a body moves itself in response to its perception of what another body does. Thus bodies, for Cavendish, are self-moving and perceiving entities. Indeed, she believes that all bodies are endowed not only with perception, but also with rationality and freedom. What conception of freedom Cavendish accepted, however, is hotly contested.3 Each body, and the material world as a whole, is a mixture of three types of matter: inanimate, sensitive, and rational. How exactly we should understand such “perfect blending,” is a difficult question that falls well beyond the scope of this paper (see O’Neill 2001: xxi–xxv; Boyle 2018: 62–78; Shaheen 2019a). So Cavendish’s critique of mechanism differs from More’s in two ways. For More, mechanism is useful, but it explains only a limited range of phenomena, necessitating an appeal to immaterial 90

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entities. For Cavendish, the mechanistic model of explanation is problematic in itself, so she rejects it wholesale. In addition, she rejects an appeal to immaterial entities. Indeed, in Section 7.2.2 we will see that she regards the notion of an immaterial spirit as inherently problematic. Furthermore, like Princess Elisabeth before her and Anne Conway afterward, she leans on the problems for interaction between immaterial and material entities. It is worth noting that for More the interaction problem poses a serious problem not only for human minds, but even more so for his Spirit of Nature, as its role consists entirely in producing material phenomena by acting on matter (for More’s view on this issue, see Reid 2012: 239–40). In her Philosophical Letters,4 Cavendish specifically targets More’s reliance on his Spirit of Nature to explain the order of nature. As we saw, for More the order in nature comes from divine commands, and their efficacy requires an immaterial intermediary, his Spirit of Nature. Cavendish not only argues that reliance on such an entity is problematic, but also that it is superfluous: matter can do the job itself. Furthermore, her view stands in marked contrast to More’s conception of the Spirit of Nature as essentially self-active, but at most perhaps endowed with sense perception. Her creaturely source of the order of nature, matter, is fully minded: it has sense, reason, and freedom. We will discuss these two features of her view in turn. Cavendish repeatedly writes that she wishes to stay out of theological matters; knowledge of the nature and existence of God and the immaterial soul is beyond our natural capacities (but see Detlefsen 2009). Nonetheless, she offers various claims about God’s relationship to the world; these claims suggest a rather limited role for God in the natural world. First of all, against More she argues that matter itself can execute God’s commands because it is self-moving: …but he [More] that thinks it absurd to say, the World is composed of meer self-moving Matter, may consider, that it is more absurd to believe Immaterial substances or spirits in Nature, as also a spirit of Nature, which is the Vicarious power of God upon Matter; For why should it not be as probable, that God did give Matter a self-moving power to her self, as to have made another Creature to govern her? For Nature is not a Babe, or Child, to need such a Spiritual Nurse, to teach her to go, or to move; neither is she so young a Lady as to have need of a Governess, for surely she can govern her self; she needs not a Guardian for fear she should run away with a younger Brother, or one that cannot make her a Jointure. (Cavendish 1664: II.vi, 149) Not only does she reject a role for an immaterial Spirit of Nature here, but she also implies limits on the role of God in the order of nature, as she writes that Nature needs no oversight from some immaterial substance or Spirit of Nature. Now views on the source of order in Cavendish’s nature are the subject of much scholarly debate. Some interpreters argue that her God issues specific commands to Nature that constitute something like the laws of nature, or that specify, for instance, the natures of natural kinds (Detlefsen 2007, 2009; Boyle 2018). Others have suggested that God’s role is much more limited, and that in particular Cavendish’s God does not issue commands that constitute laws of nature (Lascano 2019; Shaheen 2019b). The latter interpretation strikes us as closer to the truth. Cavendish repeatedly offers alternatives to the idea that God issues a variety of laws of nature. For instance, in response to More, she allows just one law to nature: I cannot well conceive what your Author means by the Common Laws of Nature; But if you desire my opinion how many Laws Nature hath, and what they are; I say Nature hath but One Law, which is a wise Law, viz. to keep Infinite matter in order, and to keep so much Peace. (Cavendish 1664: II.v, 146) 91

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Here she allows for just one law of nature: maintain order! Elsewhere she limits God to a different single decree, which also does not sound like what we conceive of as a law of nature at all, and which leaves nature largely to her own devices: God, the author of nature, has ordered her [Nature], so that she cannot work beyond her own nature, that is, beyond matter;…particular parts are not bound to work or move to a certain particular action, but they work according to the wisdom and liberty of nature, which is only bound by the omnipotent God’s decree, not to work beyond herself, that is, beyond matter… (Cavendish 2001: 139) Therefore it is probable, God has ordained Nature to work in herself by his Leave, Will, and Free Gift. (Cavendish 1664: I.ii, 11) 5 Now, these last two quotes occur in contexts where Cavendish is not focused on the issue of the laws of nature. Instead, her point here is that the material world is a closed system: nothing goes into or goes out of existence, and there is no supernatural intervention in nature, by God or by other immaterial beings. Both phenomena, she thinks, would threaten the order of nature. Nonetheless, these texts strongly suggest that she does not think of God as issuing laws of Nature. And there is more. Shortly after the last quote above, Cavendish offers a remarkable discussion of the biblical creation story, where she does seem to give a more specific role to God, but it is not in terms of God imposing anything like laws of nature. She cites Genesis’s description of God issuing a variety of commands, which generate order in what was then a rude and indigested Heap, or Chaos, without form, void and dark; and then God said Let it be light; Let there be a Firmament in the midst of the Waters, and let the Waters under the Heaven be gathered together, and let the dry Land appear; Let the Earth bring forth Grass, the Herb yielding seed, and the Fruit-tree yielding Fruit after its own kind; and let there be Lights in the Firmament, the one to rule the Day, and the other the Night; and let the Waters bring forth abundantly the moving Creature that hath life; and let the Earth bring forth living Creatures after its kinde; and at last God said, Let us make Man, and all what was made, God saw it was good. Thus all was made by God’s command, and who executed his Command but the Material servant of God, Nature? which ordered her self-moving matter into such several Figures as God commanded, and God approved of them. (Cavendish 1664: I.iii, 16; see also Cavendish 1664: II.iii, 142) One may wish to dismiss this text as a mere accommodation to religious orthodoxy, but in fact, it contains various remarkable and unorthodox claims (for Cavendish’s lack of orthodoxy, see Smith 2016). So for our purposes, we propose to take it at face value. As we expect by now, and in line with the view we just saw, Cavendish writes that matter itself executes the divine commands; there is no need for an immaterial intermediary. But in fact, she goes beyond omitting such an intermediary, and as a result, she deviates from the text of Genesis, which repeatedly states that after issuing commands, God himself executed them: And God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also… So God created great whales and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind…. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after 92

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their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis I: 16–25) 6 Here God is the source of the order of nature in a more specific sense than when she attributes to God only a single, very general law. But the resulting view of God’s role is noteworthy in terms of the contents of his commands: it is in line with the text of Genesis, but out of step with the early modern emphasis on laws. For consider: “and let the Waters bring forth abundantly the moving Creature that hath life; and let the Earth bring forth living Creatures after its kinde.” This is not a command that yields anything recognizable as a law of nature, like a law of motion; instead, it is a command to produce certain kinds of entities, certain end-products. And the command does not say how to do this. As we saw, Nature takes it upon herself to execute it, and Cavendish’s God leaves the task to Nature’s wisdom: And hence we may conclude, that nature is neither absolutely necessitated, nor has an absolute free will: for, she is so much necessitated, that she depends upon the all-powerful God, and cannot work beyond herself, or beyond her own nature; and yet hath so much liberty, that in her particulars she works as she pleaseth, and as God has given her power; but she being wise, acts according to her infinite natural wisdom, which is the cause of her orderly government in all particular productions, changes and dissolutions; so that all creatures in their particular kinds, do move and work as nature pleases, orders and directs. (Cavendish 2001:109) Here again, Cavendish explicitly attributes to God only the very general command we saw before that Nature work within itself. The upshot is that God commands Nature to generate certain products, but God leaves it up to her how to do this. So God is not like a craftsman who fashions products himself; rather (to use a metaphor Cavendish employs in a different context) he is like an architect who orders products from a craftsman, and who leaves it up to her how to produce them. Consequently, Nature needs a full complement of mental capacities and Cavendish does not see Nature as a blind executioner. She does not explicitly appeal to the mindedness of matter when she writes that Nature itself imposes God’s commands on its parts, but it is not hard to see it at work. Nature must comprehend these commands in order to impose them on its parts and order them to execute these commands. Furthermore, the parts then obey these commands, and so they too must deploy mental capacities. As others have argued, Cavendish’s model of the natural order is highly anthropomorphic: it is based on the structure of human society, it relies on self-activity, sense, reason, and freedom, as well notions like peace and strife (Detlefsen 2007; Boyle 2018). God is very far from being a micromanager and nature itself commands its parts, relying in turn on their obedience. In sum, Cavendish departs from More in two important ways. More postulated an immaterial intermediary, on which God’s commands are imprinted. He allowed that his Spirit of Nature might have sense perception, but not reason and free will. It executes God’s commands blindly. Cavendish thinks that instead matter does the job, and the way it does so is also very different. She agrees with More that the world displays evidence of intelligent design. But unlike More, who sees God as the sole source of such design and relied on it to argue for God’s existence (More 1966: Bk II), Cavendish places the explanation for such design in the rationality of Nature itself. Or at a minimum, she does so to a significant degree. God commands Nature to form birds and fish, and so the initial idea about what kinds of beings should exist may come from God, but Nature itself must figure out how to produce them. So she downloads the rationality evidenced by the order of Nature, at least in significant degree, from God to material Nature itself. And given the 93

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importance of the internal structure of organisms to the appearance of design, this is quite a significant move.

7.2.2  Against Human Exceptionalism and Immaterial Souls As we indicated above, there are two types of human exceptionalism at stake in Cavendish’s works: (1) The question whether human beings alone are rational, or at least more rational than other creatures; (2) The question whether human beings, and only human beings, have immaterial souls. (1) Rationality. Cavendish holds that all of nature has sense, reason, and freedom, and so rules out that human beings alone are rational. Her view allows, however, in principle that they have some of these capacities in a superior form, and so may be exceptional in degree if not in kind. But Cavendish argues vigorously against human superiority to animals with respect to reason as well as language. Against Hobbes, she contends that reason does not presuppose speech, and that the view that animals can’t engage in abstract reasoning has no basis: … according to my Reason I cannot perceive, but that all Creatures may do as much; but by reason they do it not after the same manner or way as Man, Man denies they can do it at all; what is very hard; for what man knows whether Fish do not Know more of the nature of Water, and ebbing and flowing, and the saltness of the Sea, or whether Birds do not know more of the nature and degrees of Air, or the cause of Tempests? … For though they have not the speech of Man, yet thence doth not follow, that they have no Intelligence at all. (Cavendish 1664: I.x, 40) So it is our ignorance and inability to communicate with animals that are the origins of the widespread, unwarranted view that animals have no intelligence at all. Furthermore, we lack impartiality when judging ourselves as superior to the rest of creation (Cavendish 1664: II.v, 147). Her egalitarianism also cuts the other way. She cites Hobbes as saying that human superiority – this “Priviledge in Man”– is mitigated by our unique propensity for “absurdity”: Cavendish opines that other creatures make mistakes just as we do (Cavendish 1664: I.X, 41). In the Ground she does allow for an anthropocentric view, but she does so without endorsing our superiority, and while taking us down a peg: As all the Creatures of our World, were made for the Benefit of Human Creatures; so, ‘tis probably, all the Creatures of the Irregular World, were produced for the Torment and Confusion of Human Creatures in that World. (Cavendish 1668: Appendix IV.ix, 289) In sum, she rejects the idea that human beings are superior in virtue of their rational capacities. (2) Immaterial souls. The question of the immaterial soul is more complicated, however. Cavendish writes in her Philosophical Letters: “Were it not for Mans supernatural Soul, Man would not be more Supreme, then other Creatures in Nature” (Cavendish 1664: I.x, 40). Significantly, however, she consistently keeps them out of nature: they are supernatural, incomprehensible to us, and play no role in nature. She insists that interference in the natural world by immaterial beings would harm the order of the natural world; it would create chaos (Cavendish 1664: II.xx, 207; xxviii, 214). She often writes that they (may) exist in nature, but they are not part of nature (Cavendish 1664: III xxi, 320–21). This much is already a clear departure from dualism as found in the likes of More or Descartes. 94

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An important element in Cavendish’s view here is that for her, the scope of our cognitive capacities is limited to the natural world, which is, of course, not a supremely unusual position: consider the tradition of thinking that God, or God’s nature, or God’s purposes, are inaccessible to human understanding. But what is less common is that, like Hobbes, Cavendish also places immaterial souls beyond the limits of our understanding; only material entities are intelligible to us. She offers a range of considerations against immaterial entities that we will not examine in detail: immaterial entities are unintelligible to us; they are neither necessary nor useful for explanatory purposes; interaction between material and immaterial is seriously problematic (see Cunning 2016: 57–62). We already saw that she rejects More’s Spirit of Nature, but for immaterial human souls the matter was trickier for religious reasons. In her Philosophical Letters, she repeatedly writes that human beings do have such souls (Cavendish 1664: I.x, 41; II.xviii, 187; II.xxix, 217; xxxi, 225– 26; xxxii, 227; III.xxi, 321; see also Cavendish 2001: 137). But supernatural souls are not within her purview as a natural philosopher; they are the province of theologians, “the divines.” There are, however, various reasons to wonder about the sincerity of her commitment to the existence of immaterial human souls. (i) Coherence. One might wonder whether it is coherent for her to accept such beings, if they are unintelligible to us, especially given her frequent description of immaterial entities as “nothing” or non-beings. This consideration is not decisive, however. For she repeatedly specifies that an immaterial spirit is a “natural nothing” (Cavendish 1664: III.xxi, 320, 321; III.xxx, 262, emphasis added). And she deems the notion of a natural immaterial being to be contradictory (Cavendish 1664: IV.vi, 446). The qualification “natural” is important; in an unqualified form, this label would risk ruling out the existence of an immaterial God. She shows no sign of wanting to do that. Her point may be that we are unable to form a substantive conception of anything when thinking in terms of immateriality. Such beings are beyond human reason and beyond nature. Indeed, she frequently makes such claims about God (Cavendish 1664: II.xxi, 322) and about what God can do. But there is more. (ii) The role of immaterial souls. In line with her view that we have cognitive access only to material nature, she attributes our mental states and free will to our natural, material soul. The supernatural soul has a different job: It has a higher and more divine imployment, viz., to fix her self on her Creator, and being indued with supernatural faculties, and residing in the body in a supernatural manner; all of which I leave to the Church. (Cavendish 1664: II.xxv, 210–11) This claim is puzzling, however, given her repeated statement that all of (material) nature worships God (Cavendish 1664: II.i, 138; Cavendish 1668: Appendix I.v).7 But if all of nature worships God, then what need is there for an immaterial soul? An obvious answer lies in immortality. In the Philosophical Letters, Cavendish explains that the immortality of the “Divine Soul” needs no argument; it is a claim whose truth, in my opinion, is so clear, as hardly any rational man will make a doubt of it; for I think there is almost no Christian in the world, but believes the Immortality of the Soul, no not Christians onely, but Mahometans and Jews. (Cavendish 1664: II.xxx, 220) But only a few pages later she writes that both types of soul are immortal: “for of the supernatural soul there is no question, and of the natural soul I have said before, that nothing is perishable 95

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or subject to annihilation in nature” (Cavendish 1664: II.xxx, 223). Her claim that the natural soul is immortal raises the question of identity over time for individuals, a question that is well beyond the scope of this paper. But clearly, immortality is not a sufficient reason for her to accept an immaterial soul either. (iii) God’s creation of immaterial beings. Later, in the Ground, Cavendish seems to rule out even supernatural immaterial souls. She repeats her claim that we can’t conceive of immaterial beings (Cavendish 1668: Appendix I, ch. 1, 237). But she also writes: I cannot conceive how an Immaterial can be in Nature: for, first, An Immaterial cannot, in my opinion, be naturally created: nor can I conceive how an Immaterial can produce particular Immaterial Souls, Spirits, or the like. (Cavendish 1668: Appendix I.ch. 2, 239) Now it is unsurprising that she thinks immaterial beings can’t be naturally created and that she can’t conceive how an immaterial being, which would be God, could create them. The former she would regard as impossible, the latter beyond human understanding. But now she seems to conclude that they don’t exist in nature, whereas, as we saw, in the Philosophical Letters she allowed their existence in nature but not as part of nature. This change in terminology may not be significant, but there is more. (iv) The risk of polytheism. Strikingly, Cavendish is now willing to conclude that immaterial beings cannot be created: Wherefore, an Immaterial, in my opinion, must be some uncreated Being; which can be no other than GOD alone… if there were any other Immaterial Beings, besides the Omnipotent God, those would be so near the Divine Essence of God as to be petty Gods; and numerous petty gods would, almost, make the Power of an Infinite God. But, God is Omnipotent, and only God. (Cavendish 1668: Appendix I.ch. 2) A plurality of immaterial beings would be a collection of “petty Gods.” And this would violate monotheism. That sounds like a strong indictment of any immaterial beings other than God indeed. And remarkably now she appears willing to draw conclusions about the immaterial world based on her own reasoning. This claim too is anticipated in the Philosophical Letters, when she writes repeatedly that belief in immaterial substances in nature will lead to belief in “Pan, Bacchus, Ceres, Venus and the like,” in short, polytheism (Cavendish 1664: II.iv, 145; see also Cavendish 1664, II.ix, 164; II.xxi, 195; IV.ii, 431). It is tricky, however, to bring these remarks to bear on the issue of the immaterial soul, as they often address the view that corporeal phenomena are due to immaterial beings such as More’s Spirit of Nature, a view that more easily fits the mold of “pagan superstition.” But at least once she does apply the polytheism charge to the human soul: You will say, perhaps, they are so many faculties or properties of the Incorporeal Mind, but, I hope, you do not intend to make the Mind or Soul a Deity, with so many attributes, Wherefore, in my opinion, it is safer to say, That the Mind is composed of several active Parts. (Cavendish 1664: II.iv, 143, emphasis added) Now it is tempting to see Cavendish’s views on immaterial souls as evolving over time: perhaps she accepts them in the Philosophical Letters but rejects them in the later Ground (Wilkins 2016). But matters are not so clear-cut, given that her objections to immaterial souls are mostly in place 96

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in the Philosophical Letters already. Indeed, in the Philosophical Letters she already sometimes objects to God creating immaterial beings, but not against his creating matter: For first, God is an Immaterial and Spiritual Infinite Being, which Propriety God cannot give away to any Creature, nor make another God in Essence like to him, for Gods Attributes are not communicable to any Creature. Yet this doth not hinder that God should not make Infinite and Eternal Matter… (Cavendish 1664: I.iii, 14) Again, by her own lights, she should restrict such claims to what we can conceive and to what is natural. Indeed, later in the Letters, she declares that the creation of either material or immaterial beings is beyond our grasp: “for as the Creation of material Creatures, as of this World, belongs to Faith, and not to Reason, so doth also the Creation of immaterial substances, as Spirits” (Cavendish 1664: II.xxxiii, 230; see also II.xxxiv, 233; III.xxiii, 329). So on this point, Cavendish is not clearly consistent. Furthermore, even though in the Philosophical Letters she claims she believes in immaterial souls, she sometimes merely admits that she does not deny them, or that they may exist (e.g., Cavendish 1664: II.xviii, 187; II.xxxi, 225–26; III.xxi, 320–21). And she even writes that the Apostles were silent about the nature of the soul; they were concerned with salvation and how to live; it’s “Modern divine Philosophers” who were worked up about it (Cavendish 1664: III.xxi, 326). So it is hard not to see significant skepticism about them even in the Philosophical Letters, a skepticism that perhaps for reasons of prudence, she does not wish to take to its full conclusion (Wilkins 2016: 863–64). If she does change her mind, she does not seem to do so by becoming more critical of immaterial souls: her philosophical objections to them are mostly in place in the Philosophical Letters. Rather she may have become more willing to extend the reach of our understanding to the realm of the immaterial; she does so to the point of rejecting God’s creating immaterial substances – but not to the point of rejecting God’s own immateriality. On the other hand, she is more consistent on the role of immaterial souls. She reserves no real role for them even for religious purposes: all of nature worships God and even our material souls are immortal. And she is quite consistent and insistent in claiming that immaterial, created entities play no role in the natural world. Cavendish’s clear and unqualified contention that immaterial souls pose a threat to monotheism means that she abandons her protection of such souls by assigning them to the supernatural. The effect of this move is to place her in a highly unusual position with respect to her contemporaries. Belief in immaterial beings was seen as important in view of God’s immateriality as well as the immortality of the human soul. Philosophers in the period used different strategies to safeguard such religious doctrines. Descartes argued that only human beings have immaterial souls and that this is exactly in line with religious orthodoxy: it yields the result that only human beings, and no other animals, have immortal souls (Descartes 1964/1984: AT VI, 59–60/CSM, 141)8. More takes a completely different tack from Descartes’s; he sees the need for immaterial entities, such as his Spirit of Nature, to explain natural phenomena beyond the human as helpful to the purposes of religion. It helps legitimate belief in immaterial entities in general, and so belief in the immateriality of the soul and God. Cavendish rejects all this, as, unlike most of her contemporaries, she winds up reserving immateriality for God alone.

7.3 Conway As with Cavendish, so too with Conway, we focus on two prongs in her rejection of dualism. (1) Like Cavendish, Conway agrees with More that Descartes was too optimistic about the scope of mechanistic explanation. But she agrees with Cavendish, against More, that introducing 97

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immaterial entities into nature is not a solution; a radically different conception of matter is called for, one that is self-active. (2) Conway’s stance on human exceptionalism is also complicated, but in ways that are quite different from Cavendish. Conway is clear that human beings are special among creatures. What makes them special, however, is unequivocally not their having immaterial souls or even a special kind of (rational) immaterial soul. While made of fundamentally the same stuff, human beings have the ability to exercise higher mental faculties that other creatures can exercise only potentially, and that enables human beings to rise to a moral level that other creatures, say, clams or pigs, cannot. Human beings are thus morally exceptional. But Conway too has a strong and interesting anti-exceptionalist streak even within this moral exceptionalism, for she insists that all creatures will eventually rise to the status of human being! What is more, she has an inclusive view of salvation: all creatures are subject to salvation.

7.3.1  The Moral Order of Nature Like Cavendish and the dualists, Conway is impressed by the order she finds in nature and she sets out to explain it. Like Cavendish, her attempt to account for that order drives many of her arguments against dualism and for her own brand of vitalist monism. The order of most interest to Conway, however, is a kind of moral or normative order (Mercer 2012, 2019; Lascano 2017; Hutton 2018; Detlefsen 2018), and that takes her argument in a rather different direction from Cavendish, as we will see.9 Although it is not her focus, Conway does offer a few observations about the orderly local motions among bodies that Cavendish, Descartes, and More were all at pains to explain. Descartes, she suggests, did a perfectly good job explaining them so far as it goes: Descartes taught many excellent and ingenious things concerning the mechanical part of natural operations, and how all natural motions proceed according to rules and laws mechanical, even as indeed nature itself, that is, the creature, hath an excellent mechanical skill and wisdom in itself, (given it from God, who is the fountain of all wisdom) by which it operates. (Conway 1996: 9.2, 64 [147–48])10 Descartes would certainly have balked at the suggestion that nature operates by “wisdom in itself.” But it is significant that Conway joins Descartes and Cavendish, against More, in denying that we need to introduce immaterial entities into nature in order to explain its orderly local motions. Nature, on her view as on Cavendish’s, carries out the laws itself. Immaterial entities, on her view as on Cavendish’s, are not only unnecessary, but futile for accounting for bodily local motions. Being by their nature penetrable, as More held, they would not be able to move bodies, for they would float right through them: If a spirit could so easily penetrate all bodies, wherefore doth it not leave the body behind it, when it is moved from place to place, seeing it can so easily pass out without the least resistance? (Conway 1996: 8.1, 57 [128]) Trying to move a body by an immaterial entity, she quips, would be like trying to sail a ship with nets rather than sails: the wind would pass freely through them and the ship would remain unmoved! (For more discussion of Conway on dualistic interaction, see McRobert 2000; Grey 2017; Borcherding 2019). Conway’s view of the most urgent shortcoming of dualism is rather different from Cavendish’s, however. She is struck by the many “transmutations” she finds in nature, i.e., changes from one 98

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sort of thing to another. These transmutations are what the dualist cannot explain. Some of the transmutations that Conway discusses are ordinary: as from a stone into earth, and from earth into grass, and from grass to a sheep, and from a sheep into human flesh, and from human flesh into the most servile spirits of man, and from these into his noblest spirits. (Conway 1996: 9.5, 65 [153]) Others are quite extraordinary: [D]aily experience teaches us, that the species of diverse things are changed, one into another, as earth into water, and water into air, and air into fire or aether; and the contrary, as fire into air, and air into water, etc., which yet are distinct species of things; and so also stones are changed into metals, and one metal into another…We shall observe the same not only in vegetables, but also in animals, like as barley and wheat are convertible the one into the other, and are in very deed often so changed, which is well enough known to housekeepers in many provinces, and especially in Hungary where, if barley be sown, wheat springs up instead thereof; but in other places more barren, and especially in rocky places, such as are found in Germany, if wheat be sown, barley cometh up, and barley in other places becomes mere grass: And in animals, worms are changed into flies, and beasts, and fish that feed on beasts, and fish of a different kind do change them into their own nature, and species…And in the creation of this world did not the waters at the command of God, produce birds and fishes? (Conway 1996: 6.6, 34 [64–65]; see also 5.6, 26 [43–44]; 8.5, 62[138]) Conway’s numerous reports of transmutations in nature come from many sources: her own observations; the testimony of her well-traveled and scientifically-minded friends; and Scripture, as this second passage illustrates. And they include instances of spontaneous generation! Understood in one way, there is nothing especially astonishing about these transmutations, apart from a few fantastical examples. Most of us would agree that when Polonius the pig is slaughtered, smoked, and eaten by a human being, the stuff of Polonius the pig becomes the stuff of the human being who eats it. Or, assuming he lives out his life happily in the pasture, the stuff of which Polonius is made will be redistributed into other entities, such as dirt and worms, when he dies. But Conway goes further. She proposes that individuals undergo and persist through these transmutations: “that thing is said to have changed its species” (Conway 1996: 6.3, 29 [52]; see also 7.1, 43 [88]). Polonius himself, not just his corpse, can transmute from pig to dirt, or from pig to human being, and still be Polonius. This is not to suggest that when I eat bacon, individuals like Polonius come to occupy my body, or that I become Polonius. As Conway depicts it, an individual creature’s identity consists of a collection of “principal” or “central” or “ruling” spirits (Lascano 2013, 2017; Thomas 2018) that, in transmutation, abandon one body and grow a new one, much as a lobster sheds one shell and grows a new one (Conway 1996: 6.6, 32-33 [59–61]; 7.1, 43 [88–90]). Thus when I eat bacon I am presumably eating only Polonius’ discarded body. For Polonius himself to become a human being, he would need to acquire his own human body, not mine. The consequences of all this species-hopping are considerable: individuals are more ontologically basic than species and they are not essentially a member of any species. An individual’s species can and, Conway insists, does and must change over time (Lascano 2013, 2017; Detlefsen 2018; Thomas 2018; Grey 2020). This is not a matter of mere observation, of course. It is a theoretical conclusion rooted in Conway’s observation of the orderliness of nature’s transmutations together with a few important (largely (neo)Platonic) assumptions. First, Conway adheres to a view, not uncommon in the period 99

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(though notably rejected by Cavendish), that there is a strict hierarchy among the species. Human beings are more perfect than pigs, pigs more perfect than clams, clams more perfect than stones. Second, Conway finds, or at least believes, that the transmutations in nature follow a strict order along this hierarchy: Thus the lowest may become the highest and the highest…the lowest, according to the course and succession which divine wisdom has ordained, that one change may succeed another in a certain order, so that A must be first turned into B before it can be turned into C, which must be turned into C before it can be turned into D, etc. (Conway 1996: 9.5, 65 [152]) Third, Conway is committed to a strong theological and teleological assumption that everything God creates tends toward the good: The divine power, goodness, and wisdom hath created every creature good; and indeed so, that it might by continual augmentations (in its mutability) be advanced to a greater degree of goodness, ad infinitum. (Conway 1996: 6.6, 32 [59]; see also 2.6, 14 [13]; 7.1, 42 [86]; 7.2, 46 [96]) In this combination of commitments, Conway finds an argument for the aforementioned transmutation of individuals through the hierarchy of species: if a creature is so exceeding straitly bounded, and strictly included and imprisoned within the narrow limits of its own species, that the mutability of creatures is wholly taken away: neither can any creature variously exercise any greater participation of divine goodness, or be advanced or promoted to any farther perfection. (Conway 1996: 6.5, 32 [58–59]) Thus when Cornelius the clam becomes the best possible clam he can be, the only thing left, in order to progress further toward the good, is to become member of the next species on the hierarchy, say, a shrimp. In this orderly series of transmutations, Conway detects a moral order inscribed in nature by God. Those who perfect themselves through their good deeds are rewarded with an elevation in species and those who debase themselves are punished with a demotion in species: Now we see how gloriously the justice of God appears in this transmutation of a thing out of one species into another;…and he that doth not observe the same may be said to be utterly blind…When they are changed into the better, this justice distributes to them the reward and fruit of their good deeds; when into the worse, the same punishes them with due punishments, according to the nature and degree of the transgression… (Conway 1996: 6.7, 35 [66–67]; see also 5.7, 27 [46–47]; 7.4, 55 [123]; and 9.6, 66 [155]) This moral and teleological theory of transmutation bears a striking similarity to that put forward by Plato at Timaeus 42b–d and 91d, minus the Christian God. But Conway stresses that an individual can’t be rewarded or punished in this way if it doesn’t survive the transmutation (see Conway 1996: 6.2, 29 [50]; 7.4, 55 [123–24]). Transmutation must preserve the identity of the individual. And thus “death of things is not their annihilation but a change from one kind or degree of life to another” (Conway 1996: 8.7, 62 [143–44]; see also 6.7, 36 [69–70]). The language of “reward” and “punishment” makes it sound as though the individual finds itself in its new species from one life to the next as a result of a divine act. In fact, much as 100

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Cavendish depicts nature itself carrying out whatever law God decreed for it, so Conway has it that the individual fashions its own new mode of existence. Of the human being who lives a brutish life, she writes: And when the said brut spirit returns again into some body, so that its plastick faculty hath the liberty of forming a body, after its own idea and inclination, (which before, in the human body, it had not;) it necessarily follows, that the body, which this vital spirit forms will be brutal, and not humane; for the brutal spirit cannot produce and form any other figure: because its plastick faculty is governed of its imagination, which it doth most strongly imagine to its self, or conceive its own proper image, which therefore the external body is necessarily forced to assume. (Conway 1996: 6.7, 36 [70] italics added) Ever the optimist, Conway is convinced that while individuals can resist the drive for moral improvement and change for the worse, the natural progression of things is ultimately toward the good. And, famously or infamously, the mechanism that is supposed to ensure that all creatures (eventually) progress toward the good is pain, which, Conway insists, stimulates a turn to the good (Conway 1996: 7.1, 42-43 [87]; for discussion see Mercer 2012; Lascano 2017; Detlefsen 2019). She also maintains that there is pleasure to be had in progressing toward the good from the fruits of one’s own labor (Conway 1996: 9.6, 66 [155]). Individuals are all, as she puts it, on a moral stairway to heaven (Conway 1996: 6.6, 34 [63–64]). In what follows, we consider the ways in which this moral order of nature shapes Conway’s metaphysics of nature, with attention both to the ways in which it drives her arguments against dualism, as unable to account for this moral order in nature, and for her own distinctive form of vitalist monism.

7.3.2  Conway’s Monism and the Moral Order Conway is, in the grand scheme of things, a metaphysical trialist. There are three essentially different kinds of thing: God, Christ, and creatures (or nature).11 The difference concerns their mutability, and more specifically their moral mutability: God is immutably good; Christ is mutable but only changes for the better; creatures are mutable and change, as we noted above, for both better and worse (Conway 1996: 4.1, 21 [30]; 4.4, 22 [32–33]; 5.3, 24 [36–39]; 6.1, 28-29 [49–50]; 6.4, 30-32 [53–56]). Our focus is nature, i.e., the realm of creatures, with respect to which Conway, like Cavendish, is a monist: nature is comprised of a single kind of mutable stuff (Conway 1996: 6.4, 31 [55–56]; 7.1, 41 [84]). There is considerable scholarly debate whether she is also a token (or “existence”) monist about nature, but we set this question aside (see Grey 2017; Gordon-Roth 2018; Mercer 2019; Thomas 2020). Conway offers various arguments for monism, including the Hobbesian contention that nature must be comprised of a single kind of stuff to account for the transmutations we witness in nature. If creatures were essentially different sorts of things, then rather than transmutation from one kind of thing to another we would find a “continual annihilation of real substances and productions of new ones in this world” (Conway 1996: 9.5, 65 [151]). Only monism can underwrite the fluidity we find among the species in nature. In this Conway and Hobbes agree: But if it be objected, that this our philosophy seems, at least, very like that of Hobbes, because he taught that all creatures were originally one substance from the lowest and most ignoble to the highest and noblest; from the smallest worm, insect, or fly unto the most glorious angel; yea, from the least dust or sand, unto the most excellent of all creatures; and then this, that every creature is material and corporeal; yea, matter and body itself; and by consequence 101

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the most noble actions thereof, are either material and corporeal, or after a certain corporeal manner. Now I answer to the first, I grant that all creatures are originally one substance, from the lowest to the highest, and consequently convertible or changeable, from one of their natures into another; and although Hobbes saith the same, yet that is no prejudice to the truth of it. (Conway 9.4, 64 [149–50], italics added) As this passage reminds us, Conway puts a moral spin on nature’s transmutations that is absent in Hobbes: individuals survive these natural transmutations, and the transmutations represent their moral promotion or demotion.

7.3.3  From Dead to Living Matter Conway also agrees with Hobbes that the one stuff of nature is material, but she cautions: “by material and corporeal, as also by matter and body, here the thing is far otherwise understood, than Hobbes understood it” (Conway 1996: 9.6, 65 [153–54]). Hobbes shares with the dualists a mechanistic conception of matter: it is extended and impenetrable; and it is inert or “dead.” Conway rejects dead matter in no uncertain terms. Her more familiar argument turns on the nature of God’s creative act. God acts by emanation, which entails that an effect receives the communicable attributes of its cause (Conway 1996: 4.1, 21 [30–31]). The most fundamental of God’s communicable attributes is life or self-activity. God is thus constrained to create a living, vital, or self-active world. He simply cannot create dead matter. And so it cannot exist. It is a “chimera,” a “nonbeing,” a “vain fiction” and an “impossible thing” (Conway 1996: 7.2, 96 [46]; 7.3, 48 [103]). Matter must be living or self-active. Conway also advances an argument against dead matter that turns on the moral order of nature. The transmutations at the center of her argument for monism are directed toward the good: as we’ve seen, Conway argues that God creates things in order that they perfect themselves through their transmutations. But a creature consisting of only mechanistic or dead matter, she argues, could not perfect itself. It might undergo infinitely many changes of shape and local motion, but there is no reason to think that one configuration or local motion is, in and of itself, better or more perfect than another. After all, whatever configuration it takes on, however it is moved around, the body is still dead (Conway 1996 7.2, 46 [96–97]; but cf. Conway 9.7, 66 [156–57]). She argues further that the shapes and mechanical motions of bodies can contribute to a creature’s perfection only insofar as they subserve its vital functions. The eye has the shape it does to enable a creature to see and it moves about in its socket to bring things into focus; these vital functions enable to the creature to improve itself (Conway 1996: 9.8–9, 67 [157–59]). By omitting life from body Hobbes and the dualists omit the very reason for which bodies have the mechanical properties that they do! The dualists’ conception of matter thus cannot account for the tendency of nature to perfect itself. With their dead matter, Hobbes and the dualists will [n]ever help us to understand what that excellent substance is, which they call body and matter; for they have never proceeded beyond the husk or shell, nor ever reached the kernel; they only touch the superficies, never discerning the center, they were plainly ignorant of the noblest and most excellent attributes of that substance which they call body and matter, and understood nothing of them. (Conway 1996: 9.6, 66 [154]) That “kernel” is, of course, life: nature “is but a living body” (Conway 1996: 9.2, 64 [148]); that is, it “hath activity and motion, per se” (Conway 1996: 7.1, 41 [83]) or an “internal motion” that 102

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“is the natural and proper effect of its essence” (Conway 1996: 9.9, 69 [165]). All creatures, on her view, are comprised of living or self-moving matter. Like Cavendish and others in the period, Conway also takes life to entail sense perception, knowledge, and passions. Thus: “Every body is a certain spirit or life in its own nature, and…the same is a certain intelligent principle, having knowledge, sense, love, desire, joy, and grief ” (Conway 1996: 7.1, 41 [83]; see also 9.2, 64 [148] and 9.6, 66 [154–55]). There is, however, an important caveat. Conway insists that everything has a potential for sense and knowledge, not that it actually senses and knows (Conway 1996: 7.4, 51 [112]). A stone does not actually sense and know (as it does for Cavendish). Its potential to do these things will only be activated if it moves significantly further up the moral stairway through a long process of transmutation: …dust and sand, may be capable of all those perfections [feeling, perception, or knowledge, love, virtue, joy] through various and successive transmutations from the one into the other; which according to the natural order of things, require long periods of time for their consummation. (Conway 1996: 9.6, 66 [155]) Self-motion, by contrast, is something that every creature actually exercises, even stones (Conway 1996: 8.5, 61 [140–41]). Thus: out of popular ignorance, when in certain bodies they perceived no motion, they termed them dead, wanting both life and spirit: but indeed there is no where any such body that hath not motion, and by consequence life and spirit. (Conway 1996: 7.4, 51 [113]) Many puzzling questions remain, of course. What does it take for a stone to live a good stone life and thus earn a promotion on the stairway to heaven? What would it take for the stone to resist God’s law? And what does God’s punishment of the stone look like? Can a stone feel pain? We leave these questions for future research. Conway leverages the moral order of nature not only to argue against dead matter, as we saw above, but also directly for her conception of living or self-active matter. Promotions or demotions along the moral stairway constitute rewards or punishments for a creatures’ acts or deeds: “in his divine wisdom [God] hath purported to reward every creature according to its works” (Conway 1996: 5.7, 27 [46–47], italics ours). Again: creatures “have time by working still to promote themselves to a greater perfection” (Conway 1996: 9.6, 66 [155]). But if creatures are to perfect or denigrate themselves through their own efforts, then they must be self-active, not simply acted upon. In one passage, Conway goes so far as to suggest that creatures must engage in a voluntary act, which makes her sound all the more like Cavendish (Conway 1996: 7.1, 43 [88]; for discussion see Lascano 2017; Detlefsen 2019). As Conway puts it, to work its way along the moral stairway, every creature must have “a power in it of changing itself either unto good or evil” (Conway 1996: 5.3: 24 [37]). It is tempting to say, as Detlefsen comes close to doing, that Conway’s individuals are on an infinite project of self-actualization (Detlefsen 2019: 140). Conway argues further that continuity along the moral stairway demands that creatures at all levels be living or self-active, not just those on the higher end. By contrast, suppose Aisha begins her journey as a stone devoid of vitality: she is pushed around and changed by other things. Somewhere along the journey from stone to dirt to tree to animal, Aisha will have to pick up a principle of vitality that enables her to move herself, perceive, and think. As we are about to see, Conway thinks the injection of a vital principle (a Morean immaterial spirit, say) into Aisha somewhere along the line raises more questions than it answers (Conway 1996: 9.5, 65 [152]). 103

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7.3.4  From Immaterial to Material Spirits We’ve been saying that Conway’s one substance is material, and this might raise an eyebrow. After all, Conway persistently describes nature as filled with finite spirits, as we’ve seen in the quotations already. She even insists that all creatures are composed of body and spirit (Conway 1996: 6.11, 38 [77]). That’s true. But just as Conway rejects the dualists’ notion of matter, so she rejects their conception of finite spirits. In particular, she rejects their conception of spirits as immaterial entities. What makes a spirit spiritual is life or self-activity, not immateriality. Like everyone else, Conway grants that God is an immaterial spirit that “doth not nor cannot partake of the least corporeality” and “has nothing of body” (Conway 1996: 7.1, 42 [84–85]; 1.2, 9 [2]). But she also insists, like Cavendish in the end, that God is the only immaterial or “pure” spirit. Finite, created spirits (including the human soul) are “impure” spirits that partake of corporeality (Conway 1996: 8.3, 60 [136]). Now that could simply mean that finite spirits, themselves immaterial, are “in” or “united to” material bodies. In that case, finite created spirits would be material only by association. Conway certainly talks about spirits being “in” or “having” bodies quite often (Conway 1996: 5.6, 26 [44]; 6.11, 38-39 [78]). But she also writes that “spirit [is] nothing but a subtle and volatile body” (Conway 1996: 8.4, 61[140]). This is a stronger claim. And it occurs in a section devoted to arguing that we should not think of created spirits as simply existing in bodies but rather that “spirits are bodies” (Conway 1996: 8.4, 60 [137]). Created spirits are themselves material. What that means is that they have all the hallmark properties of the dualists’ matter: they are extended, composite and so divisible into constituent parts, and impenetrable in the sense of being non-co-locatable (Conway 1996: 3.5, 17 [19–20]; 7.3–4, 48-55 [104–24]; 9.6, 66 [154-56]). As with dead matter, so too with created immaterial spirits, Conway argues against their very possibility: in creatures there is both time and corporeal quantity, because otherwise they would be either God, or nothing, which is impossible. For whatsoever quantity, bulk, or extension, any creature hath, it retains the same, as something which is of its own essence. (Conway 1996: 7.4, 51 [111]) This is not the most transparent argument. It is clear that Conway thinks that creatures (including finite spirits) have “corporeal quantity” essentially on pain of their being God. So, like Cavendish, she thinks the existence of immaterial beings in nature smacks of polytheism. But how does the argument work? We think the reasoning goes as follows. God and creatures are distinguished first and foremost by their power of change: God is essentially immutable; creatures are essentially mutable (Conway 1996: 4.1, 21 [30]; 4.4, 22 [32–33]; 5.3, 24 [39–41]; 6.1, 28-29 [49–50]; 6.4, 30-32 [52–56]). If materiality is a condition of mutability, then it would follow that creatures must be material on pain of being immutable and so God. The text suggests this reading: But as touching the other attributes of matter, viz. impenetrability, figure, and mobility; certainly none of these have any place in God, and so are not of his communicable attributes; but rather the essential differences or attributes of diversity, whereby the creature, as such, is distinguished from God, because [prout] mutability is of the number of those differential attributes. (Conway 1996: 7.2, 45 [95], italics ours) Materiality is essential to creatures because mutability is.12 Dualists like Descartes and More would, of course, deny that materiality is a condition for mutability, insisting that immaterial spirits are also mutable. But, as Bayle asked Leibniz: how can an immaterial, and so, as he saw it, simple, being change (Dictionary, Note L to “Rorarius” vi)? 104

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Conway also rejects immaterial spirits on the ground that they cannot explain the moral order of nature any more than dead matter can. She issues a reductio. Suppose body and spirit are essentially different: body is material and spirit immaterial. Suppose also that it is the immaterial spirit (or form) that makes the body to be the species that it is. (She takes her dualist opponent to be committed to both claims.) Both parties grant that body is transmutable into different species: clam, pig, human being. If immaterial spirits determine the changing species of the body, then the body must contain immaterial spirits corresponding to all those species: clam, pig, and human being. If the body contains them actually, then it seems the creature is clam and pig and human being all at once. But if the body contains them only potentially, “then it must be granted, that the body and all those spirits are one and the same thing” (Conway 1996: 8.4, 60 [138]). The change of species is really just bodily change after all. The dualist could, of course, insist that a series of immaterial spirits flow in and out of the body making it now a clam, now a pig, now a human being. But, as Conway later notes, “If it be demanded of them, from whence this spirit is sent? Also why a spirit of this species is sent, and not of another; here they are at a stand, and yield themselves to their adversaries. (Conway 1996: 9.5, 65 [152]). For a body to have spirit (or be spiritual) is simply for it to be able to change itself; and this capacity for change, not the presence of an array of anything immaterial, underwrites the transmutation of species. We think Conway has a further argument against the immateriality of spirits available to her from the moral order of nature, a more direct companion to her earlier argument against dead matter. Like dead matter, an immaterial spirit would violate the moral order because it would not be able to perfect itself. In this case, the issue is not that it has no goodness at all, but rather that it is already perfectly good. And so, again, it is God. Created spirits must be perfectible, not perfect. They must therefore be material. The problem with the dualist’s dead matter and immaterial spirit, in the end, is that they represent the absolute limits of the moral order: complete imperfection (i.e., non-existence) and complete perfection (i.e., God, eternal unchanging existence). They cannot, therefore, account for a creature’s transformative mission to perfect itself. Only a monistic metaphysics of living (i.e., spiritual) matter can do the job.

7.3.5  Conway’s Spirits and Bodies As we’ve seen in quotations, Conway nevertheless draws a distinction between spirit and body. But she insists that the distinction is modal, not substantial, in no fewer than seven lines of argument comprising Chapters 7 and 8 of the Principles. Spirit and body differ not in kind but only in degree: “a thing may more or less approach to, or recede from the state and condition of a body or a spirit” (Conway 1996: 7.1, 42 [84], italics added). Just as there is a continuous scale running from cold to hot, so too there is a continuous scale running from body to spirit (see, e.g., 6.11, 40 [81]). There seems to be no definitive line that separates body from spirit; things are, in truth, more or less bodily and more or less spiritual. What is clear is that body falls at the lower end of the scale and spirit at the upper end. And because they are only modally different, body and spirit transmute into each other just as pigs and human beings do (Conway 1996: 3.9, 20 [28]; 7.2, 44 [92]; 7.3, 48 [102]). Still, that doesn’t entirely answer the question. One wants to ask: more or less of what makes something (more) bodily or (more) spiritual? What is the scale a scale of ? Here is one revealing way in which she casts the scale: “body is nothing but a fixed and condensed spirit, and a spirit nothing but a subtle and volatile body” (Conway 1996: 8.5, 61 [140]). Elsewhere she casts the scale in terms of darkness and light, crassness and fineness, grossness and fluidity, hardness and softness, badness and goodness, and even female and male (Conway 1996: 6.11, 40 [81]; 7.1–2, 41-44 [84–97]). At bottom, we think this scale is a scale of self-activity, the “most noble” and “most 105

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excellent” attribute of created substance. Something counts as a spirit (and more spiritual) if it is more self-active and as a body (or more bodily) if it is less self-active: “in every creature there is a body and a spirit, or a more active and more passive principle” (Conway 1996: 6.11, 38 [77]). On the moral stairway, creatures perfect themselves by becoming more self-active, and so more spiritual: Nature still works to a farther perfection of subtlety and spirituality; even as this is the most natural property of all motion and operation: for all motion wears and divides, and so renders a thing subtle and spiritual. (Conway 1996: 8.5, 61 [141]) All of creation, according to Conway, is thus a single kind of thing, but the varying degrees of self-activity in its parts serve to distinguish them, modally, into body and spirit. Medium-sized creatures like pigs and people are comprised of a collection of bodily parts and a collection of spiritual parts, all of which are capable of transmuting, for better or worse, into more spiritual or more bodily conditions as a result of their essential self-activity.

7.3.6  Conway on Human Exceptionalism We noted in the opening that dualists have a stake in human exceptionalism. As the only creatures with an immaterial soul (Descartes) or at least the only creatures with a rational immaterial soul (More), human beings are not only categorically different from other creatures, but uniquely capable of salvation and personal immortality. This is supposed to be a selling point of dualism. Like Cavendish, Conway strikes a blow to human exceptionalism. Unlike Cavendish, Conway agrees with tradition that human beings are importantly special among creatures: they stand near the top of a hierarchy of species, just below the angels. Contrary to tradition, she insists that their superiority to other creatures on the hierarchy is not a matter of kind (e.g., they are distinctive for having immaterial souls or rational souls) but a matter of degree: human beings are simply more spiritual, i.e., more self-active, than horses and stones (Conway 1996: 6.6, 32-34 [59–63]). If human beings were infinitely more spiritual than other creatures, i.e., different in kind, “then unto any man, even one of the vilest and basest nature and disposition, may be attributed a certain infinite excellence in act, such as only agrees to God and Christ, but to no creature” (Conway 1996: 6.6, 33 [62–63]). More dramatically, however, her moral metaphysics commits her to the view that no individual is essentially human or nonhuman, and that every creature may eventually pass through a human stage in their journey up the moral stairway. Thus “certainly a horse may in length of time be in some measure change into a man (I mean his spirits; as for his body that is a thing evident” (Conway 1996: 6.6, 33 [62]). Indeed, to the extent that human beings are special, Conway tells us that that is in order that they not only “have dominion over” other creatures but to “exalt them to a higher degree, (viz.) into his own proper [human] nature” (Conway 1996: 6.6, 34 [66]). She even goes so far as to suggest that all creatures were “in their original state” a “certain species of man” (Conway 1996: 6.4, 31 [55]), again echoing Plato’s Timaeus 52b–d and 91d. Being a human being may be special, but every creature has a chance to be a human being. Conway thus confers equality, or at least equal opportunity, to all creatures, over time (see also Detlefsen 2019). Conway also breaks with tradition in allowing all creatures a chance at salvation through their moral transmutations. The grace of God, she notes, “is extended over all his works” (Conway 1996: 6.8, 37 [73]). All creatures are saved (Conway 1996: 7.1, 42 [86]). Death, we noted above, is “not the annihilation of these things, but a change from one kind and degree of life to another” (Conway 1996: 8.7, 62 [143–44]). All creatures at death naturally transmute into a new 106

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creature, for better or worse. Recall that an individual has a collection of “principal” spirits (that is, especially self-active bodies) that mark its identity and that have a bond that is not separable. At death: With [the] subtler and more tenuous parts of the body, the principal spirit (together with its ministering spirits, so many as it can possibly gather together) departs out of those thicker parts of the body, which it leaves as so many cadaverous bodies, which are no longer fit to serve the said spirits in those operations which they exercise in their present state. (Conway 1996: 7.1, 43 [89]) Ultimately, she proposes, all creatures “must after certain periods be converted and restored, not only to good but unto a better state than that was in which they were created” (Conway 1996: 7.1, 42 [86]). With her theory of moral transmutation, then, Conway effectively builds salvation directly into the structure of nature and makes it available to all of nature’s creatures (for further discussion see Lascano 2017; Hutton 2018).

7.4  Conclusion: Two Paths to Vitalist Monism On a cursory reading, Cavendish and Conway appear to pull the dualist wishbone in opposite directions. Cavendish explicitly and repeatedly rejects the existence of immaterial spirits as parts of nature and self-consciously invites the label “materialist.” Conway is harder to label, although her emphasis on spirit in nature invites the label “spiritualist” and perhaps even “immaterialist” (see McRobert 2000; Hutton 2004, 2018; Lascano 2013, 2017). We think the difference is more verbal than substantive. Although they have vastly different starting points and argumentative strategies, in the end, they arrive at a remarkably similar metaphysical vision of nature. Cavendish and Conway both argue that there is only one kind of substance in the natural world. Central to both of their accounts is the conviction that any substance in nature is selfactive or “alive,” for which reason they may aptly be described as “vitalists.” They both reject the existence of the dualists’ “dead matter,” arguing that matter is alive.13 They also both reject the existence of the dualists’ immaterial spirits in nature, concluding that the only immaterial spirit is God. They both bring together in one type of created substance properties that dualists distribute across two: self-activity, sentience, cognition, extension, divisibility, composition, and impenetrability. If Cavendish is a materialist, her matter is spiritualized. If Conway is a spiritualist, her spirit is materialized. Rather than split the dualist’s wishbone, they reject it altogether in favor of a single substance that borrows features from each of the dualists’ two. Confusion comes, we think, from the fact that Conway and Cavendish work with different conceptions of spirit. The term “spirit” was ambiguous in the period (Goclenius 1613: 1076). Sometimes it refers to an immaterial entity, as in More’s Spirit of Nature. Other times, it refers to especially small and volatile material entities, as in Descartes’ animal spirits. Cavendish uses the term in this second, material, sense in her early Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), but aware of the risk of confusion, she abandons that use in the Philosophical Letters (1664) (Cavendish 1664: II.xxi, 195; III.xxi, 320), now taking spirit to be an immaterial entity and ousting it from nature in order to stress her materialism. Conway, by contrast, understands a spirit to be, first and foremost, a highly self-active entity. When she conceives nature as spiritual there is no implication that it is immaterial or that there are finite immaterial entities at work in it. For her too nature is material throughout, but it is also spiritual in the sense of self-active. Whatever differences in terms and emphasis, Cavendish and Conway reject the connection, endorsed by dualists, between selfactivity and immateriality. Material nature, according to both, is self-active. While Cavendish vocally stresses the material, Conway stresses the self-active. 107

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That is not to say there are no differences between them. An important difference is the way in which Cavendish and Conway imagine the co-existence of what the dualist would identify as “material” and “spiritual” properties in nature. Cavendish posits three “kinds” or “degrees” of matter that are thoroughly blended in every creature. All three kinds of matter have the properties of extension, impenetrability, divisibility, and compositeness, but only the two animate kinds of matter are self-active and exhibit the “spiritual” properties of sense and cognition. Inanimate matter provides resistance to the self-motions of animate matter; more specifically, it provides resistance to the sentient kind of matter, for she takes rational matter to be unconstrained. Conway, by contrast, imagines creatures to be composed not of three kinds of matter blended together but of proper parts that each fall on a sliding scale from more bodily to more spiritual, i.e., less active to more active. Most parts of nature have the full panoply of “material” and “spiritual” properties in greater or lesser degree, though the most bodily parts (e.g., the grosser parts of a stone) may have the higher spiritual properties of perception and cognition only potentially. Cavendish and Conway also disagree on the possibility of “pure matter” and the relationship between an immaterial God and material nature. Conway offers an a priori argument that “pure matter” is impossible: given that God creates by emanation, he must pass on to his creatures his communicable attributes, including activity or life. She also insists that while God is “in a real and true sense distinct” from nature, he is nevertheless “really present” in it (Conway 1996: 1.3, 9 [2]; 5.4, 25 [39–40]; see Pugliese 2019) and concurs with the operations of self-active material nature or acts in them “in his own way” (Conway 1996: 3.9, 20 [27]; 5.4, 25 [39–40]). Cavendish’s analogue of pure matter is inanimate matter. While not clearly ruling out the possibility of a world of just inanimate matter, she argues, on what appear to be empirical grounds, that such a world is nonactual, since matter moves. She blocks Conway-style arguments by insisting that God has no communicable attributes. This point also reveals a striking difference in their conceptions of God. Both see God as immaterial. For Cavendish God is entirely other; for Conway God is radically different from creatures, insofar as he is immutable and immaterial, but he is also continuous with them, insofar as for her creation involves the communication of some of his attributes to them and his real presence in them. These differences and similarities raise questions for future research. First, what do Cavendish and Conway take the essence of their vital matter to be? Matter is self-active; but is self-­ activity essential to it or is it, perhaps, something that God super-adds to matter, along Lockean lines? Conway would clearly reject such super-addition, but Cavendish is less clear. On the one hand, she writes that it is “the nature of body to move, and no thing [including God] can change its nature” (Cavendish 1664: I.v, 21). This suggests self-activity is indeed essential to matter. On the other hand, she indicates, as we noted, that dead, inanimate matter is conceptually possible and describes God as “giving” matter a self-moving power (Cavendish 1664: II.vi, 149; see also Cavendish 1664: II.xxviii, 215). This suggests superaddition—or at least that it’s up to God whether he creates matter that has self-motion (see Shaheen unpublished). She also, of course, claims that inanimate matter is not self-active; it is moved by sensitive matter while rational matter moves itself (Cavendish 1664: II.iv, 144). Much will depend on how we understand the distinctions between her three types of matter and on the nature of their “blending” in every part of nature. Relatedly, what is the relationship between matter’s self-activity and its more mechanical properties of size, shape, and change of place? Matter’s mechanical properties are hard to conceive of as modes of self-activity; they do not presuppose self-activity. But Cartesian modes presuppose the nature of the substance to which they belong. Nor do they seem to flow from self-activity in the way that a “property” in the scholastic sense does; they are not obviously entailed by self-activity. Conway writes that “life and figure are distinct, but not contrary attributes of one and the same 108

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substance” (Conway 1996: 9.8, 67 [157]; see also 9.7, 66 [156]). Is this a form of property dualism? That doesn’t seem quite right, for self-activity, as we’ve seen, is the “kernel” of matter and extension merely the “husk.” Conway further describes the mechanical properties of matter as “subserving” matter’s vital activities as a kind of instrument. But there is much yet to unpack in these metaphors. Cavendish gives us even less to go on: she does not offer us any explicit statements about the relationship between mechanistic and vitalistic properties. Does she think of them as distinct categories as Conway seems to? Her outright rejection of mechanistic explanation may suggest something different. There is clearly much yet to pursue in these two anti-dualistic metaphysics of vital matter. Whatever merits one sees in their views, they both clearly pose challenges to the dualism and mechanistic materialism of their day. On the other hand, one may well ask: how would or do they respond to the most common arguments for dualism in the period? Both explicitly reject the argument that the subject of the mental must be an indivisible entity and therefore immaterial, as More and others did (Cavendish 1664: II.iv, 143; Conway 1996: 7.3, 54 [120]; for discussion see Chamberlain, 2022, and Lennon and Stainton 2008). On the other hand, neither directly addresses a common Cartesian-style argument that demands that the modifications of a substance must be conceptually connected to its nature (Rozemond 2016). Investigation of the latter would lead to a deeper examination of their views about the nature of their “onely matter” and the relationship between its properties and the scope of human knowledge. But these are questions for another day.

Notes 1 All references of More’s works are divided by book, chapter, and section. 2 In her earlier years, prior to the Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Cavendish accepted atomism, but she came to reject it. See Detlefsen 2006; Boyle 2018. 3 For a libertarian interpretation, see Detlefsen 2007; Boyle 2018: 74–78. For a compatibilist interpretation, see Cunning 2016: 210–42. 4 References are by section, letter and page number, as in II.xxi, 322. 5 In the Ground Cavendish does speak of a multiplicity of divine decrees. But her focus here is on moral injunctions like the Ten Commandments and rules governing worship rather than on anything like laws of nature (Cavendish 1668: Appendix I.vi-x). References are by part, chapter and page number, as in XIII. xiv, 234. 6 Cavendish also contends that it is only the present world order that originated 6,000 years earlier. Elsewhere she allows for a plurality of such orders (Cavendish 1668 XIII.xiv, 234; Appendix I.vii, 244). Matter itself existed before this world order, and it is eternal, that is, eternally created by God (Cavendish 1664: I.iii, 14–16). For discussion of matter’s eternity, see Boyle 2018: 80–85. 7 This is, incidentally, in accord with Scripture. Psalm 18 exhorts all of creation to praise God, and according to Romans 8:22, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain”. 8 Citations to the French text: volume and page number as AT I 1. Citations to English text: volume and page number as CSM I 1. 9 Hutton 2018 prefers to describe the “goodness” central to Conway’s system as “metaphysical” rather than moral. We agree that goodness is metaphysical for Conway, but agree with the others that this metaphysical goodness also still has a moral character. 10 Citations for Conway’s The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy: are to chapter and section, with the page numbers from the 1996 translation followed by those from the 1692 translation in [square brackets]. Liptson 1982 contains both the Latin and the 1692 English translation. We first provide references to the 1996 translation, but the quotes are from the 1692 translation, which we prefer. See new text in note above. 11 This is a controversial claim. Some argue that Conway is a metaphysical (type) monist on the ground that God, Christ, and nature are all spiritual (McRobert 2000; Hutton 2004; Lascano 2013; Pugliese 2019). We agree with other commentators (e.g., Mercer 2012; Detlefsen 2019) that Conway is a metaphysical trialist, since the most fundamental feature a thing has, on Conway’s view, is its (in)capacity for moral change, which serves as a categorical or essential difference among God, Christ, and nature (Conway 1962: 5.3, 24-25 [36–39]; 6.4, 30-31 [53–56]).

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Marleen Rozemond and Alison Simmons 12 The Latin prout is rendered “because” in the Cambridge Texts translation. It is rendered “and also” in the earlier 1692 translation, which is too weak. As prout means “according to” or “insofar as” we support the stronger reading. 13 Of course, Cavendish speaks of “inanimate matter,” but she thinks it is always perfectly blended with animate matter to constitute a creature. Our claim thus applies to creatures.

References Bayle, P. (1991) Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. R. H. Popkin, Indianapolis: Hackett. Borcherding, J. (2019) “Loving the Body, Loving the Soul: Conway’s Vitalist Critique of Cartesian and Morean Dualism,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 9: 1–35. (2022) “A Most Subtle Matter: The (Im)materialisms of Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish,” in B. Göcke and J. Farris (eds.), The Routledge Handbook on Idealism and Immaterialism, London: Routledge. Boyle, D. (2018) The Well-ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, New York: Oxford University Press. Cavendish, M. (1655) The Philosophical and Physical Opinions Written by Her Excellency the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, London: Printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye. (1664) Philosophical Letters: Or Modest Reflections upon Some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, London: [No Publisher] (1668) Ground of Natural Philosophy, London: A. Maxwell. (2001) Margaret Cavendish: Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. E. O’Neill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chamberlain, C. 2022. “What Is it Like to Be a Material Thing? Henry More and Margaret Cavendish on the Unity of the Mind.” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, vol. 11: 97-135. Conway, A. (1692). The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. London Conway, A. (1982) The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. P. Loptson, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Conway, A. (1996) The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. A. P. Coudert and T. Corse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cudworth, R. (1977) True Intellectual System of the Universe, London, for Richard Royston, Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. Originally Published in 1678. Cunning, D. (2016) Cavendish, New York: Routledge. Descartes, R. (1964–1974) Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 vols, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Nouvelle Présentation, Paris: Vrin. (1984) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, ed. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Detlefsen, K. (2007) “Reason and Freedom: Margaret Cavendish on the Order and Disorder of Nature,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 89: 157–91. (2009) “Margaret Cavendish on the relation between God and World,” Philosophy Compass 4(3): 421–38. (2018) “Cavendish and Conway on the Individual Human Mind,” in R. Copenhaver (ed.), Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages (The History of Philosophy of Mind, Volume 4), Milton: Taylor and Francis. Goclenius. (1964) Lexicon Philosophicon, Frankfurt, Reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. Originally published in 1613. Gordon-Roth, J. (2018) “What Kind of Monist is Anne Finch Conway?” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4(3): 280–97. Grey, J. (2017) “Conway’s Ontological Objection to Cartesian Dualism,” Philosophers’ Imprint 13: 1–19. (2020) “Species and the Good in Anne Conway’s Metaethics,” in C. Marshall (ed.), Comparative Metaethics: Neglected Perspectives on the Foundations of Morality, New York: Routledge. (unpublished manuscript) “Anne Conway’s Monism Reconsidered.” Hutton, S. (2004) Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2018) “Goodness in Anne Conway’s Metaphysics,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 229–46. King James Bible. Project Gutenberg Edition. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10900/10900h/10900-h.htm (Accessed: 23 December 2021). Lascano, M. (2013) “Anne Conway: Bodies in the Spiritual World,” Philosophy Compass 8(4): 327–36.

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Cavendish and Conway against Dualism (2017) “Anne Conway and Liberty,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600– 1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2019) “Review of The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Mind 128(509): 260–68. Lennon, T. L. and R. J. Stainton. (eds.) (2008) The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology. Dordrecht: Springer. McRobert, J. (2000) “Anne Conway’s Vitalism and her Critique of Descartes,” International Philosophical Quarterly 40(1): 21–35. Mercer, C. (2012) “Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy: G. W. Leibniz and Anne Conway,” in S. Ebbersmeyer (ed.), Emotional Minds, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. (2019) “Anne Conway’s Metaphysics of Sympathy,” in E. O’Neill and M. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Dordrecht: Springer. More, H. (1659) Immortality of the Soul, London: J. Flesher. (1966) Antidote against Atheism, Reprinted in Opera Omnia, Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Originally published in 1653. (1995) Enchiridion metaphysicum, trans. Alexander Jacob (as Manual for Metaphysics), Georg Olms Verlag. Originally published in 1671. O’Neill, E. (2001) “Introduction,” in M. Cavendish and E. O’Neill (eds.), Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato. (1977) Timaeus, ed. and trans. F. Cornford, London: Routledge. Reprinted in Indianapolis: Hackett. Pugliese, N. (2019) “Monism and Individuation in Anne Conway as a Critique of Spinoza,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27(4): 771–85. Reid, J. (2012) The Metaphysics of Henry More, Dordrecht: Springer. (2019) “Henry More: Supporter and Opponent of Cartesianism,” in S. Nadler, T. M. Schmaltz, and D. Antoine-Mahut (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rozemond, M. (2016) “Descartes, Malebranche and Leibniz: Conceptions of Substance in Arguments for the Immateriality of the Soul,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24(5): 836–57. Shaheen, J. (2019a) “Parts of Nature and Division in Margaret Cavendish’s Materialism,” Synthese 196(9): 3551–75. (2019b) “Review of Deborah Boyle’s The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Annals of Science 76(3–4): 340–47. (unpublished manuscript) The Superheroic Margaret Cavendish and the Metaphysics of Only Nature. Smith, H. L. (2016) “Claims to Orthodoxy: How far can we trust Cavendish’s Autobiography?,” in B. Siegfried and L. T. Sarasohn (eds.), God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish, London: Routledge. Thomas, E. (2018) “Anne Conway on the Identity of Creatures over Time,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2020) “Anne Conway as a Priority Monist: A Reply to Gordon-Roth,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6(3): 275–84. Wilkins, E. (2016) “’Exploding’ Immaterial Substances: Margaret Cavendish’s Vitalist-Materialist Critique of Spirits,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24(5): 858–77.

Further Readings Broad, J. (2018) “Conway and Charleton on the Intimate Presence of Souls in Bodies,” Journal of the History of Ideas 79(4): 571–91. Peterman, A. (2019a) “Cavendish on Motion and Mereology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 57(3): ­471–99. (Argues that Cavendish reduces all motion to mereological change) (2019b) “Empress vs Spiderman: Margaret Cavendish on Pure and Applied Mathematics,” Synthese 196(9): 3527–49. (Cavendish against the usefulness of mathematics) Reid, J. (2020) “Anne Conway and Her Circle on Monads,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 58(4): 679–704. Siegfried, B. and L. T. Sarasohn. (2016) God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish, London: Routledge. (A collection of articles on Cavendish’s relationship to religion)

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8 MARGARET CAVENDISH, ANNE CONWAY, AND CATHARINE COCKBURN ON MATTER Emily Thomas

8.1 Introduction Matter is central to early modern philosophy. Many early moderns believe that matter is everywhere, making up tables and mountains and bones. Most early moderns also believe that God is not material. How, then, does God relate to matter? This chapter explores this question through the work of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Catharine Cockburn. These three women have much in common. They are all English, all working in the same philosophical context, and (like most philosophers of this period) are responding in one way or another to Cartesian dualism. They are each concerned with the metaphysics of substance, with unifying nature, and with finding a proper place for God. Nonetheless, each has very different things to say about matter, and God’s relationship to it. I’ll detail their answers, and offer some comparisons. Along the way, I’ll explore other metaphysical issues too, such as the nature of matter, the process of creation, and hierarchies of being.

8.2  Background Material The mid-seventeenth century was a time of huge philosophic upheaval. Descartes passed away in 1650 but his newfangled substance metaphysics was speedily percolating. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan argued, radically, for materialism. Henry More was trying to decide how much spirit there should be in the world. Some background on these developments will be helpful for understanding the views of Cavendish, Conway, and Cockburn. Before Descartes, many thinkers understood material bodies to be matter-form composites. A material body such as a tree was composed of prime matter, molded into shape by a form. Descartes upended this scholastic metaphysics by putting forth a new account of substance.1 Descartes’ 1644 Principles of Philosophy states, “By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence” (Pr. I.51; CSM 1 210; AT 8A 24). Substances can be contrasted with “modes,” the changing states or modifications of substances; modes are dependent on their substances in the sense they cannot exist without them. To each substance belongs one “principal attribute” which constitutes its nature or essence, and to which all its modes are referred. Extension in length, breadth, and depth constitutes the principal attribute of corporeal or material substance. Thought constitutes the principal attribute of incorporeal or thinking substance (CSM 1 210–12; AT 8A 24–26). For Descartes, a tree is a material substance, and its modes include greenness and tallness. A human mind is an immaterial substance, 112

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its modes including ideas or thoughts. A “real distinction” holds between minds and bodies, in the sense that they are really distinct substances, that is, they can exist independently of one another insofar as they share no principal attributes (CSM 1 213; AT 8A 28). Descartes attempted to capture the material world purely in terms of matter and motion, excluding the immaterial. For example, he explains the movements of the planets by placing them inside a whirling vortex of matter, with the sun at the center (CSM 1.253; AT 8A 92). Descartes’ material-immaterial substance dualism took off. Some philosophers, such as Nicholas Malebranche and Arnold Geulincx, adopted it. Others critiqued it, often using these critiques as a starting point for their own metaphysics. Such critics included More, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Newton, and Leibniz. I will briefly introduce the metaphysics of More, Hobbes, and Locke, focusing on their accounts of matter. More’s 1642 Psychodia Platonica draws on neo-Platonism to characterize the universe as a sequence of eight emanations. In this early work, More (repr. 1878: 10–12) identifies the highest three emanations with the Christian Trinity: God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. The lowest emanation is body. Yet, on this early system, bodies are not material. More (repr. 1878: 160) is explicit that body is “fixt spirit,” viscous and congealed immaterial spirit. At this point, More is a vitalist, in that he holds all body to be alive. Slowly, More came to allow that material bodies really existed, but it took him longer to drop the thesis that everything is alive. He is still pondering this possibility in his 1653 An Antidote Against Atheism, enlarged in 1655. Here, More suggests that matter might be “in some sort vital,” as otherwise, it couldn’t move in the way it does. He adds: and besides, the Nature of God being the most perfect fulness of life that is possibly conceivable, it is very congruous that this outmost and remotest shadow of himself be some way, though but obscurely vital. (More 1655: 90) More is arguing that matter may be “obscurely” alive because a living God couldn’t create something that is not alive.2 As we will see below, this argument recurs in Conway. Over the course of his career, More changed his mind about various things. 3 Some of these changes came after reading Descartes; More was both impressed by Descartes, and critical of him. More argued that Descartes’ mechanistic account of the material world, which attempted to explain the world purely in terms of matter in motion, was insufficient and could even lead to atheism. Unlike Descartes, More believed we needed spirits to explain natural phenomena. Ultimately, More came to endorse a modified version of Cartesian dualism. Like Descartes, More’s 1671 Enchiridion Metaphysicum argues there are two kinds of substances: bodies and spirits. Bodies are now material, and no longer alive. However, unlike Descartes, More (trans. 1995: I 119; XXVIII.3) argues both kinds of substances are spatially extended. He distinguishes between them via penetrability and discerpibility. Sprits are “penetrable,” in that they can penetrate bodies and other spirits; and “indiscerpible,” lacking parts that can be really divided or separated. In contrast, bodies are impenetrable and discerpible. More’s extended spirits proved controversial. Even more controversial was Hobbes’ materialism. Hobbes argues everything is material. Hobbes’ 1655 De Corpore characterizes body as a thing existing of itself, that fills space (Hobbes, repr. 1839: 46). Hobbes’ Leviathan explains: the universe, being the aggregate of all bodies, there is no real part thereof that is not also body… substance and body signify the same thing; and together substance incorporeal are words, which when they are joined together, destroy one another, as if a man should say, an incorporeal body. (Hobbes, repr. 1957: 256; III.34) 113

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For Hobbes, all substances are bodies, and a non-material body is a contradiction in terms. Hobbes even holds that God is material. For example, Leviathan attributes motion and place to God, “which are intelligible only of bodies, and not of substances incorporeal” (Hobbes, repr. 1957: 257; III.34). Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding is notoriously difficult to read on ontological matters. Like More, Locke seems to hold a modified version of Cartesian dualism: our complex Ideas of Substances, besides all these simple Ideas they are made up of, have always confused Idea of something to which they belong, and in which they subsist: and therefore when we speak of any sort of Substance, we say it is a thing having such or such Qualities, as Body is a thing that is extended, figured, and capable of Motion; a Spirit a thing capable of thinking. (Locke, repr. 2011: II.23.3) The problem is this. Descartes claims we can “easily come to know” a substance through its principal attribute (CSM I 210; AT 8A 25). Yet Locke is not so sure. Locke seems to accept that something must uphold collections of qualities, such as blueness or sweetness. Consequently, he seems to accept that substances exist. However, he argues that our idea of substance is obscure: “Substance is supposed always something besides the Extension, Figure, Solidity, Motion, Thinking, or other observable Ideas, though we know not what it is” (Locke, repr. 2011: II.23.2–3). This means we should be critical of Locke’s statements about substance dualism. In the passage above, is he really distinguishing between bodies and spirits as different kinds of substances, or merely acknowledging that other people do? Although some scholars read Locke as a substance dualist, this is controversial.4 Even if Locke is a substance dualist, he rejects some details of Descartes’ account. Unlike Descartes, Locke believes matter may be able to think: We have the Ideas of Matter and Thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know, whether any mere material Being thinks, or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own Ideas, without revelation, to discover, whether Omnipotency has not given to some Systems of Matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive or think. (Locke, repr. 2011: IV.3.6) Locke doesn’t think it likely that God has given material bodies the capacity to think, but it is possible. Further, Locke denies the Cartesian view that souls are always thinking (Locke, repr. 2011: II.1.10). Locke may accept substance dualism without being committed to Descartes’ view that each kind of created substance has one principal attribute. Against this intellectual backdrop of Cartesianism and its alternatives, Cavendish, Conway, and Cockburn developed their own metaphysics of matter.

8.3  Cavendish: A Divided Ontology Margaret Cavendish, née Lucas (1623–1673), published on philosophy during the 1650s and 1660s, and her views evolved over the course of her career. During years spent on the continent, she met Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Kenelm Digby, and Hobbes. I’ll set out the account of matter found in her latest pertinent text, her 1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy.5 Cavendish’s (1668: 1) book opens with the statement, “Matter is that we name Body.” She explains some “Learned Persons” believe there are substances that are not material bodies. Who could Cavendish be referring to? From discussions in her earlier, 1664 Philosophical Letters, we 114

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know she is familiar with the work of Descartes, Hobbes, More, Walter Charleton, and Jan Baptist van Helmont; with the exception of Hobbes, this statement could be aimed at any of them. Against this position, Cavendish objects that these Learned Persons cannot prove there are substances that are not bodies. Cavendish argues that, while there are different kinds of matter, there are no substances that are not body. For Cavendish, everything around us is material, including our minds. One of Cavendish’s arguments for materialism is that our bodies, corporeal beings, couldn’t perceive immaterial beings: Whatsoever is Corporeal, is Perceivable; that is, may be perceived in some manner or other, by reason it hath a Corporeal Being: but, what Being an Immaterial hath, no Corporeal can perceive. wherefore, no Part in Nature can perceive an Immaterial, because it is impossible to have a perception of that, which is not to be perceived, as not being an Object fit and proper for Corporeal Perception. (Cavendish 1668: 240) In effect, Cavendish’s materialism is rooted in naturalism. We shouldn’t believe in things we cannot see.6 Although Cavendish argues everything is material, she understands matter in a unique way. For philosophers like Descartes, all matter is unthinking, and many parts of matter (such as rocks and stars which do not have moving parts) are dead. In contrast, Cavendish argues all material bodies are knowing and alive: All the Parts of Nature have Life and Knowledg; but, all the Parts have not Active Life, and a perceptive Knowledg, only the Rational and Sensitive. (Cavendish 1668: 6) Cavendish’s terminology refers to further details of her system. She believes matter comes in three degrees. Inanimate matter is the least pure kind of matter, dull and heavy, and it cannot move itself. Other parts of matter can move themselves. Rational matter is the purest kind of matter: light and agile, it can move itself but can’t move anything else. Sensitive matter sits in the middle of the scale: it is light enough to move itself, yet heavy enough to move inanimate matter. These degrees of matter are intermixed throughout nature, so all parts of nature contain all three (Cavendish, 1668: 3–5). In the passage above, Cavendish is explaining that whilst all matter is alive and knowing, only the rational and sensitive parts of matter are active and perceptive. One of Cavendish’s arguments for living matter is grounded in her observation that the universe is orderly. Cavendish argues this order cannot be the result of chance, of bodies bumping around randomly. It must be the result of living, knowing things, continually moving in ordered ways.7 She tells us: If Nature were not Self-knowing, Self-living, and also Perceptive, she would run into Confusion: for, there could be neither Order, nor Method, in Ignorant motion; neither would there be distinct kinds or sorts of Creatures, nor such exact and methodical Varieties as there are: for, it is impossible to make orderly and methodological Distinctions, or distinct Orders, by Chances. (Cavendish 1668: 7) As Broad (2002: 56–58) explains, More’s work also features an argument from order: More argues that the orderliness we find in nature can only be explained by positing immaterial substances. Cavendish argues her solution is superior to More’s in several ways: she avoids the material-immaterial 115

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interaction problem dogging dualism, and her system is simpler because it involves one created substance rather than two. For Cavendish, matter is extended and thinking. Where More sought to modify Cartesian dualism, Cavendish ditches it. She has subverted Descartes’ division between extended, unthinking matter and non-extended, thinking spirit. We are now ready to ask how Cavendish relates matter to God. Does Cavendish follow Hobbes in positing a material God? She does not. Cavendish is firm throughout her corpus that God is immaterial. This means that, for Cavendish, God is a wholly different kind of substance to all his creations. This is a severe break from the dualism of Descartes, More, and (arguably) Locke; and Hobbes’ materialism. On these metaphysics, God seems to be the same kind of substance as his creation, or at least there is a deep ontological kinship between them. On Descartes’ system, we have an idea of God as an “uncreated and independent thinking substance” (CSM I 211; AT 8A 26); this suggests that human beings and God both have the attribute of thought. Hobbes makes a parallel claim: humans and God are both material. On these systems, God seems to be the same kind of substance as humans or human minds; and even if he is not the same kind—perhaps because he is so much greater than us—he is at least deeply similar to us in that we share key attributes with him. Theologically, it may be a virtue of Cartesian dualism and Hobbes’ materialism that God is the same kind of substance as us. The Bible is littered with claims that humans bear similarities with God. Genesis (1:27) states, “God created mankind in his own image.” Corinthians (11:7) explains that a man is “the image and glory of God.” However, the Bible also states that God is above us, different to us. Isaiah (55: 8–9) writes: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Cavendish makes a virtue out of how, on her system, God is a different kind of substance to his creation. She does so by arguing that her metaphysics avoids a particular theological pitfall. Although Cavendish does not provide a name for it, elsewhere I have labeled the pitfall “polytheistic blasphemy.”8 Explaining this requires a little background. Early modern theories of space risked several blasphemies or heresies. Berkeley’s 1710 Principles of Human Knowledge describes the problem of polytheistic blasphemy concisely. It is the “pernicious and absurd” notion that “there is something beside God which is eternal, uncreated, infinite, indivisible, immutable” (Berkeley, repr. 1989: 113–14; §117). In some theories of space, space is a real being, distinct from God, yet it is eternal, uncreated, infinite, indivisible, and immutable. The problem is that these attributes are usually held to be uniquely divine. God and human beings can share some attributes—they may both be alive and thinking. Yet there are some attributes that are traditionally ascribed uniquely to God, including his eternity, infinity, and immutability. Berkeley is arguing that people who posit something with these attributes are positing a second God. I argue many early modern philosophers are sensitive to this issue.9 For example, in a letter dated 17 November (likely) 1651, More objects to a supposition raised by Anne Conway that matter is uncreated. He writes: [To the supposition that] matter is uncreated, I answer, that seems to me not so rationall. For then there will be some thing independent of God… if we can admit, that any thing may be of it self uncreated of the first most perfect being, we may as well admit that there are more Gods than one. (More, cited in Nicolson and Hutton 1992: 491) 116

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Isaac Barrow’s 1683 Lectiones Mathematicae argues against the view that space exists separately to matter, and writes: if it [space] be unproduced and independent, it must consequently be also eternal and immense… but for any Thing to partake of the singular Attributes of the Divine Nature, such as not to be created nor dependent upon God, seems contrary, as well to right Reason, as Religion. (Barrow, trans. 1734: 164–65) By “singular attributes”, Barrow means attributes unique to God. I find evidence that Cavendish was sensitive to the specter of polytheistic blasphemy in her Philosophical Letters. Like Berkeley and Barrow, Cavendish worries that space distinct from matter would be too godlike. On these grounds, she considers and rejects Walter Charleton’s view of space: he calls Vacuum Immovable, which in my opinion is to make it a God; for God is only Immoveable and Unalterable… if Vacuum be not created, and shall not be annihilated, but is Uncreated, Immaterial, Immoveable, Infinite, and Eternal, it is a God. (Cavendish 1664: 452) Cavendish is charging Charleton with polytheistic blasphemy, with positing a second God. This is one reason why Cavendish cannot accept Charleton’s absolutism about space. The problem, as Cavendish is well aware, is that her metaphysics also risks positing another God—nature. On her understanding, nature shares many of God’s traditionally unique attributes. Above, we saw how Cavendish believes that all material bodies—all the parts of nature—are knowing and alive. She also holds that nature is infinite, and eternal. The opening lines of Cavendish’s 1653 Philosophicall Fancies run: There is no first Matter, nor first Motion; for matter and motion are infinite, and being infinite, must consequently be Eternal. (Cavendish 1653: 1) Nature is infinite, eternal, living, and knowing. Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters discusses how nature might be seen to threaten God: But you will say perhaps, if I attribute an Infinite Wisdom, Strength, Power, Knowledge, &c to Nature; then Nature is in all coequal with God, for God has the same Attributes. (Cavendish 1664: 8) Against this worry, Cavendish points out that God and nature are entirely different kinds of things. She continues: I desire you to understand me rightly, when I speak of Infinite Nature, and when I speak of the Infinite Deity, for there is a great difference between them, for it is one thing a Deitical or Divine Infinite, and another a Natural Infinitie; You know, that God is a Spirit, and not a bodily substance, again that Nature is a Body, and not a Spirit, and therefore none of these Infinites can obstruct or hinder each other, as being different in their kinds… a Natural Infinite, and the Infinite God, may well stand together, without any opposition or hindrance, or without any detracting or derogating from the Omnipotency and Glory of 117

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God; for God remains still the God of Nature, and is an Infinite Immaterial Purity, when as Nature is an Infinite Corporeal Substance; and Immaterial and Material cannot obstruct each other. (Cavendish 1664: 8–10) For Cavendish, nature cannot be a second God because nature is entirely material. Later, Cavendish (1664: 453) stresses that her account of nature is “more humble” than Charleton’s account of space, as his space is immovable and her matter is moveable. Cavendish returns to this issue in her Grounds of Natural Philosophy, and vaunts this aspect of her system. Cavendish (1668: 239) argues that immaterial beings can’t be created. They can’t be created by nature, because immaterial things are too different from natural things. She also can’t conceive how one immaterial being could create others. As any immaterial being must be uncreated, Cavendish concludes there can only be one of them: “no other than GOD alone.” Attacking philosophers such as Descartes who allow the existence of multiple immaterial beings, Cavendish continues: for surely, if there were any other Immaterial Beings, besides the Omnipotent God, those would be so near the Divine Essence of God, as to be petty gods; and numerous petty gods would, almost, make the Power of an Infinite God. But, God is Omnipotent, and only God. (Cavendish 1668: 241) Cavendish has made her thoroughgoing materialism into a theological virtue. The strict divide she draws between the created material world, and God as the singular immaterial being, avoids polytheistic blasphemy and renders God even more special than he is on other metaphysical systems.

8.4  Conway: Against Matter Anne Conway, née Finch (1631–1679), was involved with philosophy throughout her adult life, being a one-time pupil then lifelong friend of More; and becoming friends with the physician and vitalist Francis Mercury van Helmont (son of Jan Baptist). From 1677 to early 1679, she began working on a notebook.10 After Conway’s death, the English text was translated into Latin and titled Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae. As the original text was then lost, this is the closest we have to the original. The English translations are titled The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.11 Conway’s Principles is deeply concerned with the nature of the world around us, and she offers the following ontology. There are three species, each of which has their own nature and essence. God is the highest being. Created creatures are the lowest beings. Christ acts as a mediator between God and creatures (Conway, repr. 1996: 24–25; V:3–4). Let’s focus on creatures. They comprise all of creation, making up trees, rocks, stars, animals, and humans. As scholars have noted, there are similarities between the metaphysics of Conway and Cavendish.12 Like Cavendish, Conway (repr. 1996: 45; VII:2) holds that all creatures are alive. Conway (repr. 1996: 49; VII: 3) also holds that all creatures are spatially extended. Like Cavendish, Conway (repr. 1996: 18; III:9) believes that all created beings are infinitely divisible, into further beings: “the smallest creatures which can be conceived have an infinite number of creatures within themselves so that the smallest particles of body or matter can be extended or divided in infinite ways into ever smaller and smaller parts.” Cavendish (1668: 15–16) does not just argue that all the parts of nature are orderly, she believes they are all connected, allowing the parts to “move sympathetically” with each other. Cavendish’s material world is a plenum, with no 118

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vacuums to interrupt nature’s motions. Conway’s (repr. 1996: 20; III:10) world is also a plenum, and she believes that all beings are united through “subtler mediating parts… through which they can act upon one another also at the greatest distance.” Like Cavendish, Conway (repr. 1996: 13; II:4) holds the created world is eternal, that as God is eternally a creator it follows that “he gave being to creatures from time everlasting.” Despite these similarities, there is also a big difference. Unlike Cavendish, Conway argues that no created beings are truly material. For Conway, there is no such thing as material substance. Conway argues all creatures are composed of the same kind of substance. A creature can be more bodily or more spiritual, depending on its modes: In every visible creature there is body and spirit… Nevertheless, it is not an essential property of anything to be a body, just as it is not a property of anything to be dark. For nothing is so dark that it cannot become bright… Truly, every body is a spirit and nothing else, and it differs from a spirit only insofar as it is darker. (Conway, repr. 1996: 38–40; VI:11) A creature is more bodily if its modes are dense, heavy, or dark. A creature is more spiritual if its modes are airy and light. Although strictly speaking there are no material bodies, we can speak grosso modo of bodies on Conway’s system—substances that are more bodily via their modes. Any body can become more purely spirit, if it becomes airier and lighter. By rejecting the existence of material bodies proper, Conway’s metaphysics simultaneously rejects the materialism of Hobbes and Cavendish, and the substance dualism of Descartes and More. Why does Conway reject the existence of matter? One of her arguments stems from the relationship between God and his creation. Conway believes that God is immaterial. Further, like the early More, she believes that God’s nature constrains the kinds of things he can create. God can’t create anything too different from himself. Conway explains that she has seriously considered God’s attributes, and this has led her to the following view: God is infinitely good and communicates his goodness to all his creatures in infinite ways… and since the goodness of God is a living goodness, which possesses life, knowledge, love, and power, which he communicates to his creatures, how can any dead thing proceed from him or be created by him, such as mere body or matter… It has been truly said that God does not make death. It is equally true that he did not make any dead thing, for how can a dead thing come from him who is infinite life and love? (Conway, repr. 1996: 44–45; VII:2) Conway starts from the uncontroversial claim that God is good and alive. Given this, she reasons that it would be impossible for God to create a vile or dead thing. Given God’s nature, he can only create things that are good and alive, at least to some degree. She states firmly: “God’s creatures, insofar as they are creatures, must be like their creator in certain things” (Conway, repr. 1996: 5; VII:2). There is no dead matter in God, and consequently there cannot be any in his creations. Dead matter is “a vain fiction and chimera, and an impossible thing” (Conway, repr. 1996: 46; VII:2). Conway’s position is shared by her friend van Helmont: that false and vain Imagination of sundry Philosophers (so called) concerning Matter and Body, is to be rejected, as tho’ it were a thing, not only wholly inanimate, and void of Life… For from God, who is Life himself, and the fountain of it, nothing that hath not Life, or is incapable thereof, can proceed; for God created all his Creatures in his most excelling 119

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Goodness, Wisdom and Power, that in him they might at length be blessed… which they could never do, if they were void of Life. (van Helmont 1694: 13) Van Helmont also believes that God’s nature precludes the creation of dead matter13. Let’s return to Conway and Cavendish. We’ve seen that Conway’s creatures and Cavendish’s bodies are both alive, knowing, divisible, and extended. This might lead you to think that their disagreements over ontology are largely verbal. Lascano raises precisely this issue: One of the most difficult questions concerning Conway’s ontology is whether and in what way it can be said to differ from that of a materialist like Margaret Cavendish who holds that all things are matter but that matter has spiritual qualities. Most importantly, Cavendish, like Conway, holds that matter is vital. One might conclude that the difference is merely terminological: both posit the same ‘‘stuff’’ in the world, but one calls it ‘‘spirit’’ and the other “matter.” (Lascano 2013: 334 fn 3) How significant is it that Cavendish posits material bodies, whilst Conway’s creatures are not material? I argue it is very significant. To explain why, we need to say a little more about Conway’s metaphysics of creatures. For Cavendish, material bodies are continually in motion. Conway (repr. 1996: 24–26; V:3–6) holds a prima facie similar position: creatures are continually changing. This explains why we see “water change into stone, stones into earth, earth into trees, and trees into animals or living creatures.” Change is all around us, all the time.14 The difference between them is that, for Conway, these changes are directed toward becoming more like God. On Conway’s system, creatures can change from being more purely bodily to more purely spiritual, and vice versa. How creatures change is connected to divine justice: when they change for the better, they are rewarded by becoming more purely spirit. When they change for the worse, they are punished by becoming more purely corporeal. Conway (repr. 1996: 35–36; VI:7) explains that a man who lives a pure life on earth may become an angel, whereas a man who lives a brutish life will become a beast. The angel has become more purely spirit, like God. As Conway explains: creation is one entity or substance in respect to its nature or essence… it only varies according to its modes of existence, one of which is corporeality. There are many degrees of this so that any thing can approach or recede more or less from the condition of a body or spirit. Moreover, because spirit is the more excellent of the two in the true and natural order of things, the more spiritual a certain creature becomes (that is, if it does not degenerate in other ways), the closer it comes to God, who, as we all know, is the highest spirit… Consequently, it is the nature of a creature, unless it degenerates, always to become more and more like the creator. (Conway, repr. 1996: 41–42; VII:1) Conway (repr. 1996: 65; IX: 5) tells us that, as the “supreme Being” God’s nature “infinitely surpasses” every creature. Although we cannot reach God’s ontological heights, we can move toward them. Conway (repr. 1996, 46; VII:2) adds that it would be impossible for non-living bodies to grow closer to God. “For what further progress in goodness and perfection can dead matter make?” Conway argues that even if matter assumed many forms, and changed into all kinds of shapes, it could be no closer to God than it was before. It would not be closer because it would not be more spiritual. In contrast with Conway’s creatures, it doesn’t matter how Cavendish’s material bodies move, they will never become more ontologically similar to God. The disagreement between Cavendish 120

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and Conway over the existence of matter is not merely verbal. It is rooted in an even deeper disagreement: how similar God is to his creation. Above, we saw that Cavendish makes a virtue out of the stark ontological divide holding between God and his creation. Now, we have seen that Conway makes a virtue out of the kinship between God and creatures. God’s creatures must be similar to him, for God can only impart goodness, and the kinship between God and creatures is how creatures ontologically grow closer to him.

8.5  Cockburn: Matter, God, and the Great Bridge Catharine Cockburn, née Trotter (1679–1749), was born several generations after Cavendish and Conway. Her first philosophical work was published in 1702, The Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding. On discovering her identity, Locke gave her money and books. Cockburn went on to publish many plays and philosophical texts, including her 1739 Remarks upon some Writers.15 Of our three women philosophers, Cockburn’s metaphysics comes closest to traditional substance dualism. Substance dualism is implicit in Cockburn’s early Defence - at least to the same degree that it is in Locke’s Essay. For example, dualism seems to emerge in Cockburn’s defense of Locke’s claim that the soul need not think. Cockburn argues, like Locke, that we have no clear idea of the substance of a soul. Consequently, we cannot know whether the soul always thinks: whatever that substance is, which has the power of thinking, there is no reason to doubt, that it remains the same, when it ceases from that action, any more than there is to doubt, that a body in motion, and at rest, is the same substance; for we have no clearer idea of the substance of body, than we have of the substance of spirit, as Mr. Locke has shown. (Cockburn, repr. 2006: 60–61) This passage implies that Cockburn believes in the existence of material and immaterial substances, even if we cannot know their natures. This reading receives confirmation in a later passage: [has] God given the power of cognition to a material, or an immaterial substance: and which way soever this question is resolved, the soul must equally be supposed a distinct permanent substance; for a material substance is not less a substance than an immaterial. (Cockburn, repr. 2006: 83) The substance dualism of Cockburn’s Defence is not Cartesian but Lockean. Material substance exists but we cannot know its nature. Like Locke, she accepts the possibility that material bodies could think.16 In Cockburn’s later Remarks, more details about her metaphysics emerge. In some cases, it is unclear whether she is elaborating on beliefs she already held, or whether her views have evolved over the intervening decades. Cockburn’s Remarks discuss material and immaterial substance at several points, and assumes that these two kinds of substances exist. For example, she returns to her earlier defense of Locke’s suggestion that immaterial substances need not always think. In this context, she argues that we should accept: an unknown substratum of the properties of matter and of spirit. Is it suitable to our limited understandings to conclude, that because we know not what the substance or either is, therefore they may be the same? Is there not at least the same ground for the very contrary 121

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conclusion? …let us rather conclude, that properties so essentially different as those of matter and spirit are, must certainly belong to substances as essentially different in themselves. (Cockburn, repr. 2006: 101–02) Cockburn is arguing that whilst we cannot know the natures of material or immaterial substances, the fact they have such different properties suggests that the substances themselves are different. What exactly are the properties that she associates with material and immaterial substance? Cockburn (repr. 2006: 95–104) refers to material substances as extended, solid, unthinking, senseless, divisible, and as having shape and figure. She describes immaterial substances as unextended, thinking, intelligent, and indivisible. Interestingly, like Cavendish and Conway, Cockburn (repr. 2006: 97–98) argues that human spirits have a place. Cockburn finds it “utterly inconceivable” that spirits lack places; otherwise, as soon as a human soul is “freed” from its bodily prison, it would be equally present to all the myriad of spirits, when surely they must be nearer and farther from some spirits than others. Echoing More, Cockburn wonders if spirits may have a non-bodily, “other kind” of extension, consistent with indivisibility. Unlike Conway, Cockburn maintains the existence of a material substance in her metaphysics. On this point, she is in agreement with Cavendish. However, unlike Cavendish, Cockburn describes bodies as unthinking and senseless. Cockburn does not describe material bodies as dead, but there is no reason to believe she thinks they are alive. Cockburn holds precisely the view of matter that Cavendish rejects. How does Cockburn understand the relationship between God and created matter? She does not tell us explicitly, but we can read into her advocacy of the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain is a metaphysical thesis, on which everything that exists is structured into an ontological hierarchy. Lovejoy (1936: 52–58) explains that the Great Chain uses two principles. The Principle of Plenitude holds that whatever can exist, does exist: all possible beings are actual. This is rooted in Plato’s Timeas (30c), which states that our universe resembles something which “comprehends within itself all intelligible living things.” The Principle of Continuity holds that existing things differ only gradually from one another. This is rooted in Aristotle, whose History of Animals (588b4–14) states, “Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation.” Aristotle also arranged animals in a hierarchy of perfection. Lovejoy notes that the Principle of Continuity can be deduced from the Principle of Plenitude: if between any two species, there is theoretically possible an intermediate species, that species must be realized. Together, the principles paint a Great Chain of Being: the universe contains all possible things, graduated in a slow hierarchy of perfection. God, the most perfect being, sits at the top of the chain, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants, and finally the least perfect, lifeless things. Lovejoy (1936: 183–84) argues the Great Chain attained its “widest diffusion and acceptance” in the eighteenth century. He claims this was partly because it was popularized by Leibniz and Locke. For example, Locke’s Essay states: in all the visible corporeal world we see no chasms, or gaps. All quite down from us the descent is by easy steps, and a continued series of things, that in each remove differ very little one from the other. There are fishes that have wings and are not strangers to the airy region; there are some birds that are inhabitants of the water, whose blood is as cold as fishes. (Locke, repr. 2011: III.vi.12) Cockburn (repr. 2006: 97) assumes the Great Chain, and cites descriptions of it in Locke and Joseph Addison. She goes on to put the Great Chain metaphysic to work in a new way. Cockburn (repr. 2006: 97) argues that, as matters stand, the Great Chain is unfinished, because there is a “vast chasm” between “senseless material” substance, and “intelligent immaterial” substance. 122

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She argues we need a third kind of substance to fill the gap: space, “an immaterial unintelligent substance.” Just as Cavendish’s account of nature runs the risk of polytheistic blasphemy, so does Cockburn’s account of space. I have argued previously that Cockburn’s account of space manages to avoid this heresy, through space’s place in the Great Chain.17 Cockburn’s adoption of the Great Chain illuminates her understanding of the relationship between God and matter. The Great Chain does not merely connect humans with rocks. It also connects humans with God. On the Great Chain, human beings do not sit at the top, close to God. We sit somewhere in the middle, superior to animals and rocks but inferior to angels. Locke’s Essay emphasizes this: there are far more species of creatures above us than beneath; we being in degrees of perfection much more remote from the infinite being of God, than we are from the lowest state of being. (Locke, repr. 2011: III.vi.12) Cockburn agrees: the whole chasm in nature, from a plant to a man, is filled up by such a gentle and easy ascent, that the little transitions from one species to another are almost insensible: That if the scale of beings rises by such a regular progress so high as man, we may, by a parity of reason, suppose, that it still proceeds gradually through those beings, that are of a superior nature to him. (Cockburn, repr. 2006: 97) Cockburn’s scale of beings proceeds downward from humans to plants, and upward to superior beings. The substantial divide between God and his creations is mitigated by the Great Chain, which bridges imperfect material bodies and God’s perfect immaterial being. Cockburn’s Great Chain metaphysic is alien to Cavendish, who posits an uncrossable gulf between God and his creation. However, this aspect of Cockburn’s metaphysics has some affinity with Conway’s. Although Conway makes no explicit mention of the Great Chain, it is arguably implicit in her work: Conway posits Christ as an “intermediary” between God and creatures, and Conway’s creatures run the perfection gamut from pebbles up to the noblest spirits. Nonetheless, an issue with attributing a Chain Great metaphysic to Conway is that, traditionally, this metaphysic was taken to be inconsistent with progress. As Lovejoy (1936: 242–46) explains, this was because the Great Chain was historically conceived as complete, and consequently “rigid and static.” However, in the eighteenth century, “temporalized” Great Chains became popular, on which all things come into existence over the course of time. Temporalized Great Chains allow for progress within the universe. Lovejoy argues that More, Addison, and Leibniz held such Great Chains. For example, More’s The Immortality of the Soul argues that human souls only attain “small degrees of purification” in our lifetimes, so the spiritual bodies they obtain after death must also come in “degrees of purity and excellency” (More, 1659: 333; II.1.5). As More puts it elsewhere, “A Musician strikes not all strings at once” (More, 1659: 306; II.17.7). A temporalized Great Chain becomes less a chain than a ladder, and there is a Great Ladder in Conway’s metaphysics.18

8.6 Conclusion Cavendish, Conway, and Cockburn each take very different attitudes to matter, and God’s relationship with it. For Cavendish, the whole of creation is material, and there is an absolute, substantial divide between God and nature. For Conway, matter does not exist, precisely because there 123

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cannot be such a divide between God and his creatures. Finally, for Cockburn, matter exists, and material things sit on the bottommost link of the Great Chain of Being. God’s substance is unlike that of bodies, yet the gulf between them is bridged by knots of being19.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Pasnau (2011) provides an excellent study of this shift. Reid (2012: 237–55) argues this motivation for More’s vitalism is present throughout all his early work. Reid (2012) provides a thorough study of More’s evolving metaphysics. Scholars who read Locke as a dualist include Aaron (1955: 143), Woolhouse (1983: 180) and Kochiras (2016: §4.2). For critical discussion, see Bermúdez (1996) and Kim (2010). 5 For biographies of Cavendish, and broader discussions of her work, see James (1999), O’Neill (2001), Broad (2002), Sarasohn (2010), and Cunning (2016). On Hobbes and Cavendish specifically, see Hutton (1997b). 6 On this naturalism, see Cunning (2006). 7 On Cavendish’s argument from order, see James (1999: 222–25), Broad (2002: 50–63), Detlefsen (2006: 207–11), Sarasohn (2010: 54–75; 126–47), and Cunning (2016: 70–79). 8 See Thomas (2013: 195–98). 9 Especially around space. Thomas (2013: 198–99) discusses the heresy with regard to Newton and Leibniz. 10 On the dating, see Loptson (1982: 7–9). 11 For biographies, and wider discussions of Conway’s work, see Waithe (1991), Broad (2002), Hutton (2004) and Sheridan (2016). 12 See Hutton (1997a), Clucas (2000) and Broad (2002: 66–89). 13 On this issue in van Helmont, see Coudert (1975: 641–42). 14 For more on change in Conway, see Loptson (1982), White (2008), Lascano (2013) and Thomas (2018). Lascano seeks to explain why Conway’s system retains bodies in any sense, pointing for example to the role they play in memory. White and Thomas find affinities between Conway’s emphasis on change and process philosophy. 15 For biographies of Cockburn (nee Trotter) and wider overviews of her philosophical work, see Waithe (1991), Bolton (1996), Broad (2002), Kelley (2002), and Sheridan (2016). 16 On Cockburn’s defense of Locke on this issue, see Broad (2002: 154–55), Gordon-Roth (2015), and Thomas (2015). 17 For Cockburn, space is uncreated, eternal, infinite, and immutable—risking polytheistic blasphemy. Yet she argues for space’s existence from the gap she perceives in the Great Chain and, given its place in the Chain, this means space must be unintelligent and senseless, and less perfect than God. Consequently, Cockburn’s space could not be a second god. See Thomas (2013: 202–10). 18 Merchant (1979: 261) and Duran (2006: 54) also read a Great Chain into Conway. Merchant argues that van Helmont also held a Great Chain metaphysic. 19 I am very grateful to Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro for putting this collection together, and for encouraging me to write this chapter—all the way back in 2017.

References Aaron, R. (1955) John Locke, Second Edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aristotle. (1984) The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barrow, I. (1734) The Usefulness of Mathematical Learning Explained and Demonstrated, trans. J. Kirby, London: Stephen Austin. Berkeley, G. (1989) Berkeley: Philosophical Works, ed. M. R. Ayers, Guernsey: Everyman’s Library. Bermúdez, J. L. (1996) “Locke, Metaphysical Dualism and Property Dualism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 4(2): 223–245. Bolton, M. B. (1996) “Some Aspects of the Philosophical Work of Catharine Trotter,” in L. L. McAlister (ed.), Hypatia’s Daughters: 1500 Years of Women Philosophers, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Broad, J. (2002) Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavendish, M. (1653) Philosophicall Fancies. Printed by Roycroft, for J. Martin and J. Allestrye. London. (1664) Philosophical Letters, n.p. London. (1668) Grounds of Natural Philosophy, n.p. London.

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Cavendish, Conway, and Cockburn on Matter Clucas, S (2000) “The Duchess and Viscountess: Negotiations between Mechanism and Vitalism in the Natural Philosophies of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway,” In-Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9(1): 125–36. Cockburn, C. T. (2006) Catharine Trotter Cockburn - Philosophical Writings, ed. P. Sheridan, Peterborough: Broadview Press. Conway, A. (1996) The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, trans. T. Corse and A. Coudert, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coudert, A. (1975) “A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36(4): 633–52. Cunning, D. (2006) “Cavendish on the Intelligibility of the Prospect of Thinking Matter,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 23(2): 117–36. (2016) Cavendish, London: Routledge. Descartes, R. (1964–1976) Oeuvres de Descartes [Vols. I–XII], ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Paris: P. Vrin/ C.N.R.S. [AT] (1985) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes I–II, trans. J. Cottingham R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [CSM] Detlefsen, K. (2006) “Atomism, Monism, and Causation in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 3: 199–240. Duran, J. (2006) Eight Women Philosophers: Theory, Politics, and Feminism. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Gordon-Roth, J. (2015) “Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Defence of Locke,” The Monist 98(1): 64–76. Hobbes, T. (1839) De Corpore in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Volume I, ed. W. Molesworth, London: John Bohn. (1957) Leviathan, ed. M. Oakeshott, Oxford: Basil Blackwood. Hutton, S. (1997a) “Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish and Seventeenth-Century Scientific Thought,” in L. Hunter and S. Hutton (eds.), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700, Sutton: Stroud, pp. 218–34. (1997b) “In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy,” Women’s Writing 4: 421–32. (2004) Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, S. (1999) “The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7(2): 219–44. Kelley, A. (2002) Catharine Trotter – An Early Modern Writer in the Vanguard of Feminism, Great Britain: Ashgate Publishing Company. Kim, H. K. (2010) “What Kind of Philosopher was Locke on Mind and Body?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91(2): 180–207. Kochiras, H. (2016) “Locke’s Philosophy of Science,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Lascano, M. (2013) “Anne Conway: Bodies in the Spiritual World,” Philosophy Compass 8(4): 327–36. Locke, J. (2011) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loptson, P. (1982) “Introduction,” to A. Conway’s The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. P. Loptson, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Lovejoy, A. (1936) The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Merchant, C. (1979) “The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz’s Concept of the Monad,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 17(3): 255–69. More, H. (1655) Antidote against Atheism, Second Edition, London. (1659) The Immortality of the Soul. Printed by J. Flesher, for William Morden. Cambridge. (1878) The Complete Poems of Dr. Henry More, ed. A. B. Grosart, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (1995) Henry More’s Manuel of Metaphysics - A Translation of the Enchiridium Metaphysicum, 2 vols., trans. A. Jacob, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim. Nicolson, M. and S. Hutton (eds) (1992) The Conway Letters: the Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More and their Friends, 1642–1684, New York: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, E. (2001) “Introduction,” in E. O’Neill (ed.), Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. i–xxxvi. Pasnau, R. (2011) Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato. (1997) Complete Works, ed. J. Cooper, Indianapolis: Hackett. Reid, J. (2012) The Metaphysics of Henry More, London: Springer. Sarasohn, L. (2010) The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy During the Scientific Revolution, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Emily Thomas Sheridan, P. (2016) “Catharine Trotter Cockburn,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Thomas, E. (2013) “Catharine Cockburn on Substantival Space,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 30(3): 195–214. (2015) “Catharine Cockburn on Unthinking Immaterial Substance: Souls, Space, and Related Matters,” Philosophy Compass 10(4): 255–263. (2018) “Anne Conway on the Identity of Creatures over Time,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Helmont, F. M. (1694) Seder Olam. Printed for Sarah Howkins, trans. J. Clark, London. Waithe, M. E. (1991) “Catharine Trotter Cockburn,” in M. E. Waithe (ed.), A History of Women Philosophers, Volume III 1600–1900, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. White, C. (2008) The Legacy of Anne Conway, Albany: State University of New York Press. Woolhouse, R. S. (1983) Locke, Brighton: Harvester Press.

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9 SKEPTICISM Martina Reuter

9.1 Introduction In early modern Europe, the revival of ancient skepticism became a philosophical inspiration as well as an intellectual challenge. Following Richard Popkin’s influential approach, most presentday scholars are less interested in identifying thinkers who can be characterized as Skeptics with a capital “S,” and more interested in tracing how skeptical arguments affected and became intertwined with new developments in philosophical, scientific, religious, and political thought (Popkin 2003; Laursen and Paganini [eds.] 2015). This is the most fruitful approach to skepticism when we want to study its influence on women philosophers. We do not find early modern women who can be exclusively characterized as Skeptics, but we find many women who are deeply engaged with skeptical arguments and who develop ingenious variations, applications, and criticisms of these arguments. This chapter focuses on influences of skepticism in seventeenth-century continental Europe.1 I will discuss the work of three women philosophers: Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645), Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680), and Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689). Gournay edited several posthumous editions of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, a book known for its skeptical tendencies, and she used skeptical ideas in her arguments for the equality of women and men. Elisabeth refers to skepticism in her correspondence with René Descartes (1596–1650) and it remains an open question whether his attempts to convince her did eventually prevent her from becoming a skeptic. Christina’s diverse intellectual interests included skepticism and scholars have investigated to what extent this interest influenced her decisions to abdicate the Swedish throne and convert to Catholicism. My discussion of skeptical influences on Christina’s thought will involve her later intellectual career in Rome and I conclude with some remarks on her views about the fate of the female sex. Before sections on these three women, I briefly present the main features of early modern skepticism, focusing on Montaigne’s account.

9.2  Early Modern Skepticism Ancient skepticism arrived in renaissance and early modern Europe through three major sources: Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Cicero’s discussions of skepticism, particularly in his On Academic Skepticism; and finally the writings of Sextus Empiricus. Sextus’ works are the most detailed philosophical source and his Outlines of Pyrrhonism became deeply influential after its publication in Latin translation in 1562 (Popkin 2003: 17–18). Skepticism was divided into the DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-12

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Academic and Pyrrhonian schools, and these schools were distinguished from the position that was called dogmatism. Academic skepticism derived its name from the Academy founded by Plato and was developed there in the third century B.C. by philosophers such as Arcesilaus and Carneades, who denied the possibility of knowledge following Socrates’ claim that he is wiser than those who think they know, since he knows that he knows nothing (Plato, Apology 21d; Popkin 2003: xvii). Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), one of the Early Modern thinkers most deeply influenced by skepticism, gives an apt summary of the Academic and Pyrrhonian positions in his essay “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Montaigne emphasizes that from the Pyrrhonist point of view, Academic skepticism is ultimately a form of dogmatism since Academic skeptics claim to know that they cannot know (Montaigne 2003: 64). Following Sextus, Montaigne describes how the Pyrrhonians refuse to decide between two opposing arguments—including arguments on whether knowledge is possible or not—since they find as much strength on both sides. Instead, they suspend their judgment (epoché). For the Pyrrhonians, skepticism is not the endpoint, but rather the beginning of their enquiries, which is why they were also called zetetics or enquirers (Laursen and Paganini 2015: 4). As Montaigne puts it: “They use their reason to inquire and to debate, but not to conclude and choose” (Montaigne 2003: 66). Skeptics have always been forced to answer the question of how it is possible to live without asserting any beliefs. Their answers have emphasized that in the absence of truth, one can live in accordance with appearances, as emphasized by the Pyrrhonians, or probabilities, as emphasized by the Academics. Sextus provided a list of rules by which the skeptic can live, including the guidance of nature and the customs and laws of one’s country. The skeptic does not follow these rules because they are true or right, but because he does not know what is true or right, but nonetheless needs to live. In his translation of Academic skepticism into Latin and the Roman context, Cicero introduced the word probabilitas and argued that in the absence of truth, the skeptic can live in accordance with probabilities (Laursen and Paganini 2015: 6). In the early modern context, the skeptic’s emphasis on living in accordance with custom created a connection between skeptical ideas and conservatism. Montaigne combined detailed analyses of the arbitrariness of customs with the rule that in order to achieve inward as well as outward peace, one should live in accordance with the laws and customs of one’s country. In the midst of the religious wars in France, his moderate attitude included a defense of Catholicism, which is one of the motives behind the “Apology for Raymond Sebond.”2 In his studies of early modern skepticism, begun in the 1950s, Popkin influentially argues that skepticism is compatible with fideism, i.e., with the position that in the absence of knowledge based on reason, one must trust religious faith (Popkin 2003: xxi–xxiii; Laursen and Paganini 2015: 5). Montaigne writes that skeptical enquiries make man “much more likely to receive in himself divine knowledge, annihilating his judgment to make more room for faith” (Montaigne 2003: 68). He defended Catholicism against the Protestant Reformations, but he was also a proponent of religious toleration (Popkin 2003: 47; Rosaleny 2009: 57). Not knowing the truth, the Skeptic lives in accordance with custom, including religious custom, but he cannot prove by reason that his religion is the right one and does not have justified grounds to persecute other religions. Montaigne’s skepticism was taken up, developed, and systematized by his friend and disciple, the philosopher and theologian Pierre Charron (1541–1603) in Of Wisdom (1601). Modern scholars often consider Charron’s version of skepticism derivative and philosophically less interesting than Montaigne’s work, but it is important to note that Charron was very widely read in the seventeenth century and that Montaigne’s influence was in no small part mediated through Charron (e.g., Foglia 2019: 17). Among the three women I discuss, Charron’s work seems to have acted as mediator particularly to Queen Christina. 128

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9.3  The Role of Skepticism in Marie de Gournay’s Thought In 1595 Marie le Jars de Gournay published her first edition of Montaigne’s Essays, based on a manuscript revised by Montaigne that she had received from his widow Françoise de la Chassaigne, Madame de Montaigne. It was followed by several other editions, the last one published in 1635. We know that Gournay was deeply familiar with the skeptical arguments Montaigne examined, but it is more difficult to judge the extent to which her own philosophical thought relied on skeptical ideas. In recent scholarship Eileen O’Neill (2007) and Rebecca Wilkin (2008: 177–82) have defended skeptical interpretations of the feminist argument Gournay develops in her Equality of Men and Women (1622/1641), whereas Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green (2009: 129) have emphasized the limits of Montaigne’s skeptical influence and Marguerite Deslauriers (2019) has argued that we should not let Gournay’s skeptical interests overshadow her use of Aristotelian arguments. The scholarly debate on Gournay’s skepticism has mostly focused on her Equality of Men and Women, but in order to evaluate how she interpreted Montaigne’s argumentation, including his skepticism, we must begin by looking at the long “Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne by his Adoptive Daughter, Marie le Jars de Gournay” that she wrote for the 1595 edition of the Essays. The “Preface” was criticized for focusing too much on the person of the editor, and Gournay replaced it with shorter prefaces in later editions (Hillman 1998: 5). The original “Preface” is not Gournay’s last word on how to present the Essays to their reader, but it reflects her early understanding of the book and contains passages that she later republished in other contexts. For our purpose, Gournay’s discussion of judgment is particularly important. “Judgment,” Gournay writes, is the one of all the functions to which men apply themselves in the most diverse measures – the rarest gift that God bestows on them, their perfection. […] Judgment alone raises human beings above the beasts, Socrates above them, God above him. (Gournay 1998: 31) She does not refer to the suspension of judgment, but her mention of Socrates indicates that she understands judgment as an ongoing questioning rather than as the simple affirmation of truth. The fideist context is explicated when she continues by emphasizing: “Judgment alone puts us in true possession of God: this is called adoring him, and not knowing Him” (Gournay 1998: 31–33). Two details are important here. First, that judgment does not result in knowledge claims and second that religious faith, contrasted with knowledge, constitutes the ultimate aim of our judgments. The topic of judgment is taken up again toward the end of the “Preface.” Here Gournay describes in what respect Montaigne’s Essays are superior to even the works by the ancients. She writes: All others, and even the ancients, have as their goal the exercise of intellect; that of judgment is a matter of chance. He, on the contrary, has as his design the fencing that sharpens judgment, and perhaps intellect, the perpetual scourge of common errors. The others teach wisdom; he un-teaches foolishness. (Gournay 1998: 83) Gournay contrasts Montaigne with those ancients, such as the Aristotelians and Stoics, who have the achievement of knowledge as their goal and who would, from a skeptical point of view, be characterized as dogmatists. She does not refer to any ancient Skeptics; instead, Montaigne’s thought is set up as the alternative to dogmatism, ancient as well as modern. The “fencing that sharpens judgment,” the “perpetual scourge” and the un-teaching of foolishness are well-formulated 129

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references to a philosophical method, where the goal is, as Montaigne put it, “to inquire and to debate, but not to conclude and choose” (Montaigne 2003: 66). Gournay very clearly claims this method for herself as well, writing that her “soul, for its part, has no other way of managing but to judge and reason in this way” (Gournay 1998: 85). Finally, before discussing The Equality of Men and Women, we must note that Gournay gives her discussion of judgment a feminist twist straight away in the “Preface.”3 Right after her first discussion of judgment, she writes: Blessed indeed are you, Reader, if you are not of a sex that has been forbidden all possessions, is forbidden liberty, has even been forbidden all the virtues, […] all for the sake of establishing, as its sole virtue and happiness, ignorance and suffering. (Gournay 1998: 35) Gournay continues by pointing out that even if she had the arguments of Carneades, there is no one so much a weakling that he will not rebuke me, to the grave appropriation of the company present, with a smile, a nod, or some jest, which will have the effect of saying, ‘It’s a woman speaking’. (Gournay 1998: 35) This is not only a touching description of academic bullying, but also, I think, an apt analysis of how (in this case, male) power distorts skeptical enquiry. Carneades was one of the leading Academic skeptics4 and Gournay is stating that regardless of the quality of argument, enquiry comes to an end when the opponent has the power not to answer. This criticism of male power is continued in Gournay’s later writings. Right at the beginning of The Equality of Men and Women, first published in 1622, Gournay distances herself from earlier participants in the querelle des femmes, who defend the superiority of either men or women. She writes: Most of those who take up the cause of women, opposing the arrogant preference for themselves that is asserted by men, give them full value for money, for they redirect the preference to them. For my part, I fly all extremes; I am content to make them equal to men, given that nature, too, is as greatly opposed, in this respect, to superiority as to inferiority. (Gournay 2002: 75) Rebecca Wilkin points out that we can read this passage in the light of the skeptic suspension of judgment, the epoché. According to her reading, Gournay claims that to “lean either in favor of men or of women, like boasting that we know everything or nothing, evinces only ‘the inability to go further’, as Montaigne puts it” (Wilkin 2008: 178). Wilkin interestingly identifies how Gournay adopts the Pyrrhonist suspension of judgment as the starting point for her enquiry. This fits well with what she says about judgment in the 1595 “Preface” to Montaigne’s Essays. It is also important to note that equality is defined by Gournay as that which is neither superior nor inferior: equality in itself follows from the suspension of the two extremes. It is a kind of skeptical outcome. The main unresolved scholarly question regarding Gournay’s skepticism concerns the role of her Aristotelian argument in favor of the equality of the sexes. In The Equality of Men and Women, Gournay refers to Aristotelian metaphysics and argues that “the human animal, taken rightly, is neither man nor woman, […] The unique form and distinction of that animal consists only in its rational soul” (Gournay 2002: 86–87). Is Gournay assenting to this Aristotelian position or is it one more argument presented as part of a skeptical enquiry ultimately denying the possibility of 130

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knowledge? Eileen O’Neill defends the latter interpretation. She claims that Gournay’s arguments “are not justifications for her thesis of equality. They are, rather, skeptical arguments meant to show the vanity of reason” (O’Neill 2007: 25). O’Neill reads Gournay as a consistent fideist skeptic. She gives particular weight to a passage at the beginning of The Equality of Men and Women, where Gournay seems to reject the possibility of proving women’s worth by reason and refers to faith as the ultimate ground. Gournay writes: [I]f I judge well, either of the worthiness or of the capacity of women, I do not propose at present to prove it with reasons, since the opinionated might dispute them, nor with examples, since they are too common, but indeed only by the authority of God himself. (Gournay 2002: 76; O’Neill 2007: 22) O’Neill’s fideist interpretation is strengthened by the fact that Gournay’s Aristotelian argument, referring to the form of the human being, is directly followed by Biblical references showing that “God bestowed on [men and women] the same creation and the same honor” (Gournay 2002: 87) and that her essay ends with an appeal to the authority of Genesis (Gournay 2002: 95). Still, O’Neill may be overlooking that Gournay, like most early modern philosophers, was an eclectic thinker. This does not mean that she was inconsistent, but rather that she aims to combine arguments from several of the “great philosophers” (Gournay 2002: 76). Adopting a skeptical method of enquiry does not, for Gournay, mean that all philosophical arguments must be considered equally justified or unjustified. In this sense, she is not a pure Pyrrhonian—but neither, one might add, was Montaigne (Foglia 2019: 10–14). The final word is given to Scripture, but a critical examination of the arguments of great philosophers prepares the way. The interpretation I am suggesting allows us to appreciate Gournay’s philosophical use of Aristotelianism, which Marguerite Deslauriers has analyzed in subtle detail (Deslauriers 2019). It is important to note that Gournay’s Aristotelian argument strengthens her initial skeptically tuned claim that equality follows from the suspension of superiority as well as inferiority (Gournay 2002: 75). Having argued that men and women share the same species form, she adds that “if man is more than woman, woman is more than man” (Gournay 2002: 87).5 Superiority and inferiority must indeed be suspended. We can read Gournay as combining skeptical interrogation with a perceptive evaluation of the full range of the Aristotelian grounds for the equality of women and men. This interpretation does justice to her use of the skeptical method as well as to her use of the Aristotelian argument.

9.4  Skepticism and Fideism in the Thought of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia When studying Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia as a philosopher, our main source is her extensive critical correspondence with Descartes. In her third letter to him, dated July 1, 1643, Elisabeth repeats a question they have been discussing and adds: “I will lose hope of finding certitude in anything in the world if you, who alone have kept me from being a skeptic, do not answer that to which my first reasoning carried me” (Shapiro 2007: 72). Descartes famously used skeptical arguments as the backbone of his methodological doubt, but equally famously, his doubt led him to assert that he himself exists as a thinking thing. In the Discourse on the Method, he concluded that since the proposition ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking. (CSM I: 127) 131

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Elisabeth agrees on the certainty of Descartes’ argument for his existence as a thinking thing, but she remains unconvinced by his attempt to explain the interaction between mind and body. This is where she refers to her fear of becoming a skeptic. In the spring and summer of 1643, Elisabeth and Descartes exchanged five letters on the problem of mind–body interaction. Descartes tries to convince Elisabeth that since the human mind is unable to conceive “very distinctly, and at the same time, the distinction between the soul and the body and their union” (Shapiro 2007: 70), Elisabeth is best served if she trusts her senses in matters concerning mind–body interaction. Elisabeth is not satisfied by this answer and on July 1, in her last letter on this topic, she writes: “I also find that the senses show me that the soul moves the body, but they teach me nothing (no more than do the understanding and the imagination) of the way in which it does so” (Shapiro 2007: 72). We can place Elisabeth’s objection, culminating in her despair over having to remain a skeptic, in the framework of the skeptic’s suspension of judgment. Elisabeth accepts that the testimony of her senses allows her to go on with her life, like the skeptic is able to live in accordance with appearances, but she argues that the question of whether we can actually know that the mind and body interact has remained unanswered. Therefore, she must remain a skeptic and suspend her judgment, if Descartes is not able to give a philosophical answer to the question of mind–body interaction. In addition to Elisabeth’s correspondence with Descartes, we have her correspondence with the Quakers Robert Barclay, Benjamin Furly, and William Penn. These letters were written between 1676 and 1679, toward the end of Elisabeth’s life. She was now abbess at the Lutheran convent at Herford, which she entered in 1660.6 The letters are mainly concerned with religious matters and with the political persecution of the Quakers: Barclay’s father and 40 others are imprisoned in Scotland when the correspondence starts (Shapiro 2007: 187–88). In these letters, Elisabeth repeatedly values faith over knowledge. In her first surviving letter to Barclay, she writes that “whatsoever I have studied and learned heretofore is but dirt in comparison to the true knowledge of Christ” (Shapiro 2007: 188). Some months later she points out that “there are still great mountains in our way, which God in his infinite mercy will remove, in his due time” (Shapiro 2007: 192–93). In March 1677 she writes to Barclay that “knowledge without light is uncertain and words without deeds are vain” (Shapiro 2007: 204). These remarks do not formulate an explicit skeptical fideism, and they can be interpreted in different religious frameworks, but a focus on fideist elements allows us to perceive Elisabeth’s commitment to religion as the outcome of a consistent philosophical development. By the end of her life, she has accepted that Descartes’ philosophy does not save her from becoming a skeptic, at least not when it comes to all metaphysical matters, and she trusts revealed truth over truth achieved by reason (also Reuter 2021). An emphasis on the skeptical and fideist elements in Elisabeth’s thought allows us to discuss the relation between these elements and her religious toleration. This toleration was expressed already in her correspondence with Descartes, and exceeded the mere private fact that she, a Princess strongly allied with the Protestant cause, corresponded with a Catholic philosopher. In a letter dated December 27, 1645, Elisabeth comments on the appointment of a professorship in mathematics and architecture at the University of Leiden. Descartes has recommended Frans van Schooten, Elisabeth has acted in his favor and now she points out that Schooten is considered the strongest candidate “except by a few scrupulous men who fear that he would introduce the errors of his Arminian religion into his lessons on mathematics” (Shapiro 2007: 129). As we see, Elisabeth did not approve of the Arminian doctrine, but she strongly emphasized that it must not be discriminated against and that only stupid people think that religious conviction interferes with the duties of a professor of mathematics. Her toleration was even more dominant during her years as abbess at Herford, were she was, in Carol Pal’s words, “the Calvinist queen of a Lutheran abbey that sheltered Quakers and Labadists” (Pal 2012: 254). As her sister Sophie, Electress of Hannover, 132

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described her in a letter, Elisabeth was “the refuge of all the oppressed” (cited in Pal 2012: 255). Among the oppressed Labadists was Elisabeth’s long-time friend, the philosopher and philologist Anna Maria van Schurman, who stayed at Herford in the early 1670s. Like Montaigne, Elisabeth combined toleration with a critical attitude toward conversion, in particular when this was politically motivated. In 1635, she refused to convert to Catholicism in order to marry King Władysław of Poland, and in 1645, she was very upset over the “folly of one of [her] brothers,” when her brother Edward became a Catholic in order to marry Anne of Gonzaga (Shapiro 2007: 127). The same sentiment is rearticulated and elaborated in her correspondence with her Quaker acquaintances, who were indeed keen on converting her. Elisabeth repeatedly points out that as long as she does not find in herself the “true light” emphasized by the Quakers, she cannot convert to their faith. She is not categorically excluding the possibility of conversion, but as she writes to William Penn in October 1677, “God’s grace must be assistant” (Shapiro 2007: 216). Without such grace, she remains in the religion into which she was born and raised. In her letter to Barclay, where she also points out that “knowledge without light is uncertain,” she elaborates on the relation between her decision not to convert and her toleration of other religious practices. She writes: I cannot submit unto the opinion or practice of any others though I grant that they have more light than myself. The Countess of Conoway does well to go on the way she thinks best, but I should not do well to follow her, unless I had the same conviction. Neither did it ever enter into my thoughts so to do. I love all that love God, and am ready to embrace all that is undoubtedly good. I am far from judging them or the rest. (Shapiro 2007: 204) Elisabeth does not condemn Anne Conway’s conversion to Quakerism, 7 quite the contrary, but she emphasizes that conversion must be grounded in personal faith. She herself had not experienced the inner light that would have justified becoming a Quaker. Elisabeth preserves aspects of her skeptical spirit in the context of her religious engagement at Herford. At this point, her skepticism is predominantly fideist: certainty depends on personal faith and in the absence of such certainty, one must withhold one’s judgment.

9.5  Influences of Skepticism in the Thought of Queen Christina Queen Christina abdicated the Swedish throne in June 1654, converted to Catholicism at Innsbruck in November 1655, and arrived in Rome in late December of the same year. When she abdicated, she remained sovereign queen in the sense that she was subject to no other monarch (Fogelberg Rota 2008: 16). This fact, in combination with the propaganda value that her conversion gave the Catholic church, granted her an exceptional position in Rome, where she was second to no one but the pope. Christina used her position for both political and intellectual ends, and her major intellectual enterprise was the founding of the Accademia Reale (Royal Academy) in Rome. Among scholars and students of early modern philosophy, Christina is mainly known from the letters on the love of God and the highest good that Descartes wrote to her (CSMK: 324–26, 369–70) and for the fatal consequences of his visit to her court in Stockholm, where he died in early February 1650. Christina is sometimes compared with Elisabeth of Bohemia and found to be the philosophically less interesting of the two. This is partly due to the fact that Christina did not leave an account of her philosophical views comparable to Elisabeth’s correspondence with Descartes. Her life was in many respects one of action rather than philosophical contemplation, but this does not mean that we cannot trace any philosophical ideas from the sources we have. 133

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These sources make it clear that Christina’s broad intellectual interests embraced skepticism. We know that her library in Rome held a Greek-Latin edition of Sextus Empiricus’ collected works (Åkerman 2013: 182n395) and Isaac Vossius, who acted as her librarian in Stockholm, testifies that she had some familiarity with Sextus’ thought already during her discussions with Descartes (Åkerman 1991: 49n9). The French intellectuals with skeptical sympathies present in Stockholm included Gabriel Naudé, a physician. Naudé studied medicine in Paris and Padua; he was acquainted with Pierre Gassendi and an admirer of Montaigne and Charron. During his time in Stockholm, he was given access to Christina’s library and participated in learned discourses organized by the queen (Stolpe 1959a: 154–57). The Swedish literary scholar Sven Stolpe has discussed how Christina’s interest in skepticism may have affected her decision to abdicate the throne and convert to Catholicism. He emphasizes that one should not seek for a contradiction between the skeptical and the Catholic influences at Christina’s court (Stolpe 1959a: 144). The latter were mediated in particular by two Italian Jesuits, Paolo Casati, and Francesco Malines, who were mathematicians and represented a Catholicism seeking to reconcile reason and faith. Stolpe’s interpretation places Christina’s skeptical interests in a fideist framework (Stolpe 1959a: 174). Originally, she seems to have held the same critical attitude toward religious conversion that we find expressed by Montaigne and Elisabeth. In a letter to her relative by marriage, Frederick II, Count of Hesse-Eschwege, upon the (false) rumor about his intentions to convert to Catholicism, she strongly dissuades him. In words resembling Elisabeth’s condemnation of her brother’s conversion, Christina emphasizes that the convert is hated by those he leaves and despised by those he joins (Christina 2006: 104; Shapiro 2007: 127). Interestingly, in this letter, Christina refers to herself as holding a third position, distinct from both of the quarreling churches. She claims to have found truth by rejecting the positions of both parties as false (Christina 2006: 103). We do not know why Christina eventually changed her mind and decided to abdicate and convert, but there seems to be a close relation between the two decisions. She longed for an intellectual freedom that was denied her as reigning Lutheran Queen. Christina had a lifelong interest in learned academies as a venue for intellectual discourse. Soon after her arrival in Rome, she hosted her first academic meetings, though the Accademia Reale was not formally constituted before 1674. By this time Christina had settled in Palazzo Riario (now Corsini) and she took active part in writing the statutes of the academy.8 As argued by Stefano Fogelberg Rota, Neo-Platonist sentiments were strong throughout the activities at the Accademia Reale, not least in the emphasis on music, which was seen as a true and universal form of art. According to the statutes, all sessions of the academy were to begin and end with a musical composition (Fogelberg Rota 2008: 84). The statutes also dictated that each lecture at the academy should be followed by two chosen members debating pro and contra a given problem. From surviving notes of the Accademia Reale, we know that the structure of arguing for and against a proposition was put into practice and that the positions of the ancient philosophical schools were discussed. This structure of debate was commonplace in the academies of the time and one of the aims was to develop rhetorical skills by defending positions that seem impossible (Fogelberg Rota 2008: 84–85). Intertwined with the rhetorical framework, we find a skeptical influence: the arguments for and against were supposed to give equal weight to two opposing positions. At the first recorded session of the academy, the outcome of the discussion was the defense of the true philosophy; in this context, the Catholic faith. The setting included many intellectual elements, but we can detect a fideist aspiration to defend faith by showing that neither Stoicism nor Epicureanism holds the truth.9 Among the documents related to Accademia Reale, we find an explicit refutation of skepticism. It is developed in a speech by Cardinal Francesco Albizzi, where he presents Christina’s academy as a follower of Plato’s original academy, as it existed before its skeptical turn.10 Albizzi’s alternative to skepticism is, as Fogelberg Rota has argued, primarily based on Christian Neo-Platonism and 134

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Neo-Stoicism (Fogelberg Rota 2008: 95–106; Fogelberg Rota 2012). In his refutation of skepticism, Albizzi refers to “true reason” [rettisima raggione].11 For our purposes, it is interesting to note that this true reason is in itself divine, not human. Albizzi’s refutation of skepticism is not what the skeptic would call a dogmatic refutation, where skeptical arguments are refuted by knowledge claims based on human reason and experience. Instead, we have a picture of divine light according to which human understanding and virtue are ultimately dependent on divine inspiration. Albizzi’s position is not that of a fideist skeptic—he is refuting rather than using skeptical arguments—but it is a position compatible with fideism. If the activities of the Accademia Reale give a picture of Christina’s intellectual interests, the existing collection of her maxims, Les Sentiments Héroïques, give more hints about her own views, even if due to their aphoristic character, they are not full philosophical expositions.12 She was inspired by François de La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims and made detailed notes in her copy of his book.13 Some of Rochefoucauld’s maxims traveled into her collections and others were given interesting reinterpretations. Rochefoucauld claims that “It is as easy to deceive ourselves without noticing it, as it is hard to deceive other people without their noticing it” (Rochefoucauld 2007: 35). Christina turns the claim around and her maxim 102 states that “It is easier to deceive others than ourselves about ourselves” (Christina 1959: 49).14 She emphasizes the importance of self-knowledge and conscience, but toward the end of the collection, we find claims that are closer to Rochefoucauld’s pessimistic views. These are also the maxims that demonstrate the strongest skeptical influences. In maxim 474, Christina refers to the Oracle of Delphi and its saying “know thyself ” as a source of misery. Christina agrees that self-knowledge is a necessary basis for wisdom, but emphasizes that due to our faults, this knowledge makes us unhappy. She writes that we can “as little avoid knowing ourselves as being unhappy when we do so” (Christina 1959: 143). The next maxim takes one step further and denies the very possibility of self-knowledge. Christina writes: Man is an abyss of miseries and ignorance, and he knows neither his body nor his soul. Still, he knows that he is a true nothing, covered with a shred of life. This knowledge combined with all his philosophy can neither change him nor set him right. (Christina 1959: 143–45) In the following maxims Christina emphasizes that any science is vain, insofar as it does not give us ease in life and death (maxim 476), and that the main advantage of study and science is that we “never become bored and never admire anything” (Christina 1959: 145; emphasis in the original). In true fideist fashion, these skeptical reflections on the value and the possibility of knowledge give way to faith. In maxim 495 Christina writes that “we can comfort ourselves concerning our ignorance with the conviction that those who pretend they have penetrated the innermost [core of nature], whatever they may claim, do not know more than we do” (Christina 1959: 149). The penultimate maxim invites the reader “from this moment,” to “stay alone with God, because he alone is sufficient for us to live and die happy” (Christina 1959: 151). I conclude my discussion of Christina’s maxims by highlighting some interesting changes in her views on the female sex, which come to light when we compare two existing versions of the manuscript for Les Sentiments Héroïques.15 The discussion of women begins with maxim 356, where Christina asserts the legitimacy of Salic law, which excludes women from the succession to the throne (Christina 1959: 107). The maxim remains unaltered by Christina’s revisions, but the notes she has added recontextualize it with a much stronger emphasis on social circumstances. Whereas the original manuscript emphasizes that the female sex is defective by nature, her reformulation claims that: “The female sex is a terrible and incorrigible defect, a great turmoil from which it is almost impossible to escape with honor” (Christina 1959: 109). This claim is followed by maxims 135

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where Christina laments that princes are ruined by their miserable educations, and her next additions about the condition of the female sex make it clear that she considers women victims of their circumstances rather than their nature. She has crossed out a maxim where she blames women for being condemned to either marriage or the convent. In the original version, she exclaims: “What a weakness to let oneself be subdued to such a tough and tyrannical law!” (Christina 1959: 111). The new version of this maxim radically changes the burden of guilt. Christina writes: What crime has the female sex committed in order to be condemned to the hard necessity of spending their lives as prisoners or slaves? I call the nuns prisoners and the married women slaves. (Christina 1959: 111) Finally, the original maxim 371 holds that: Worldly preoccupations and education are—to the favor of men—the only difference supposed to exist between the two sexes. However, every reasonable being is capable of good as well as evil, since the soul has no sex. (Christina 1959: 111) In her marginalia, Christina has crossed out the first sentence and reformulated a maxim consisting of only the second sentence. We do not know why. Her reasons may be stylistic—a maxim focusing on the claim that the soul has no sex is more striking—but we must also note that the original version claims that worldly preoccupations and education are “the only difference supposed to exist between the two sexes” (Christina 1959: 111; my emphasis). Christina is not claiming that this is her opinion. Her crossing it out might indicate that she did still not want to take a final stand on whether sexual difference is innate or due to circumstances, despite her strengthened emphasis on the latter. There is no direct connection between Christina’s remarks on the female sex and the maxims that show skeptical influences, but her remarks on women show that she was aware of the arguments presented by contemporaries who defended the intellectual and moral capacities of women.16 This includes an awareness of the critique of custom developed by, among others, Marie de Gournay. In the case of Gournay, her criticism of custom was influenced by the skepticism Montaigne developed in his Essays. We do not know Christina’s sources—the claim that the soul or mind has no sex was widespread—but her remarks on the female sex place her in the same seventeenth-century French context as Gournay, despite the fact that Christina took the opposite position on Salic law (Gournay 2002: 84, 86).

9.6 Conclusions Despite many differences in how Gournay, Elisabeth, and Christina use skeptical ideas, they all combine skepticism with other philosophical influences. In the cases of Gournay and Christina, these influences were mainly drawn from the different schools of ancient philosophy. In the case of Elisabeth, skepticism is intertwined with a critical interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy. Many scholars have emphasized that Elisabeth did not merely criticize Descartes: she developed her own philosophical position, which is characterized by its rejection of his substance dualism (Shapiro 1999; Tollefsen 1999; Janssen-Lauret 2018; Alanen 2021). My emphasis on the skeptical elements in Elisabeth’s thought is not intended to question that she put serious philosophical effort into developing a position of her own.17 When we look at Elisabeth’s philosophical and religious correspondence as a whole, however, we find no indication that she would have reached a philosophical 136

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position that put her skepticism to rest for good. Toward the end of her life, she found ultimate certainty in religion, not in philosophy. Gournay, Elisabeth, and Christina share a fideist version of skepticism. This means that, for them, there is no necessary connection between skepticism and atheism. In this respect, they differ from their Anglophone contemporary Mary Astell, whose criticisms of skepticism were motivated by her worries about atheism (Broad 2019). Fideism made skepticism an acceptable attitude, which allowed Gournay, Elisabeth, and Christina to question different forms of dogmatism. Gournay questioned the customs and received opinions that degraded women. Elisabeth suspended her judgment concerning Descartes’ attempt to explain mind–body interaction and maintained a lifelong questioning of religious dogmatism. Christina questioned religious dogmatism, she provided for intellectual conversations that examined the pros and cons of the positions of the ancient philosophical schools, and she wrote maxims questioning the possibility of self-knowledge. None of the three women was a Skeptic to the exclusion of other intellectual interests, but they all made innovative use of skeptical arguments.18

Notes 1 This focus means that I do not discuss important refutations of skepticism by Anglophone philosophers such as Mary Astell and Mary Shepherd. See the conclusions and the list of further reading for references to works on these authors. 2 Raymond Sebond was a Roman Catholic theologian, whose treatise Theologia naturalis (1434–1436) Montaigne had translated into French. 3 When using the term “feminist” in this historical context, I mean a defense of women accompanied by an explicit criticism of male power. Gournay later revised and republished these passages in her essay The Ladies’ Complaint (1641); see Gournay (2002: 101–02). 4 One should not put too much emphasis on the fact that Gournay refers to an Academic skeptic even if her view seems to be closer to the Pyrrhonist conception of ongoing interrogation. Vicente Raga Rosaleny has shown that Montaigne does the very same thing: he refers to Cicero’s account of Academic skepticism in contexts that are clearly Pyrrhonist in spirit, see Rosaleny (2009: 69). 5 For an analysis of the exact Aristotelian context of this claim, see Deslauriers (2019: 289–94). 6 On Elisabeth’s time at Herford, see Shapiro (2007: 14–16); and Pal (2012: 254–65). 7 On the connections between Elisabeth and Anne Conway, see Hutton (2021). 8 The statutes exist in 18 drafts, several in Christina’s own hand; see Fogelberg Rota (2008: 76). 9 Tornata dell’Accademia Reale, f. 7 v., cited from Fogelberg Rota (2008: 85). 10 See Discorso accademico per l’apertura della Regia Accademia della Maestà di Svezia, Urb.lat. 1692, 45r–52r; the manuscript has been digitalized. The dating of the manuscript is contested. The catalogue of the Vatican Library dates it 1656, but Marie-Louise Rodén (2005) and Fogelberg Rota (2008: 344n148) have argued that it is most likely an inaugural speech at Accademia Reale from the fall of 1674. On the manuscript, see also Åkerman (1991: 228–29). 11 Discorso accademico f. 48 r., cited from Fogelberg Rota (2008: 101). 12 These maxims are written in French; they are difficult to date, but were copied by her secretary and edited by Christina herself in the 1680s (Stolpe 1959b: 15–16). The maxims exist in several manuscripts and I will here use Sven Stolpe’s published edition, Les Sentiments Héroïques (Christina 1959). 13 The copy is held by the Swedish National Archives, Azzolino Collection 38. 14 All translations of Christina’s maxims are by Tuomas Parsio and the chapter author. 15 Stolpe’s edition is based on a copy in the hand of Christina’s secretary, in which Christina has crossed out and added numerous passages. These changes remain visible in the published edition. 16 See Marguerite Deslauriers’ chapter in this volume. 17 Neither did Elisabeth’s skeptical attitude rule out an interest in scientific knowledge. Like many early modern philosophers, Elisabeth combined her awareness of the skeptical challenge with a lifelong interest in the new natural sciences, with a particular emphasis on geometry and astronomy; see Ebbersmeyer 2021. 18 I thank Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro for inviting me to contribute with a chapter on skepticism. Detlefsen, Marguerite Deslauriers, Tuomas Parsio, and Kate Sotejeff-Wilson have made excellent comments on earlier drafts.

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References Åkerman, S. (1991) Queen Christina of Sweden and her Circle: The Transformation of a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Libertine, Leiden: Brill. (2013) Fenixelden: Drottning Kristina som Alkemist [The Fire of Fenix: Queen Christina as Alchemist], Möklinta: Gidlunds förlag. Alanen, L. (2021) “The Soul’s Extension: Elisabeth’s Solution to Descartes’s Mind-Body Problem,” in S. Ebbersmeyer and S. Hutton (eds.), Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Her Historical Context, Cham: Springer. Broad, J. (2019) “Mary Astell’s Critique of Pierre Bayle: Atheism and Intellectual Integrity in the Pensées (1682),” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27(4): 806–23. Broad, J. and K. Green. (2009) A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Christina, Queen of Sweden. (1959) Maximer. Les Sentiments Héroïques, French-Swedish edition, ed. and trans. S. Stolpe, Stockholm: Bonniers. (2006) Brev och skrifter [Letters and Writings], ed. M.-L. Rodén, trans. C. Huldt and V. Melander, Stockholm: Atlantis. Descartes, R. (1985) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Cited as CSM followed by volume number]. (1991) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Cited as CSMK]. Deslauriers, M. (2019) “Marie de Gournay and Aristotle on the Unity of the Sexes,” in E. O’Neill and M. P. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Cham: Springer. Discorso accademico per l’apertura della Regia Accademia della Maestà di Svezia, Urb.lat. 1692, 45r–52r, Vatican Library. Available at: http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/console?service=shortDetail&id=186. Ebbersmeyer, S. (2021) “Elisabeth of Bohemia and the Sciences: the Case of Astronomy,” in S. Ebbersmeyer and S. Hutton (eds.), Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Her Historical Context, Cham: Springer. Fogelberg Rota, S. (2008) Poesins Drottning: Christina av Sverige och de Italienska Akademierna [The Queen of Poetry: Christina of Sweden and the Italian Academies], Lund: Nordic Academic Press. (2012) “Queen Christina’s Heroic Virtue and its Religious Implications,” Early Modern Culture Online 3(1): 1–13. Foglia, M. (2019) “Michel de Montaigne,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gournay, M. Le Jars de. (1998) Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne by his Adoptive Daughter, Marie le Jars de Gournay, French-English edition, trans. R. Hillman and C. Quesnel, Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. (2002) Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works, ed. and trans. R. Hillman and C. Quesnel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hillman, R. (1998) “Introduction,” in R. Hillman (ed.), Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne by his Adoptive Daughter, Marie le Jars de Gournay, trans. R. Hillman and C. Quesnel, Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. Hutton, S. (2021) “Princess Elisabeth and Anne Conway (1631–1679): The Interconnected Circles of Two Philosophical Women,” in S. Ebbersmeyer and S. Hutton (eds.), Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Her Historical Context, Cham: Springer. Janssen-Lauret, F. (2018) “Elisabeth of Bohemia as a Naturalistic Dualist,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laursen, J. C. and G. Paganini. (2015) “Introduction,” in J. C. Laursen and G. Paganini (eds.), Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Montaigne, M. de. (2003) Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. R. Ariew and M. Grene, Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. O’Neill, E. (2007) “Justifying the Inclusion of Women in Our Histories of Philosophy: The Case of Marie de Gournay,” in L. M. Alcoff and E. F. Kittay (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell. Pal, C. (2012) Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato (1984) The Apology, in The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1, trans. R. Allen, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

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Skepticism Popkin, R. (2003) The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reuter, M. (2021) “Elisabeth on Free Will, Preordination, and Philosophical Doubt,” in S. Ebbersmeyer and S. Hutton (eds.), Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Her Historical Context, Cham: Springer. Rochefoucauld, F. La. (2007) Collected Maxims and other Reflections, French-English edition, ed. and trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore, and F. Giguère. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodén, M.-L. (2005) “L’anello mancante. Il discorso de apertura della Regia Accademia del cardinale Francesco Albizzi,” in D. Poli (ed.), Christina di Svezia e la cultura delle accademie, Rome: Editrice “il calamo.” Rosaleny, V. R. (2009) “The Current Debate about Montaigne’s Skepticism,” in J. Neto, G. Paganini and J. Laursen (eds.), Skepticism in the Modern Age: Building on the Work of Richard Popkin, Leiden: Brill. Shapiro, L. (1999) “Princess Elizabeth and Descartes: The Union of Soul and Body and the Practice of Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (3): 503–20. (2007) “Volume Editor’s Introduction,” in L. Shapiro (ed.), The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Stolpe, S. (1959a) Från Stoicism till Mystik: Studier i Drottning Kristinas Maximer [From Stoicism to Mysticism: Studies of Queen Christina’s Maxims], Stockholm: Bonniers. (1959b) “Inledning” [Introduction], in Queen Christina of Sweden Maximer. Les Sentiments Héroïques, French-Swedish edition, ed. and trans. S. Stolpe, Stockholm: Bonniers. Tollefsen, D. (1999) “Princess Elisabeth and the Problem of Mind-Body Interaction,” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 14(3): 59–77. Tornata dell’Accademia Reale, Ott. Lat. 1744, Vatican Library. Wilkin, R. M. (2008) Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France, London & New York: Routledge.

Further reading Broad, J. (2019) “Mary Astell’s Critique of Pierre Bayle: Atheism and Intellectual Integrity in the Pensées (1682),” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27(4): 806–23. (A detailed discussion of Astell’s critique of Bayle’s skepticism, and of its philosophical context.) Lagerlund, H. (2020) Skepticism in Philosophy: A Comprehensive, Historical Introduction, New York: Routledge. (This recent overview of the history of skepticism includes a discussion of Mary Shepherd’s anti-skepticism.) O’Neill, E. (2007) “Justifying the Inclusion of Women in Our Histories of Philosophy: The Case of Marie de Gournay,” in L. Alcoff and E. Kittay (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell. (O’Neill presents detailed analytical reconstructions of Gournay’s skeptical arguments.) Wilkin, R. (2008) Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France, London: Routledge. (The book discusses the role of skepticism in renaissance discourses on women.)

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10 WAYS OF KNOWING David Cunning

Women philosophers of the early modern period offer a wide range of accounts of the nature and acquisition of knowledge. This paper will consider the very different accounts that appear in the work of Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, and Mary Shepherd. Cavendish argues that minds come to have knowledge via two routes – sensory perception and reason. There is a difference between these two faculties of knowledge, for Cavendish, but her through-going materialism entails that this is a difference in degree and not in kind. Astell posits a more rigid distinction between sensory perception and reason and argues that the former is relatively speaking crude and deficient. By contrast, reason traffics in ideas that are wholly non-sensory and allow for a level of certainty that counts as knowledge in the strict sense. Shepherd locates a position that lies in between that of Cavendish and Astell. Shepherd argues that we know things through a non-sensory faculty of reason: for example, that changes in a body cannot occur without a cause, and that things cannot be annihilated or come from nothing. She concludes that we have a faculty of sensation that provides a kind of knowledge as well – and a kind that reason cannot secure on its own.

10.1  Margaret Cavendish Cavendish posits two ways of knowing, at least for human beings. The first is knowledge via sensory perception; the second is knowledge via reason. For Cavendish, a being has a sensory perception when its sense organs have an interaction with an external body and form an image of that body. Here Cavendish is working squarely in line with the tradition in which she is writing. Her fellow materialists Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi subscribed to a similar view, and even philosophers with an immaterialist conception of mind embraced a close variant of it.1 The view is indeed common-sensical: what makes an experience a sensory perception of an object (as opposed to a hallucination) is the involvement of the object and a sensory image that depicts it (as opposed to something else). But Cavendish is also a critic of the tradition as well. Where her contemporaries suppose that external bodies press on our sense organs and impose new motions on them, Cavendish argues that the bodies that compose a sense organ are active and pattern images of external bodies by way of their own self-motion. She writes, the motions of the sentient in the act of perception, do figure out or imitate the motions of the object, so that the object is but as a copy that is figured out, or imitated by the sentient, 140

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-13

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which is the chief agent in all transforming and perceptive actions that are made by way of patterning or imitation.2 Here Cavendish is taking issue in particular with the view of Hobbes, who argues that “the cause of sense or sensitive perception is the external body or Object, which presses the Organ proper to each Sense” (Hobbes 1994: I.i.4, 6).3 This is also similar to the language that we find later in Hume – that external objects impress themselves onto our sense organs and make us form sensory images of them (Hume 1978: I.i.1, 1–7). Cavendish disagrees and argues that in sensory perception a sense organ actively patterns an image of the external body that it perceives: to pattern out, is nothing else but to imitate, and to make a figure in its own substance or parts of Matter like another figure….4 For Cavendish, sensory perception is a matter of a sense organ actively forming a pattern or image of the external bodies that it perceives. One reason she thinks that sensory images are not formed by a process of stamping is that, if they were, the bodies that are the target of such stamping would undergo trauma and damage. But they do not.5 Another reason that Cavendish offers is that motion is never transferred from one body to another, but motion would be transferred to sense organs if sense perception were as Hobbes says it is. A tenet of the Cavendish system is that motion is inseparable from the body that has it: In my opinion, there can be no abstraction made of motion from body, neither really, nor in the manner of our conception, for how can I conceive that which is not, nor cannot be in nature, that is, to conceive motion without body? Wherefore Motion is but one thing with body, without any separation or abstraction soever. (PL: 97; see also 445) Cavendish subscribes to the view that if a body ever has motion, it has always had that motion, and its motion is inseparable from it. On that view, a body might transfer a chunk of itself to a second body, and thereby transfer the motion that is inseparable from that chunk, but motion can never be transferred on its own (PL: 82). Cavendish would add that in most cases in which a body appears to add new motion to a second body, the second body does not become larger or more substantive, and so the “new” motions of the second body are motions that it had all along. Here we might think for example of the rapidly moving bodies inside a balloon that appears to be stationary, or the bodies in the deep of a pond that appears to be still.6 Cavendish accordingly says that in sense perception (and other apparent cases of motion-transfer) bodies are only occasional causes: I say that some things may be Occasional causes of other things, but not the Prime or Principal causes…. (PL: 79) one part of animate or self-moving Matter, may without Translation move, or rather occasion other parts to move…. (PL: 420) The motion of a body is ipso facto the self-motion of that body, according to Cavendish (PPO: 96). An occasional cause can redirect motions that are had by the bodies that compose a sense organ, for example, but the motion of the latter bodies is self-motion.7 141

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Cavendish does say a bit more to flesh out the details of sense perception. She writes for example that we are able to perceive objects at a distance because the light from those objects reaches our eyes: Neither is the influence of the Stars performed beyond a certain distance, that is, such a distance as is beyond sight or their natural power to work; for if their light comes to our Eyes, I know no reason against it, but their effects may come to our bodies. (PL: 301–302) She adds in the very next sentence that, in the same vein, a disease can only infect a body if it comes into contact with that body.8 Cavendish does not suppose that objects (like distant stars) transmit pieces of themselves to our sense organs and to the sense organs of all who perceive them.9 Just like bodies would lose much of their substance if all of the motion that they occasioned was due to a literal transfer (of motion and matter), distant bodies would deteriorate quickly if they sent pieces of themselves to all who perceive them. An object is perceived at a distance – and almost all objects are at a distance – when the light and air surrounding the object pattern an image of it that reaches our sense organs via additional patterning still.10 Not via stamping and pressing, but patterning (PL: 182–83). We perceive things at a distance and through barriers, but not because the matter of a distant body travels through the plenum and stamps an image of itself on our sense organs. The process is more along the lines of Newton’s Cradle.11 Cavendish holds that “sensitive motions… are… copies of the Original objects”12 and that “the Optick Corporeal Motions, in Waking-actions… move, according to the outward Object” (PPO: 113). Nowhere in her corpus does she offer an argument for the view that our sense organs accurately copy images of external objects. She states the view factively as though it is at the level of a philosophical presupposition and is not something to be demonstrated through presuppositions that are taken to be more basic. Nor does Cavendish expend any time or effort into the refutation of skeptical arguments that were popular in her time and that she no doubt knew.13 She is well aware of the contention that because dream experience and waking experience are in some cases indistinguishable, there is no way for us to be certain that a sense perception is veridical in any given circumstance: “many times, Dreams will be as exact as if a Man was awake, and the Objects before him….”14 She nowhere attempts to refute the contention, however. Nor does she ever talk about why she does not attempt to refute the contention. One possible explanation for her silence is her view that there is urgent work for philosophers and scientists to do if the external world does turn out to exist as we sense it and that there is little to be gained (and much to be lost) if we focus our energies instead on a proof to that effect. She writes for example that the complete understanding of a disease is not something that any individual scientist can achieve in a single lifetime – even if they get started right away, and even if that one disease is all that they study – and yet there are many diseases and conditions.15 She adds that there are none more intemperate than Philosophers; …So that this kind of Study kils all the Industrious Inventions that are beneficial and Easy for the Life of Man, and makes one fit onely to dye, and not to live. (WO: 161) Cavendish supposes that there is no demonstration of the existence of the external world, and accordingly it is not a demonstration that she pursues.

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Cavendish holds that in sense perception a sense organ copies or patterns images of external objects. We then form ideas of the objects that are copies of those images. She says that our ideas “move… with the sense,” offering as proof (and explication) that all the several Sensitive perceptions of the Sensitive Organs, (as all the several Sights, Sounds, Scents, Tasts, and Touches) are [accompanied by] thoughts of the same. (GNP: 57) She also speaks in favor of the doctrine that “there is nothing in the understanding, that is not [f ]irst in the senses,” identifying it as “more probable” (WO: 20–21) than its opposite. There are other passages however in which she speaks of our ability to know things that the senses are not in a position to detect. For example, she supposes that we are able to know that it is impossible for motion to exist in separation from the body that has it and hence that motion is never transferred from one body to another. Our senses might appear to suggest the contrary, but Cavendish is loud and clear: “Neither doth it agree with my reason, that one body can give or transfer motion into another body” (PL: 97). There are other things that she takes to disagree with reason as well – for example, she insists that immaterial spirits cannot interact with bodies or “have the effects of a body” (PL: 197); that immaterial motion is impossible (GNP: 2; PL: 77); and that nothingness has no properties.16 Cavendish indeed supposes that we have a faculty of reason by which to uncover what the senses do not reach: Truly our reason does many times perceive that which our senses cannot; and some things our senses cannot perceive until reason informs them. (OEP: 252) There is a Double Perception in Nature, the Rational Perception, and the Sensitive. The Rational is more subtil and penetrating than the Sensitive; also, it is more generally perceptive than the Sensitive; also, it is a more agil Perception than the Sensitive. (GNP: 9) Cavendish posits a distinction between cognition via sensation and cognition via reason. Given her unmitigated materialism, however, the distinction is a more a matter of degree than a matter of kind.17 According to a prominent view of her era (and of the Platonic the tradition that led up to it), reason traffics in immaterial ideas that admit of no sensory content and that yield knowledge that is wholly indefeasible. Descartes for example writes that where imagistic ideas import the imprecision of the sensory perceptions from which they arise, acts of “purely mental scrutiny” are very different: “if there is any certainty to be had, …it occurs in the clear perceptions of the intellect and nowhere else.”18 Here Descartes has in mind the abstract subject-matter of mathematics and geometry, and also metaphysical axioms whose scope outstrips the testimony of the senses – for example the axiom that nothingness has no properties.19 Cavendish grants that we cognize truths of geometry and axioms of metaphysics, but her materialism posits that our grasp of these is not different in kind from our grasp of truths that are known through the senses. 20 She supposes that all ideas are material images of their objects: I take an Idea to be the picture of some object…. (OEP: 74)

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[M]y opinion is, that figures are as inherent to the minde, as thoughts; And who can have an unfigurative thought, for the minde cannot have thoughts, but upon some matter, and there is no matter but must have some figure, for who can think of nothing…. (PPO: 119) Here Cavendish is articulating a view on the kinds of things that we can think, and she is also articulating on view on the kinds of things are beyond us. We cannot have an idea of God, or an idea of a finite immaterial soul, or ideas of the immaterial entities that are sometimes posited in scientific explanations, and so we should not (and indeed cannot) speak of these.21 In the more famous (but later) tradition of Locke and Hume, Cavendish is arguing that finite minds have thrown good money after bad in the history of philosophical and scientific inquiry and that we benefit from first exploring the limits of our tether. Cavendish subscribes to the view that ideas are imagistic pictures, and she applies the view to ideas that traditionally have been taken to be abstract and non-figurative. The most abstract that we can get is to think a particular image that is perhaps more hazy and that we employ to represent more broadly: Tis true, the minde may be in a maze, and so have no fixt thought of any particular thing; yet that amaze hath a figurative ground, although not subscribed; as for example, my eyes may see the sea, or air, yet not the compasse, and so the earth, or heavens; so likewise my eye may see a long pole, yet not the two ends, these are but the parts of these figures, but I see not the circumference to the uttermost extention…. (PPO: 119) 22 Ideas are pictures in the case of all subjects of inquiry, with a resultant loss of certainty and precision that Cavendish appears to welcome. She writes, this is to be observed, That all rational perceptions or cogitations, are not so perspicuous and clear as if they were Mathematical Demonstrations, but there is some obscurity, more or less in them, at least they are not so well perceivable without comparing several figures together, which proves, they are not made by an individable, immaterial Spirit, but by dividable corporeal parts. (PL: 179) Here Cavendish again is referencing a tradition that takes non-sensory mathematical thinking to be the height of cognition, and she is saying that our thinking is never in fact like that – not even our thoughts about math.23 She holds that reason is a kind of “refined imagination”24 that provides us with a high level of certainty in some cases but that is also somewhat hazy and indefinite in others. That is presumably why Cavendish is more circumspect about the deliverances of reason than about the deliverances of sense. Kant famously argues over a hundred years later that reason left to its own devices – and without the aid of sensory input – is highly speculative and no more than a process of “random groping” (Kant 1929: 21). Cavendish does not go nearly that far, but she also disagrees with Descartes, Spinoza, and others who take pure reason to be an infallible tracker of truth. Reason is not pure, Cavendish would say, and it is also speculative. She writes, The truth is, our exterior Senses can go no further than the exterior figures of Creatures, and their exterior actions: but our Reason may pierce deeper, and consider their inherent natures, and interior actions. And although it do sometimes erre, (for there can be no perfect 144

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or universal knowledg in a finite Part concerning the Infinite actions of Nature) yet it may also probably guess at them, and may chance to hit the Truth. (OEP: 94) The language here is very striking. It is not at all the language that we find in the work of her rationalist contemporaries, and as we will see it is not the language that we find in work of Astell and Shepherd. Cavendish uses tempered language to describe the faculty of reason itself, and she qualifies her level of confidence in the particular results that it secures as well. She does this even with respect to some of the very linchpins of her system – identifying as merely probable the tenet that immaterials cannot act on materials (PL: 207) and the tenet that motion in inseparable from the body that has it (PL: 445). Cavendish is in a funny position with respect to axioms or principles that are beyond the scope of the senses but that do not appear to be made up. She finds them to be wholly obvious, and so there is no way that they are not going to appear in her reasonings about the nature of reality, but at the same time, she recognizes that they are speculative and are to be taken with a grain of salt. Reason may “probably guess,” she says, “and may chance to hit the Truth,” but it does bear the kind of fruit that her opponents keep trying to extract from it. To her credit, Cavendish is recognizing that there are results that might be utterly evident to us and that cannot help but guide our thinking, but that we also have no reason to believe are true. We find a very different approach to questions of knowledge in the work of Astell and Shepherd.

10.2  Mary Astell Astell and Cavendish could hardly be more different in their epistemology. Unlike Cavendish, Astell has no reservations about touting the extent and scope of our rational faculties. We also have cognitions that fall short of knowledge, Astell allows, but as a rule these are cognitions that arise through sensation. Strictly speaking, we do not have knowledge of sensory objects, but such objects do not matter, Astell supposes, and we are better off without them. A driving motivation in the epistemology of Cavendish is to highlight the imagistic nature of all thinking and to emphasize the speculation and fallibility that are the mark of reason in particular. Astell would agree that what Cavendish identifies as our rational faculties are not particularly exalted, but she would add contra Cavendish (and Gassendi and Hobbes) that they are not properly identifiable as rational faculties. A driving motivation in the epistemology of Astell is to highlight the workings of a non-imagistic faculty of reason that is able to yield results that are incontrovertible. Astell then appeals to these workings in the service of an argument for the equality of women and men. She allows that men and women differ in terms of their embodiment and their embodied experience – for example with respect to their biology and with respect to the range of embodied activities that are available to women – but according to Astell women and men are more or less equal in terms of their ability to reason. Astell posits three tiers of knowledge, which she identifies as faith, science, and opinion. These are distinguished by the level of confidence and certainty that they afford: in this present and imperfect State in which we know not any thing by Intuition, or immediate except a few first Principles which we call Self-evident, the most of our Knowlege is acquir’d by Reasoning and Deduction: And these three Modes of Understanding, Faith, Science and Opinion are no otherwise distinguish’d, than by the different degrees of Clearness and Evidence in the Premises from whence the Conclusion is drawn.25 Science admits of the highest level of evidence, Astell argues, and indeed she identifies a cognition as a part of science only if it is so clear and obvious that thinking it entails believing it. The main difference between faith and science, as she puts it, is that we “do not See them [the truths of faith] 145

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so clearly and distinctly as to be unable to disbelieve them” (SP2: 151). Here Astell is revealing one of the many respects in which she is a Cartesian. Descartes held that some results are so perspicuous that they cannot be thought without being affirmed – regardless of the independence and freedom that our wills might have in other contexts – and Astell agrees.26 The subject matter of science and the subject matter of faith might in some cases overlap, but faith is marked by an ability to affirm or not affirm. We are rewarded for affirming truths of faith, Astell supposes, and penalized for rejecting them, but the language of reward does not have a home in cases in which we do not have the ability to affirm otherwise, and punishment only makes sense “thro an unwillingness to Believe” (SP2: 151). Truths of faith are still truths, and they become truths of science if we uncover reasons that dictate our belief in them, but until then they are on an epistemic hierarchy below science but above opinion. Opinion is then the lowest grade of knowledge for Astell. It is “variable and uncertain” (SP2: 150), and because it leaves so little to be desired she spends almost no time addressing it. Perhaps she includes it as a form of knowledge because there are instances in which we have beliefs that are true, but our grasp of them is accidental and precarious. Perhaps these are truths that we have learned from others who recognize reasons that compel belief in them, even if in our own case such reasons are lacking.27 Matters of opinion would differ from matters of faith in terms of their subject matter, and they would also differ in terms of the sources of compulsion that might be present in faith and absent in opinion (and also science).28 Astell focuses most of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies on science, in part because it yields a kind of knowledge that is “immutable” (SP2: 150) and indubitable and that with an updated educational program can be secured by women and men both. As we might expect in the light of her understanding of science, Astell does not put a lot of epistemological weight on the senses as a source of information.29 She does not count sensory cognition as a tier of knowledge even. She writes, In this enumeration of the several ways of Knowing, I have not reckon’d the Senses, in regard that we’re more properly said to be Conscious of than to Know such things as we perceive by Sensation. (SP2: 150) 30 But the senses do perform a function, Astell supposes. She acknowledges for example that it is critical that we make that use of our senses for which they are design’d and fitted, the preservation of the Body, but not to depend on their Testimony in our Enquiries after Truth. (SP2: 165) The senses help us to gather practical information for navigating the world of bodies, in a way that increases our chances at securing nourishment and avoiding danger.31 The senses also assist us in efforts that are less embodied, for example in performing charitable works and in disciplining the mind to be positioned to think as clearly as possible (SP2: 170, 161, 212). The senses have cognitive value, Astell supposes, but in order to do what is properly called science – “the following the Process our Selves upon Clear and Evident Principles”32 – we need to turn our attention away from external bodies and toward ideas that are non-sensory and (apparently) innate: There are some Ideas which our Understandings receive so early that they seem to be born with us, which are never totally absent from our Minds, and are in a manner the source of all the rest…. (SP2: 205) 146

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Here Astell is again showing her hand as a Cartesian, rejecting the view in Cavendish and others that all ideas are sensory imagistic pictures. She holds that some ideas have a kind of content for which sensations cannot account and that must therefore have arisen in some other way.33 In some passages, she suggests that these ideas are innate in our minds, and in other passages, she suggests that they are so exalted (and eternal and immutable) that they are in the mind of God (and that that is where we access them).34 Either way, these are non-sensory ideas on which it is appropriate for us to focus our attention, she supposes, even if the world of sensible bodies would work to distract us from them: We must therefore withdraw our Minds from the World, from adhering to the Senses, from the Love of Material Beings, of Pomps and Gaieties; for ‘tis these that usually Steal away the Heart, that seduce the Mind to such accountable Wandrings, and so fill up its Capacity that they leave no room for Truth…. (SP2: 161) Astell does not provide many examples of the innate and non-sensory ideas that are the ground of the evident reasonings that are the highest tier of knowledge, but two (she argues) are our ideas of God and justice. She says that it is evident from the idea of God that God is good and that it is evident from idea of justice that injustice is not good. She then concludes from these that God is not unjust.35 Other examples, again, would be from math and geometry36 – results that tell us about the relationship between (perfect) angles, lines, and numbers, ideas whose content the senses significantly underdetermine. One of the reasons that Astell puts so little weight on the senses as a source of information is the uncertainty and imprecision of the results that they yield. Another is that the picture of reality that they deliver is in large part illusory. Astell agrees with Descartes that the features that pertain to bodies are the features that we clearly and distinctly understand to be essential to them – in effect relations of dimension and extension – and that features that cannot be explained in terms of those are not features of body at all.37 Bodies have size, shape, and motion, for example, but they do not have sensible features like color, taste, heat, or sound. If so, there is a sense in which the manifold of sensible bodies that we experience on a day-to-day basis is not reflective of what those bodies actually are. Features like color and sound are sensations by which we are able to make discriminations that allow us to better navigate the world (SP2: 164), for Astell, but they exist in thought only. She says that we are conscious of the things that we perceive via sensation, but that we do not know them – and that is because we do know (on the basis of non-sensory reason) that strictly speaking sense perceptions do not conform to reality. Astell supposes that there is little loss that comes with turning our attention away from bodies and toward ideas that involve no trace of sensation. Bodies have some value, as a creation of God, but relatively speaking they are worthless (SP2: 212). Thinking about bodies is a noble endeavor, so long as we restrict our attention to those mathematical and geometrical elements of a body that are non-sensory (and that bodies actually possess), but in that case, we are trafficking in ideas. Like many of her predecessors, Astell supposes that the turn away from sensible bodies does not come easily.38 A person will not arrive at knowledge unless they develop a properly calibrated sense of what is valuable – matters of intellect – and what is not – sensible bodies – and so Astell argues that knowledge and the development of virtue go hand in hand.39 She argues in particular that there are cultural pressures that have led women to focus on clothing, physical appearance, courtship, and romance novels, among other distractions.40 Part of her project is accordingly to motivate the creation of educational sanctuaries in which women can be shielded. These sanctuaries – or Monasteries or Religious Retirements (SP1: 73) – will make possible a retreat from sensible bodies more generally and a turn toward the axioms and principles that are the bedrock of science. If given the opportunity, 147

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Astell supposes, women will exhibit the same cognitive abilities as men. We know this from another result that we grasp via reason – that God does not make rational minds in vain and hence that the minds of women and men are equipped to arrive at knowledge that is wholly evident (SP2: 168; SP1: 58–59). For Astell, science is a form of knowledge in which we arrive at results that are so clear that we are not able to disbelieve them. We arrive at such results by way of ideas that due to God’s justice and even-handedness are widely available to all. Some minds do not think as capaciously as others (SP2: 168), she allows, and not all are in the same position to uncover information about the details of sensible bodies. But that is a consideration that applies across the spectrum of all humanity and not to any difference between women and men in particular.41

10.3  Mary Shepherd Astell and Shepherd agree that there is a form of cognition that is entirely non-sensory and that yields knowledge that is unimpeachable. The discussion below will focus on results that Shepherd takes us to secure via reason and on how she employs those results in conjunction with sensory perception to generate knowledge of the bodies that surround us. A good entry point to the epistemology of Shepherd is her rejection of the view in Hume that all of our knowledge is acquired through experience – either sensory impressions or impressions of the states of our psychology (Hume 1978: I.i.1, 1–7). Shepherd objects in particular to Hume’s contention that since we never have a sensory impression of a necessary connection that binds causes and effects, the impression that gives rise to our idea of “necessary connection” can be nothing other than an impression of one of our internal states (see also Bolton 2019). Hume concludes that the idea is due to an impression of a feeling of expectation that we have when we observe an object A that in our past experience has been constantly conjoined with an object B (Hume 1978: I.iii.14, 155–72). Shepherd supposes that Hume’s account here is ludicrous: Thus necessary connection of cause and effect is only a custom of the mind! Power is only a custom of the mind! …Now it is my intention to shew, in contradiction to these ideas of Mr. Hume, that it is Reason, and not Custom, which guides our minds in forming the notions of necessary connection of belief and of expectation.42 She then offers a number of examples of cause-effect relationships for which (she argues) Hume’s view cannot account. One such relationship is that between vision and the opening of our eyes. She writes, Each knows that in certain given circumstances, the closing of the Eye will eclipse the prospect of nature; and the slight motion of reopening it, will restore all the objects to view. Therefore the Eye (in these circumstances), is the Cause or Producer of vision. One trial would be enough, under certain known circumstances. Why? Not from ‘custom’, because there has been one trial only; but from Reason… (ERCE: 36) Shepherd is asking us to consider whether or not we would need to close and open our eyes multiple times in order to develop the expectation over time that opening our eyes is one of the causes of our visual perception of objects. She supposes that it is obvious that just one instance is enough (see also Lolordo 2019: 11–12). According to Shepherd, a tenet that we know via reason alone – and a tenet that is at the foundation of her anti-Humean account of our knowledge of the external world – is that objects and qualities cannot come into being on their own. If an object or quality did come into existence 148

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on its own, then before it existed, there would be a feature that would be properly identifiable as its coming into existence, but it would not be a feature of the object or quality, because it does not exist yet. Instead, it would have to be the feature of something or than the object or quality – namely, the cause that brings the object or quality into existence. It is just repugnant to reason to think otherwise: Let the object which we suppose to begin its existence of itself be imagined, abstracted from the nature of all objects we are acquainted with, saving its capacity for existence; let us suppose it to be no effect; there shall be no prevening circumstances whatever that affect it, nor any existence in the universe: …now, what is this starting forth, beginning, coming into existence, but an action, which is a quality of an object not yet in being, and so not possible to have its qualities determined, nevertheless exhibiting its qualities? (ERCE: 33) If nothing existed, Shepherd is saying, then an object could only come into existence if prior to its existence there existed the quality of its starting forth and coming into being, but if the object did not yet exist it would not possess that quality or any qualities at all. Something else would have to exist that possesses the quality of starting forth – namely, the cause of the new object (see also Landy 2020). The same argumentation would then apply to objects (or qualities) that putatively bring themselves into existence in a universe that already contains existents – their cause would be something other than themselves. Shepherd then appeals to reason again to argue that there is a necessary connection between a cause and its effect. Things do not bring themselves into existence, and whatever cause does bring an effect into existence will bring that effect into existence every time that it [the cause] is in place: like causes, that is, like objects, are by the supposition admitted, and then the question arises, whether it is demonstrable they must have like effects or qualities, under like circumstances in future? I answer, they must have like effects, or qualities, because there is nothing else given that can be supposed to make a difference, and a difference of qualities could not arise of itself, could not begin its own existence; and I add, not only, there is nothing else supposed that can make a difference; but that when we also know that in the FORMATION of any object no difference took place; then, there is no ground whatever, for imagining the possibility of an alteration in the effects of that object. (ERCE: 42; see also Fantl 2016: 97–106) Here she might have us return to the case in which our eyes are closed and we do not have a visual experience of the surrounding environment. She is contending that if our eyes stayed closed, and all other circumstances remained the same, we would continue to not have a visual experience of the surrounding environment. The only way that we could have a visual experience of the surrounding environment with all circumstances remaining the same is if the visual experience arose of itself, but that (reason tells us) is impossible. No object or quality can arise of itself, and so it must arise as a result of another cause. She then offers an array of similar examples: the food that is introduced into our system and that produces nourishment (ERCE: 40), the fire that is introduced to wood and that leads to its combustion (ERCE: 41), the fire that is felt by a hand and that produces a sensation of burning (ERCE: 51). Like causes bring about like effects, Shepherd is insisting, and if two causes appear to be identical but have different effects, we can infer that one has an unnoticed and “secret power” (ERCE: 48–52) in the light of which it is not a like cause after all. A like cause has to lead to a like effect, which is to say that there is a necessary connection between a cause and its effect. 149

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Shepherd is arguing that we know by a non-sensory faculty of reason that Hume’s account cannot be right. She does not provide empirical evidence to disconfirm that account; to do that would be to accept that the level of evidence to which Hume limits himself is the highest that there is, and she is asking us to reach beyond our senses and to see if we cannot notice ground that is higher (and firmer) still.43 She states her argument that a difference cannot begin of itself and therefore must begin in something else, and then writes: “This is an argument, which all persons, however, illiterate, feel the force of ” (ERCE: 37). In presenting us with what certainly appear to be non-sensory results, Shepherd is in effect asking us to consider what is more obvious and intuitive – that all ideas are copies of impressions, and that our idea of necessary connection is really just an idea of a feeling that is part of our psychology; or, that our idea of necessary connection is an idea of a power that is in objects, and a power that will bring about its effect in every case in which it is operative. She supposes that there is a level of evidence that accompanies results that are known via reason and that anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention will recognize that it is in a league of its own. Shepherd holds that one way of knowing is via reason, and she also allows that with the assistance of reason we can employ our senses to acquire knowledge about the bodies that surround us. Such knowledge will be extremely modest and limited, however. Like Astell, Shepherd holds that sensible features like color and sound are not features of body but are sensations that exist only in thought.44 For Shepherd (as for Astell), we have sensory perceptions of bodies, but for Shepherd that is just to say (1) that there exists a cause of those perceptions that is distinct from them and (2) that any change in our perception is due to a change in its cause. If our perception of a body changes over time – for example, if the color of a body fades – that entails that there has been a change in the cause of our perception: if there had not been a change, our perception would have continued exactly as it was. We know via reason that changes in perceptual experience are paired with changes in the causes of that experience, and hence “the proportional varieties of external objects may be known” (EPEU: 188). We know (via reason) that sensory perceptions have a cause and that that cause changes proportionally with changes in perception, but since our awareness is limited to our ideas and perceptions, we do not know what those causes are like in themselves (EPEU: 189). Shepherd is happy to call these causes material, but only if matter is defined as that which is active in bringing about perceptions in minds and mind is defined as that which has perceptions induced in it (EPEU: 193–94).45 It is noteworthy just how little Shepherd takes us to know. We know a number of results via a non-sensory faculty of reason. We also apply such results to draw conclusions about the creatures that surround us. We know via reason that our perceptions of external bodies are caused by “matter” and that changes in perception occur in lockstep with changes in their cause. We also know via reason that if there is a gap in our perception of an object, the object does not go in and out of existence itself (EPEU: 127–131; see also Boyle 2020: 97–99). But we cannot speak of the causes of our perceptions with any more confidence than that, and there is an important sense in which we cannot identify the details of like causes and the like effects that they produce. We have perceptions of like causes and like effects, and those perceptions are proportional to the “matter” that brings them about, but for Shepherd, the details of any such causes and effects are beyond us. A central epistemological theme in early modern philosophy is the comparative authority of rational perception and sensory perception as sources of knowledge. Philosophers offered differing accounts of the nature of each faculty. For Cavendish, reason traffics in imagistic ideas that Astell and Shepherd would argue are not the province of reason at all. Cavendish supposes that rational perception is fallibilistic and indeed less authoritative than sense perception. Astell and Shepherd would argue that what Cavendish identifies as rational perception is fallibilistic, but that rational perception strictly speaking is something very different. Astell downplays the senses as a source of knowledge in part because they do not generate the certainty and precision that are afforded by 150

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the innate ideas of science. She also downplays the senses because the material world with which they are interfaced is not especially worthy of our attention. Shepherd and Astell agree on the epistemic limits of sense perception. Shepherd however does not advocate the turn away from bodies that is emphasized by Astell. It is important that we study bodies and learn about them, Shepherd supposes, even if our knowledge of them is minimal. We apply the knowledge that we secure via reason – for example, that there are causes that necessitate each and every one of our sense perceptions – but when it comes to the details of those causes we are left mostly in the dark.

Notes 1 See for example Hobbes (1651): I.i.4, 6–7, and Gassendi (1641): 236–37. See also Descartes, Treatise on Man (1664), in Descartes (1985): 105. 2 Cavendish (1668): ¶17 of “To the Reader.” See also the discussions in Adams (2016) and Michaelian (2009). 3 Cavendish discusses the Hobbes passage in Cavendish (1664): 18–20. 4 Cavendish (1664): 420. Subsequent in-text citations refer to this text as PL. See also PL: 104–105, and Cavendish (1668): 218–219. Subsequent in-text citations abbreviate the latter text as OEP. 5 PL: 182. She quips that if Hobbes were right, and sense perception was the result of objects pressing onto the sense organs of the perceiver, then “if the Ear was bound to hear any loud Musick, or another sound a good while, it would soundly be beaten, and grow sore and bruised with so many strokes” (PL: 72). 6 See also Cavendish (1655): 31. Subsequent references to this text abbreviate it as PPO. See also O’Neill (2001): xxix–xxxii; Sarasohn (2010), chapter 5; and Walters (2014), chapter 1. 7 Cavendish holds for example that a body will sometimes dominate another body and force a change in its motions (PL: 96, 357; “Further Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy,” in OEP: 85), but motion is never transferred. She also argues that the material universe is a plenum of bodies that are linked together in a continuous chain and that bodies depend for their motions on the bodies that immediately surround them (PL, 7, 117, 430, 451, 455; OEP, 40–41, 137–39; Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) [hereafter referred to as GNP]: 105, 217). But again motion is never transferred. 8 See also PL: 3. Note that there is a very different interpretation of Cavendish on self-motion according to which she holds that the motion of a creature is self-motion in the sense that creatures possess libertarian freedom. (See, e.g., Detlefsen (2006): 234, and Boyle (2018): 36.) On this interpretation, a body occasions a second body to move by soliciting it to move, and not by contacting it and redirecting its motion. A body solicits a second body to move, and how that body acts in response is a function of its exercise of libertarian freedom. Cavendish does speak of a freedom that pertains to creatures, or at least to nature more generally (for example PL: 225), but there is a question about whether that freedom is of the libertarian or compatibilist variety. 9 OEP: 222–23. In the passage Cavendish dismisses the Aristotelian view that “species” exit the objects that we perceive and travel all the way to our sense organs. 10 PL: 83. See also OEP: 211; PL: 1.IV, 18–21, 80–83; and OEP: 209–213. One potential objection to this reading is that Cavendish holds that telescopes (and other artefacts) do not provide veridical views of their objects, where one of her stated reasons is that telescopes pattern copies of copies of objects, and those copies are inexact (OEP: 8–12). However, the reason why artefacts pattern inexact copies, for Cavendish, is that they are not natural productions and (like all human artefacts) are clunky at best (for example OEP: 23, 39–40). 11 Cavendish of course knows nothing yet of Newton’s Cradle, but it is a helpful analogy for making sense of her view of patterning that traverses through walls and other barriers. See for example PL: 73, 182–183. 12 GNP: 90. Note that Cavendish holds that sensory features like color are literally in objects and are copied in patterning. See Chamberlain (2019). 13 See for example the skeptical arguments that Descartes offers in Principles I.1–5 (Descartes 1985: 193–5), and Discourse on the Method, Part Four (Descartes 1985: 126–30). Cavendish read both of these. See PL: 97–114. 14 GNP: 92–93. See also GNP: 90. 15 See for example PPO: 169–70, and The Worlds Olio (Cavendish 1655): 179–80 (the latter is subsequently abbreviated as WO). 16 PL: 67. Cavendish appeals to this third result to derive the view that there is no empty space and that the universe is a material plenum. She applies the first and second results to derive the view that minds

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David Cunning are material – since they interact with bodies, and since our thinking accompanies us as we move from place to place. 17 For a cross-section of Cavendish’s arguments for the doctrine that all creatures are material, minds included, see Cunning (2016), chapter 2. See also the very helpful discussion in Shaheen (2019). 18 Second Replies (1641), in Descartes (1984): 104. The reference to acts of purely mental scrutiny is of course from the Second Meditation (1641), in Descartes (1984): 21. 19 For example, Principles I.49, in Descartes (1985): 209. 20 See also the similar view in Pierre Gassendi in the fifth set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations – Fifth Objections, in Descartes (1984): 223. 21 See also the related discussion in Lascano (2020), and the discussion in Cunning (2016), chapter 3. 22 See also the similar imagistic language that Hume uses to describe mathematical cognitions Hume (1978): I.ii.4, 39–53. 23 Perhaps Cavendish is right that our reasonings concerning math and geometry are messier than is often thought, but a worry that would still arise on her view is how we are able to think of axioms like that motion is inseparable from the body that has it, or that immaterial motion is impossible. See also Peterman (2017) and McNulty (2018): 232–35. 24 “Further Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy,” in OEP: 35. Note that another important element of Cavendish’s view on reason is her distinction between rational, sensitive, and inanimate matter. 25 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, in Astell (1694): 149. This is abbreviated as SP2. 26 See also the Fifth Meditation (1641), in Descartes (1985): 48; and Broad (2015): 30. 27 See also the helpful discussions in Boyle (2011), and Sowaal (2015), section 2. 28 See for example A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I, in Astell (2002): 65, where Astell speaks of faith as limited to religious subject-matter, and religious subject-matter that is known through divine revelation. Below A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part I is referred to as SP1. 29 A paradigm category of a scientific result in Astell’s system is the “Propositions of Geometry that are prov’d with Mathematical exactness” (SP2: 150). It might seem odd to identify a discipline as a science when it is not centered on empirical or sensory data, but this is a common approach in the early modern period. See, for example, Descartes’ notion of scientia – Second Replies, in Descartes (1984): 101. 30 See also Broad (2015): 27. 31 See also Descartes, the Sixth Meditation, in Descartes (1984): 57–58. 32 SP2: 151. These are “Axioms and Principles… such as carry the highest Evidence and Conviction, such as every one who will but in the least Attend may clearly see, and be fully convinced of, and which need not another Idea for their demonstration” (SP2: 172). 33 See also Descartes, Fifth Replies, in Descartes (1984): 258, 262. 34 See also Astell (1730): 262, and Broad (2015): 40–41. 35 SP2: 172–73. See also Lascano (2016). 36 SP1: 103. See also Sutherland (2006), 97. 37 See Astell and Norris (1695): 278–79; Descartes, Principles I.53 (1644), in Descartes (1985): 210–11. See also Squadrito (1987), Bryson (1998), and O’Neill (2007): 150–55. 38 SP2: 188–89. See also Descartes, Second Replies, in Descartes (1984): 110–11. See also Forbes (2019). 39 See also Broad (2015): 34–36. 40 SP1: 60, 63–64, 69. See also Broad (2015): 26, 30–31. 41 See also the related discussion in Springborg (2005), chapter 2. 42 An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824), referred to as ERCE in this chapter, in Shepherd (2018): 36. 43 In this her procedure is very similar to what we see in Descartes’ Second Meditation discussion of wax. See Descartes (1984): 20–21. See also Folescu (2021). 4 4 Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (1827), subsequently referred to as EPEU, in Shepherd (2018): 112. 45 See also Rickless (2018) for a discussion of important connections between Shepherd and Berkeley.

References Adams, M. P. (2016) “Visual Perception as Patterning: Cavendish against Hobbes on Sensation,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 33(3): 193–214. Astell, M. (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I & II, ed. P. Springborg, Ontario, CA: Broadview, originally published 1694. [SP1, SP2]

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Ways of Knowing . (2013) The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, ed. J. Broad, Toronto, ON: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and Iter Publishing, originally published 1730. and J. Norris. (1695) Letters Concerning the Love of God Between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris, London: Printed for Samuel Manship and Richard Wilkin. Boyle, D. (2011) “Mary Astell and Cartesian ‘Scientia’,” in Judy Hayden (ed.), The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–112. (2018) The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, Oxford: Oxford UP. (2020) “Mary Shepherd on Mind, Soul, and Self,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 58(1): 93–112. Brandt Bolton, M. (2019) “Lady Mary Shepherd and David Hume on Cause and Effect,” in E. O’Neill and M. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, New York: Springer, pp. 129–52. Broad, J. (2015) The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue, New York: Oxford UP. Bryson, C. B. (1998) “Mary Astell: Defender of the ‘Disembodied Mind’,” Hypatia 13(3): 40–62. Cavendish, M. (1655a) Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye at the Bell in St. Pauls Church-Yard. [PPO] (1655b) The Worlds Olio, London: Printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye. [WO] (1664) Philosophical Letters, London. [PL] (1668a) Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, London: Printed by A. Maxwell. [OEP] (1668b) Grounds of Natural Philosophy, London: Printed by A. Maxwell. [GNP] Chamberlain, C. (2019) “Color in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish against the Early Modern Mechanists,” The Philosophical Review 128(3): 293–336 Cunning, D. (2016) Cavendish, London: Routledge. Descartes, R. (1984) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, ed. and Trans J. Cottingham, D. Murdoch, and R. Stoothoff, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. . (1985) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, ed. and Trans J. Cottingham, D. Murdoch, and R. Stoothoff, New York: Cambridge UP. Detlefsen, K. (2006) “Atomism, Monism, and Causation in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 3: 199–240. Fantl, J. (2016) “Mary Shepherd on Causal Necessity,” Metaphysica 17(1): 87–108. Folescu, M. (2021) “Mary Shepherd on the Role of Proofs in Our Knowledge of First Principles,” Noûs, https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12365. Forbes, A. S. (2019) “Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice,” Hypatia 34(4): 777–801. Gassendi, P. (1984) “Fifth Set of Objections,” in J. Cottingham, D. Murdoch, and R. Stoothoff (ed. and trans.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, New York and Cambridge UP, originally published 1641. Hobbes, T. (1994) Leviathan, ed. E. Curley, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, originally published 1651. Hume, D. (1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, New York: Oxford UP, originally published 1739. Kant, I. (1929) A Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. N. Kemp Smith, London: MacMillan and Co., originally published 1781. Landy, D. (2020) “Shepherd on Hume’s Argument for the Possibility of Uncaused Existence,” Journal of Modern Philosophy 2(1):13, 1–14, https://jmphil.org/articles/10.32881/jomp.128/. Lascano, M. (2016) “Mary Astell on the Existence and Nature of God,” in A. Sowaal and P. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 168–187. (2020) “Margaret Cavendish and Early Modern Scientific Experimentalism: ‘Boys that play with watery bubbles or fling dust into each other’s eyes, or make a hobbyhorse of snow’,” in S. Crasnow and K. Intemann (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 28–40. Lolordo, A. (2019) “Mary Shepherd on Causation, Induction, and Natural Kinds,” Philosopher’s Imprint 19(52): 1–14. McNulty, M. (2018) “Margaret Cavendish on the Order and Infinitude of Nature,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 35(3): 219–239. Michaelian, K. (2009) “Margaret Cavendish’s Epistemology,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17(1): 31–53. O’Neill, E. (2001) “Introduction,” in E. O’Neill (ed.), Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. x–xxxvi.

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David Cunning (2007) “Mary Astell on the Causation of Sensation,” in W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, London: Ashgate, pp. 145–63. Peterman, A. (2017) “Empress vs. Spider-Man: Margaret Cavendish on Pure and Applied Mathematics,” Synthese 196(9): 3527–3549. Rickless, S. C. (2018) “Is Shepherd’s Pen Mightier Than Berkeley’s Word?,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26(2): 317–330. Sarasohn, L. (2010) The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Shaheen, J. (2019) “Part of Nature and Division in Margaret Cavendish’s Materialism,” Synthese 196(9): 3551–3575. Shepherd, M. (2018) Selected Writings, ed. Deborah Boyle, Exeter: Imprint Academic. [ERCE, EPEU} Sowaal, A. (2015) “Mary Astell,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/astell/. Springborg, P. (2005) Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination, New York: Cambridge UP. Squadrito, K. M. (1987) “Mary Astell’s Critique of Locke’s View of Thinking Matter,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 25(3): 433–439. Sutherland, C. (2006) The Eloquence of Mary Astell, Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Walters, L. (2014) Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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PART II Section B: Natural Philosophy

11 SPACE AND TIME Geoffrey Gorham

11.1  Introduction: Time and Space as Ordering Principles All metaphysicians and natural philosophers of the European early modern period looked to time and space as fundamental “ordering principles.” By this, I mean they conceived time and space as essential, quantitative parameters of physical change, such as motion, reflection and refraction, collision, condensation, and rarefaction, as well as physiological processes like fetal gestation and the circulation of the blood. The temporal and spatial aspects of cognition, imagination, and sensation were also increasingly explored. During the scientific revolution, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes were pioneers in this spatio-temporalization of nature, while Newton represented its apotheosis. This development in natural philosophy raised a number of important metaphysical problems, especially: (i) do time and space themselves have a nature or structure independent of motion, change, and bodies?; (ii) are time and space rightly thought of as structurally analogous – “twin brothers” as Walter Charleton, put it (Charleton 1654: Bk. 1, Ch. vii, Section ii, article 1, 75; For commentary, see Gorham 2012)?; (iii) how does the Godhead, traditionally conceived as somehow timeless or eternal, and un-extended, relate to a thoroughly spatiotemporal world? How space and time are understood metaphysically has concrete implications for how we structure and interpret the phenomena we encounter. If (i) the flow of time is absolute, or intrinsic, should we aim to identify an “ideal clock” that would perfectly synchronize with it? But if time is relative to changes in bodies, or in the mind, should we pin the measure of time’s passage to the most regular empirical phenomena, or to the most general agreement about among minds to the succession of ideas? The former approach to time is Newton’s (1999: 410), the latter is Berkeley’s (1948: 97, 83). Different conceptions of space will similarly deliver different approaches to laws and the ordering of phenomena in domains such as optics, astronomy, and cosmology. For example, is there a fact of the matter whether the sun really moves relative to the earth or not? And if time and space are independent of change and body, does it follow that the universe is necessarily unending and infinite? (See Koyré 1957: Chs. V, VI, IX; Grant 1981: Ch. 9.) If (ii) time and space are presumed analogous, then are both subject to the same mathematical analysis? For example, if we conceive space or extension as a three-dimensional Euclidean structure, should we also conceive time as a continuous, one-dimensional real line? If God is outside time and space (iii) how can He continually create the world, and know the distinction among past, present, and future? If God is in time and space, how literally should we take Biblical passages like: “they heard

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-15

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the voice of the lord God walking in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3: 8) and “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17: 28)? Besides the natural philosophers mentioned above, Pierre Gassendi, Baruch Spinoza, Henry More, John Locke, and G.F. Leibniz hotly debated these questions. But it is only beginning to be appreciated how much early modern women philosophers contributed to the emerging debates and philosophies of time and space, often in highly original ways. In this discussion of these contributions, I will be mainly concerned with the seventeenth-century English metaphysical philosopher Anne Conway and the eighteenth-century French mathematician and physicist Émilie Du Châtelet. These two influential figures have divergent concerns; but, in pursuit of these concerns, they each generate deep insights about time and space, which warrant further study and analysis. In the discussion that follows, I mainly tread paths broken by other recent scholars (mentioned below), but I hope to contribute modestly to the burgeoning interest in Conway and Du Châtelet among historians and philosophers of time and space.

11.2  Anne Conway Conway (1631–1679) was an English philosopher who developed an elaborate metaphysics that mirrored Christian Trinitarianism, but she was also influenced by the mystical-Jewish Kabbalah, and by Quakerism (a very good intellectual biography of Conway is Hutton 2004). She holds there are three orders of reality, with increasing mutability, imperfection, and dependence, moving from top to bottom: God, Christ, creatures. Despite this tripartite structure of reality, Conway may have held that reality was somehow unified, though the nature of her monism is debated.1 Conway sets out her system in her sole published work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. (1692) The early chapters of this work are heavily concerned with time and space, and especially the nature of God’s eternity in contrast with the temporality of created things. Conway largely adopts the traditional distinction: God’s eternity is not successive with parts arranged before-and-after, but rather all at once, whereas the time of creatures is successive or flowing (Gorham 2007). Thus, Conway writes that even if creatures have infinite duration this can only mean that “they always were and always will be,” i.e. their duration is an endless succession of “before-and-after.” However, this “infinite of time is not equal to the infinite eternity of God since the divine eternity has no times in it and nothing in it can be said to be past or future, but is always and wholly present.”” (Conway 1996, II 5: 13–14) The express reason for this is that “time is nothing but the successive motion or operation of creatures, and if this motion or operation should cease, then time itself would cease.” (Conway 1996, II 6: 14) Conway is therefore of the view that time is reducible to the motion or change of created things. And since in God “there is no successive motion or operation... there are no times in God or his eternity.” (Conway 1996, II 6): 14. However, since it is also an essential attribute of God to be a creator, it turns out that “creatures always were and always will be”; otherwise God’s essence would change. (Conway 1996, II 6: 14) Conway cleaves to the traditional analogy between space and time, though she somewhat unusually gives precedence to time. In Chapter III of the Principles, she reiterates that there is no contradiction – indeed it is required – that God has created all “worlds or creatures” from the infinite past into the infinite future. (Conway 1996, III 3: 16) From this it follows likewise that “an infinity of worlds or creatures was made by God.” (Conway 1996, III 4: 16) She specifically opposes her conception of the spatial and temporal expanse of creation to those who say they do not confine God to a finite universe, but rather “imagine him to exist no less outside this universe in imaginary spaces” (Conway 1996, III 7: 18). Against the long “imaginary space” tradition, Conway inveighs: either these spaces are “mere idle conceits of the brain,” or else “if they are real entities, what can they be but creatures of God” (see Grant 1981 for an authoritative treatment of 158

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the imaginary space/time tradition). But just as God is strictly timeless in his duration, “evidently no space coincides with God.” (Conway 1996, III 7: 18) God creates infinite time, though he is timeless, and creates infinite real space, though he is un-extended. Conway does not deny that an empty space is possible, but her logic indicates God would not create a space unless God had reason to produce bodies there: “God always works and his work is to create and to give being to creatures” (Conway 1996, III 7: 18).2 Conway’s demarcation of time and eternity might seem to go too far: how could God be said to continuously create infinite time if God’s own being is in no way related to time? Conway seems aware of this problem since near the end of the passage cited above she asserts: “While he is in time, he is not bound by time” (Conway 1996, II 5: 14). But what could this mean? One recent commentator (Thomas 2017; see also the discussion of Conway in Thomas 2018) has suggested that Conway is a “holennmerist.” Holenmerism is a term of art, coined by Conway’s friend, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, for the view that God is wholly present at every part of time and in every part of space. This solves the problem, according to Thomas, since it allows God to be simultaneous with creation (as creator) but still not subject to a temporal before-and-after since his eternity is wholly present and unwavering. Thomas marshals impressive evidence for this reading, mostly indirect, but also direct: “God is really and intimately present in all times and does not change.” (Conway 1996, VII 4: 50; Thomas 2017; Leibniz and Clarke 2000) I would like to propose an alternative account of Conway’s God being in time yet not bound by time. Note first that in one of Thomas’s key passages, just quoted, Conway emphasizes that God is “really and intimately present in all times.” With this in mind, consider a passage earlier in Conway’s Principles, addressing specifically how God eternally creates: This continual action or operation of God, insofar as it is in Him, proceeds from Him, or insofar as it refers to himself, is only one continual action or command of his will; it has no succession or time in it, no before or after, but is always simultaneously present to God so that nothing is past or future because he has no parts. But insofar as it is manifested in or terminates in creatures, it is temporal and has a succession of parts. (Conway 1996, III 8: 18; see Thomas 2017: 998) Conway’s claim is that God’s essence, as well as God’s actions, are not at all successive or temporally extended; rather God’s creation is temporal only in the sense that it produces effects over time. Conway herself offers a “common and humble” analogy: suppose God is the hub of a vertical wheel that God continually turns: “although the center moves the whole, and produces a great and continual motion, it nevertheless remains always still and is not moved in any way.” (Conway 1996, III 8: 18) She admits that the analogy is not perfect since the hub itself rotates: “But if we wish to speak properly there is no motion because all motion is successive and can have no place in God.” (Conway 1996, III 8: 18) I think this is a superior model to holenmerism since it better comports with Conway’s strict view that for God nothing is past or future, not even past and future iterations of his full presence. It also better fits the slogan that God is not “bound by time” since it emphasizes that time is rather bound by God. 3 Finally, there is historical precedence for such a model of eternal creation in a text that Conway would have known well (Conway 1992: 206; see also Gabbey 1977), namely the Descartes-More correspondence of 1649. Henry More, who was by this time wavering in his commitment to holenmerism,4 challenged Descartes to explain how God could act in time and space unless God was really extended. Descartes answers: “the extension which is attributed to incorporeal things is merely an extension of power and not of substance.” (Descartes 1991: 373).Admittedly, the main issue in the exchange with More is spatial extension, but Descartes’ model can easily be converted to “duration of power.” Indeed, Conway herself seems to apply such a model to God’s relation to both time and space. In a section 159

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concerned with God’s omnipresence, mentioned above, she objects to the presumption that God is either confined to the finite universe or expanded through infinite “imaginary space”: “Nor can he be said to exist in imaginary spaces, because evidently, no space coincides with God, yet he can be said to act there through his own simple power.” (Conway 1996, III 7: 18) Conway’s God has presence of power, just as duration of power.

11.3  Émilie Du Châtelet Conway’s philosophy of time and space is tailored to her overarching trinitarian metaphysics. God, who cannot possibly improve or degrade, is timeless: “In God there is no time, change, arrangement or division of parts. For he is wholly and universally one in himself and within himself without any variation or admixture.” (1996 1, 2: 9) Christ, the mediator between God and creation, can improve but not degrade: “he can be said to share eternity (which belongs to God) and time (which belongs to creatures)” (1996 5, 5: 26). Created beings are capable of improvement but also susceptible to degradation: the eternity of creatures is nothing but an infinity of times in which they were and always will be without end. Nevertheless, this infinity of time is not equal to the infinite eternity of God, since the divine eternity has no times in it. (Conway 1996, 2, 5: 13) Considerations of time and space are also obviously important for a philosopher like Émilie Du Châtelet (1706–1749), who aims at an integrated system of natural philosophy, and makes substantial contributions to mechanics. Like Conway, Du Châtelet’s brief comments on space and time are insightful, but problematic. Following tradition, Du Châtelet treats space and time in tandem (Du Châtelet 2009: Chapters 5 and 6). The nature of space is one of the most fundamental questions, she tells us, “because of its influence on the most important truths of physics and metaphysics.” (Du Châtelet 2009, 5: 72) Du Châtelet approaches the question through the age-old dispute whether or not space exists as an absolute being independent of bodies. Newton, of course, thought it did, but Du Châtelet follows Leibniz in holding that absolute space would violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason, because God would have no reason to create the world in one place or at one time. Rather, she thinks, the universe is an absolute plenum – entirely filled with matter – and therefore not subject to arbitrary re-orientation (Du Châtelet 2009, 5: 74–75).5 This is familiar territory. But Du Châtelet interestingly proceeds to account for our natural inclination to posit empty or absolute space, suggesting that this inclination arises from our subjective individuation of external bodies: extension separates bodies and makes them two (or more). The mistake in this, according to Du Châtelet, can be recognized by perceiving that the attribute of extension is inseparable from the being it modifies. This forces us to admit that two separate bodies are really unified by extension (since nothing would separate them): Since we represent to ourselves in extension several things that exist externally to each other, and that are one through their union, all extension has parts that exist externally to one another and which are one, and once we represent to ourselves things that are both diverse and unified, we have the idea of an extended Being. (Du Châtelet 2009, 5: 77) But however ingenious this critique of pure or absolute space – which owes much to Leibniz, and anticipates Kant – it seems to make extension itself ideal or “imaginary,” as Du Châtelet asserts

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(Du Châtelet 2009, 5: 79). But this makes bodies themselves imaginary, since, as she herself insists, “all bodies are extended in length, breadth and depth” (Du Châtelet 2009, 7: 120; see further Brading 2019: 61–62). Du Châtelet’s account of time is similarly intriguing, but also fraught. In her view, absolute time, like absolute space, is defeated by the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Du Châtelet 2009, 6: 96). Here she follows Leibniz once again (Du Châtelet 2009, 6: 102). Just as empty space depends on the imaginary notion of extension, empty time depends on an ideal conception of succession (Du Châtelet 2009, 6: 100–01).6 But I would like to emphasize two more controversial issues (touched upon in regard to Conway above): God’s eternity and temporal measures. We know Du Châtelet read Locke closely. I suggest on both issues his Essay’s treatment of time is at the forefront of Du Châtelet’s mind. She initially seems to adopt the traditional timeless conception of eternity (which Locke himself ridiculed, Essay II xvii: 16). In a seeming contradiction, Du Châtelet seems to assert both: (i) God does not exist in time (dans le temps). God is at once all that he can be, whereas creatures can only successively achieve the states of which they are capable. (Du Châtelet 2009, 6: 159) And, she also later seems to adopt a successive and eviternal (i.e. endless) model of divine eternity: (ii) If we remove its beginning and its end from the idea we have of the duration of finite beings, the duration will become the eternity of God. (Du Châtelet 2009, 6: 116; see also 2, 20) On their face, these accounts of divine eternity are inconsistent: (i) exempts God from successive duration altogether, while (ii) seems to attribute successive duration to God. My tentative suggestion is that (ii) is Du Châtelet’s official position. Even in the section containing (i) she admits that God “continues to exist during time (pendant le temps) since time, as time is only the order of succession of beings” (Du Châtelet 2009, 6: 104). The reason God is not dans le temps is because God “is at once achieves all that he can be”, in contrast with creatures. This is very reminiscent of Locke’s own account of divine eternity, mentioned above: “There is nothing he cannot make exist at each moment he pleases...all things exist every moment, that he thinks fit to have them exist” (Locke 1975, II xv: 12). Concerning temporal measures, Du Châtelet again agrees with Locke that there cannot be a perfect measure of time (unlike measures of extension) since “one cannot apply a part of time to itself, as one measures extension” (Du Châtelet 2009, 6: 113; See Locke 1975, II xv: 12; Gorham and Slowik 2014; Thomas 2016). Locke’s example, despite the well-known proofs that certain kinds of pendula are perfect clocks., since we cannot apply and directly compare one swing to another. Du Châtelet adds two further worries that were less important to Locke: (i) that “each [person] has his own measurement of time in the quickness or slowness with which his ideas succeed each another” (Du Châtelet 2009, 6: 113); and (ii) “it is quite possible that other things [than minutes, hours, days, and years] have been used as measurements by other peoples” (Du Châtelet 2009, 6: 114). In any event, from these skeptical considerations, she draws a conclusion similar to Locke: “The only universal measurement is what is called the instant; for all men necessarily know this portion of time, which flows while a single idea stays in our mind” (Du Châtelet 2009, 6; T: 114; See Locke 1975, II xv: 21). But if this is right, and even our best measures of time are drawn from Newtonian principles, such as the law of the pendulum, we cannot hope to achieve a secure knowledge of the laws of motion. And this seems contrary to her confidence about laws and order.

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11.4 Conclusion While there is, unsurprisingly, no consensus among early modern women philosophers about the precise natures of time and space, the very far-reaching philosophers Conway and Du Châtelet (writing 100 years apart, in different languages) conceived space and time within traditional boundaries, though in ways that fit their respective philosophical projects. More important than any sweeping agenda for science among early modern women philosophers, their significant contributions provided much (often anonymously and against great odds) to the project of natural philosophy in the early modern era. As O’Neill (1998) and others have emphasized, it might be a fluke, or a conspiracy, that their work must now be “recovered,” since it was already well-received and respected in their own day. But this continuing work of recovery can only enrich our understanding of early and current science.7

Notes 1 The nature of Conway’s “monism” is debated. See Duncan 2012; Gordon-Roth 2018; Thomas 2020. See also Lascano 2013. 2 See also Conway 1996, III: 10, 20; Cf. Leibniz, Fifth Letter to Clarke, P.S.: “There must be no vacuum at all, for the perfection of matter is to that of a vacuum as something to nothing” (Ariew 2000: 28). In a 1697 letter to Thomas Burnett, Leibniz remarks, “My philosophical views approach somewhat closely to the late Countess of Conway” (Leibniz 1649–1960, vol. 3: 217). 3 Holenmerism, spatial and temporal, is widely repudiated in the seventeenth century (see Locke 1975, II, xvii 16: 219; Newton 1999 ‘General Scholium’; Newton 2004: 91; Hobbes 2008, IV, 46: 19, 22, 460–61). 4 On Henry More’s eventual abandonment of the extravagant notion of holenmerism, see Reid 2007. 5 For a recent, contextual treatment of Du Châtelet’s attitude to both spatial absolutism and spatial relationism, see Lin forthcoming; see also Lin 2016; Jacobs 2020. 6 Brading 2019: 62 makes the interesting observation, which has sometimes been made of Leibniz (e.g. by Bertrand Russell, Arthur 1985), that time is special for Du Châtelet, since the temporal order of the states of monadic simples is privileged, whereas space depends arbitrarily on the arrangement of bodies. On Du Châtelet’s broader metaphysics and conception of substance, see Janik 1982; Janiak 2018; Stan 2018; Brading 2019. 7 I am grateful to Jessica Gordon-Roth, Amy Ihlan, Karen Detlefsen, and Alison Peterman, for comments and discussion.

References Arthur, R. (1985) “Leibniz’s Theory of Time,” in K. Okruhlik and J. R. Brown (eds.), The Natural Philosophy of Leibniz. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science 29. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 263–313. (2001) New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. M. Coogan, New York: Oxford University Press. Cited by book, section, paragraph and page number. Berkeley, G. (1948) Principles of Human Knowledge Vol. 2, in A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (eds.), Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, 9 Vols, London: Thames Nelson and Sons. Brading, K. (2019) Émilie Du Châtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science, London: Routledge Publishing. Charleton, W. (1966 [1654]) Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana, or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms, New York: Johnson Reprints. Conway, A. (1992). The Conway Letters, ed. S. Hutton, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1996) The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, A. Coudert and T. Corse, (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Reference by chapter, section, and page number]. Descartes, R. (1991) Philosophical Works, Vol, III: Correspondence. Cottingham, D. R. Stoothoff, A. Murdoch, and A. Kenny, (eds. and trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Space and Time Du Châtelet, É. (2009 [1640]) Institutions de Physics, in J. Zissner (ed.), Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Cited by chapter and section].Supplemented by K. Brading’s translation the Prohect Vox website. https://projectvox.org/about-the-project/ Duncan, S. (2012) “Debating Materialism: Cavendish, Hobbes, and More,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 29(4): 391–409. Gabbey, A. (1977) “Anne Conway et Henry More: Lettres sur Descartes (1650–1651),” Archives de Philosophie 40(3): 379–78. Gordon-Roth, J. (2018) “What Kind of Monist Is Anne Finch Conway?” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4(3): 280–97. Gorham, G. (2007) “Descartes on God’s Relation to Time,” Religious Studies 44(4): 1–19. (2012) “The Twin-Brother of Space’: Spatial Analogy in the Emergence of Absolute Time,”Intellectual History Review 22(1): 1–17. Gorham, G. and E. Slowik. (2014) “Newton and Locke on Absolute Time and its Sensible Measure,” in Z. Biener and E. Schliesser (eds.), Newton and Empiricism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, E. (1981) Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, T. (1994) Leviathan with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. E. Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. [Citation by part, chapter and page number]. Hutton, S. (2004) Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacobs, C. (2020) “Du Châtelet; Idealist about Extension, Bodies and Space,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 82(3): 66–74. Janiak, A. (2018) “Émilie Du Châtelet: Physics, Metaphysics and the Case of Gravity,” in E. Thomas (ed.) Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janik, L. (1982) “Searching for the Metaphysics of Science: The Structure and Composition of Madame Du Châtelet Institutions de physique 1737–1740,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 201: 85–113. Koyré, A. (1957) From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lascano, M. (2013) “Anne Conway: Bodies in the Spiritual World,” Philosophy Compass 8(4): 327–36. Leibniz, G. W. (1649–1660) Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. Leibniz, G. W. and S. Clarke. (2000) Leibniz and Clarke: Correspondence, ed. R. Ariew, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Lin, M. (2016) “Leibniz on the Modal Status of Absolute Space and Time,” Noûs 50(3): 447–64. Lin, Q. (1996)) “Du Chatelet on the Representation of Space,” in Fatema Amijee (ed.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Du Châtelet, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Locke, J. (1975) Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Cited as “Essay” by book, chapter, and section]. Newton, I. (1999) The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, ed. and trans. I. B. Cohen, A. Whitman, and J. Budenz, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. (2004) Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Janiak, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, E. (1998) “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and their Fate in History,” in J. Kourany (ed.), Philosophy in A Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reid, J. (2007) “The Evolution of Henry More’s Theory of Divine Absolute Space,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45(1): 79–102. Stan, M. (2018) “Emilie du Châtelet’s Metaphysics of Substance,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 56(3): 477–96. Thomas, E. (2016) “On the ‘Evolution’ of Locke’s Space and Time Metaphysics,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 33(4): 305–25. (2017) “Time, Space, and Process in Anne Conway,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25: 990–1010. (2018) “Anne Conway on the Identity of Creatures over Time,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2020) “Anne Conway as a Priority Monist: A Reply to Gordon-Roth,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6: 275–84.

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12 METHOD AND EXPLANATION Anne-Lise Rey

12.1 Introduction This chapter takes up, in the field of epistemology, one of the fundamental issues of the volume: that of the rediscovery of forgotten texts and figures, that is to say, that of the recognition of eclipsed texts by women philosophers. In short: since women philosophers are, in their overwhelming majority, invisible women, it is necessary to make their texts known, to give the means to study them, to discuss them, to criticize them, to build schools of interpretation which oppose and dispute them, as for all the other philosophers. A procedure of inclusion and then of normalization is then played out which makes them enter the canon, the Pantheon of canonical texts. Nevertheless, we must immediately add that the question of incorporating women’s work into our history is only a preliminary, a very necessary preliminary in that we must naturally recover these women’s works and build the conditions of dialogue with the other philosophical figures of the canon. But this immediately raises a difficulty, which Lisa Shapiro points out in her article, “Some Thoughts on the Place of Women in Early Modern Philosophy” (2004): if we stick to including these new figures in the already existing philosophical canon, we continue to tell the same story of philosophy, to develop the same philosophical program instead of questioning it and instituting other, alternative ones. We can naturally show that the texts of women philosophers discussed here remind us that they were, most often, the protagonists of dialogues with canonical figures—dialogues which, in their measure, had an influence on the history of philosophy, whether we consider the correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia, or the exchanges between Lady Masham and Leibniz, etc. But this chapter does not try to center these dialogues because this chapter is mainly about showing why the canon which has evolved must change. It is thus first of all a question of changing the philosophical topics—of questioning the centrality and the relevance of the concepts mobilized thus far in our histories—by enriching the body of texts in our history. Thus, and following Shapiro, we should ask a simple but decisive question: do the problems that we consider as the proper problems of philosophy allow us to give a place to women’s writings? This question supposes another one, which we have to tackle in turn: what is a philosophical problem, what are the constitutive problems of philosophy, and why these and not others? The norm is naturally to show that some figures are said to be central in the history of philosophy according to problems we consider as central, but if we ask the question proposed, then we notice the contingency both of the canonical texts and also of the framework in which these texts are found. 164

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Hence a proposal: if we were to make a history of philosophy that is interested in other questions, that emphasizes other problems, and—given what interests us more particularly here—that questions the supposed domination (not to say hegemony) of one epistemic model over others in a given period, would this not be a way of centering other texts, other figures?

12.2  Method and Explanation in the Classical Age: A Review of the Historiography of Modern Science and Philosophy What is it that we are questioning, and hopefully changing, here when we study method and explanation? Let us start with method. According to one common depiction, modern science represents, in an extremely schematic way, the emancipation of science from metaphysical principles due to the establishment of laws of nature as central to our understanding of the natural world. The recent fortune of the reformulation proposed by Peter Anstey (2005), namely between “speculative natural philosophy” and “experimental natural philosophy,”1 has begun to seriously discuss this opposition without totally challenging it. For both approaches assume what is widely accepted in the historiography of the Enlightenment, namely that what seals epistemological modernity is a prevalence granted to experience in the acquisition of knowledge about nature, which will then be captured mathematically by the constitution of its laws. Let us pass over the fact that this construction rarely acknowledges significant differences between the Baconian inductive method (that of Francis!), the recourse to thought experiments in Galileo, the precepts of the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society following those proposed by Robert Boyle, or the centrality of experiments in Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica. Let us also pass over the fact that if the point is to show that modernity coincides with a recourse to experiments, this depiction of modern science ignores texts important for the experimental method such as those that Ibn Al Haytham devotes to optics in the eleventh century, or those of Roger Bacon two centuries later, which theorize a recourse to experiments in the constitution of knowledge on the nature of light. But should we also pass over what constitutes, in our opinion, a central core of the epistemology of the Enlightenment, namely different ways in which philosophers discuss the roles of hypothesis and experience? For one way of understanding modern science as a wrenching away from metaphysics, requires that we reject any enterprise of elucidation of the “mysteries” of nature. And this can only be done (or at least done more easily) thanks to a two-fold gesture: First, we must consider the rejection of the Cartesian method, which assumes in the most explicit way in the Treatise on the World, the necessity of tearing oneself away and separating oneself from the sensible world in order to be able to understand and think about the world as it actually is. (We will see later how Émilie du Châtelet plays Descartes against Descartes in her critique in her Foundations of Physics of an internally-vivid feeling (1740: I.2).) Second, we must take at face value and as in a general methodological (not to say hegemonic) precept, the famous Newtonian formula, taken out of context of its utterance: hypotheses non fingo. We can see with this brief overview how wanting to situate the methodological positions of women philosophers produces this first result: we must re-read and critically assess our usual historiographical divisions. Let us turn to the second fundamental concept of this chapter: that of explanation. And let us choose to approach it, at least in the first instance, by considering alternatives that will quickly prove to be reductive: are we considering explanation, cause, or reason? One familiar way of depicting modern science is to do so by acknowledging a transformation in the epistemic requirement of intelligibility. Specifically, the transformation is from taking the search for intelligibility to be the search for causes and fundamentally, the search for a first cause (with their avowed metaphysical overtones), to taking the search for intelligibility to be expressed 165

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in terms of laws (with their descriptive nature a mark of epistemic humility). It is undoubtedly more interesting, in that it leads to a more nuanced reading, to show the ways in which metaphysical principles are reinvested in the very heart of concepts of laws, even when they are characterized as the mathematical expression of a phenomenal regularity, empirically observed or determined through experiment. We see this in two ways. First, we see a transformation in the function of metaphysical principles, if such principles remain present in physics treatises of the end of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. For example, the principles of sufficient reason, non-contradiction, or continuity more often than not have a methodological (Brading 2018), or normative (regulative), function rather than a foundational role in explanation. Second, we can think of the very transformation of the meaning of the metaphysical itself, as well as its primary example, causality. For this transformation, it is enough to refer to the very eloquent article “Elements of the sciences” of the Encyclopedia written by D’Alembert (1755: 491). In this article, D’Alembert proposes to conceive of metaphysics as a metaphysics proper to each science (as many metaphysics as there are sciences!) and to consider metaphysics within this framework as “the general consequences that result from observation,” a condition for philosophy to be the science of facts and not of chimeras! This redefinition of the philosophical has strong consequences on the definition of the principle which, far from being an inaccessible instance, becomes, under the pen of D’Alembert, observation itself, and I quote again from the article: “each science has & can have only observation as its true principles” (1755: 5.429). We propose that the fundamental characterization of epistemology in the Enlightenment could be formulated in a way other than as an eclipse of the explanatory in favor of the descriptive, supposedly the only guarantor of certainty. The significant question seems to me to be: might we refer to a regime of causality that allows us to explain phenomena in terms of other phenomena? Or must we always presuppose that what Leibniz calls “mechanical reason” must be metaphysically grounded in order to carry certainty? It seems to me that what we have to think about is the form of certainty that we can reach in our efforts to make the phenomenal world intelligible without presupposing that it has to be founded in a hypothetical “back-world” beneath and grounding the phenomena. I propose this because if such a back-world exists, it is unknowable to us. Or because if such a back-world exists, it is of another order than the world in which we live— it is heterogenous—and we therefore have no recourse to think of it. Or finally, because such a back-world does not exist. This proposal thus encourages us to think anew about the epistemic ambitions of humanity. Naturally, this reconstruction of what is at stake when we consider questions of epistemology in the Classical Age poses a fundamental question for the enterprise animating this paper. Is it the case that, in the process of characterizing in broad strokes another epistemology of the Enlightenment, the unusual nature of Margaret Cavendish’s and Émilie du Châtelet’s thought will disappear as we see that these two philosophers both embody, in their own way, this new epistemological identity of the Classical Age? Or will we find an explanation for why their texts were rendered invisible given the way epistemology was constructed to preclude these women’s philosophical positions (O’Neill 1998)? I believe that we must begin by discussing this: the criteria by which we identify central philosophical questions are themselves historically situated. But this also invites us to examine those criteria and to make central other philosophical questions, and this is rather good news for the history of philosophy! From this point on, we need to think about: A the historicity of texts: we should distinguish texts that were known and recognized during the lifetime of their authors, but that were later eclipsed (e.g., those of Johann Jakob Brucker, Victor Cousin, etc.), from texts that have never been published, or that have not enjoyed posterity until recently (e.g., The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish); 166

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B the criteria we should use when writing a new history: we should ask what justifies the presence of a text or of an author in the history of philosophy; C the role and value of what we might call displacements: we should think about other philosophical traditions or innovative uses of philosophical texts (as shown, e.g., by Flora Tristan’s critique of formal equality, in the field of political philosophy in the nineteenth century) in order to evaluate their theoretical value. To illustrate this point, we could think of how Joan Scott’s characterization of the feminization of the history of philosophy is understood, namely, that it is not the identification of specific topics or of a particular field of research. Rather, it is a critical instrument that questions and seeks to transform thinking, thus allowing us to think differently.

12.3  Proposed Interpretation: The Problem of Inadequacy The historical conditions being what they were, the education of the women having been limited and restricted (which makes the fact that self-taught women produced knowledge all the more notable), the kinds of women’s publications that were tolerated being essentially limited to translations and books of piety—with these restrictions in mind, we should especially note all the deviations from this constrained space. For example, we should note deviations which make use of different genres to create new spaces of freedom and reflection. We must also mention some notable exceptions: du Châtelet and Laura Bassi were recognized, adored, and honored in their time. Still, we should not fall prey to the trap of exceptionality. For, on the one hand, du Châtelet herself pushes against the constraints of her time in, for example, her feminist manifesto, slipped into the “translator’s preface” of her 1735 translation of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. Du Châtelet writes: “I began to believe then that I was a thinking creature!” (1735: 244r). And, on the other hand, let us recall what Geneviève Fraisse says about exceptionality in the introduction to her book Women and History: exceptionality is part of a process of exclusion (1998). For recognizing exceptional women philosophers does not call into question the underlying assumptions about the guiding norms dear to the Ancien Régime, and thereby does not fundamentally modify the attitude toward all women. With this precaution in mind, the line of interpretation that I would like to develop in this chapter concerns the richness of the domain of conceptuality devoted to experience. We might reasonably understand the Classical Age as a time motivated by a normative ideal of modern science, according to which economical use is made of hypotheses, there is a fundamental distancing from metaphysical principles, and experience is paramount in evaluating any scientific hypothesis used. As a result, experience and its replicability are at the core of a canonical understanding of scientific method, inaugurated with great fanfare in the History of the Royal Society as Sprat shaped it (1667). This method converged with certain Newtonian methodological precepts to the point of making us forget earlier experimental traditions found at the advent of the experimental philosophy in Italy, in the United Provinces, and to some extent also in France. Is my goal here to demonstrate that the women philosophers of science whom I will shortly discuss are on the “good” side of scientific practice due to their particular use of experience in their scientific practice? Not really! Rather, my concern is to show how, within the canon, the practice of these women philosophers anticipates, subverts, displaces and, to say the least, invents another relation to the experience. This is a daring challenge; let us see how to carry it out. I shall show how the presence of texts by these women philosophers leads to the elaboration of concepts that can make experience intelligible, thus making more adequate the concepts of early modern science. However, this reconfiguration by including the presence of women philosopher’s texts once again poses puzzles: the marginal position of these women philosophers sometimes leads them to 167

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write outside the agreed methodological alternatives. The importance, repeatedly underlined, of the fact that these women are self-taught allows us to articulate under the banner of marginality, the singular experiences, and the free learning nature of these women’s philosophical positions. It is then a question of women’s learning made out of the constrained straitjacket, imposed by the rules of an “education for the women,” and outside of the philosophical canon, which results from the education lavished on the young men. This figure of methodological marginality which we see in the women, and which is understood as a double exteriority points out the contradictions of a learned or philosophical world, which excludes itself from the alternatives forged by the canon (Cf. Rey 2022a). It is also in this sense that the category of situated epistemology—as women’s epistemology was—proves fruitful. What we have, then, is an epistemic situation which is explained by historical and social conditions.2 Indeed, the situation of women philosophers in the society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries allows us to refer to the epistemology of positioning, that is to say, to our capacity not only to be aware of the historical and social situation of the minoritized philosopher or of philosophers made invisible at a given time, but above all to take note of it in order to carry out an essential movement proposed by Donna Haraway: the one by which we activate an epistemic mobility (2007).3

12.4  The Proof by Example: Margaret Cavendish, Émilie du Châtelet I will give two examples, taken from the modern age, of a transformation already underway, which has led to the introduction into the mainstream canon of women authors who, less than 20 years ago, were greeted with an ironic and sulky pout. I am referring to Margaret Cavendish and Emilie du Châtelet, who are now regularly taught in university courses on modern philosophy (at least in the Anglo-Saxon world), and about whom articles are published in the leading journals of the history of philosophy and the history of science.

12.4.1  Margaret Cavendish Margaret Cavendish is well known, when one knows her (!), for taking the opposite view of Robert Hooke and the tradition of the Royal Society’s experimental philosophy in order to defend a literal reading of nature. In a word, she plays an experiment against experimentation, as can be seen in the Observations on the Experimental Philosophy (1666 (1668)) and her The Blazing world (1666). I would like to show the ways in which fiction intervenes in this argument, in favor of direct experience. Indeed, this discursive machine that is fiction takes on a particular dimension when it is used in science. Is it only a matter of summoning it for “its faculty to produce images and narratives and for its heuristic (by seeing one understands better) and rhetorical (one strikes the imagination of the readers) properties”? (Aït-Touati forthcoming). Fiction entertains me (seventeenth-century hybrids in The Blazing World of half-man-half-bear creatures devoted to experimental philosophy, bird-men to astronomy, spider-men, louse-men to mathematics, etc.). Margaret Cavendish, who seems to take the opposite side of experimental philosophy, and of the recourse to optical instruments, explicitly hostile toward Robert Hooke, criticizes these prostheses (optical instruments) that “distort the world,” and uses satire to denounce the blind belief (Parageau 2006) in a certain knowledge of nature and to warn against this renewed illusion that mocks Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis utopia. Sandrine Parageau raises the amusing example of these hybrids (half-human, half-animal that she designates as virtuosi, derived from the name of Boyle’s contemporary collectors of curiosities, more sensitive to entertainment than to

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the search for truth (Cavendish 1992: 144)), in this case bear-men, representatives of experimental philosophy, who try to observe a whale with a microscope, and she quotes this comical passage: alas! the shape of the whale was so big, that its circumference went beyond the magnifying quality of the glass; whether the error proceeded from the glass or from a wrong position of the whale against the reflection of light, I cannot certainly tell. (Parageau 2006, citing Cavendish 1992: 144) But what does Cavendish do when she mocks the “World of the Wavering Mind” namely the Royal Society in her book The Blazing World? The displacement and the invention of another world certainly allow for a better understanding of the scientific proposition that is defended or discussed, which in Cavendish is the questioning of the prosthetic knowledge that is for her the optical instrument praised by the Royal Society. Cavendish, at the heart of the fiction, affirms her preference for what she calls rational observation, the deductive method. She denounces instruments that are useless because they are artificial, unreliable because they are immediately outdated by new techniques, deceptive because they distance themselves from nature, and dangerous because they subvert the order of the faculties. But above all, scientific fiction makes it possible to question the presuppositions of a scientific theory, to identify the issues at stake, to pose the question of the limits of its relevance; in a word, fiction operates, in the scientific field, as a territory within which criticism can be exercised, it is thus an instance of testing a scientific theory, a model of intelligibility of nature. So, why scientific fictions? Of course, to make us understand a scientific theory through images by entertaining us but also to evaluate the relevance and the robustness of these theories: it has a double heuristic and critical function. Nevertheless, this probably does not exhaust the meaning of scientific fiction, and I would like to come back to one point: on the island where Cavendish’s heroine lands, the operator that makes the heuristic and critical dimension possible is always the change of perspective, the adoption of another point of view, another epistemic point of view, to be precise. That is to say, one that does not only allow me to see differently, but that proposes to situate knowledge elsewhere, that proposes a form of epistemic mobility. Paradoxically, fiction is thus less a space of escape, an a-topia, than a proposal to situate the word of the scholar elsewhere. It carries the possibility to move in the epistemic situation, but what is central, it is less the other world than the journey in another world. Therefore, fiction is not so much what allows us to rise to the point of view of God, because it throws into crisis a conception of knowledge that rests on this panoptic phantasm. In other words, it would render null and void the “divine trick” (Haraway 1991: 115) (which amounts to “seeing everything from nowhere”), guaranteeing a unified, hegemonic, and totalizing vision of objective knowledge. Fiction formulates on the contrary the necessity to think an “embodied objectivity.” But, more fundamentally, is it the taking into account of a singular point of view or rather the possibility of changing points of view that scientific fiction allows? This teaches us that there is an argumentative space that does not seek to discuss what the world is but what it can be, which uses for that purpose arguments that do not come from the necessity to conform the possible to the real but rather to understand what is the rationality that is exercised within this world of possibles. In proposing, thanks to fictions, alternative models of the universe that correspond most often to counterfactual readings of the world, these other worlds, following the example of Theodore in Theodore’s dream at the end of Leibniz’s Essays on Theodicy, compare the rationality and intelligibility of nature that these other worlds conceal.

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However, is it always a question, as with Leibniz, of reassuring the rationality of our reality through fiction, or rather, as with Cavendish, of calling it into question? My hypothesis is the following: it is the illusion of certainty in our knowledge of nature that Cavendish denounces here by mocking the new paradigm carried and defended by the Royal Society, which claims to be able to master nature with certainty through new methodological decisions concerning the importance that should be given to the experience. Does this mean that we are adopting a skeptical position?4 It is rather the use of the skeptical instrument that allows us to question expectations that are so obvious that they have long ceased to be questioned. First, the search for and identification of a first principle in nature, and second the possibility of achieving, on the condition that we adopt the appropriate method, complete knowledge of nature. Skepticism is then used as a critical posture that allows us to question these expectations, to propose, instead, access to partial or better probable truths: “an endeavor to find out truth, or at least the probability of truth” (Cavendish 1666 (1668): 46, cited in Parageau 2006: 37). The limits of knowledge are fixed by our natural reason, to want to exceed them is to succumb to the illusion that Cavendish denounces. But by formulating the problem in these terms, what does she do? She shifts the issue and even the meaning of method: it is no longer a question of looking for a method that would allow us to reach complete and perfect knowledge of nature, it is a question of understanding that any method must conform to and, to put it bluntly, limit itself in line with to what our reason is. We can see here the dialogue with Boyle, who made this awareness of our limits the starting point of an epistemological pessimism, but even more so do we see here how the introduction of the probable as the fundamental dimension of knowledge is inscribed on the very front of a necessary disillusion. It opens a new field of research that fundamentally transforms what knowledge is: at its core are incorporated not only the limitations of knowledge, but also its fallibility.

12.4.2  Émilie du Châtelet The second example is that of Émilie du Châtelet. The analysis of Emilie du Châtelet’s methodological choices in the Institutions de Physique (1740) leads to a demonstration of the work of the concept: the paradoxical conciliation of hypothesis and experience is less the figure of a vague eclecticism than the indication that du Châtelet works against. She opposes the evidence of divisions, of excluding alternatives, but it is not a taste for paradox for paradox’s sake, she is concerned with questioning and testing the relevance of categorizations and often, by doing so, with displacing them. She is certainly a philosopher in this way: a philosopher of confrontation rather than conciliation, but of fruitful confrontation. In the following lines, I would like to give an outline of this inventiveness. To the necessarily modern antiphon of “hypotheses non fingo,” so often misinterpreted that no longer any attention whatsoever is paid to the meaning given to it by Newton in the Principia, one could say that du Châtelet opposes what could be the following slogan (even if it is naturally never formulated in these terms): hypotheses fingo et experientias facio. And in doing so, she is really reading Newton. Émilie du Châtelet contributes significantly to reconfiguring the use of hypotheses and experience and to proposing fruitful articulations of them. To this end, the Foreword of Institutions de Physique insists on the necessity of hypotheses and the usefulness of experiments. In the same way, in the famous chapter IV, “Of Hypotheses,” circumscribes the perimeter and the legitimate uses of hypotheses (Detlefsen 2019) in the knowledge of nature, thus distinguishing the physical hypothesis from the metaphysical hypothesis and recalling in this way the use that Newton himself makes of hypotheses! In the same way, opposing the adherence to the immediacy of experience as a condition of certain knowledge of nature, she proposes a vast palette of uses of the

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experience (experimental approximation, reproducibility of the experiments, falsifying experiment, etc.) that anchor in an extremely stimulating way her work in the plural epistemology of the Enlightenment. To give an overview, let us consider two examples of articulation (§64 and §65 of the Institutions) which are examples of confrontation. What happens when there is a contradiction between a hypothesis and an experiment? This is the question addressed by du Châtelet: in the first example, experience alone cannot corroborate a hypothesis, it can only falsify it. But this proves nothing by itself. Rather, it is the fact of multiple and diverse experiences that that changes the status of a hypothesis into a proposition so probable that it could pass for a truth. Popper’s tools are endorsed. In the second example, Du Châtelet invites us to consider auxiliary hypotheses which constitute the hypothesis under consideration to suggest that the rejection of this hypothesis cannot be global; rather, confrontation with experience simply allows it to be modified, adjusted. We validate Duhem-Quine. From this confrontation arises, once again, a displacement: thinking the relation between hypothesis and experiment is a way to show that experiment is not so much the moment of truth for the hypothesis, if I may say so, it is rather the laboratory in which the formulation of the hypothesis is exercised and refined. These considerations are different answers to a common epistemic problem: uncertainty in science. How can we know nature with certainty if we do not subordinate physics to a certainty founded metaphysically, that is to say guaranteed by metaphysical principles, in the way in which Descartes bases his laws of movement on divine immutability (1647: 36, part 2) nor to a certainty established solely on the mathematical expression of observed phenomenal regularities, in the manner of Newton? What to do with the observation of what seem to be the (provisional?) limits of our knowledge? Are they a sign of our epistemic impotence? It is the vertigo aroused by this questioning that Émilie du Châtelet tackles. She proposes taking our condition, or better, of our epistemic situation, not so much as a sign of our impotence but rather as a mark of our epistemic identity. We have confused representations and it is from this confusion that the phenomenon is born (Cf. §154 of the Institutions) in such a way that (1) effectively, we must forge, and to tell the truth, imagine hypotheses (hypotheses fingo) because we cannot experience all reality; (2) but this imaginative power must be limited by the principle of sufficient reason (1740: §8); (3) thus, the hypothesis is a probable proposition which is similar, under certain conditions (1740: §53), to a certainty. The gesture that Émilie du Châtelet thus makes is to propose an inventive epistemic device that is at the exact height of our human condition: to find the means, starting from our perceptive and epistemic limitation, to construct the conditions of certain knowledge of nature by integrating what can initially appear as strong obstacles: she turns the instability of nature and confusion of our perceptions into the outline of our identity. We must therefore invent a method to acquire certain knowledge of nature at the very heart of the experiences we have of the phenomenal world. It is therefore no longer the time to be surprised that Emmanuel Kant cites Émilie du Châtelet: not because this distinguished honor would testify to a recognition that is invisible today, but rather because she formulates a philosophical position which makes awareness of the limits of our knowledge less a lament than a means of building physical certainty (Rey 2022b).

12.5  Conclusion: What Displacements? These two examples show in action how summoning the texts of Cavendish or du Châtelet explodes the canon of natural philosophy in the Modern Age, as it has been transmitted and

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taught until now. The centrality of the displacement concerns the relation between certainty and probability in the constitution of knowledge. That is, it fundamentally concerns the situation of the epistemic subject who has undergone a form of epistemic injustice since her word has not been given credit, who assumed to have a singular point of view in the field of knowledge without presupposing the adoption of a well-constituted line of the canon within the alternatives already considered, who proposed to us a form of epistemic mobility that allowed us to change our point of view on the epistemological positions considered without renouncing objectivity. On the contrary: it reinforces this objectivity precisely by its capacity to renounce the “Divine Thing.”

Notes 1 Anstey claims, […] speculative natural philosophy is the development of explanations of natural phenomena without prior recourse to systematic observation and experiment. By contrast, experimental natural philosophy involves the collection and ordering of observations and experimental reports with a view to the development of explanations of natural phenomena based on these observations and experiments (2005: 215). 2 It may be useful in this respect to indicate that these conditions produce a network: from Masham to Astell, from Gournay to Schurman. 3 Haraway wrote: “To base the capacity to see from the margins and the depths has a great importance. But it carries the serious danger of idealizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their position. Seeing from below is not easily learned and is not without problems, even if “we” “naturally” inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledge. The positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-examination, decoding, deconstruction and interpretation: which means both semiological and hermeneutical approaches of critical inquiry. The points of view of the subjected are not “innocent” positions” (2007: 119). 4 We know the importance of the reference to the Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus (discovered on the occasion of his reading of Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy) even in the plan of his Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.

References Aït-Touati, F. (forthcoming) “Margaret Cavendish: la fabrique des mondes,” in A.-L. Rey (ed.), Philosophies féminin pluriel, Paris: Classiques Garnier, pp. 284–300. Anstey, P. (2005) “Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy,” in R. Anstey and J. Schuster (eds.), The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 215–242. Brading, K. (2018) Emilie Du Châtelet and the Foundations of Physics, New York: Routledge. Cavendish, M. (1666 (1668)) Observations on the Experimental Philosophy, London: A Maxwell. (1666) The Blazing World, London: A. Maxwell. (1992) The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. K. Lilley, London: Penguin Classics. D’Alembert, J.-R. (1755) “Elements of the Sciences,” in D. Diderot and J.-R. D’Alembert (eds.), l’Encyclopédie des arts et des métiers, Paris: Briasson. Available at: http://enccre.academie-sciences.fr/encyclopedie/ article/v5-851-0/?query=Elemens. Descartes, R. (1647) Les Principes de la philosophie, trans. C. Picot, Paris: Henry Le Gras. Detlefsen, K. (2019) “Du Châtelet and Descartes on the Roles of Hypothesis and Metaphysics in Natural Philosophy,” in E. O’Neill and P. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Cham: Springer, pp. 97–127. Du Châtelet, É. (1735) “Préface du traducteur,” in translation of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, National Library of Russia, Saint Petersburg, Voltaire Library, Vol. 9, f. 241. (1740) Institutions de physique, Paris: Chez Prault fils. Fraisse, G. (1998) Les Femmes et leur histoire (Folio Histoire), Paris: Gallimard. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge.

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13 PHYSICS AND OPTICS Agnesi, Bassi, Du Châtelet Bryce Gessell and Andrew Janiak

13.1 Introduction Coincidentally, 1686 was a propitious year for European science. It saw the publication of works representing the apotheosis of technical physics, Newton’s Principia mathematica, and also the popularization of science, Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. Whereas Newton’s audience was limited to the most sophisticated mathematicians, Fontenelle’s work helped to usher in a new era in which male philosophers would explain the latest developments in science to broad audiences, including female readers. His Conversations addressed a “naïve but intellectually receptive marquise” (Terrall 1995, 210),1 an aristocratic woman interested in science, thereby creating a “template of the scientific woman” (Findlen 2003: 60).2 Fontenelle’s later status as the long-serving secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris helped to ensure the influence of his approach well into the eighteenth century. Indeed, reaching an educated audience of women became a major theme of Enlightenment science.3 Although Fontenelle himself was a lifelong Cartesian, even Newtonians and Leibnizians followed in his footsteps: from Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianism for the Ladies (1737) to Samuel Formey’s La Belle Wolfienne (1741), philosophers sought to reach an educated female audience interested in the latest scientific developments.4 Fontenelle clearly envisioned women to be mere consumers and not producers of scientific knowledge, but the exclusivity of the various European academies did not prevent women from breaking through this boundary, contributing to each realm of science. Women published works on the mathematics required for physics, such as Maria Gaetana Agnesi’s 1748 book on the calculus, Instituizioni analitiche (1748). They helped to present physics in the form of the new analysis, as in Émilie Du Châtelet’s “analytical commentary” on Newton’s Principia mathematica, published posthumously with her French translation of that text in 1759. And they contributed to physics through experimentation: e.g., Laura Bassi conducted experiments on a vast range of subjects in presentations to the Academy in Bologna and in her own home from 1746–1777.5 These three women in particular achieved considerable fame.6 Bassi was the very first woman to join the faculty of a European university, giving public lectures on physics for many years, finishing her career as Institute Professor of Experimental Physics (Findlen 1993). Agnesi’s book, one of the very first on the calculus in Italian, circulated widely, was praised by the secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, and was listed in the early nineteenth century along with works by mathematical giants like Bernoulli and Euler (Findlen 2011).7 Du Châtelet’s ideas were debated widely in France, Prussia, Italy, and Switzerland. Indeed, Agnesi, Bassi, and Du Châtelet were often compared with one another.8 They were arguably the most famous women to contribute to early 174

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modern European science (Findlen 1999: 316–317), and all three were mentioned prominently in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, which Robert Darnton called “the supreme text of the Enlightenment” (1985: 191).9 This triumvirate is more significant than it may appear. The emergence of modern science is often said to involve three key elements: the development and employment of new mathematical techniques; the extensive use of experiment and observation to obtain knowledge; and the emergence of grand new theories of nature. Together, Agnesi, Bassi, and Du Châtelet represent all three elements, thereby exemplifying the full range of women’s production of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe. Bassi contributed extensively to physics through her lectures and experiments under the auspices of the Bologna Academy, without publishing substantially. In contrast, Du Châtelet made her reputation through her various publications, especially her Institutions de physiques (Foundations of Physics 1740), while remaining largely excluded from French academic life. Bassi’s work underscores the fact that in early modern science, one could contribute as much to the discovery and dissemination of knowledge through academic work and public lectures as by publications. Agnesi was an intermediary figure: although she was a famous member of the Bologna Academy and earned the extraordinary position of honorary professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna at a time when the exclusion of women from academic institutions was nearly total, she also spent many years working in private (Findlen 2011: 271). Her fame rested largely on the importance of her Analytical Institutions of 1748, which brought the reader from analyzing finite quantities to a discussion of the differential calculus and then to the integral calculus. As an experimentalist, Bassi contributed to scientific knowledge in part through ingenuity and in part through testing techniques and confirming results; an experiment that others cannot replicate has little claim to producing knowledge.10 She presented experiments on a bewildering range of subjects, including the compression of the air, the calculation of a center of gravity, issues in hydrodynamics, and the nature of fire.11 There were certain topics, especially concerning hydraulics and the nature of electricity, on which she presented numerous times over many years, with electricity serving as a special focus in the 1770s. In her presentations to the Bologna Academy, some of her experimental work is described as involving rather general issues, e.g., in physics or hydraulics, and at other times we receive an extremely detailed description, e.g., in April of 1763 she presented on a method of correcting a specific problem in telescopes.12 It was experiments in these and other areas that helped to transform physics into an empirically robust discipline.13 Bassi’s wide range of experimentation also reflects the broad nature of physics in the eighteenth century: presentations to the Academy might involve discussion of the salt content of water taken from a local source, the nature of air bubbles in specific fluids, broad discussions of the nature of electricity, problems in mechanics such as the center of gravity, etc. In this sense, Bassi participated in the full range of experimental investigations that characterized eighteenth-century physics, and because she was an academician, the scientific knowledge generated by her experiments circulated through the classic intellectual channels of the time. As a theoretician, Du Châtelet’s originality rested on her analysis of the basic principles that the science of nature would require in the early Enlightenment in her Institutions de physiques. For her part, Agnesi contributed to the other main pillar of modern physics, the mathematics that must accompany the use of theory and experiment to explain natural phenomena. Her Analytical Institutions circulated widely, both in Italian and later in English and French translation. As their titles suggest, both Du Châtelet and Agnesi presented “institutions” of modern science, that is, fundamental principles or elements: the former focused on principles like the laws of nature, the latter on mathematical principles.14 They were equally important to eighteenthcentury science.

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Despite their fame, Agnesi, Bassi, and Du Châtelet were often caught in a gender trap. The idea that progress toward gender equality was made as women shifted from the role of consumers of science to producers of it is a happy one, but not historically accurate.15 In fact, the role of consumer in which Fontenelle, Algarotti, and Formey placed women often continued to undermine their attempts to become producers of scientific knowledge well into the Enlightenment. For instance, just three years after Algarotti published Newtonianism for the ladies, a text in which he explicitly cast Du Châtelet in the role of the Marquise who awaited his instruction on scientific topics, Du Châtelet published her own magnum opus on physics. And yet, far from ensuring that she would forever after be interpreted as a producer of scientific knowledge, many readers of Du Châtelet’s work downplayed her status as a philosopher studying nature, emphasizing her role as a consumer—and also as a reader, translator, and disseminator—of male authors’ ideas. Although Algarotti studied experimental physics with Bassi in Bologna and praised her in Newtonianism for her role in disseminating Newtonian ideas in Italy (Findlen 1993: 448; see also Mazzotti 2004: 120; Mazzotti 2007: 129), calling her “la filofessa di Bologna,” it’s clear that an appearance in a male author’s text disseminating scientific knowledge could be a double-edged sword.16 The way in which Bassi and Du Châtelet figure in Algarotti’s text illustrates the constant struggle for recognition that women producing science in early modern Europe faced. Du Châtelet’s status as a passive consumer of Algarotti’s wisdom in his popular work is especially ironic, for there was probably no scientific work written by a woman in the early modern period that matched the influence of her magnum opus. Within a few short years of its publication in 1740, Du Châtelet’s Institutions was read and discussed by philosophers such as Kant and Wolff, mathematicians such as Bernoulli and Euler, and the secretaries of the Berlin and Paris academies (Samuel Formey and Dortous de Mairan, respectively). It went through subsequent editions in French (1741–1742), German, and Italian (both in 1743) (see Hagengruber 2012; Detlefsen 2014). All of the major thinkers of the day reacted to the text: Kant discussed Du Châtelet’s ideas in depth in his first publication, the True Estimation of Living Forces (1747); Euler praised her understanding of hypotheses in physics;17 and Formey copied nearly verbatim many passages from the Institutions for his projected French version of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, which eventually became the famous Enlightenment text edited by Diderot and D’Alembert (Roe 2018). Formey’s decision is especially intriguing because he himself had written on many of the same topics in La belle Wolffienne; one can only guess why he regarded her work as more authoritative. At the same time, Du Châtelet’s male readers and interlocutors were not quite comfortable with the status and authority she had gained through the publication of her magnum opus and the circulation of its ideas about the relation between metaphysics and physics. Many of the very figures who praised Du Châtelet or reacted publicly to her ideas, from Kant to Voltaire to Wolff, sought at the same time to undermine her originality. Perhaps the most famous remark in this regard is an oft-quoted dismissal from Kant’s Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime, first published in 1764: A woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mrs. Dacier, or who engages in fundamental disputations about mechanics, like the Marquise du Chastelet, might as well also have a beard; for that might perhaps better express the mien of depth for which they strive. The beautiful understanding chooses for its objects everything that is closely related to the finer feeling, and leaves abstract speculation or knowledge, which is useful but dry, to the industrious, thorough, and deep understanding. The woman will accordingly not learn geometry; she will know only so much about the principle of sufficient reason or the monads as is necessary in order to detect the salt in satirical poems which the insipid grubs of our sex have fabricated. The beauties can leave Descartes’ vortices rotating forever without worrying about them, even if the suave Fontenelle wanted to join them under the planets, and the attraction of their 176

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charms loses nothing of its power even if they know nothing of what Algarotti has taken the trouble to lay out for their advantage about the attractive powers of crude matter according to Newton. (Kant 1902: 229–30) Kant’s remark perfectly illustrates the tension noted above: although he acknowledges that Du Châtelet engages in fundamental disputes concerning mechanics in her own work, he then mocks her, returning to the safer waters in which figures like Fontenelle and Algarotti serve to explain the latest science to educated women like her. This remark is all the more remarkable when we remember that Kant himself had discussed Du Châtelet’s views in mechanics extensively and with considerable respect years earlier. Although Kant focused on Du Châtelet in this passage, his type of attitude was often expressed about Agnesi and Bassi as well, often in subtler ways. For instance, one primary reaction to all three women was to regard them as mere followers of a more prominent male figure, in this case, Newton. Even in recent years, Agnesi and Bassi have been dubbed “Newtonian women” alongside Du Châtelet (see Feingold 2004: 126–29). Her French translation of Newton’s Principia mathematica, along with its appended extensive “analytical commentary” on that text, has often overshadowed her own magnum opus: in fact, some discussions fail to mention her magnum opus altogether, presenting her solely as the French translator of Newton.18 This approach mirrors her presence in the Encyclopedia: although her Institutions was copied nearly verbatim in a dozen entries of Diderot and D’Alembert’s text, in the “Newtonianisme” article she is portrayed only as a commentator on, and translator of, Newton (D’Alembert 1750–1765b: 123). The attempt to present Du Châtelet’s thought as derivative did not stop with discussions of Newtonianism. In contradiction to the first approach, she was also sometimes called an opponent of Newtonianism, viz. a Leibnizian.19 Neither label stuck.20 The question of whether an eighteenth-century figure like Agnesi or Du Châtelet is “Newtonian” also connects with a deep question about the historiography of the entire period. The standard textbook approach to eighteenth-century physics and optics undermines our ability to understand major contributions to those fields. The standard narrative is that soon after the publication of Newton’s Principia mathematica, something called “Newtonian mechanics” quickly overtook physics. In Kuhn’s famous figure, it became the “paradigm” of the century. That left little work for others to do, except for clarifying various conceptual issues, discovering more empirical evidence (e.g., concerning the lunar orbit), and perhaps translating Newton’s old-fashioned geometric presentation of physics into the new language of “analysis.” This story facilitates the idea that figures such as Agnesi, Bassi, and Du Châtelet were merely “Newtonian women,” for they were simply helping to promote “Newtonian mechanics.” But in fact, all three key elements of modern physics—mathematics, experimentation, and theory—involved significant changes in the eighteenth century that were not mere efforts to tidy up Newton’s results (see Porter 2003, especially 2–5; Hepburn 2020). In her Institutions, Agnesi expressed an open-minded attitude toward the old LeibnizNewton debate. She used differentials, or Leibnizian notation, throughout her text, but she would occasionally employ Newtonian terminology alongside these equations by speaking of “fluents” or “fluxions” (Guicciardini 2015: 342, note 17). Indeed, some prominent British Newtonians claimed her as one of their own: John Colson, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the very position that Newton himself once held, translated the text into English with something of a pro-Newtonian bias.21 Moreover, Colson, along with the editor of the English edition of her work, John Hellins, praised her approach to the calculus for falling into the “geometrical” tradition of the calculus inaugurated by Newton and promoted by his (mostly British) followers in the eighteenth century. The status of her text is therefore complex. It is true that 177

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Agnesi sought to provide what she regarded as an abstract formulation of the calculus without applying it to mechanical or empirical problems, and that she emphasized what one of her interpreters calls “the priority of geometrical evidence” in presenting her arguments (Mazzotti 2007: 119). So, it was reasonable for some Newtonians to praise her approach. But that does not make her a self-proclaimed Newtonian, and it would be a mistake to allow the British reception of her work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to color our overall conception of Agnesi’s mathematics. In tandem, the foundations of physics in the eighteenth century remained unsettled in Newton’s wake. According to Euler, one of the most significant aspects of those foundations was the role of hypotheses in physical science. Both the legacy of Cartesian science, especially in France from 1700–1750, and the legacy of its Newtonian competitor, ensured the importance of analyzing hypothetical reasoning. As Du Châtelet describes in chapter 4 of her Institutions, the Cartesians and the Newtonians occupied the two extreme positions on hypotheses: whereas the former engaged in hypothetical reasoning about a vast range of natural phenomena, from the true cause of gravity to conjectures about electricity and magnetism, the latter turned Newton’s famous dictum hypotheses non fingo from the General Scholium to the Principia into an outright ban on such conjectures. Neither approach, according to Du Châtelet, can be defended; instead, hypotheses can be employed under appropriate circumstances in physics, e.g., to propose experiments, but they must be rejected if evidence against them is uncovered. One of the major lacunae in Newton’s work was a general discussion of the methodology of physics—in fact, hypotheses non fingo was originally not presented as a general dictum but rather a remark specifically about the potential “seat” of gravity. Newton understood that it was unsatisfying to his readers for him simply to say that the Sun attracts the Earth and vice versa, accelerating them in their respective orbits, without noting any mechanism of interaction between them. After all, how could two objects separated by close to a 100 million miles accelerate one another? Newton also knew that many of his readers would favor a vortex theory of the kind first proposed by Descartes in his own Principia Philosophiæ (1644) and later adopted by Leibniz and others—the idea would be that a giant swirling fluid would push, or carry, the planets through their orbits.22 Newton rejected the vortex theory, then refused to hypothesize about a distinct mechanism. Du Châtelet argued that it was wrong simply to declare that a vortex must explain the planetary orbits; instead, one could use a vortex theory in order to propose experiments or observations that might decide the question. Many of Newton’s interlocutors, such as Leibniz, took their deep commitments to the mechanical philosophy to be sufficient to undergird their vortex theory of planetary motion. Du Châtelet rejected precisely that approach, declaring that it remained uncertain whether there would be a mechanical explanation of all forces of nature. But she also cautioned Newtonians against banning conjectures from physics altogether, for empirical evidence supporting a vortex theory, or some other mechanism, could still be found. One of the great virtues of Du Châtelet’s approach, highlighted by her chapter on hypotheses, is to caution philosophers and mathematicians against taking the state of physics at a given moment in time and solidifying its attributes through extreme approaches to methodology.23 As Agnesi discusses in her early work, Propositiones Philosophicae, another vexing problem for the eighteenth century was the status of space and time.24 Newton had famously proclaimed that it was appropriate to think of both space and time from an “absolute,” rather than a merely “relative,” point of view. Independently of all matter and material relations, he thought, space could be thought of as a homogeneous, immovable, three-dimensional magnitude (and time as a homogeneous and flowing, one-dimensional, magnitude). Throughout the century, many philosophers, including Leibniz, Berkeley, Du Châtelet, and Kant, rejected the idea of absolute space. By 1740, there were many well-known arguments against absolute space, including the claim (originating with Leibniz) that the idea was incompatible with the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), that 178

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it was tantamount to suggesting that God was not the only infinite being in the world, and that Newton’s own laws did not require the postulation of absolute space. Instead of merely rehearsing such arguments, Du Châtelet sought in the fifth chapter of her Institutions to tackle a prior question, namely, why was the idea of absolute space so attractive in the first place? Rather than tracing the idea to some aspect of Newton’s personal psychology, or to his own religious views, she argued that his conception of space reflected a much more general and fundamental aspect of the human representational apparatus. In particular, although it is straightforward to represent (e.g.) an office filled with books, chairs, a table, etc., and then to remove each of these items until nothing is left, we find that we cannot then take one last step by removing space itself from our representation. That is, although for any object, we can represent it, and then represent its absence, it seems that we cannot represent the absence of space, for doing so is the same as representing empty space. If Newton were wrong, and space were merely the order of objects and their relations, as Leibniz had argued against Samuel Clarke, then one could presumably represent the absence of space simply by representing the absence of objects and relations. But this maneuver fails. So, Du Châtelet argues that the idea of absolute space is attractive to us for a very deep reason, namely, it seems to comport with a basic feature of human representation. When we analyze our representation of space, it certainly seems to us that space is indeed an independent being, something that could exist even if no matter existed. She cautions against concluding from this fact that space is in fact absolute: after all, a feature of human representation, however deep, does not guarantee that the world conforms to that representation. But space does appear to be as Newton says it really is. Du Châtelet made other crucial methodological contributions to physics. For instance, the quest for a mechanism underlying gravity, which continued until Einstein proposed the General Theory of Relativity in 1915, was accompanied by deep questions about how to interpret the idea that all material bodies gravitate toward one another. Locke’s fame in the French Enlightenment ensured the influence of his own preferred understanding of universal gravity, which he first presented in his correspondence with Bishop Edward Stillingfleet at the end of the seventeenth century. Rather than searching for some mechanism underlying gravity, such as a Cartesian vortex, Locke declared that Newton’s “incomparable book”—which he had reviewed anonymously for the Bibiliothèque universelle in 1688—had convinced him that gravity was a property of all matter. However, it was not part of the idea of matter, and he admitted that even after reading Newton, he still could not conceive of any way in which matter could gravitate toward other matter. Instead, he declared that God must have superadded gravity to matter. Since gravity was added to material bodies by God, no further mechanism was required. No hypotheses would be fingere because divine fiat solved the problem. Du Châtelet rejected Locke’s interpretation of Newton’s universal gravity. She did not emphasize the specific impropriety of relying on divine fiat; she chose instead to make the more general point that any interpretation of physics ought to meet the methodological criterion of cohering with the PSR. In particular, no interpretation should attribute to matter a property or properties that cannot be rationally understood as flowing from the other, established, features of matter. Since Locke and his followers admitted that they could not understand how matter gravitates toward matter, but were simply convinced by Newton that it must do so, they violated this criterion. Even on their own theory, proposing that gravity was “superadded” to matter does not make it rationally intelligible as a feature of material bodies. She then made a deeper point: if we cannot make gravity rationally intelligible as a feature of material bodies, perhaps it is unwise to think of it as a property of matter in the first place. Its status as a property, rather than say as a phenomenon that could be reduced to the actions of some mechanism (like a vortex), was still contested. With the publication of influential discussions of optics in the first half of the eighteenth century, Du Châtelet’s substantive differences from her portrayers Algarotti and Voltaire become 179

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even clearer. Her treatment of optics also challenges her status as a “Newtonian,” for in the Institutions she comes to reject a so-called Newtonian approach to optical phenomena. In their popularizations of Newton’s work, both Algarotti and Voltaire treat the science of light and that of moving bodies on a par. The full title of Algarotti’s work is Newtonianism for the Ladies, or, Dialogues on Light and Colors (“ovvero, Dialoghi sopra la Luce e I Colori”; 1737). The first five dialogues cover the nature of light and color, optical principles, vision, and Newton’s experiments, among other topics. The sixth and final dialogue concerns “the universal principle of Newtonian attraction, and the application of this principle to optics” (1737: 236). Algarotti’s discussion of attraction includes Newton’s planetary theory and a response to Cartesian vortices, but only by way of explaining the behavior of light. While we perceive the effects of attraction in fields as diverse as chemistry, hydrostatics, and anatomy, attraction explains optical phenomena in particular, including refraction (1737: 276). Algarotti’s application of attraction to light draws from the Principia, where Newton had mentioned refraction in connection with attraction. Propositions 94–96 of Book I discuss cases of different parallel media exerting attractive forces on an impinging body. The forces accelerate the body such that “the sine of the angle of incidence onto either plane will be to the sine of the angle of emergence from the other plane in a given ratio” (proposition 94). Proposition 95 then applies this reasoning to the body’s velocity, and proposition 96 deals with a limiting case in which the accelerations combine to reflect the body away from the media. Newton relates the results to light in the Scholium to these propositions, writing that “These attractions are very similar to reflections and refractions of light made according to a given ratio” (Newton 1687). This remark, together with Newton’s explanations in the Opticks (1704), gave apparent license to Algarotti and other commentators to explain many optical phenomena through attraction. In this respect, Voltaire differed little from Algarotti. More than half of the chapters in the first edition of Élemens de la philosophie de Neuton cover optical phenomena, and Voltaire dedicates ­chapter 7 to the “grande découverte de Neuton”—that the breaking of light’s path in refraction comes from attraction (1738: 97). Voltaire mentions several experimental results before asking why light accelerates when entering a new medium. He answers that it does so “because it is carried into it, both by its proper motion and by that of the attraction which the water or the glass impresses on it” (1738: 100). Voltaire assures his readers that “this attraction, this tendency, this species of gravitation” exists, and we cannot doubt it, because “we have seen light attracted by the glass and reenter it without touching anything” (1738: 100). In their popularizations of Newton, Algarotti and Voltaire thus offer blanket coverage of ­Newtonian science without regard for any distinction between different domains. Such methodological nonchalance manifests in their freewheeling explanations of refraction by attraction, a topic Newton’s Opticks treated in the Queries (1704; see Query 29 in particular). The strategy of Algarotti and Voltaire contrasts with Newton’s own: he separated the science of bodies in motion from that of light, treating them in the Principia and Opticks, respectively.25 The linchpin connecting the popularizers’ union of the domains—attraction—appears in an optical context only briefly in the Principia, and only in the Queries in the Opticks. We should not ignore Newton’s circumspection on this point since the possible uses of attraction would have occurred to him as easily as to his followers. Algarotti, Voltaire, and others helped create the tradition of “Newtonian” science by treating all of Newton’s discoveries on the same epistemic and methodological grounds. Du Châtelet, however, did not. In her unpublished manuscript Essai sur l’optique (n.d.) and her Institutions, we see a self-conscious separation of optics and moving bodies into different domains. On the surface, this choice seems to mark her as more Newtonian than either Algarotti or Voltaire. In reality, though, the Institutions challenges the popularizers’ use of attraction in optics, and condemns her own approach in the Essai. Paradoxically, it is the thoroughly Newtonian Essai— evaluated in light of her later work—that most disputes her status as a “Newtonian,” as we will see. 180

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Du Châtelet’s Essai contains an introduction and four chapters. The chapters discuss light in general, transparence, opacity, and colors. Three extant manuscripts have the introduction and each chapter, while a fourth contains only the final chapter. Because the manuscript Fritz Nagel discovered in Basel in 2006 is available to the public in both French and English, we will focus on it here.26 In the Basel text, Du Châtelet reports many of Newton’s optical results. She comments on experiments involving light passing from one medium into another, and gives a detailed account of the “fits” of easy transmission and reflection (n.d.: 29, 32). She explains certain types of reflection by means of attraction (n.d.: 34) and canvasses Newton’s experiments on colors (n.d.: 40). The most important chapter for Du Châtelet as a “Newtonian” is the second, in which she affirms that bodies act on light from a distance (n.d.: 15). She tries to allay concerns about the mechanism of that action: Anything having the appearance of a push seems easier to conceive than effects at a distance. But if we examine these ideas rigorously, we may find that we can conceive hardly better of how a body can communicate its motion to another by pushing it than we can of how a body can act on another without touching it. (n.d.: 15) Algarotti and Voltaire share this view about the conceivability of attractive effects. In the Essai, Du Châtelet’s concern is just to account for the phenomena by attraction, which she recognizes as a legitimate cause. She believes she can give this account without providing the “principle” (principe; n.d.: 15) behind the action. The sixth section of this chapter then explains refraction via attraction: “The ray begins refracting…as soon as it enters into the body’s sphere of activity” (n.d.: 15), or the region in which the attractive force operates. “This power…increases as the ray comes closer to the body. The power also makes itself felt more when [the body] is denser, so that the refracting force of bodies is nearly proportional to their quantity of matter” (n.d.: 15–16). With a sentence Voltaire could have written, Du Châtelet concludes that it’s “impossible not to acknowledge an attraction between bodies and light” (n.d.: 16). The rest of section six, however, distinguishes Du Châtelet from her male counterparts, especially when read in conjunction with the later Institutions. Here she writes that “this attraction seems, in several cases, to follow laws other than those which bodies follow in acting on each other” (n.d.: 16). A subsection heading then asks, “What are the laws of this attraction?” Her first two proposals are about differently-colored rays resisting the action of bodies in different measures and sulfurous bodies acting on light more than one would expect. These two are inconsequential compared to her final proposal, where she speculates about the mathematical structure of bodylight attraction: It seems that the attraction of bodies on light is not entirely bound to the laws which attraction follows among bodies we’re familiar with. We know that, among bodies, attraction is always proportional to the masses involved, that it decreases by the square of the distance, and so on. But is it impossible for it to observe other proportions in some circumstances? Light seems a being apart, unlike any other we’re familiar with. I would see no contradiction in supposing that for light there are, in certain circumstances, other laws of attraction than for bodies. There are so many laws for motion produced by impulsion; why couldn’t there be a few for motion produced by attraction? In this matter I see neither impossibility nor contradiction in accepting whatever the phenomena might reveal to us. Attraction observes 181

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different proportions in contact and at a distance; there could likewise be a special law of attraction between light and bodies. (n.d.: 16–17) The “proportions” she refers to come from Newton’s inverse-square law for gravitational attraction, where the force is equal to the product of the masses divided by the distance squared. As she notes, this force “decreases by the square of the distance.” Given how different light is from bodies, however, Du Châtelet wonders whether the attraction which causes refraction might not “observe different proportions.” Such a “special law of attraction between light and bodies” could take various forms, but the most obvious is an inverse cube. Thus, the attraction would diminish by the distance cubed and would become imperceptible far faster than attraction between bodies. An inverse cube law would explain why light must be close to a surface in order to refract, why reflection occurs near a body’s surface, and so on. Du Châtelet’s own remark following the long quote above characterizes her approach to these speculations and other aspects of the Essai: “Therefore let us follow the phenomena and see to what extent the laws of attraction among bodies apply to light” (n.d.: 17). In contrast to the unpublished Essai, Du Châtelet’s Institutions does not follow the pattern of other Newtonian popularizations and commentaries, as Algarotti and Voltaire wrote; in fact, the Institutions is notable for its complete lack of sustained discussion on light. Du Châtelet dedicates not even a single chapter to optics. The word “light” does not figure in any chapter title and neither “lumière,” “réfraction,” nor “réflexion” appear in the index to the 1740 first edition. It may seem that the absence of light in the Institutions makes the work more Newtonian. After all, Newton’s treatment of light came in the Opticks, not the Principia. There is a better explanation, however. The Institutions does say something about light, and even that limited discussion reveals how much Du Châtelet had already moved from the “Newtonian popularizer” mindset of Algarotti and Voltaire. The Institutions discusses optics in two places. One is in §13, where Du Châtelet introduces Leibniz’s “law of continuity.” The law says that, for each state S of a body, the previous state must contain the sufficient reason for S. Du Châtelet applies this law to reflection and refraction. For her, light bends near surfaces in curves because it must pass through all the intermediate states before traveling in a new direction. The Institutions also discusses light in chapter 16, on Newtonian attraction. Here Du Châtelet criticizes Newtonians for their use of attraction in explaining many phenomena, including some from optics. It is also here that we see how much Du Châtelet had come to reject a “Newtonian” approach to light—the very approach she herself took in the Essai. She now argues that Newton’s followers wish to make attraction “reign everywhere” and believe that it can explain “the cohesion of bodies, chemical effects, [and] the phenomena of light” (§389). In his dialogue with the Marchesa, Algarotti affirmed that attraction explained chemical effects, and both he and Voltaire used it in optics. This Du Châtelet now refused to do. The reason is that she no longer considered attraction as a cause which could explain anything. She had no sufficient reason for why attraction occurs, and in the Institutions, anything lacking a sufficient reason is a phenomenon and not a real cause. Attraction therefore couldn’t explain the behavior of light because attraction itself required an explanation. Without one, attraction couldn’t explain light, chemical effects, physiology, or anything else. Du Châtelet therefore came to reject not only the speculative explanations of Algarotti and Voltaire, but also her own explanations in the Essai. The penultimate paragraph of §389 is a list of (illegitimate) attraction-based explanations for various optical phenomena, all given “according to the Newtonians.” But the Essai treats everything on that list. That paragraph also notes that, in 182

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giving attraction-based explanations for light, these Newtonians posit an attractive force following a non-standard mathematical structure. Rather than the inverse-square relation of Newtonian gravitation, Newton’s followers imagine an attraction which diminishes with the cube of the distance. Thus they “are forced to suppose laws of attraction other than that which directs the course of the stars” (§389). According to Du Châtelet, some Newtonians even suggest that the law’s A B correct structure is a series sum of the form 2 + 3 …, where x is the distance between the two x x attracted objects (§390). Like her earlier criticisms, this one applies to Du Châtelet’s own work as well. As we saw, her third proposed “law” for body-light attraction would require some mathematical structure other than the inverse square. The entire Essai is based on the possibility of this “special law of attraction,” and on taking attraction as an explanatory cause. But Du Châtelet categorically rejects this approach in the Institutions. It is the Newtonian Essai, then, viewed in the context of her later work, that best separates Du Châtelet from Algarotti and Voltaire and most challenges her status as a “Newtonian.” The Institutions is not a popularization of Newton’s discoveries, at least not in the manner of other works. Nor is Du Châtelet really a “Newtonian.” Newton had refused to feign hypotheses for action at a distance, but without a mechanism, Du Châtelet could not sanction the Algarotti-Voltaire explanatory strategies that found their source in the Principia. Algarotti finished his dialogue by having the Marchesa ask, “Can I seriously call myself a Newtonian?” (1737: 300). Du Châtelet gave a tentative “yes” in the Essai, but settled the question with a resounding “no” in the Institutions. These details of eighteenth-century physics and optics reveal the unfortunate consequence of the standard narrative detailing the dominance of a “Newtonian” paradigm during the Enlightenment. That narrative presses scholars to interpret our three figures, Agnesi, Bassi, and Du Châtelet, within the terms of that dominant paradigm. But all three were independent thinkers who sought to articulate their own conceptions of mathematics, experimental physics, optics, and the theory of nature. All three deserve to be read on their own terms.

Notes 1 Terrall also discusses how Algarotti followed in Fontenelle’s footsteps; see (Terrall 1995: 225). 2 Fontenelle’s Conversations was wildly popular and was continually updated until 1742—see (Harth 1992). 3 See especially (Sutton 1995). 4 For discussion of Algarotti’s text, which became an eighteenth century bestselling work and was quickly translated into French, English, German, and Dutch, see (Mazzotti 2004). 5 See (Schiebinger 2003) and for discussion of Bassi’s extensive experimentation in physics, see (Frize 2013). 6 See (Daston 1992; Findlen 1999; Schiebinger 2006). 7 For instance, it is mentioned in that way in Wrönski’s Philosophie de l’infini (1814: 105). On the Paris Academy’s recognition of the Analytical Institutions, and the pronouncement that it is “the most complete treatment and the best of its kind,” see the December 6, 1749 abstract from the Académie Royale’s registers reprinted in Antonella Cupillari (2007: 103–06); the judgment was signed by Dortous de Mairan. In his 1799 biography of Agnesi, Francesco Frisi notes that her work was the first Italian text on the calculus: see the translation of Frisi’s work in Cupillari (2007: 57ff ). Mazzotti indicates that it was one of the first such works, and the first systematic presentation of Italian terminology for the new calculus: see (Mazzotti 2007: 109, 114). 8 See (Findlen 2011: 275). The comparisons occurred throughout the early modern period and into the nineteenth century; for instance, see (Chasles 1870: 36). 9 For discussion, see (Malueg 1984: especially 263–64). On Du Châtelet’s role in the Encyclopedia, see (Roe 2018). For Agnesi, see (D’Alembert 1750–1765a: 805). As the self-proclaimed product of a “society of men of letters,” the Encyclopedia rarely mentioned women in intellectual contexts at all, and only a single article out of many thousands was attributed to a woman.

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Bryce Gessell and Andrew Janiak 10 On the difficulties that some French and Italian authors had in replicating Newton’s famous optical experimental results, see (Mazzotti 2004: 132–33). 11 She presented and conducted experiments on these topics and others at the Academy of Sciences in Bologna from 1746 until 1777—see (Frize 2013: 183). In (Rosen 1971), there is a complete list of all presentations to the Bologna Academy in Appendix B. Rosen notes that Bassi made at least 30 official presentations (1971: 105). 12 As Rosen translates and presents the entry for Bassi’s presentation to the Academy on April 28th, 1763, she presented “a method of correcting telescopes of the problem arising from diverse refrangibilities of rays which unite according to their colors at various points on the axis” (Rosen 1971: 246). 13 On the shift of the focus and meaning of physics during the early modern period, see the classic account in (Heilbron 1979: 11–14). 14 Although the English translation of 1801 preserved Agnesi’s title well, rendering it literally as Analytical Institutions, the French translation of 1775 invented a new title, Traités Élémentaires de calcul différentiel et de calcul integral (Paris: Jombert, 1775), losing her notion of institutions. This translation was authorized by the Académie Royale des Sciences in the register for late August 1775, having been analyzed by D’Alembert and Condorcet. 15 For discussion of both Fontenelle’s key role and also Du Châtelet’s, see (Terrall 1995: 208–09, 224). Findlen describes a similar tension (2003: 59–87, and especially 64). 16 As Findlen notes, neither Bassi nor Du Châtelet were happy with Algarotti’s portrayal (2003: 62). 17 On Du Châtelet’s connection with Euler, see (Nagel 2012: 114–119, 130). 18 For instance, see Joyce Chaplin’s book on Benjamin Franklin, The First Scientific American (2006: 256). 19 In his “Préface historique” to her posthumously published translation of Newton’s Principia, Voltaire writes that in addition to her superlative translation, she also published the Institutions de physiques, “an explication of the philosophy of Leibniz” (Voltaire 1759: v). Wolff’s own early enthusiasm for her philosophical position in the Institutions later dissipated when in a June 1743 letter he lamented the fact that Maupertuis and Clairaut, who “understand nothing of philosophy, and therefore accommodate themselves so easily to the so-called philosophia Newtoniana, have turned Mme Du Châtelet around” (Wolff cited in Ostertag 1910: 42–43). 20 As Anne-Lise Rey argues (2017), one explanation for Du Châtelet’s sometimes negative reception in the eighteenth century lies in the difficulty of labeling the Institutions as a Cartesian or Lockean or Newtonian work. The same balanced treatment of Newton and Leibniz characterized Agnesi’s early philosophical work, the Propositiones philosophicae of 1738: e.g., Agnesi discusses Newton’s law of gravity in detail at Propositiones philosophicae section 66, pages 39ff. See (Findlen 2011: 252). 21 The English translation of Agnesi’s Analytical Institutions was published in London in 1801. Whereas Agnesi herself would typically refer simply to the differential and integral calculus, the translator Colson or editor Hellins often inserted a reference to the Newtonian method. For instance, already in the author’s preface, the translation says “In the Second Volume, in which I treat of the Integral Calculus, or what is also called the inverse method of fluxions” (1801: xxiii). But Agnesi’s original simply reads, “Nel tomo secondo per entro il Calculo Integrale” without mentioning fluxions (1748, Vol. 1: no pagination, fourth page of the preface). Similarly, Book I, Section VI of the translation (1801: 244) refers to resolving some problems in algebra “without the assistance of the Differential Calculus, or what is also called The Method of Fluxions,” but Agnesi herself simply says “aversi senza l’ajuto del calcolo differenziale” without mentioning fluxions (1748, Book I, Capo VI, 416). There are literally dozens of such insertions. Agnesi herself was certainly not promoting the equivalence of the Continental methods she employed with those of Newton and his followers. 22 The locus classicus for discussions of the fortunes of the vortex theory is The Vortex Theory of Planetary Motions (Aiton 1972). 23 For an illuminating discussion of Du Châtelet’s approach to such questions through the articulation of a complex methodology, see Émilie Du Châtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science (Brading 2019). 24 Agnesi notes that Descartes did not tackle the question of absolute space and motion, preferring to think of space and body as identical and of motion as relative, as involving a transfer of bodies from one vicinity to another—see (Agnesi 1738: 23, section 50). 25 Newton thought that light and material bodies followed different principles, treating the former through an English treatise focused on experiment with little mathematical apparatus accompanying it, and the latter through a Latin treatise consisting almost entirely of mathematical demonstrations. 26 For the text, see (Project Vox (website)). For a discussion of the discovery of the text in the Bernoulli archive in Basel in 2006, see (Nagel 2012).

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Works Cited Agnesi, M. G. (1738) Propositiones philosophicae, Milan. (1748) Instituizioni analitiche (Analytical Institutions), Milan. (1775) Traités Élémentaires de Calcul Différentiel et de Calcul Integral, Paris: Jombert (French translation of Instituizioni analitiche). (1801) Analytical Institutions (Instituizioni analitiche), trans. John Colson, London: Taylor and Wilks. Aiton, E. (1972) The Vortex Theory of Planetary Motions, London: Macdonald/American Elsevier. Algarotti, F. (1737) Newtonianism for the Ladies, or, Dialogues on Light and Colors, Venice: publisher unknown. Brading, K. (2019) Émilie Du Châtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science, London: Routledge. Chaplin, J. (2006) The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius, New York: Basic Books. Chasles, M. (1870) Rapport sur les Progrès de la Géométrie, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale. Cupillari, A. (2007) A Biography of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. D’Alembert, J. L-R. (1750–1765a) “Integral (matématique transcendentale)” in D. Diderot and J. L-R. D’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers Volume 8, Paris: André le Breton, Michel-Antoine David, Laurent Durand and Antoine-Claude Briasson. (1750–1765b) “Newtonianisme” in D. Diderot and J. L-R. D’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers Volume 11, Paris: André le Breton, Michel-Antoine David, Laurent Durand and Antoine-Claude Briasson. Darnton, R. (1985) “Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie,” in Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 191–213. Daston, L. (1992) “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context 5(2): 209–235. Descartes, R. (1644) Principia Philosophiæ, Amsterdam: Elzevir. Detlefsen, K. (2014) “Émilie du Châtelet,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Du Châtelet, É. (1740) Institutions de physique (Foundations of Physics), Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier. (n.d.) Essai sur l’optique (manuscript), Handschriftenband: L I a 755, fo. 230–265, Universität Basel, Switzerland. Feingold, M. (2004) The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Findlen, P. (1993) “Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy,” Isis 84(3): 441–469. (1999) “A Forgotten Newtonian: Women and Science in the Italian Provinces,” in W. Clark, J. Golinski, and S. Schaffer (eds.), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 313–349. (2003) “Becoming a Scientist: Gender and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Italy,” Science in Context 16(1–2): 59–87. (2011) “Calculations of Faith: Mathematics, Philosophy and Sanctity in 18-Century Italy,” Historia mathematica 38(2): 248–291. Formey, S. (1741) La Belle Wolfienne, La Haye: Le Vier. Frize, M. (2013) Laura Bassi and Science in 18th Century Europe: The Extraordinary Life and Role of Italy’s Pioneering Female Professor, Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Guicciardini, N. (2015) “Editing Newton in Geneva and Rome: The Annotated Edition of the Principia by Calandrini, Le Seur and Jacquier,” Annals of Science 72(3): 337–380. Hagengruber, R. (ed.) (2012) Émilie Du Châtelet Between Leibniz and Newton, Dordrecht: Springer. Harth, E. (1992) “Fontenelle and the Ladies” in E. Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 123–167. Heilbron, J. (1979) Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study in Early Modern Physics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hepburn, B. (2020) “The Quiet Scientific Revolution: Problem Solving and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of ‘Newtonian’ Mechanics,” in E. Schliesser and C. Smeenk (eds.), Oxford Handbook to Isaac Newton, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1902–) Gesammelte Schriften Volume 2, Berlin: Akademie Ausgabe. Malueg, S. E. P. (1984) “Women and the Encyclopédie,” in S. Spencer (ed.) French Women and the Age of Enlightenment, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 259–271. Mazzotti, M. (2004) “Newton for Ladies: Gentility, Gender and Radical Culture,” British Journal for the History of Science 37(2): 119–46.

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Bryce Gessell and Andrew Janiak (2007) The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nagel, F. (2012) “’Sancti Bernoulli orate pro nobis’: Émilie Du Châtelet’s rediscovered Essai sur l’optique and her relation to the mathematicians from Basel,” in Ruth Hagengruber (ed.), Émilie Du Châtelet Between Leibniz and Newton, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, pp. 97–112. Newton, I. (1687) Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (“Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”), London: The Royal Society. (1704) Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, London: Smith & Walford. Ostertag, H. (1910) Der philosophische Gehalt des Wolff-Manteuffelschen Briefwechsels, Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer. Porter, R. (2003) “Introduction,” in R. Porter (ed.), The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 4: Eighteenth Century Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–20. Project Vox. (2019) “Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, la Marquise Du Châtelet,” Project Vox. Duke University Libraries. https://projectvox.org/du-chatelet-1706-1749/. Rey, A-R. (2017) “La minerve vient de faire sa physique,” Philosophiques 44(2): 233–253. Roe, G. (2018) “A Sheep in Wolff’s Clothing: Émilie du Châtelet and the Encyclopédie,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51(2): 179–196. Rosen, R. (1971) “The Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna, 1690–1804,” PhD Dissertation, Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University. Schiebinger, L. (2003) “The Philosopher’s Beard: Women and Gender in Science,” in R. Porter (ed.), The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 4: Eighteenth Century Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 184–210. (2006) “Women of Natural Knowledge,” in K. Park and L. Daston (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, Volume Three, Early Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 192–205. Sutton, G. (1995) Science for a Polite Society: Gender, 3 Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Terrall, M. (1995) “Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences: Inside and Outside the Paris Academy,” Configurations 3(2): 207–232. Voltaire. (1759) “Préface historique” in Principes mathématiques de la philosophie naturelle de Newton: Par feue madame la marquise Du Chastellet (Émilie Du Châtelet’s translation of Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica), Paris: Desaint et Saillant. Voltaire (d’Arouet, F.) (1738) Élemens de la philosophie de Neuton: mis à la portée de tout le monde, Amsterdam: Etienne Ledet et Compagnie. Wrönski, J. M. H. (1814) Philosophie de L’Infini Contenant Des Contre Reflections sur la Métaphisique du Calcul Infinitésimal, Paris: Didot.

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14 WOMEN, MEDICINE, AND THE LIFE SCIENCES Gideon Manning

…one discovers in reading history… that the monuments to women’s names are absent, like the traces of a ship crossing the sea. – Anna Maria van Schurman to André Rivet, 6 November 16371

14.1 Introduction Seeking to understand women’s philosophical contributions to medicine and the life sciences during the early modern period, the obvious place to look is in the books they left behind.2 But women did not leave too many books compared to men at the time, even though women represented a far greater portion of caregivers, especially the farther one moved away from the “institutional core of medical orthodoxy” and into the court and aristocratic households, convents, and domestic spaces (Brockliss and Jones 1997: 262). Early modern cultural practices, along with explicit regulations, meant that women needed to transgress some norm or other to write, publish, and be read as natural philosophers, including in medicine and the life sciences. There were women like Queen Christina, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Katherine Jones (Lady Ranelagh), and Princess Caroline of Ansbach who were able to move within the circles of philosophical and scientific culture, even making that culture come to them, as the women of the French Salons would do. But there existed too many barriers between women, the typical gendered identity of the philosopher and physician, and the genres of learned biological and medical writing for women to attain anything like equal representation. Even Louise Bourgeois’s wildly successful three-volume textbook Observations diverses sur sterilité, perte de fruict, foecondité… (1609–1626) did not displace, let alone challenge, men within France’s medical establishment, and neither did it precipitate an increase in publications by women (Perkins 1996: 51, cited in De Renzi 2004: 220). Even so, this chapter calls attention to two of the earliest systematic works of natural philosophy written by women—one by Camilla Greghetta Erculiani (1540–1590) and the other by Olivia Sabuco de Nantes (y) Barrera (1562–1626(?))—both of which transgress the norms of their time to address questions belonging to medicine and the life sciences. The goal of the chapter is to indicate not only the philosophical, medical, and biological claims these women made, but also to show how they achieved what they did at the intersection of philosophy, medicine, and the life sciences. The answer, simply enough, was by writing, publishing, and being highly original, which allowed them to participate in the literary culture of their time. This is a common enough three-part strategy, though it is one I will challenge in my conclusion, for I believe accepting it DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-18

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hides more women than it reveals. In section one I recount the life and work of Camilla Greghetta Erculiani and her Letters on Natural Philosophy (1584). In section two, I turn to Olivia Sabuco de Nantes Barrera and her New Philosophy of Human Nature (1588). Sabuco was more widely read than Erculiani, and her physiological views were as unorthodox as any that would come later in the so-called “scientific revolution.” Specifically, her view that a fluid in the nerves, not the blood, nourished the body would be repackaged by later English physicians, including well-known physicians like George Ent, Francis Glisson, and Thomas Willis. Erculiani was similarly original, discussing topics ranging from human nature, the relationship between soul and body, creation of matter and life, astrology, and the origins of the rainbow. But it was Erculiani’s discussion of the Biblical flood, along with its biological consequences, that is most significant here, for Erculiani proposes a natural-material explanation for The Flood. That is, she addresses the most consequential ecological and biological event in human history, apart from The Creation itself, as a natural as opposed to a divine event, extending the reach of the sciences and constricting the sphere of religion and theology. I conclude the chapter with a historian’s manifesto. With my focus on the published books of two exceptional women, I, like other historians of early modern philosophy, have accepted the three-part strategy of writing, publishing, and being original as the proper recipe of success. In doing so, we have not fully confronted the range of sources available to us. Perhaps women could be philosophers of medicine or the life sciences even if they did not become writers. Setting aside our expectation that philosophy can only be found in texts and with explicit written arguments, like those of Erculiani and Sabuco, we may discover that philosophers did not just publish books, teach in universities, or belong to medical colleges or scientific societies. I want to suggest that philosophical content is to be found in the work of illustrators and artisans as well, many of whom were women who shaped and shepherded philosophy outside of surviving texts.

14.2  Camilla Erculiani’s Letters on Natural Philosophy3 Camilla Greghetta Erculiani illuminated Italy from the appropriately named Three Stars (Tre Stelle) apothecary shop in Padua. Self-identifying as a “speciala” or “learned apothecary,” a term she apparently coined on the title page of her only published work, the Letters on Natural Philosophy (1584), Erculiani was a merchant’s daughter twice married to successful apothecaries. What she knew of philosophy, medicine, and science, she likely learned from her family library and on the job, interacting with physicians and medical students who sought and shared knowledge in the rich intellectual milieu of the Renaissance apothecary shop, where women like Erculiani could have an active hand in the family business. About her Letters, we know that they were published in Poland, though we do not know precisely why. Several explanations have been offered, including the attraction of Poland’s policy of religious tolerance at the time, which makes sense given the heterodox views expressed in the letters. Perhaps most of all the fact that a work by an Italian speciala was published in Poland testifies to sixteenth-century networks of scientific knowledge and the links that existed between Padua and Krakow. These networks did not necessarily lead to large print runs, however, for fewer than a dozen copies of the Letters survive and it is hardly mentioned by Erculiani’s contemporaries (Carinci 2013). Beyond her correspondents and the officials involved in her trial before the Venetian Inquisition, there is no reception of Erculiani’s work of which I am aware. Yet the uniqueness of Erculiani’s position is apparent when we consider what she accomplished. According to one recent scholar, she “aspired to become a renowned female pharmacist who engaged physicians and other potential readers with her interpretation of Aristotelian natural philosophy” (Findlen 2021: 5). More than simply using philosophy as a means to an end, through the act of publishing her correspondence Erculiani transformed herself from being a reader and “consumer of natural

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philosophy” into “a philosopher” herself (Findlen 2021: 26).4 This, as much as the content of her natural philosophy, calls her to our attention. No mere passive vessel for philosophy, she wrote and created philosophy as well, molding it and herself in the process. As we might expect, Erculiani did not shy away from the subject of women’s intellectual abilities or the Renaissance querelle des femmes (Maclean 1980). She writes in her dedication to Queen Anna of Poland that women were “like men… capable in all areas of knowledge.” Still, it was her natural philosophy that best makes her case for what women could do if given the opportunity; she showed by example (Erculiani 2021: 110). Of special note, running through all of the Letters, is Erculiani’s willingness to address religious questions from within the genre of natural philosophy, taking the questions from one domain—theology—and using the techniques and methods of another—natural philosophy—to answer them. This is apparent in the unifying subject of the Letters: her materialist and naturalist interpretation of The Flood. Erculiani takes a biologically relevant event that had almost invariably been discussed in a theological framework citing a divine cause and, without fuss, approaches the event as a natural philosopher. In so doing, she converts The Flood into a natural biological event through and through. The remainder of this section focuses on Erculiani’s view of The Flood and some of the arguments and asides developed to support her account, many of which which are of philosophical interest in their own right. It bears noting at the outset, however, not only is it her naturalism and materialism in biological matters that stand out but also when Erculiani presents her views, and when others challenge her by citing their preferred authorities, she is the only woman participating in the exchange; she is resisting the objections of men and rejecting male authorities. This is part of what Erculiani had to do to transform herself into a natural philosopher or, in her words, to take on “the duty of the natural philosopher” (Erculiani 2021: 143). The biblical story of The Flood is the Earth’s greatest extinction event and its biological significance was fully appreciated in the early modern period. As told in Genesis 6–9, the sins of humanity, who had “done much evil on earth,” lead God to rain down ecological disaster as our just punishment (The Holy Bible: Genesis. 6.5). God said, “This race of men whom I have created, I will wipe them off the face of the earth—man and beast, reptiles and birds” (The Holy Bible: Genesis. 6.7). But first God commands Noah, a righteous man who had won his favor, to build an ark and then to save seven pairs of each of the ritually clean animals, one pair of the unclean animals, and seven pairs of every bird (The Holy Bible: Genesis. 7.2–7.3). God then informs Noah in “seven days’ time I will send rain over the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe off the face of the earth every living thing that I have made” (The Holy Bible: Genesis. 7.4–5). Sparing only the fish and plants the “waters increased over the earth… they covered all the high mountains everywhere under heaven… [wiping] out every living thing that existed on earth, man and beast, reptile and bird… [until] only Noah and his company in the ark survived” (The Holy Bible: Genesis. 7.19–23). After 150 days, “God thought of Noah… and made a wind pass over the earth, and the waters began to subside” (The Holy Bible: Genesis. 8.1). The survivors in the Ark, including Noah’s children Shem, Ham, and Japheth, were left to repopulate the earth, with the covenant: “never again shall all living creatures be destroyed by the waters of the flood, never again shall there be a flood to lay waste the earth” (The Holy Bible: Genesis. 9.11). Erculiani takes for granted The Flood occurred—it happened in biblical times and altered the course of life on earth—but she provides a very different and heretical account of its causes as compared to the retelling above. Instead of a more literal interpretation of Genesis like that developed by the “Mosaic physics” emerging at the time, which sought to harmonize the knowledge of nature with the Word of God by deriving natural philosophy from Scripture, Erculiani adopts a looser and more metaphorical interpretation of Scripture, resisting not just the role of sin but the mechanism of rain as well.5 In the very first paragraph of her opening letter to Georges Guarnier,

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a physician from Burgundy whom she may have met while he was a medical student at Padua, Erculiani claims: The Flood came because men had grown to be so many on Earth in number, and so great of bodily size and length of life, that after [Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden] the earth element was much diminished, since it was this element that gave the greatest part of itself to those large bodies. Over many hundreds of years, the earth element was not returned to the Earth, such that the Earth became so greatly diminished that it was necessarily swallowed up by the waters, which had contributed only a little part to these bodies. (Erculiani 2021: 114) Erculiani is making a simple argument about quantities, proportions really, and the exact numbers do not seem to matter. She claims that over time, as the human population grew, the element of earth was extracted from the Earth in greater proportion than the element of water. This is due to the elemental makeup of the human body, which is composed of more earth than any other element, or at least more earth than water. Eventually, once the human population had grown enough after “many hundreds of years,” the Earth’s original balance between the elements of earth and water was upset, the earth being depleted. As a result, the Earth was simply “swallowed up by the waters” not because the water rose but because the earth fell. To be clear, in Erculiani’s retelling, The Flood was the consequence of several factors. These include: (1) the human body’s majority earthen constitution, (2) population growth, (3) prediluvian longevity, and, as she would make explicit in a subsequent letter, (4) nature being a closed system where “the elements cannot have a quantity greater than the initial quantity given to them by nature” (Erculiani 2021: 143). Combined, these factors produce a naturalist and materialist explanation of a biological event typically given a divine explanation. In other words, in the hands of the right natural philosopher, The Flood can be explained using the resources and principles of natural philosophy without direct appeal to divine action. Erculiani’s bold originality expressed itself through a host of other topics that arise in her letters as she defends her natural philosophical account of The Flood, including a discussion of human nature, the relationship between body and soul, and the creation of life and matter, all of which, independent of her views about the cause of The Flood, were instances of heresy.6 Take, for example, the question of Adam’s natural immortality, which was noticed in her trial before the Venetian Inquisition (Erculiani 2021: 156ff.). This topic had a long history prior to Erculiani, dating at least to St Paul, but by the fourteenth century there had been “a surge in natural reasoning” and a “biological approach” to what had once been purely religious questions about Adam’s nature (Ziegler 2001: 236–37). At issue was the status of Adam’s body in the State of Innocence: would Adam need to do anything to sustain himself prior to the Fall and would he have any use for medicine? Asked another way, was Adam’s body naturally corruptible? If it was there would be a role for medicine in the Garden of Eden. Erculiani’s answer, materialist and proponent of naturalism that she was, is yes, Adam’s body is naturally corruptible. Mentioning a certain unnamed “Excellent Man” who instructed her that “if it were not for the sin that Adam committed, man would live forever,” Erculiani reports to Guarnier of being unable to “resist responding man could not live for eternity” (Erculiani 2021: 113–14). Her reason is that “man is not made of simple earth” but “all the… elements come together in him” (2021: 114). A well-known Aristotelian view of the elements is in the background here. Human bodies are composed of a mixture of elements and Erculiani endorses the typical four: earth, water, air, and fire. Further, she accepts that the elements are in some sense opposed to one another because they have both opposite qualities—hot vs. cold, wet vs. dry—and different natural places or locations where they tend to aggregate. Water, for example is wet and cold, whereas earth is dry and cold, and so 190

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on. Fire, which is hot and dry, naturally rises furthest from the earth; air, which is dry and wet, does not rise quite as far; and water falls but not so far as earth, which occupies the lowest position in nature. All to say, the elements do not mix especially well, too much of one overwhelms the other, and they tend to separate when they have the chance. This much of Erculiani’s account is effectively a restatement of Aristotle’s basic views about the elements and the sensible qualities of physical objects as found in works such as On Generation and Corruption II.2 and Meteorology IV.1. Applying her account of the elements to the question of whether Adam’s body is by its nature corruptible, Erculiani states “it inevitably happens that, as time passes, one [element] surpasses the other and dissolves this body” (2021: 114). There is some ambiguity here,7 but Erculiani is clear that the human body, even in the State of Innocence, is subject to the principles of nature and the eventual corruption of composite bodies that we know to occur today. She is adamant, “it cannot be said that because man is made of a simple and single element he cannot undergo corruption” (2021: 114). Indeed, once we look beyond Adam and take account of population growth after The Fall, any alternative to the body’s corruption—that is, any alternative to the body’s elements returning to their natural place—would have “reduced [the world] to nothing” (Erculiani 2021: 114). The fact that the Earth, as a whole, is now in a state of balance with respect to the elements, something Erculiani finds evidence for in the appearance of rainbows, further attests to the fact that the human body is corruptible. In addition, the current state of balance can serve to limit the admissible explanations into natural philosophy, which must respect the balance that nature now maintains. Erculiani assumes a different posture on generation and corruption when her discussion turns to the human soul, about which she is not a straightforward materialist. That is, if she is a materialist when it came to explaining The Flood, relying on a specific matter theory, she is no longer a simple materialist when discussing the human soul. In this context, she expresses herself strongly on the topic of matter and form and what came to be called in the nineteenth century the doctrine of “hylomorphism” (Manning 2013). We should not be surprised that hylomorphism comes up in the Letters, since discussions of matter and form had long been a part of biblical commentaries on the Hexameron or six days of creation in Genesis. But it is also typical of Scholastic natural philosophy as well, where an author’s metaphysical conception of substance, matter, and form shapes their biological commitments. Thus, Erculiani’s contemporaries would have easily followed her train of thought during a discussion of Genesis when she writes: I say that there cannot be form without matter, nor matter without form, and not being able to have matter without form, I say that I do not know from which part of the matter the form of man, that is the soul, is made. (2021: 142) The human soul is a special case of hylomorphism, which holds, at least with respect to natural bodies, that form is in the matter just as the matter underlies the form. Erculiani next admits she does not know from which matter the form of man, the human soul, derives or depends. Though not an unheard-of position with respect to matter and form, hers is a minority view among scholastics.8 As she puts it above, and from the context, Erculiani is asking which of the four elements serves as the matter in the creation of the human soul. Her answer is that none will do. Unable to turn to these elements, she goes on, “like Aristotle… [I believe] there is a fifth substance, or matter, which is unknown to us, in addition to the known matter…. And… this unknown matter is immortal” (Erculiani 2021: 142). It is this fifth element that serves as the matter in the matter-form composite that is the human soul.9 Erculiani continues in the same paragraph to reject crude materialist accounts of the soul’s origin in matter as well as the suggestion that the body might simply be an instrument of the soul. 191

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She also rejects any straightforward localization of the soul in the heart or brain, which are the views on localization of Aristotle and Plato (as well as Galen), respectively. “They would have done better to stay silent” she says (2021: 142). To be clear, from what she says about the human soul, Erculiani’s commitment to materialism, though extensive, including a willingness to deny the soul’s dominance over the body, is complicated by the need to align form with matter in every case. For her, form and matter are the common principles of all things, and neither proceeds from or precedes the other. Carrying the view to its logical conclusion, Erculiani would seem committed to the denial of the Peripatetic’s prime matter—matter without form. Similarly, in the case she discusses, she seems committed to the denial of pure form—form without matter. Again, on her view, though the human soul is immortal and perfect, it still requires matter, though the matter in the case of the human soul is also “immortal.” Properly then, we should interpret Erculiani as neither committing herself to spiritualism nor materialism in these remarks. Instead, she appears to support a universal hylomorphism, though she does not discuss Angels or God as form-matter composites as earlier proponents of universal hylomorphism had done. Nor, admittedly, does she broach the challenging question of whether God has the power to create prime matter without form. Leaving these finer points aside, the larger point is that in the course of the Letters, where The Flood is her primary concern, Erculiani nevertheless ranges widely, taking a stand on a host of issues both near and far from the biological event and naturalist and materialist approach with which she was most concerned. Erculiani’s correspondents recognized her views as original, without obvious or good precedent, and provocatively non-theological, despite the typically religious questions she addresses. In contrast, her defense of her views before the Inquisition sought to domesticate her, aligning her with authorities or generally indicating that she was only speaking hypothetically as a natural philosopher, and not necessarily in her own voice, when considering the material and natural origins of The Flood. This was a wise defense, and a common one, appealing to the freedom to write philosophy without necessarily being committed to the positions presented in the text. But it stands in contrast to Erculiani’s statement in the epistle to Queen Anna that she did not depend on “Aristotle and Galen” as well as in her fourth letter, when she answers the question of her sources. She writes, I see that Your Excellency wants to know in which author I found the explanation that the famous Flood came because of the reduction of the earth and because of the multitude and great size and long life of men. (2021: 143) Her answer directs us to her originality: “I reply that I have not read this in the works of any author” (Erculiani 2021: 143). Erculiani’s defense before the Inquisition appears to have secured for her some escape, for the Letters was not added to the Index and there is no evidence she was fined or imprisoned. What she appears to have been denied was the opportunity to publish further or to continue her correspondence; she disappears from the Republic of Letters after her trial. This does not change the fact that those who knew her work, including the Platonist Sebastiano Erizzo, praised her “exquisite learning in the study of philosophy” (Erculiani 2021: 149). Her combination of materialism and naturalism is especially prescient in the life sciences and medicine. But we should not overlook her self-transformation into a natural philosopher by publishing her views in a work that included “natural philosophy” in the title. And as the only woman brought before the Venetian Inquisition for her natural philosophical views, we should not overlook her subsequent defense as having written as a natural philosopher. Erculiani is at the beginning of a small but recognizable movement of female natural philosophers in early modern Italy who joined, to the extent their 192

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circumstances allowed, the push for the freedom to philosophize in the vernacular and to apply and expand natural philosophy to include texts written by women. One thinks here of Moderata Fonte (1555–1592), Maddalena Campiglia (1553–1595), Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1617) and Lucrezia Marinella (1517–1553) (Ray 2015; Plastina 2020). Erculiani may have been among the first, but as this volume, the women just listed, and the next section of the paper attest, she was not the last.

14.3 The New Philosophy of Dona Sabuco10 Though women could not be found as either students or instructors in the colleges and universities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one place they could be found was in the apothecary shops, as the case of Camilla Erculiani shows. Another apothecary shop, this time in Alcaraz, Spain, is the likely origin of Dona Sabuco. Born in Alcaraz in 1562, she is credited with writing the Nueva filosofia de la naturaleza del hombre, no conocida ni alcançada de los grandes filosofos antiguos: la qual mejora la vida y salud humana (New Philosophy), the first edition of which was published in Madrid in 1587 when she was only 25.11 I write “credited with” because the authorship of the New Philosophy is now contested. Though published in her name, and though the dedication to King Philip II has every appearance of being written by a woman showing “great intellectual pride and daring, rather than the conventional modesty displayed by women authors…. [including] using the topos of feminine weakness… [to] strongly emphasize the novelty and significance of [the] work,” documents were unearthed by the Registrar of the City of Alcaraz in 1903 that cast doubt on New Philosoophy’s authorship.12 For more than three centuries, however, early modern readers recognized Dona Sabuco as the author of the New Philosophy, even when they expressed astonishment that a woman had written such an original and creative work. I follow their lead in referring to Dona Sabuco as the author of the work and in counting her among the innovadoras, those writers who were either non- or anti-Aristotelian, a group that also includes contemporary Italian innovatori like Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi and Francesco Piccolomini (though not Erculiani). The New Philosophy is an unusual and singular contribution to medicine, but it stands out not least for being a collection of seven dialogues, the first five of which are written in Spanish and the last two in Latin. It is, then, intended for both a lay audience on the one hand and a learned audience on the other. The range of topics covered is conveyed by the dialogues’ titles: A Dialogue on Self-Knowledge; On the Composition of the World as It Is; On the Things that Will Improve the State of the World, and its Commonwealths; On the Airs and Remedies of the Ture Medicine; A Dialogue on the True Medicine; and then in Latin, Brief Remarks on the Nature of Man, The Foundation of Medicine, and The True Philosophy of the Nature of Mixed Bodies, of Man and of the World, Unknown to the Ancients. As the last title suggests, which picks up on the full title of the book itself—no conocida ni alcançada de los grandes filosofos antiguos—the New Philosophy does not include copious references to ancient authors, thereby refraining from the technique of incorporating ancient wisdom to support early modern innovation (Levitin 2015). This is not to say Sabuco was not well read, but rather in her guise as an innovator she did not rely on broad humanist knowledge or advertise herself in this way, all of which lends to the impression of her originality. The remainder of this section will, of necessity, focus narrowly on Sabuco’s physiological view of nutrition and her demotion of the liver and blood in this vital function to showcase what was new in her work. To understand Sabuco’s originality, we need to understand what came before, and specifically the orthodox views of medicine promulgated by the leading physician of Greek antiquity, Galen of Pergamon, which still held sway in the sixteenth century. But Galen’s massive and at times inconsistent surviving corpus required simplification to be assimilated in the sixteenth century, including by those readers who taught his views in universities. In the case of nutrition, the view 193

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that emerged begins with the liver, where the veins are said to originate (Manning 2022). We can trace the food we ingest from the mouth to the stomach and then intestines, where concoction (heating) transforms the food into chyle. Chyle then travels through the mesenteric and portal veins to the liver, where a second concoction transforms the chyle into thick and dark venous or nutritional blood. Venous blood then travels through the hepatic veins, the superior and inferior vena cava, and finally to the rest of the body. Upon reaching its nutritional destination, the blood is consumed. On this account, the nutritional blood cannot return to the heart for the simple reason that it is consumed at its destination, and other sources of nutrition are ruled out because of the primary role assigned to the liver. Famously, the former conclusion would be called into question by William Harvey’s public demonstration of the circulation of the blood in 1628. The role of the liver in nutrition would be challenged with the discovery of the lacteal vessels by Giancomo Aselli in 1627. However, in 1587 Sabuco argued that neither the blood nor the liver plays a central role in nutrition. The topic of nutrition is the main entry point into Sabuco’s medicine. This much is clear from the end of the first dialogue, where two shepherds bring their initial discussion to an end, Antonio speaking for Sabuco: Veronio. Therefore, Señor Antonio, according to this [account]… health consists of the proper performance and suitability [of ] fluid for the nutrition of the primary “root” or brain. Illness [consists] of the opposite…. Antonio. It seems to me that the conclusion is clear…. And if you go to the city, tell the physicians that their medicine is fundamentally mistaken. (Sabuco 2007: 121–22) Here the link is made between nutrition, the body’s fluids, and the brain, which serves as the “root” like the roots of a tree to nourish the body, only from the top down. The liver is nowhere to be seen. Later, in dialogue five, Sabuco again challenges medicine as it is written about and practiced. She has Antonio specifically challenge the “Doctor,” a new character in the dialogues. “Let us forget Latin and Greek,” says Antonio, “let us talk in our language, because so much distortion exists in the world due to the sciences being written in Latin” (Sabuco 2007: 181). Parrying the Doctor’s initial response, Sabuco meets the Doctor’s challenge to offer an alternative by delivering the “general propositions” of her medicine, elaborating on her earlier claims in the New Philosophy (Sabuco 2007: 182–86). These propositions warrant far more attention than can be given here, but “First. The digestive system” (Sabuco 2007: 182). Sabuco again marks nutrition as the entry point to her medicine. Indeed, disease has everything to do with the “coldness of the brain and the heat of the digestive system” (Sabuco 2007: 182). The role assigned to the brain and nerves in nutrition is, so far as I am aware, original to Sabuco. It is elaborated and reaffirmed in the fourth proposition, where the brain is described as the “cause and location where humors of any illness are produced” and then again in the fifth where illness is described as a “drop, catarrh, drainage… of the humid fluid of chilo leaving the brain” (Sabuco 2007: 182). Not just nutrition then, but health and disease will be linked to the brain. It is when the fluid that should be rising to the brain falls through the nerves that we become ill. Yet this is only part of the story. It is not just that the brain, its fluids, and the nerves are involved in illness. Rather, the brain, as she indicated in dialogue one, “is the ‘root.’” And its function “is to feed and nourish the entire body” (Sabuco 2007: 182; emphasis added). Again, the liver is nowhere to be found on Sabuco’s account of nutrition, and neither is the blood.

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We see this in the pivotal sixth proposition, but we also learn there that the stomach cooks our food “because of its heat,” which is what any physician, pace Galen, might have said. From the stomach, however, the brain takes that white fluid or chyle by sipping and absorbing it through the esophagus…. This chilo has been produced by the brain…. [It is] then distributed to [the body’s] limbs via the anterior nerves and through the neck or vicarage of the brain, i.e., the trunk or stem from the brain. (Sabuco 2007: 182) This is very far from Galen and orthodox medicine. With her claims about the brain’s function and the fluid in the nerves, Sabuco has rejected the position that the liver is the organ of nutrition and the blood its vehicle. These are the very claims Harvey and Asellii would come to challenge later, albeit for independent reasons. Sabuco, like Erculiani, was among the first cadre of sixteenth-century women who wrote systematic works of natural philosophy. Sabuco, for her part, put medicine and health right into the title of her New Philosophy, leaving little doubt, especially when she shifted to writing in Latin in her last two dialogues, who she sought to challenge with her views. In the range of topics covered, the New Philosophy still has the ability to impress. It delivers an equally innovative view of the female body consistent with the new role assigned to the brain and the nerves. As Marlen Bidwell-Steiner explains, using maternal metaphors, menstrual blood is assigned the role of nourishing the fluid running through the nerves nourishing the body as a whole; the human brain needs the female body (2012). The details are too intricate to present here, but it is clear that the female body is especially prominent in Sabuco’s work. We can add that Sabuco rejects the fourelement theory of Aristotle, the very theory we saw used by Erculiani in the previous section, in favor of a two-element theory. And finally, enticingly for historians of philosophy, Sabuco has been credited with being a forerunner to René Descartes, not only because she locates the soul in the brain but because she reflects on the manner in which soul and body interact in language that Descartes appears to use (see Pomata 2010: 69–70; Barbone 2015). Regardless of what we make about this last connection, Sabuco was being read outside Spain in the seventeenth century, and her significance should not be tied to the manner in which she does or does not conform to or find a response among well-known figures who come later. She was very much her own person, and author, who wrote, published, and with great originality transformed herself into a sixteenthcentury natural philosopher.

14.4  An Historian’s Manifesto (By Way of Conclusion) The previous sections present just two women’s contributions to the medical and life sciences of the early modern period, relying on the surviving published work of two exceptionally original thinkers who, in Erculiani’s case, pressed for the expansion of naturalist thinking about The Flood, and, in Sabuco’s, a strikingly new physiology. There are certainly further written sources by other female authors beyond the Letters and New Philosophy yet to be found and equally worthy of our attention. To find them, historians of philosophy must go to archives, or we must wait and read more broadly in the history of medicine and science to see what other historians discover. As we contemplate the future study of women in the medical and life sciences, however, I would propose adding another potential source, not among written notes by or about women, manuscripts, or the published texts likely to be found, but in the philosophy expressed in the things and artifacts displaying know-how; that is, toward those historical objects where women’s activity

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and acts of coordination, knowledge production, and dissemination can be seen (e.g., Daston 2002; Findlen 2013). I have in mind the images that were produced by women for medical and scientific books and the mannequins and wax figures used to teach anatomy and practice delivery (e.g., Roos 2019; Carlyle 2018; Dacome 2017). These objects are all pregnant with philosophical significance, telling us about the early modern world, the way it was conceived and modeled, and how women, and often women’s bodies, were made available to be touched and seen. I offer this suggestion, and my conclusion, as a challenge. The challenge is to maintain the connection between the study of philosophy and the study of what has come to be called “material culture.” The two are typically kept far apart, and the challenge is acute because the history of philosophy is often pursued by specialists who see epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, or philosophy of science as their defining pursuit. But the philosophers of the past were rarely, if ever, specialists in this way, and specialization endangers the open mindset that allows for approaches linking what are, today, more than one field. Maintaining connections is essential. I believe it is the key to asking the questions that best illuminate the past, and it is yet another key to unlocking the doors history has closed on those women who contributed to the philosophy of medicine and the life sciences.

Notes 1 Hinc est quod in historia legenti longissimo saepe temporis tractu nostri nominis monumenta non magis comparent, quam navis per mare transeuntis vestigium.” Anna Maria van Schurman to André Rivet, 6 November 1637. Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS. 133 B 8, no. 14. Later printed in Nobiliss. Virginis Annae Mariae à Schurman, Opuscula Hebraea, Graeca, Latina, Gallica: Prosaica & Metrica (Leiden, 1648), 69–70.3; cited in Pal (2018), 121. 2 To appreciate the extent to which women were literate and active in medicine prior to the early modern period, see (Green 1994) and (Green 2005). For discussion of the surgeoness between 1400 and 1800, see (Wyman 1984). 3 I owe special thanks to Hannah Marcus who kindly shared her draft translation of Erculiani’s Letters on Natural Philosophy as I was preparing this paper. 4 The current scholarly consensus with which I agree is that Erculiani’s Letters warrants attention for several reasons. It (1) shows how a literate female artisan could engage in wide-ranging controversy in natural philosophy with learned men using letters focusing on a discrete topic, namely the causes of The Flood; (2) offers a worked out interpretation of natural philosophy and a series of original scientific theories; (3) is a vernacular work accessible to any literate Italian reader, whether man or woman; (4) shows a female author explicitly presenting herself as an example for other women who wished to be natural philosophers; and (5) is the only book with scientific content written by a woman that led to an accusation of heresy during the Inquisition. (5) was an especially compelling reason for including her in this chapter. 5 Erculiani’s work arguably follows a burgeoning commentary tradition relating knowledge of nature to the textual traditions of Christian religion, dubbed by Jetze Touber “Medicina sacra” (2021). I do not explore this connection here. For the “Mosaic Physics” which was itself an innovative approach allowing for non-Aristotelian commitments, see (Blair 2000) and (Crowther 2008). 6 Tied to The Flood was a further question how humans repopulated the earth after being killed by the waters, and specifically how they reappeared in regions too remote for Europeans to have directly encountered them, such as the Americas. Erculiani advanced the minority view that in the right circumstances, when the temperatures were right, human beings could be reproduced by spontaneous generation. For discussion of this point and how generation could occur in such circumstances, see (Manning and Wilberding 2021). 7 Erculiani might mean a newly dominant element of the body, say water, transforms the others into its likeness and, in so doing, the water destroys the human body through elemental transformation. In other words, where once there was a substance, the human body, a process of putrefaction and corruption leads to its destruction. (See Aristotle’s Meterology 340.a.I.ff. for discussion of how the lack of balance of the elements would destroy some to the advantage of others.) Erculiani indicates in a later letter that she would prefer the second of the above-mentioned interpretations. Alternatively, and likely a better interpretation, Erculiani has in mind that over time putrefaction and corruption destroy the body and the opposing elements return to their separate and proper place in nature.

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Women, Medicine, and the Life Sciences 8 It is hardly clear the extent to which Erculiani is engaging late scholastic debates about the nature of matter, potency and actuality in the Letters, or the extent to which matter’s inertness threatens form’s ability to be educed from or otherwise arise from matter’s dispositions, all of which were highly technical matters for scholastic authors. Since the human soul is created by God, however, these issues of form coming from matter recede to the background because it is a genuine case of creation. 9 One might have expected Erculiani to say, as Aristotle does, that the human body is the matter underlying the human soul, but this is clearly not her position. The human body, as we saw above, is corruptible, and no such corruptible body could underlie the immortal human soul, which is the only issue Erculiani is addressing in her remarks. In appealing to the fifth element, Erculiani is helping herself to something Aristotle had argued for in a variety of ways, and with different empirical considerations. Fundamentally, all Erculiani needs is Aristotle’s claim that the fifth element is not defined by contrary or opposed qualities, which in material terms means the element is not corruptible like the known matter or elements here on Earth. Just as the quintessence is needed to underlie the eternal motion of the heavens, for Erculiani it serves as the matter necessary for the creation of the human soul. 10 As the notes and references to follow make clear, I rely at key points on (Pomata 2010), which is a must read for those with an interest in Sabuco. 11 The entire work is translated in (Sabuco 2007), and a portion, dialogue 7, is translated in (Sabuco 2010). The last original language critical edition is from the nineteenth century. 12 These documents include the last will and testament of Sabuco’s father, the apothecary Miguel Sabuco, where he claimed authorship of the New Philosophy (Pomata 2010: 2). Some scholars have unequivocally concluded Dona Sabuco is the author (e.g., Waither 1989; Waithe and Vintro 2003; Bidwell-Steiner 2012: 670). I am convinced by Pomata (2010: 16–22) that the issue remains open. I do not dwell on it here, for the reason given above: Dona Sabuco was believed to be the author by generations of readers. With one apparent exception that is, in England, where the author of the New Philosophy is referred to in a 1610 document held in the Royal College of Physician’s archive. The document in question specifically charges the physician Stephen Bredwell with promoting the ideas of one Sabucus Hispanius (the Latin is “… Sabuci Hispani…” indicating the belief that Sabuco was a man). For discussion and further references, see (Clarke 1964: 200). (Pomata (2010: 79) led me to Clarke and the Bredwell affair.) This “error” was subsequently corrected when the New Philosophy was referenced by later English physicians, including in lectures given at the College in 1665, which credit Dona Sabuco as the New Philosophy’s author (Ent 1665, cited in Pomata 2010: 80).

References Barbone, S. (2015) “Olivia Sabuco and the Matter of the Matter,” Societate si politica IX: 25–37. Bidwell-Steiner, M. (2012) “Metabolisms of the Soul. The Physiology of Bernardino Telesio in Oliva Sabuco’s Nueva Filosofía de la Naturaleza del Hombre (1587)” in M. Horstmanshoff, H. King and C. Zittel (eds.), Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 661–83. Blair, A. (2000) “Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the late Renaissance,” Isis 91: 32–58. Bourgeois, L. (1609–1626) Observations diverses sur sterilité, perte de fruict, foecondité, accouchements, et maladies des femmes, et enfants nouveaux naiz, Paris: A. Saugrain. Brockliss, L. and C. Jones. (1997) The Medical World of Early Modern France, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carinci, E. (2013) “Una ‘speziala’ padovana: Lettere di philosophia naturale di Camilla Erculiani (1584),” Italian Studies 68: 202–29. Carlyle, M. (2018) “Phantoms in the Classroom: Midwifery Training in Enlightenment Europe,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 2: 111–36. Crowther, K. M. (2008) “Sacred Philosophy, Secular Theology: The Mosaic Physics of Levinus Lemnius (1505–1568) and Francisco Valles (15244–1592),” in J. M. van der Meer and S. H. Mandelbrote (eds.), Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: Up to 1700, Leiden: Brill, pp. 397–428. Dacome, L. (2017) Malleable Anatomies: Models, Makers and Material Culture in Eighteenth-Century Italy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daston, L. (2002) Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, Princeton: Princeton University Press. De Renzi, S. (2004) “Women and Medicine,” in P. Elmer (ed.), The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1700–1800, Manchester: The Open University, pp. 196–227. Erculiani, C. (2021) Letters on Natural Philosophy, ed. E. Carinci, trans. H. Marcus, Foreword by P. Findlen, New York: Iter Press.

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Gideon Manning Findlen, P. (ed.) (2013) Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800, New York: Routledge. (2021) “Foreword: Aristotle in the Pharmacy: The Ambitions of Camilla Erculiani in ­Sixteenth-Century Padua,” in C. Erculiani, Letters on Natural Philosophy, H. Marcus (trans.), New York: Iter Press, pp. 1–50. Green, M. (1994) “Documenting Women’s Medical Practice,” in L. García Ballester and R. French (eds.), Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 322–355. (2005) “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, Series Three(1): 1–46. Levitin, D. (2015) Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maclean, I. (1980) The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manning, G. (2013) “History of ‘Hylomorphism,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas 74(2): 173–87. (2022) “Circulation and the New Physiology,” in D. M. Miller and D. Jalobeanu (eds.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 369–386. and J. Wilberding. (2021) “The World Soul and Spontaneous Generation,” in J. Wilberding (ed.), World Soul: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 177–185. Pal, C. (2018) “Accidental Archive: Samuel Hartlib and the Afterlife of Female Scholars,” in V. Keller, A. M. Roos, and E. Yale (eds.), Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British and Scientific Medical Archives, Leiden: Brill, pp. 120–149. Perkins, W. (1996) Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France: Louise Bourgeois, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Plastina, S. (2020) “Letters on Natural Philosophy and New Science: Camilla Erculiani (Padua 1584) and Margherita Sarrocchi (Rome 1612),” in S. Ebbersmeyer and G. Paganini (eds.), Women, Philosophy and Science: Italy and Early Modern Europe, Cham: Springer. Pomata, G. (2010) “Introduction,” in O. Sabuco de Nantes y Barrera, The True Medicine, ed. and trans. G. Pomata, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Ray, M. (2015) Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sabuco de Nantes y Barrera, O. (1588) Nueva filosofía de la naturaleza del hombre, Madrid: P. Madrigal. (2007) New Philosophy of Human Nature, Neither Known to Nor Attained by the Great Ancient Philosophers, Which Will Improve Human Life and Health, ed. and trans. M. E. Waithe, M. C. Vintro, and C. A. Zorita, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (2010) The True Medicine, ed. and trans. G. Pomata, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. The Holy Bible. Anonymous. The New English Bible, with the Apocrypha: Oxford Study Edition (1976), in S. Sandmel, M. J. Suggs, A. J. Tkacik, Joint Committee on the New Translation of the Bible (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Touber, J. (2021) “Sacred Medicine in Early Modern Europe,” in D. Levitin and I. Maclean (eds.), The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age: Comparative Approaches, Leiden: Brill. Waithe, M. E. (1989) “Olivia Sabuco de Nantes Barrera,” in M. E. Waithe (ed.), A History of Woman Philosophers, Volume II: Medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment Women Philosophers A.D. 500–1600, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishing. and M. E. Vintró. (2003) “Posthumously Plagiarizing Olivia Sabuco: An Appeal to Cataloging Librarians,” Cataloging and Classification Quarterly 35(304): 525–40. Wyman, A. L. (1984) “The Surgeoness: The Female Practitioner of Surgery 1400–1800,” Medical History 28(1): 22–41. Ziegler, J. (2001) “Medicine and Immortality in Terrestrial Paradise,” in P. Biller and J. Ziegler (eds.), Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, York: York Medieval Press.

Further Reading Dimeo, M. (2021) Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Documents the exceptional life and contributions of Lady Ranelagh to England’s intellectual world, including in science and medicine.) Merchant, C. (1980) Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, New York: Harper & Row. (Pioneering treatment of early modern science related to issues of gender and women’s role in science.)

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Women, Medicine, and the Life Sciences Rankin, A. (2013) “Women in Science and Medicine, 1400–1800,” in J. Cochman and A. M. Poska (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge, pp. 407–421. (A readable and well-informed summary of the secondary literature and trends up to that point covering some 50 years of scholarship.) Roos, A. M. (2019) Martin Lister and His Remarkable Daughters: The Art of Science in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (A masterful work showing the essential role of women family members in the production of late seventeenth-century science). Strocci, S. (2020) Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Makes an overwhelming case for women’s expansive role in healthcare beyond the household and in nearly every aspect of Italy’s medical marketplace.)

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15 THEORIES OF PERCEPTION Louise Daoust

How should we think about the relationship between our perceptions of nature and nature itself? Can our experiences reliably tell us about how the world is? Like their male peers, women philosophers in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries took interest in the problems of perception. Yet, despite the insightfulness of women’s work in this area, and despite the pride of place given to theories of perception by our standard narratives of the period, their accounts of perception have received almost no scholarly attention.1 The discussion that follows concerns especially the work of Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shepherd. Both Cavendish and Shepherd are notable in the context of modern European thought in that both were women who wrote extensively on the nature of perception, developing philosophical systems within which the problems of perception are fundamental. Cavendish and Shepherd came to philosophical maturity in different centuries—Cavendish in the second half of the seventeenth century and Shepherd in the first half of the nineteenth century2—but they are brought together here as major contributors to the literature on perception, as two figures whose substantial contributions to this cardinal area of early modern study expanded the diversity of views on offer. The essay is organized into three sections. The first reviews theories of the causal process of perception. The second takes up one of the most significant debates in the early modern period, about how to understand the relationship between ideas and the objects they present or represent. The third section explores notions of perceptual error in Shepherd and Cavendish, as well as epistemic restraint as a virtue of theories of the mind–world relation.

15.1  Causation and Perception New mechanical innovations, as well as theoretical advances in corporeal and astronomical levels of explanation encouraged sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers to conceive of the human, and the natural world more generally, in materialistic and mechanistic terms. By the midseventeenth century, theorists had available to them a new range of scientific discoveries about perception, including a more complex understanding of light and its interaction with lenses. Early in the century, Johannes Kepler showed how all the rays coming from a visible point converge at a single point on the retina (Lindberg 1981: 200), and by the 1660s René Descartes’s discoveries in optics had served as instigation for Isaac Newton’s prism experiments and theory of color (McDonough 2015). Such scientific discoveries helped to form the foundation of a research program that sought to make sense of perception, and the natural world more generally, in terms of matter

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in motion; the object perceived was accounted for under a physical description, and sensation was explained at least in part by appeal to the registration of corpuscles (bits of matter) by the sensory organs. Early modern women elaborated important responses to standard views of the causal process of perception. In response to the mechanistic account developed by Descartes, and though broadly sympathetic to the mechanistic framework, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia raised the concern that Descartes had not adequately addressed how interaction could take place between thought, understood as the essence of an immaterial substance, and the matter that constitutes everything else, understood in mechanistic terms. How does a mechanical process involving bits of matter in motion give rise to ideas, say, of color, size, or shape? In a letter to Descartes in 1643, Elisabeth notes that it would be easier “to concede matter and extension to the soul than to concede the capacity to move a body and to be moved by it to an immaterial thing” (Shapiro 2007: 68). Though Elisabeth is here concerned primarily with the metaphysical question of how causation could transpire between the material and the immaterial, the objection raises a critical question about how changes in experience, such as a change in the apparent color of an ordinary object, can be the causal result of a mechanistic process. Elisabeth never published her own philosophy, and she chose not to publish her correspondence with Descartes, which she conceived of as a private exchange (see Shapiro 2007 for discussion), but her contemporary, Margaret Cavendish, challenged the standard mechanistic view of the seventeenth century in print, developing a distinctive account of how perception works. Cavendish agreed with Elisabeth about the problem of mind–body interaction (Cavendish 1664: 111), but she also developed a non-standard form of materialism according to which matter comes in two “degrees” (Cavendish 2001: 211): animate and inanimate. Animate matter can be further classed as either sensitive or rational; and both the sensitive and rational parts of animate matter perceive and have knowledge. Despite being of different types, rational, sensitive, and inanimate matter are inseparably blended, and are everywhere found together (Cavendish 2001: 127). Perception is thus a ubiquitous phenomenon in Cavendish’s view, occurring throughout, and necessary for action in, nature (Cavendish 2001: 167). For Cavendish, we can be sure that matter is self-moving, and also rational and sensitive, because of the order we observe in nature: “I am absolutely against the opinion of senseless and irrational atoms, moving by chance: for, if nature did consist of such atoms, there would be no certain kinds and species of creatures, nor no uniformity or order” (Cavendish 2001: 169). The patterns we observe in nature, from “kinds and species of creatures” to “uniformity or order” more generally, compel us to acknowledge that matter cannot move by chance, and that it must be sensitive and rational (see also Cavendish 1668: 7; for discussion, see Detlefsen 2006). The sensitivity and rationality of matter accounts for how there is order in nature, rather than merely disorder: nature must know and perceive if it is to order itself. Because there are infinitely many types of corporeal motions in nature, there must be correspondingly many ways of perceiving. As Cavendish puts it, “for, every several kind and sort of Creatures, have several kinds and sorts of Perception, according to the nature and property of such a kind or sort of Composition, as makes such a kind or sort of Creature” (Cavendish 1668: 8; see also Cavendish 2001: 166 and 177). Just as the human eye and ear give rise to different perceptions, a human, a tree, and a stone may all perceive the same object, but their perceptions will be unalike. The tree will have a vegetative perception, the stone will have a mineral perception, and the human will have a human type of animal perception (Cavendish 2001: 167). In cases of perception “properly so called” (Cavendish 2001: 172), that is, in cases of animal perception, perception is not the result of a mechanical process of senseless, irrational particles interacting physiologically with sensory systems, as on a mechanistic view. Indeed, Cavendish argues that if

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perception did result from bits of senseless matter entering the sensory organs, we would eventually suffer injuries from these physical assaults. Perception of a lit candle, for instance, “cannot be made by pressure and reaction” as on Thomas Hobbes’ view, “or else a fire-coal, by the perception of sight, would burn out the eyes, because it would by pressure, inflame its adjoining parts, and these again the next, until it came to the eye” (Cavendish 2001: 177). Heat transferred from particles at the candle to particles at the eye would result in blindness or at least severe optical damage. As we are not the victims of such damage when we look at candles or flames, we can infer that perception is not the result of bits of senseless matter entering the sensory organs. Instead, perception is “an action of patterning out exterior parts or objects, performed by the rational and sensitive corporeal figurative motions, in their proper organs” (Cavendish 2001: 172; see also 82, 178, 186). The figurative and perceptive motions of the eye pattern out the figure of the candle, creating a kind of copy of that figure. Similarly, when I touch the candle, my hand patterns out properties such as its shape, extension, and texture. Perception is caused or made possible by the material object perceived, in Cavendish’s view, for an object is necessary for perception to obtain (Cavendish 1668: 8). In this sense, perception is object-directed: it “directly tends” (Cavendish 2001: 168) or refers to the exterior object. Still, perceptions are not primarily caused by external objects, for Cavendish; instead, perceptions are “occasioned by” external objects (Cavendish 1664: 98; Cavendish 2001: 170). As Eileen O’Neill puts it, external objects act as “auxiliary and proximate, rather than principal” causes in Cavendish’s view (O’Neill 2001: xxxii; see also Cavendish 1664: 77–79, 447–48). According to this form of occasional causation, the candle occasions the human eye to move in a way that imitates, patterns, or copies the features or parts of the candle, such as its shape and color.3 Perceptions, including animal perceptions, are primarily caused by the self-motions of nature. Thus, in contrast with her mechanist peers, Cavendish endorses a materialist occasional model of causation according to which nature is self-moving, and full of perception and representation. A century and a half later, Mary Shepherd challenged a persistent and controversial view of causation of her own day: the account of the relation of cause and effect developed by David Hume. Specifically, Shepherd took issue with Hume’s view that we cannot know the necessity of a cause for every beginning of existence, or, as Shepherd interprets it, that an object can begin its own existence. In response to Hume, Shepherd advanced her own unique account of causal inference, one which would have especially major ramifications for philosophical problems of perception, and the problem of the external world in particular. For Shepherd, reason allows us to arrive at a key causal principle which is a necessary truth, that everything which begins must have a cause. If an object could begin its own existence, then that beginning would be an action or a quality of an object, one that object has only after it has begun to exist, but this would be to say that an object both exists and does not exist. Thus, no difference can “begin of itself ” (Shepherd 1824: 101), uncaused. From her first causal principle, Shepherd derives a causal likeness principle, according to which similar causes must necessarily produce similar effects. When the causes in two different situations are the same, they must “put on similar qualities”—that is, they must yield the same effects. Otherwise, “contrary qualities or differences would arise of themselves; …which is impossible, and conveys a contradiction in terms” (Shepherd 1824: 142–43; for discussion, see Bolton 2019; Landy 2020). Thus, when one slice from a loaf of bread tastes sour, I can infer that the causes that led to that slice are different from the causes that led to the other, sweet-tasting slices I’ve had from the same loaf. The causal likeness principle tells us that some difference in the causes must be present whenever a difference in the effects emerges. Moreover, because causes and effects are necessarily connected, in Shepherd’s view, we can think of effects as synchronously contained in the mixtures of their proximate causes.

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Shepherd uses her causal principles to argue for the continuous and independent existence of an external universe, a universe that is the cause of our sensations in perception. Shepherd’s analysis of perception begins from the phenomenological position that “feeling, thought, sensation under its varieties, is the only essence of which we have absolute consciousness” (Shepherd 1827: 243). Our ideas are interrupted existences, and reason, which is “the observation of the relation of our simple sensations” in Shepherd’s view, tells us, “as a new sensation of the mind,” that unperceived existences must be the causes of our ideas, which are their effects (Shepherd 1827: 19–20). ­Moreover, because sensations tend to occur in specific and predictable patterns, as when I move further away from an object only to find that its visual appearance varies in a regular way with distance, or when I close my eyes, only to experience roughly the same sensations I did before I closed them when I open them again, I can infer that the causes of my sensations, at least in ordinary cases of perception, are continuous and independent of my mind. In this way, Shepherd took her view of perception to be a solution to the problem of external world skepticism. In short, like Cavendish’s view, Shepherd’s theory of causation in perception supplies a framework within which a novel account of the relationship between our ideas and the objects in the external world can be detailed.

15.2  The Objects of Perception How did early modern women philosophers think about the relationship between ideas and the external world? Though there were disagreements among philosophers about how to understand the relation between experiences and external objects, many embraced a version of the wellknown primary and secondary quality distinction made prominent by John Locke. According to this distinction, some ideas, such as those of size, shape, and extension, resemble the mindindependent qualities of the material objects perceived (primary qualities). A second set of ideas, those of secondary qualities, such as ideas of color, smell, sound, and temperature, do not resemble their corresponding material causes in the environment, causes that are constituted by a thing’s primary qualities. For Locke, secondary qualities are ultimately reducible to primary qualities, but the crucial difference between the two classes of properties is that a resemblance relation holds between ideas of primary qualities and primary qualities, but not between ideas of secondary qualities and secondary qualities. For instance, in this approach, the shape and size experiences you have while looking at a candle represent the environment as it is. That is, your experiences of these features resemble the features as they exist externally in the environment, independently of any perceivers. The yellow appearance of the wax, however, does not in any sense resemble a quality that is objectively present in the candle. According to standard narratives, it was George Berkeley who finally challenged the distinction between primary and secondary qualities by arguing that we cannot conceive of an object as having no color. He writes, for instance, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moving, but I must withal give it some colour or other sensible quality…. In short, extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are inconceivable. (Berkeley 1710: 1.10) Alison Simmons calls this Berkeley’s “most memorable (if unconvincing) argument against the distinction” (Simmons 2015: 4). Notably, however, Cavendish and also, later, Shepherd, reject the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. And one of Cavendish’s central arguments against the distinction appeals to our inability to conceive of an object without imagining it to

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have a color. Cavendish asks, “can anyone conceive or imagine a body without figure, magnitude, place or colour, were it as little as an atom?” (Cavendish 2001: 194). Just as Berkeley will almost half a century later, Cavendish asks her reader to recognize that we cannot conceive of matter without also conceiving of it as having a color. Rejecting any ontological distinction between primary and secondary qualities, Cavendish argues that colors, just like shapes, are simple, “corporeal, figurative actions of nature” (Cavendish 2001: 194). In human perception, whether of color or size, perceptions are made by the sensory organs patterning or copying the patterns of outward objects, imitation that is carried out in the relevant sensory organ by sensitive and rational motions. In looking at an embroidered bed, for instance, my eyes pattern out color and figure at the same time, something that is made possible in part by the fact that the color and figure are both material, corporeal features of the object: “my eye patterns out both the velvet, gold, silver, silk, colour, and the workmanship, nay, superficially the figure of the whole bed, and all this by one act and at one and the same time.” The fact that “matter, colour, figure, magnitude, etc. are all but one thing” (Cavendish 2001: 176–77) helps to account for why they can so easily be patterned out concurrently. Cavendish explicates the notion of patterning for her reader by comparing the process in a number of places to an artist making a picture or a visual representation of a scene (see for example Cavendish 1664: 172; 2001: 177, 178, 183). When the eye patterns out the exterior figure of the embroidered bed, the eye does not “become of the same nature: for the original is one thing, and the copy another: the picture of a house of stone, is not made of natural stone” (Cavendish 2001: 179). The object provides the “exterior pattern” to be copied, patterned, or imitated, and the copy is, consequently, “like” its occasioning “producers” (Cavendish 2001: 170). Seeing an object from different distances can help us understand the distinction between “originals” and “copies” in Cavendish’s view: that there are copies and originals, and that some perceptions are made by patterning, is evident by the appearance of one candle in several distances, which several appearances can be nothing else but several copies of that candle made by those parts that take patterns from the original. (Cavendish 2001: 187) Cavendish sees the different and varying copies of the candle, copies our eyes make from different distances, as a demonstration that the copies must be distinct from the original. And copies can be made of copies, on this view. Just as we can see a painting of a bed, we may see natural representations of objects in our environments. For instance, for all we know, “many stars which we take for originals, may be but so many copies or patterns of one star, made by the figurative motions of those parts where they appear” (Cavendish 2001: 187). And a dog can follow the scent of another animal only because its nose copies the copy the earth has taken of the animal as it passed. (Cavendish 1664: 92–93) Cavendish encourages us to describe this copying relation in animal perception—the imitative relation between the corporeal motions of outward objects (patterns) and motions in the sensory organs that copy them (patterning)—in terms of resemblance. Given how Cavendish explains the relationship between perceptions and their corresponding outward objects, we therefore might be tempted to frame her view as a form of intentionalism (sometimes called representationalism), the view in philosophy of perception according to which perceptual experiences are intentional states that represent the environment as being a certain way. On this kind of view, the way the world is—that is, the content of our ideas—can be represented in different ways, and Cavendish argues that different types of perceivers perceive the same object in different ways, for perception is an “effect of knowledge in the sentient, and not in the external object” (Cavendish 2001: 177). With 204

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some training, colors, which are corporeal, figurative motions for Cavendish, can be perceived by touch in a person who is blind, for touch is the “general sense” (Cavendish 2001: 82–83; see also 177, 182). This can take training, of course; colors are “the finest” of the exterior parts (Cavendish 2001: 81). But touch and sight, Cavendish seems to suggest, can share perceptual contents, even if they represent those contents in different ways. On the other hand, the view resists this type of straightforward treatment in at least several respects. For instance, Keith Allen suggests that Cavendish is a disjunctivist, a position typically espoused by those seeking to understand perception in relational terms, and to avoid talk of intentional contents in perception. According to Allen’s disjunctivist interpretation, Cavendish denies that (1) seeing the embroidered bed, and (2) hallucinating or imagining the embroidered bed, give rise to mental states of the same fundamental kind (Allen 2019; but compare James 1999: 236; I discuss the suggestion that Cavendish is a disjunctivist in further detail in section 3). Moreover, properties such as figure and color are “both in the object, and the eye” (Cavendish 2001: 147), in Cavendish’s view. In a recent paper, Colin Chamberlain interprets this latter comment as evidence that Cavendish takes bodies to be sensuously colored, and that Cavendish’s account of color is “in keeping with a naïve or commonsense view of color”, again a type of view normally endorsed by those who want to reject intentionalism and to view perception as a direct relation with external properties. According to Chamberlain, Cavendish holds that sensuous color—that is, the property a material thing visually seems to have when it appears to be colored—is “an irreducible property of bodies, on a par with size and shape” (Chamberlain 2019: 299). Cavendish does seem to conceive of color (as well as other properties such as sounds or heat—see Cavendish 2001: 148) as an irreducible property, but, as Chamberlain (2019: 300) acknowledges, she says very little about how we should think about colors or sounds as they figure in outward objects, except insofar as she describes them as corporeal motions. Take Cavendish’s response to the mechanist’s interest in a straightforward correlation between types of light and color experiences. Cavendish appeals to the stability of colors in our environments despite changing illumination conditions: “We see that natural and inherent colors continue always the same, let the position and reflexion of light be as it will” (Cavendish 2001: 75). Chamberlain reads this passage as claiming that sensuous colors are in objects, but the passage might also be read as an appeal to the stability of color appearances as demonstration that colors, understood as types of corporeal motion, do not typically change with changes in illumination. Interestingly, this same type of argument is used by intentionalists as a means of arguing that colors, understood in physical but not sensuous terms, such as in terms of surface spectral reflectances, are mind-independent properties of the objects we perceive. Even Chamberlain compares Cavendish’s appeal to color constancy to the use of constancy arguments by intentionalist color realists, such as David Hilbert and Michael Tye (Chamberlain 2019: 324 and 324n; see, e.g., Hilbert 1992), realists who do not take sensuous color to be a property of objects. As an additional complication, Deborah Boyle notes that sensitive perception in Cavendish’s view doesn’t itself seem to involve conscious awareness; for conscious awareness, the sensitive patterning out of motions of the object must be accompanied by rational perception—rational matter patterning out the motions of the external object or sensitive matter (Boyle 2015: 443; see also Cavendish 2001: 150; O’Neill 2001: xxiv). At the very least, we might conclude that Cavendish’s view of copies and their relation to environmental originals is not straightforwardly interpreted in terms of the standard frameworks in the philosophy of perception. In the early nineteenth century, Shepherd likewise rejected the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, claiming that we have no reason to think that any resemblance relation holds between our ideas and mind-independent, external objects in our environments. Shepherd was sympathetic to Berkeley’s well-known rejection of the distinction, but her reasons for rejecting it are different from Berkeley’s in a number of key respects. Shepherd was a realist, rather than 205

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an idealist; on her view, our ordinary assumptions about the existence of an external world are right. Our mistake is in thinking that we perceive reality as it is: All men consider objects, as continually existing outward beings, appearing to the mind through the senses. Their only error is, their considering them to exist outwardly under the inward forms of the “ideas and sensations” they create, through the strength of the associations. (Shepherd 1827: 49) Instead of thinking of external objects as resembling our ideas and sensations, we should think of our ideas and sensations on the model of a language “which must be translated, before it can explain the actions of nature” (Shepherd 1827: 261). The ideas themselves, which are effects, should not be assumed to resemble their causes in any straightforward sense, for we experience their causes only “under the inward forms” of the ideas they create. Still, though Shepherd rejects a traditional resemblance relation between external causes and ideas, she does think that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds. Specifically, an isomorphic relation holds at a second-order level, between (1) the relations among external causes, and (2) the relations among ideas. We can take the proportions and relations of our ideas to represent the proportions and relations of corresponding external existences despite denying that any of those ideas resemble their causes (Shepherd 1827: 20). Consider, for instance, how Shepherd explains the cause of the sensation that is extension: we know not what extension unperceived is, although I am willing to concede a mite cannot be the same as the globe, not only with respect to that condition of being which, when exhibited upon the eye or touch, yields the notion of extension, but which, when subjected to calculation, manifests that in its unknown state, it must be liable to that variety, which when perceived, is called size or figure, and becomes altered in its dimensions. (Shepherd 1827: 165) Our sensations of extension cannot be said to resemble the real cause we call “extension,” about which we know very little. What can be known about the unperceived causes of our ideas is gathered from the relations among ideas. From our ideas, we can know about the varieties, independency, continued existence, and identity of external things (Shepherd 1827: 181–84). We know, on this view, that the ocean “must be vast, in comparison of a drop of water, when both are unperceived” (Shepherd 1827: 164). It is only in this limited sense of a second-order resemblance that unperceived qualities can be thought to be like those that we perceive. What then, we might ask, is the external world really like, from Shepherd’s view? It is a set of unperceived qualities: What, then, is nature? What, then, is the universe? What are our friends and children? I answer, a whole set of corresponding, but unknown, unperceived qualities, which have a variety in that proportion and difference among each other, which their perceived varieties possess, and that the knowledge of such a fact, comes by reason, or arises from the perceptions of the relations of our ideas. (Shepherd 1827: 256) It is worth underscoring here that, in Shepherd’s view, our only real access to external causes seems to be by way of reasoning from the relations among our sensations. Reason informs us that each of our ideas “refers to an existence always considered independent of sensation; which idea is only its sign, representative, image, or whatever name it may please philosophy to term it” (Shepherd 1827: 136; see also 172). And the relations among our sensations generate conclusions about the 206

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existence of external causes, conclusions that themselves “become new sensations or perceptions” (Shepherd 1827: 8). Because Shepherd uses the language of signs and reference throughout her writings on perception, it can seem appropriate to read her as conceiving of perception in terms of representation, perhaps even as holding a form of indirect realism, the view that the objects of perception are mind-dependent representations, representations that can indirectly make us aware of the way the world is. However, it is essential to interpret this theory of perception within the context of Shepherd’s account of causation, as Shepherd intended. As Martha Bolton (Bolton 2018) has pointed out, if effects are synchronously contained in the mixture of their causes, as Shepherd suggests that they are, then we can frame Shepherd’s view of the relation between ideas and their external causes as direct and unmediated, options normally taken to be unavailable to the indirect realist. Here again, we find that the approach is not straightforwardly framed in terms of our contemporary models of the nature of perception. Both Cavendish and Shepherd deny the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and each embraces resemblance in an unconventional way. In each case, we are left with difficult questions about how to interpret the relation between appearances and external objects, questions which are not neatly resolved by trying to position these authors within taxonomies that are themselves the culmination of a tradition from which these theories of perception were excluded.

15.3  Perceptual Error and Epistemic Restraint In order to make sense of how ideas can reliably inform perceivers about the external world, early modern philosophers offered accounts of the conditions under which veridical perception occurs. Cavendish in particular discusses unsuccessful perception in a number of places in her work, emphasizing that specific circumstances must obtain for animal perception to be accurate. First, the object perceived will need to meet certain conditions for perception to be possible. The object’s size or subtlety, as well as the perceiver’s position relative to the object, matter. In addition, for perception to go well, “our optic ‘sensorium’ must be perfect, and the sensitive motions regular” (Cavendish 2001: 82). The animal sense can easily make mistakes in Cavendish’s view. In some cases, the free motions of self-moving matter are inhibited. The sensitive parts of matter are especially vulnerable to this type of misperception because they move in the context of much other natural movement, and are burdened by inanimate matter. It is simply a fact of nature that, in Cavendish’s view, nature’s parts “oppose, and oft-times obstruct each other; so that many times they are forced to move, and they may not when they would” (Cavendish 1668: 105). When the sensitive motions go awry, they are often corrected by the perceptions of the mind, or rational motions. Because the rational parts of matter are subtler and finer than the sensitive parts, the rational and sensitive parts of nature pattern out objects in different ways, so that, though rational and sensitive often work simultaneously and together in patterning an object, there are still always two perceptions, one rational and one sensitive, and “the copies are not the same.” Sense perceives in part, while reason perceives “generally, and in whole” (Cavendish 2001: 179–80). The fact that the rational parts are “more subtle, active and piercing,” helps to explain how they might “find out the error either of the object, or sense” (Cavendish 2001: 169). However, the rational motions can also fail to pattern out an object correctly, as when we briefly mistake a stranger for someone we know (Cavendish 1668: 83). In such cases, both the rational and sensitive motions err, according to Cavendish. On some occasions, the sensitive motions pattern out the object correctly, and the rational motions alone are responsible for the mistake, as when a perceiver fails to hear a sound “perfectly” because they are not paying attention. Cavendish gives the example of being pinched while deep in thought. We might see or hear something without noticing it, just as we might not feel a pinch, despite having a sensitive perception of the pinch (Cavendish 2001: 150). 207

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In more unusual cases, the sensitive organs can make figurative actions of an object when there is no object present. (Cavendish 1668: 56). Cavendish tells us that we see in dreams and cases of hallucination, and yet, on her view, there are notable differences between cases of perception, on one hand, and cases of dreaming or hallucination, on the other. Susan James has read Cavendish as opposing views that divide dreams and perceptions, a class of events, according to James, which are “qualitatively indistinguishable” on Cavendish’s view, and which, “on phenomenological grounds, requires to be treated as one” ( James 1999: 236). Allen, in contrast, reads Cavendish as holding the disjunctivist view that mental states with different causes differ in kind (Allen 2019). Allen’s analysis stresses differences in the causal processes that lead to perceptions as opposed to hallucinations or dreams. Hallucinations or dreams, for instance, do not involve patterning or imitation of an outward object, the specific type of figuring that occurs in cases of animal perception, for in such cases the outward object is absent. In dreaming, the sensitive motions voluntarily make figures on the inside of the sensitive organs, and these are imitated by rational motions (Cavendish 2001: 171, see also 20). These voluntary actions of sensitive parts are “not so exact as their exterior perceptive actions” (Cavendish 2001: 33; see also 1664: 26), and are often false or erroneous in the sense that they make “mixt figures of several objects; as, partly like a beast; and partly, like a bird, or fish” (Cavendish 1668: 92). Nor, Cavendish tells us, can they be “properly named perceptions,” since they are voluntary rather than occasioned by outward objects (Cavendish 2001: 190). Though it is clear that Cavendish can be framed as a disjunctivist, there are qualifications to be made here. As James emphasizes, for Cavendish the causes of perceptions are within the perceiving body just as the causes of our dreams are, and in either case, the process of figuring depends crucially on the organization of the perceiver. Additionally, Cavendish seems to indicate that dreams are acts of figuring that can be just like the acts of figuring that occur in cases of veridical perception. She writes, for instance, that, “perfect dreams are as perceptive as waking-patterns of present objects” (Cavendish 1668: 93), and she claims that we “see” in dreaming and hallucinating (e.g. see Cavendish 1664: 63; 2001: 77). Perhaps most decisively, Cavendish’s remarkable extension of perceptual phenomena to all of nature should serve to remind us that the more general philosophical approach is invested in continuity rather than difference. Cavendish does draw distinctions between dreams and perceptual states, but she is also concerned to underscore their similarities. Shepherd likewise finds a phenomenological continuity between dream states and perceptual states. As Shepherd puts it, there can be an “exact similarity” between “our sleeping and waking perceptions of sensible qualities” (Shepherd 1827: 91). Dreams therefore seem to present a challenge to Shepherd’s view of the certainty that can be achieved regarding the existence of an external world. If our sensations in ordinary waking life allow us to infer that external, independent, and continuously existing objects are the causes of our sensations, our sensations in dream states should allow us to make the same (in this case erroneous) inference, and this would seem to undermine Shepherd’s argument for our knowledge of the existence of an external world. Shepherd sidesteps this problem by claiming that, in fact, there are important differences in the phenomenology of dream states as compared to waking states, differences that have to do with a sense of place and the capacity to reason. Upon waking after even the most vivid of dreams, we find ourselves aware that the objects we experienced in our dream state could not reasonably be taken to exist. Moreover, in dream states, our powers of reasoning are “deficient” (Shepherd 1827: 238), and consequently, we are not able to notice many of the relations between our ideas that we would notice if we were awake. Because of these differences, it is not possible “for a person to be affected with the same train of sensations, and in the same order in a dream, or frenzy, as out of them” (Shepherd 1827: 92). In veridical perception, a kind of order characterizes our phenomenology: objects appear at least roughly the same across contexts; they regularly 208

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appear in our environments, for example, when we look their way. In other words, real objects “repl[y] to the irregular calls of the senses and motion”; and it is only when objects “fulfil their whole definitions” in this way that “they are real” (Shepherd 1827: 88–89). Though a dream state and a perceptual state might seem indistinguishable, there are empirical means of differentiating between them, at least for anyone for whom “ideas of reason are clearly included in those of sensation” (Shepherd 1827: 238). Shepherd’s attention to the phenomenology of embodied perception—and her interest, in particular, in the temporal aspects of perception—is significant in that it anticipates approaches in early experimental psychology in the later nineteenth and even twentieth centuries, not to mention the emphasis on embodiment and stability of experience that is the focus of so much recent work in the philosophy of perception. Though their approaches differ radically, both Cavendish and Shepherd sought to give principled accounts of the difference between veridical perception, and dreams or hallucinations. And in both cases, there is a contention that reason must be actively involved for perception to succeed. Despite the confidence with which both Cavendish and Shepherd affirm our ability to perceive external objects, it is worth drawing out an additional feature of these authors’ approaches to perception, that is, their interest in acknowledging and respecting limits on what we might perceive, and on the ways in which perception might operate as a source of certainty about the nature of the external world. Cavendish emphasized that there is much that we cannot hope to know about the natural world by way of animal perception. Animal perception is merely one of many varieties of perception in the natural world, varieties we cannot know much about given our animal perspectives. More generally, there are “infinite parts that are beyond our human perception, and it would be but a folly for us to deny that which we cannot see or perceive” (Cavendish 2001: 82). Cavendish’s analysis of perception exhibits a kind of epistemic restraint that anticipates recent philosophical accounts of perception that are especially sensitive to literatures in ethology and comparative psychology. We might even say that there is a kind of environmental ethic implicit in Cavendish’s view of perception: the human experience is one among myriad ways in which the world may perceptually manifest, and humans are but one integrated aspect of perceptive, knowing nature (see also Duncan 2018). Others embraced alternative forms of epistemic restraint about perception. In a recently discovered work on optics, published in 2017, Émilie du Châtelet emphasizes that the physical world may be more complex than we expect given our perceptual experiences. Du Châtelet hypothesizes, for instance, that all particles of bodies are transparent, and that they appear opaque to us only because this makes it easier to distinguish them from surrounding surfaces and objects. If our eyes were to be naturally like little microscopes, most bodies would look see-through. But in distinguishing their imperceptible parts we’d become incapable of seeing the whole, and this perspective, far from being useful for us, would actually be quite harmful. God seems to have apportioned all our senses to our needs rather than to our curiosity. As a result we hardly see anything smaller than a flea, and that’s because it’s the smallest of the animals we had to defend ourselves against. (Du Châtelet 2019: 47) For Du Châtelet, the senses are geared to help us navigate our environments in ecologically useful ways, to help us “defend” ourselves against harmful stimuli, rather than to inform us of the nature of the environment as it is independent of us. Perception is not primarily about providing us with epistemic certainty, and we therefore should be cautious in our interpretations of perceptual appearances. A form of epistemic restraint is evident in Shepherd’s theory of perception too. For Shepherd, we cannot take appearances to resemble mind-independent properties as traditionally conceived. 209

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But this does not lead to a rejection of the senses as problematic, or as misleading. Rather, the senses provide the data with which we can and do work in understanding ourselves and nature. The relations among these phenomena have the potential to unlock any knowledge that might be possible regarding the mind-independent world, but we will have to accept significant limits on that knowledge whether we want to or not. And for Shepherd, as for Cavendish, perception is something non-human animals such as birds, worms, and barnacles, are capable of as well (Shepherd 1824: 174; 1827: 360, 377). Women philosophers challenged the ideas of their peers when it came to perception and perceptual knowledge, and the views that resulted do not easily conform to the standard taxonomies we use today to think about theories of perception, taxonomies which are themselves the result of an exclusive tradition. Though approaching their writings in terms of our familiar frameworks might resolve interpretive debates, or elucidate aspects of these views that are not initially obvious, it also risks obscuring important complexities and unique features. Perhaps the more interesting project involves asking how these women’s theories might help us to reframe our own inherited understandings of how perception works. Cavendish and Shepherd in particular made major contributions in philosophy of perception, expanding the diversity of views on offer. Though Cavendish scholarship is developing faster than ever before, there are still very few published articles investigating Cavendish’s views about perception, views which are at the very heart of her theory of nature. And though some work exists on Shepherd’s theories of causation and mind, almost nothing has been published on her account of perception. This is especially remarkable given that Shepherd’s most important book is titled Essays on the perception of an external universe and other subjects. We need careful scholarship in this area, scholarship that seeks to understand these theories in their own distinctive terms. How do the theories of causation endorsed by these authors constrain or afford possibilities for understanding perception? What is the relationship between ideas and the external objects that are their causes, on these views? How should we understand the complex relationship between reason and perception proffered by these authors, and what can we learn from the way in which Cavendish and Shepherd conceive of mind as a mere facet of nature? How do these theories encourage us to reframe our own views of perceptual experience, and of ourselves more generally? In his Discourse on Method, Descartes suggests that we can approach philosophy and the history of philosophy as good conversation, in which authors of past ages reveal to us their best thoughts (Shapiro 2004; see also Descartes 1996: VI 5). If this model of philosophy is correct, then the views explored here provide us with a rich collection of ideas with which we may dialogue. Indeed, these views invite us to reconsider not only the history of ideas about perception, but our relationship with the world around us.

Notes 1 Exceptions to this generalization include: (Boyle 2015, 2019; Bolton 2018; Allen 2019; Chamberlain 2019; Adams 2020). 2 Despite publishing in the nineteenth century, Shepherd engages the questions and authors of the early modern period, and is fruitfully read within the canon of modern philosophy (see Boyle 2017 for discussion). 3 Note that Cavendish did not endorse occasionalism, the most well-known version of an occasional theory of causation, according to which all created things are occasional causes and God mediates between causes and effects. For Cavendish’s critiques of occasionalism, see (Cavendish 2001: 209).

References Adams, M. (2020) “Visual Perception as Patterning: Cavendish against Hobbes on Sensation,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 33(3): 193–214.

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Theories of Perception Allen, Keith. (2019) “Cavendish and Boyle on Colour and Experimental Philosophy,” in A. Vanzo and P. Anstey (eds.), Experiment, Speculation and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy, New York: Routledge, pp. 58–80. Berkeley, G. (1949) [1710] “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,” in A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (eds.) The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne Vol. 2. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, pp. 1–145. Bolton, M. (2018) “Sense Perception and its Objects According to Mary Shepherd,” Paper Presented to the 8th Edition of the Quebec Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, Trois-Rivières, May 31. Available at: https:// oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec.ca/pls/public/docs/GSC3717/O0000510267_Paper_Martha_Bolton.pdf (2019) “Lady Mary Shepherd and David Hume on Cause and Effect,” in E. O’Neill and M. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Cham: Springer, pp. 129–52. Boyle, D. (2015) “Margaret Cavendish on Perception, Self-knowledge, and Probable Opinion,” Philosophy Compass 10(7): 438–50. (2017) “Expanding the Canon of Scottish Philosophy: The Case for Adding Lady Mary Shepherd,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 15(3): 275–293. (2019) “Informed by ‘sense and reason’: Margaret Cavendish’s Theorizing about Perception,” in B. Glenney and J. F. Silva (eds.), The Senses and the History of Philosophy, New York: Routledge, pp. 231–248. Cavendish, M. (1664) Philosophical Letters; or Modest Reflections upon Some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, Maintained by Several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age, Expressed by Way of Letters, London. (1668) Grounds of Natural Philosophy, London: A Maxwell. (2001) Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. E. O’Neill, Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1668. Chamberlain. C. (2019) “Color in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish against the Early Modern Mechanists,” Philosophical Review 128(3): 293–336. Descartes, R. (1996) Oeuvres, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Paris: Vrin. Detlefsen, K. (2006) “Atomism, Monism, and Causation in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 3: 199–240. Du Châtelet, É. (2019) Essay on Optics, trans. B. Gessell, Project Vox, Durham, NC: Duke University Libraries. Duncan, S. (2018) “Margaret Cavendish, Environmental Ethics, and Panpsychism,” https://philarchive.org/ rec/DUNMCE. Available at: https://philpapers.org/rec/DUNMCE Hilbert, D. (1992) “What Is Color Vision?” Philosophical Studies 68: 351–70. James, S. (1999) “The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7(2): 219–244. Landy, D. (2020) “Shepherd on Hume’s Argument for the Possibility of Uncaused Existence,” Journal of Modern Philosophy 2(1): 1–14. Lindberg, D. (1981) “Johannes Kepler and the Theory of the Retinal Image,” in Theories of Vision from ­al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 178–208. McDonough, J. K. (2015) “Descartes’ Optics,” in L. Nolan (ed.), The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 550–559. O’Neill, E. (2001) “Introduction,” in E. O’Neill (ed.), Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. x–xxxvi. Shepherd, M. (1824) An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect, Controverting the Doctrine of Mr. Hume, Concerning the Nature of that Relations; with Observations Upon the Opinions of Dr. Brown and Mr. Lawrence, Connected with the Same Subject, London: Printed for T. Hookham. (1827) Essays on the Perception of an External Universe and Other Subjects Connected with the Doctrine of Causation, London: John Hatchard and Son. Shapiro, L. (2004) “Some Thoughts on the Place of Women in Early Modern Philosophy,” in L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 219–250. (ed. and trans.) (2007) The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simmons, A. (2015) “Perception in Early Modern Philosophy,” in M. Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 81–99.

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PART II Section C: Moral Philosophy

16 EARLY MODERN WOMEN AND THE METAPHYSICS OF FREE WILL Deborah Boyle

15.1 Introduction Twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions of free will are typically framed in terms of how free agency is possible in a physically deterministic world in which (it seems) every event is necessitated by some antecedent event and the laws of nature. Libertarians claim that some events are not so necessitated; in particular, that some human actions are determined entirely by an autonomous self, and that actions so chosen are among various genuine alternative possibilities. Compatibilists preserve a commitment to physical determinism, and aim to preserve the commitments to both autonomy and alternative possibilities by reconceptualizing these. Although we find a rather different landscape in early modern discussions of freedom, there are continuities with our contemporary discussions. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers refashioned medieval terminology, so we find references to necessity, freedom of indifference, freedom of spontaneity, voluntary and involuntary actions, and so on. These terms themselves had multiple meanings (see Lennon 2011, for example) and they do not map neatly onto our contemporary terms “determinism,” “libertarianism,” and “compatibilism,” which themselves have multiple interpretations. Moreover, early modern philosophers were as interested in the question of God’s freedom as they were in human freedom. Nonetheless, as Gary Watson observes, in both early modern and contemporary accounts, there are two different features of freedom that must be captured in any reasonable conception— namely, self-determination (or autonomy) and the availability of alternative possibilities. Any adequate notion of free agency must provide for possibility and autonomy in some sense, and, in my view, the traditional conceptions that are still taken seriously were meant to do so. (Watson 1987: 145) In other words, some questions addressed today also underlie early modern analyses of human freedom. Thus we can ask whether a given early modern philosopher accepts either of these features of freedom: Self-Determination (SD): In at least some cases, a person’s choices are caused by factors internal to the self rather than by external factors.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-21

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Alternative Possibilities (AP): In at least some cases, a person faces a choice between two alternative possibilities, such that even having chosen one option, the person could have chosen differently.1 Furthermore, early modern theorists of freedom addressed questions of whether or not determinism is true and whether the truth of determinism would rule out free will or vice versa. However, in the early modern period, no single view can be identified as determinism simpliciter; different accounts of the causes of events result in different varieties of determinism (Ragland 2006b; Lennon 2015). Some possible varieties include the following: 1 Physical determinism: events are causally necessitated by preceding states of physical objects and the laws of nature; 2 Theological determinism: events are causally necessitated by God; 3 Natural determinism: the will is causally necessitated by its nature to pursue the good and the true; 4 Intellectual determinism: acts of will are causally necessitated by states of the intellect. Thus any explication of a given philosopher’s account of human freedom requires examining that philosopher’s views on SD, AP, and determinism, as well as how those views relate to each other. The secondary literature on how early modern male philosophers handled these topics is vast. With early modern women philosophers, this interpretive project is just beginning. And, not surprisingly, just as the male philosophers endorsed a range of positions, so too did the women philosophers. Discussions of human freedom can be found in the works of many early modern women philosophers;2 in this chapter, I consider how Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680) and Mary Astell (1666–1731) handled this topic, and, in particular, how each responded to different kinds of determinism.

15.2  Princess Elisabeth on Theological Determinism Elisabeth’s remarks on the will occur in two contexts in her correspondence with Descartes. Her letters from May 1643 to 1645 consider the extent to which external factors—specifically bodily health—affect autonomy, while her letters from September 1645 to April 1646 consider theological determinism. This section addresses the latter issue.3 In a 1645 letter to Elisabeth, Descartes had written that knowing God exists helps us “draw joy even from our afflictions, in thinking that His will is carried out as we receive them.”4 In her reply of 30 September 1645, Elisabeth expresses doubt that God wills all mishaps that befall us: The knowledge of the existence of God and his attributes can console us from the mishaps which come to us from the ordinary course of nature and from the order He has established there, such as losing one’s well-being in a storm, or health by an infection of the air, or friends through death. But it cannot console us from those mishaps that are brought upon us by other men. For it seems to us that the will [l’arbitre] of these men is entirely free [entièrement libre], as we have nothing but faith alone to persuade us that God cares to rule these wills [les volontés] and that He has determined the fate of each person before the creation of the world. (CPE 114) 5 In her Calvinist upbringing, Elisabeth would have learned that God’s providence means that God directs all events on earth, thereby ruling human wills in their actions on earth as well as predestinating whether or not each individual will be saved (Schreiner 1991: 31–32; Helm 2004: 96). 216

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Here she suggests that her faith in that doctrine is tested by the appearance of freedom in others’ actions: it certainly seems that some people intentionally and knowingly choose to harm others. Despite his doctrines of providence and predestination, Calvin himself denied that God is the cause of human sin (Schreiner 1991: 18; see Calvin 1960: I 216–17). Exploring Calvin’s attempts to reconcile these views is beyond the scope of this chapter, but here we can note three approaches Calvin adopted.6 Sometimes Calvin appealed to God’s unknowability, emphasizing that we simply cannot know how these are compatible (Helm 2004: 123). When Calvin did seek to explain this arrangement, he invoked a Thomistic distinction between God as the primary cause and human agents as secondary causes (see Calvin 1960: I 218 and I 221–22). Third, Calvin adopted the Augustinian view that while prelapsarian humans could choose between good and evil, human nature in its fallen state can now only choose evil, yet nonetheless still possesses an active ability to make choices.7 Paul Helm notes that Calvin “did not like the adjective ‘free’ (liberum) being applied to the noun ‘will’ (arbitrium)” because that characterization misleadingly implies that people can choose between good and evil (Helm 2004: 159–60) and because Calvin denied that “the power to do evil willingly is worth calling free will” (Helm 2004: 149). Freedom, for Calvin, meant freedom from external compulsion (Helm 2004: 149–52). In the letter quoted above, Elisabeth indicates that experience and faith pull her in different directions: faith dictates belief in providence, while her interactions with others suggest that others have “entirely free” wills. But what did she mean by “entirely free”? At the very least, Elisabeth seems committed to SD, for in contrasting mishaps brought on us by other people with mishaps due to weather, health, or others’ deaths, she implies that we hold others responsible for harmful actions precisely because we think they caused those actions. Does Elisabeth also think that people who intentionally harm others could have acted otherwise, and chosen not to do harm? In other words, does her reference to wills being “entirely free” indicate endorsement of AP? Although the passage does not explicitly address this issue, her use of the terms “arbritre” and “libre,” which Calvin took to imply a genuine choice between good and evil actions, suggests that she thought AP at least seems to be true. In his reply, Descartes insists on the compatibility of providence and human freedom (CPE 120–21), but Elisabeth is still not convinced, writing in her letter of 28 October 1645 that the reasons which prove the existence of God and that he is the immutable cause of all the effects which do not depend on our free will [libre arbitre] do not persuade me that he is just as much the cause of those which do depend on it. From his sovereign perfection it follows necessarily that he could be this cause, and that he could have never given free will [libre arbitre] to human beings. But since we feel ourselves to have it, it seems that it is repugnant to common sense to think it dependent on God in its operations as well as in its being. (CPE 123; AT 4, 322–23) Here, her own experience of free will—not observations of others—convinces her that free will exists. Indeed, Elisabeth here seems to be positively endorsing the existence of free will and thereby rejecting theological determinism.8 To Descartes’ claim in his next letter that “the independence that we experience and feel in us and that suffices for rendering our actions praiseworthy or blameworthy is not incompatible with a dependence that is of another nature, according to which all things are subject to God” (CPE 126), Elisabeth’s letter of 30 November 1645 states in no uncertain terms, I confess to you as well that even though I do not understand how the independence of our will [l’independence du libre arbitre] is no less contrary to the idea we have of God than its dependence is to its freedom, it is impossible for me to square them, it being as impossible for the 217

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will [la volonté] to be at the same time free [libre] and attached to the decrees of Providence as for divine power to be both infinite and limited at once. I do not see at all the compatibility between them of which you speak, or how this dependence of the will [la volonté] can have a different nature than its freedom [la liberté]. (CPE 127; AT 4, 336) Elisabeth’s reference to the will being “attached to the decrees of Providence” is an allusion to the Calvinist view that the human will is determined to act according to the divine order decreed eternally by God (Schreiner 1991: 31); she indicates that she cannot see how that is compatible with free will. Two recent commentators have suggested that Elisabeth sought, and perhaps found, a compatibilist position. According to Lisa Shapiro, “Elisabeth herself does not seem to reject the doctrine of freedom of will, though her Calvinist background might suggest she would. Rather she is seeking a truly viable compatibilist position” (CPE 25). And Tad Schmaltz has suggested that Elisabeth’s letters indicate what kind of compatibilism she may have accepted. Schmaltz reads Elisabeth as rejecting the claim that God causes any human actions, but not the claim that God divinely preordains those actions (Schmaltz 2019: 170). Indeed, there is some support for Schmaltz’s reading, since Elisabeth rejects the claim that God is the cause of human free actions. Schmaltz thus ascribes to Elisabeth a kind of mysterian compatibilism regarding free will and divine preordination, while regarding her as an incompatibilist regarding free will and God’s causal determination of human actions (Schmaltz 2019: 171, 173). However, the evidence for reading Elisabeth as an aspiring compatibilist regarding any form of theological determinism seems weak. Her letters express progressively less hope that free will can be rendered compatible with theological determinism, culminating in her claims that it is “impossible for the will to be at the same time free and attached to the decrees of Providence” (CPE 127) and that she does not “see at all the compatibility between them of which you speak” (CPE 127). She nowhere actually suggests that a different version of theological determinism might make them compatible. Moreover, Elisabeth’s reference to the will being “attached to the decrees of Providence” is, arguably, a question about whether the will is necessitated to perform actions that were preordained by God, not about whether God exercises causal power over individual actions. Calvin distinguished two kinds of divine willing, commands and decrees (Helm 2004: 313). Commands are laws, often violated by humans; in decreeing, however, “God incorporates creaturely actions that are against his law into the wider purpose of the fulfillment of his decree” (Helm 2004: 313). It appears that, for Calvin, God’s preordination of events involves decreeing: We make God the ruler and governor of all things, who in accordance with his wisdom has from the farthest limit of eternity decreed what he was going to do, and now by his might carries out what he has decreed. (Calvin 1960: I 207; see also I 215) If God’s preordination of events consists in God’s issuing the “decrees of Providence,” which Elisabeth says does not seem compatible with human freedom, then it seems unlikely that Elisabeth finds divine preordination compatible with human freedom. Concluding that Elisabeth was not a compatibilist regarding theological determinism and free will does not imply that she was a libertarian; that conclusion would require evidence that Elisabeth thought free will was incompatible with other forms of determinism. Yet there is some evidence that Elisabeth was an intellectual determinist, at least regarding some beliefs. Thus, although Elizabeth herself casts the problem of free will as a conflict with theological determinism, it might 218

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turn out that she is a compatibilist regarding free will and the fact that sometimes the will is determined by the intellect—although, as we shall see, given her views on the mind-body relationship, she may also hold that such cases are very rare indeed.

15.3  Princess Elisabeth and Intellectual Determinism What would it mean to ascribe a belief in intellectual determinism to Elisabeth? Consider Descartes’ account of freedom. While scholars debate whether Descartes was a compatibilist or a libertarian,9 he does suggest in the Fourth Meditation that when the intellect perceives an idea exceptionally clearly and distinctly, the will is determined to judge it to be true; in other cases, the will is merely “indifferent.”10 If Elisabeth has a similar view, it would be fair to characterize her as an intellectual determinist, at least regarding some beliefs. In one letter, Elisabeth does mention a case where the will cannot help but assent to a truth perceived by the intellect. She expresses hope that Descartes can help her increase the strength of her understanding so that she can “judge the best in all the actions of life”—since, she says, “it is impossible not to follow the good path when it is known” (CPE 106). That is, when reason has adequate strength, it can perceive truths about “the good path,” and under such circumstances, the will cannot fail to assent to those truths. Elisabeth does not use Descartes’ terminology of clarity and distinctness or a “great light in the intellect” (CSM 2, 41; AT VII, 41), and it is unclear whether she thinks there are any other truths like this; nonetheless, in this one case, her claim that it is “impossible” to prevent the action of the will sounds very much like an endorsement of intellectual determinism. Thus, even if Elisabeth thinks theological determinism is incompatible with free will, she evidently does not think intellectual determinism is incompatible with it. When the intellect is strong enough to perceive a truth—truths about what constitutes the good life, if not other truths—then the will cannot fail to assent to it. But in many cases, the intellect does not perceive truths, or perceives them only obscurely. In these cases, the will is not determined one way or the other by evidence, and it can exercise its freedom. This is evidently what happens in the kind of cases that trouble Elisabeth, where bad people, failing to see what is good, choose to harm other people (CPE 114). If such people saw clearly that harming others is bad, they would not choose to do so, but since they do not understand the good, their will is not determined to choose it.11 Elisabeth’s acceptance of intellectual determinism when the intellect accurately perceives the good does not mean she thinks the will is never able to genuinely choose between two options.12

15.4  Princess Elisabeth and the Possibility of Self-Determination Determination of the will by the intellect is not determination by anything external to the self; this explains Descartes’ apparently paradoxical characterization of this determination as the highest “grade” of freedom (CSM 2 40; AT VII, 57–58). To be determined to believe only by the intellect would be perfect autonomy; insofar as the intellect is affected by factors external to the self, the self is thereby less autonomous. Elisabeth focuses on this aspect of freedom in letters where she challenges Descartes’ account of mind-body interaction. She ends up suggesting that selfdetermination may be more elusive than Descartes thought: the human intellect, being embodied, is always affected to some extent by the health of the human body, preventing perfectly clear and distinct perception, and thus preventing the will from being determined only by the intellect.13 Elisabeth’s first letter to Descartes implores him, as the “best doctor for [her] soul,” to “supply [her] with remedies” for the “weaknesses” of her soul’s “speculations” (CPE 62). This medical metaphor later becomes literal when Descartes writes about an illness Elisabeth had been suffering. “The most common cause of a low-grade fever is sadness,” he says, adding that this was clearly 219

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the cause of Elisabeth’s illness (CPE 86). He then offers a prescription: those with the “greatest souls” have reasoning so strong and so powerful that, even though they too have passions, and often even more violent ones than most do, their reason nevertheless remains mistress and makes it such that even afflictions serve them and contribute the perfect felicity which they can enjoy already in this life. (CPE 87) For these great souls, “the greatest adversities are unable to defeat them or render them so sad that the body, to which they are joined, becomes sick” (CPE 88). Elisabeth, he says, is “the most noble and upstanding soul I know,” so the solution is for her to exercise her reasoning and consider the many reasons she has to be content (CPE 88).14 In her reply, Elisabeth suggests that Descartes’ “kindness to want to cure my body with my soul” is not, in fact, the kind of advice she had planned to follow. Her body is “imbued with a large part of the weaknesses of my sex, so that it is affected very easily by the afflictions of the soul, and has none of the strength to bring itself back into line” (CPE 88).15 She mentions that walking helped bring back some strength, and that she planned to drink Spa waters (CPE 89); in other words, Elisabeth believes the body is best cured with bodily treatments, not mental action. At first glance, Elisabeth’s belief that a bodily illness requires a bodily treatment seems to be in line with Descartes’ dualism; prescribing bodily treatments for bodily illness is what we might expect if body is not closely connected to mind (Shapiro 2019: 86–87). And Descartes’ suggestion of a mental solution for a bodily problem might seem to be a surprising acknowledgment of mind-body interdependence on his part. In fact, however, Elisabeth’s position is that mind and body are even more interdependent than Descartes allowed. She mentions various ways that body affects mind: “there are diseases that destroy altogether the power of reasoning” (CPE 100), such as when, “after having had the faculty and custom of reasoning well, [the mind] can lose all of this by some vapors” (CPE 68). External conditions can affect the mind, too; in her own case, she writes, household concerns and social obligations “beat down so heavily on this weak mind with annoyance or boredom, that it is rendered useless for anything else at all for a long time” (CPE 67–68). External factors can also produce problematic passions such as sadness or anger, as when Elisabeth reports that her brother’s conversion to Catholicism “has troubled the health of my body and the tranquility of my soul” (CPE 127). Descartes thinks mind can affect body, of course; that is how voluntary actions are performed. And he concedes both that “there are illnesses, which, taking away the power of reasoning, also take away the satisfaction of a rational mind” (CPE 106–07) and that “often a bodily indisposition prevents the will from being free” (CPE 106–07). Since the highest “grade” of freedom occurs when the will is determined to judge an idea true because of its clarity and distinctness in the intellect, whatever inhibits clear and distinct perception would inhibit that highest degree of freedom. Nonetheless, Descartes remains confident that, even in illness, the mind can remain unaffected: For the remedies against the excesses of the passions, I admit that they are difficult to practice, and even that they cannot suffice for preventing disorders of the body, but only for making it such that the soul is not troubled and can retain its free judgment. (CPE 137) When passions such as anger and sadness trouble the mind, he suggests here that the right strategies can tame those passions. But, strikingly, he implies that even when the body is disordered, 220

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one can successfully tame the passions, resulting in an untroubled, free soul. Ultimately, then, Descartes persists in thinking that an ill body can coexist with a soul that “is not troubled and can retain its free judgment” (CPE 137). What Elisabeth recognizes, but Descartes evidently does not, is that the mind-body relationship is dialectical. Vapors, other bodily illness, or external factors such as political or family affairs might weaken the mind. But once such mental limitations have occurred, it might not be possible, as Descartes suggests it is, to use the mind to regulate excessive passions. And those unregulated passions may have further deleterious effects on the body; for example, sadness might prolong illness, or, as Shapiro suggests, “while melancholic, we would not be able to think clearly enough to administer the remedy” (Shapiro 1999: 510). Thus in a letter responding to Descartes’ advice to cure her bodily illness by turning her imagination only to “those objects which are capable of bringing her contentment and joy” (CPE 92), Elisabeth writes that she cannot do this. She says she knows that in removing everything upsetting to me (which I believe to be represented only by imagination) from the idea of an affair, I would judge it healthily and would find in it the remedies as well as the affection which I bring to it. But I have never known how to put this into practice until the passion has already played a role. (CPE 93) In other words, Elisabeth’s lived bodily experiences—conversing with people and reading letters—cause passions in her mind that render her mind unable simply to overrule those passions; since her body “is affected very easily by the afflictions of the soul” (CPE 88), Descartes’ suggested remedy for her bodily illness will not work. In emphasizing the dialectical mind-body relationship, Elisabeth shows that self-determination is more elusive than Descartes thought. The mind is embodied, the body embedded in a social world, so the intellect cannot just detach itself from the imagination and senses, or from external factors that influence the body. This is not to say that Elisabeth thought self-determination was completely unobtainable. It is a matter of degree; a healthier body can support a more autonomous mind. One way to become more autonomous, then, is to promote bodily health—not by treating the mind, but by treating the body. Elisabeth concedes that when a passion upsets her, so her body has become “disordered,” she needs to “govern [her] mind with care, giving it agreeable objects” (CPE 93). But she also insists that the body has to be treated in bodily terms: she is not going to give up “taking waters of Spa” (CPE 93) or treatments like herbs and bloodletting (CPE 159).16

15.5  Mary Astell and Self-Determination Discussions of freedom pervade Mary Astell’s major works, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part I (1694) and Part II (1697) and The Christian Religion (1705 and 1717).17 Following Descartes, Astell says the human mind has “two principal Faculties, the Understanding and Will” (SPL 127). The understanding is the capacity of “Receiving and Comparing Ideas,” while the will is a “Power of Preferring any Thought or Motion, of Directing them to This or That thing rather than to another” (SPL 205). To use the will in thought is to judge ideas, and Astell shares Descartes’ account of judgment: the understanding considers (whether clearly or hazily) some idea, and the will either assents to or denies that idea (SPL 80, 159).18 To use the will in motion is to decide whether or not to perform some action that the understanding is considering. Astell only briefly considers the compatibility between human freedom, divine providence, and divine foreknowledge. She observes that “We are conscious of our own Liberty, who ever denies it denies that he is capable of Rewards and Punishments, degrades his Nature and makes 221

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himself but a more curious piece of Mechanism” (SPL 148), yet she notes that only atheists would doubt “the Providence of GOD, or deny that he Governs All, even the most Free of all his Creatures” (SPL 148). She then asks “But who can reconcile me these? Or adjust the limits between GOD’s Prescience and Mans Free-will?” (SPL 148). But here Astell evidently accepts a mysterian compatibilism; she says no more about how they might be reconciled. Throughout Christian Religion, Astell emphasizes that God has made humans free rather than necessary agents: Now the difference between a Free and a Necessary Agent consists in this, That the Actions of the former, or more properly the Motions of his Mind, are in his own power. He has Ability, as everyone one of us is sensible, to determine them this way or that, according to his own pleasure, and as he is affected by the suppos’d agreeableness of the objects he pursues. This power or faculty is what we call Liberty, which distinguishes a Free from a Necessary Agent; for this last does not determine itself, has no command over its own motions, but is absolutely govern’d by a foreign cause. (CR §78: 93; see also §32: 62–63) Astell’s insistence that a free agent possesses “command over its own motions” and is not “govern’d by a foreign cause” shows her acceptance of SD. Like Elisabeth, Astell has much to say about autonomy, seeing this as the key distinction between humans and non-human animals (SPL 128). But even more than Elisabeth, Astell focuses especially on external impediments to women’s autonomy (see Weiss 2004; Sowaal 2007; Broad 2015: 170–77; Detlefsen 2016). Astell’s goal in Part I of Serious Proposal is twofold. First, she aims to convince her readers that women can and should pursue “Nobler Things” than a husband, beauty, and fashion, goals she sums up as “Butter-flies and Trifles” (SPL 55), and that it is only poor education and the “tyrant,” custom, that have led women to think otherwise (SPL 67; see also 95–95, 133). Second, she proposes a “remedy” (SPL 72), a “Monastery” or “Religious Retirement” (SPL 73) where, through study and friendship (SPL 74–75), women can “expel that cloud of Ignorance, which Custom has involv’d us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful Knowledge” (SPL 77). Part II of Serious Proposal describes a method, and the epistemology underlying it, whereby women can acquire this knowledge even without the proposed “seminary” (SPL 126). Astell tells her female readers not to be “content to be kept any longer under [men’s] Tyranny in Ignorance and Folly, since it is in your Power to regain your Freedom” (SPL 121; see also 140). This freedom, Astell makes clear, consists in self-determination: acting on reasons that one has examined for oneself and judged to be true. “Making a Right use of our Reason,” she says, is “True Liberty” (CR §249: 193): [S]o every one who pretends to Reason, who is a Voluntary Agent and therefore Worthy of Praise or Blame, Reward or Punishment, must Chuse his Actions and determine his Will to that Choice by some Reasonings or Principles either true or false. (SPL 128) This requires that both the understanding and the will be in their right state. Astell identifies various factors that impede a clear understanding of truth: intellectual laziness (SPL 131–33); the force of and attachment to “prejudice,” or old habits of thought (SPL 133–39); and the influence of popular opinions, or what Astell calls “custom” (SPL 139–40). And like Princess Elisabeth, Astell observes that sometimes an “Indisposition of the Bodily Organs...cramps and contracts the Operations of the Mind” (SPL 159; see also 169). All these factors can impede a person’s ability to perceive the truth and to reason well.19 Autonomous thought also requires that the will be in a 222

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proper state, “regulated” and “purified” (SPL 129–30); it must choose not just what seems true and good, but what is really true and good. The will must be “duly directed to its End and Object” (SPL 143), which is “GOD as its only Good” (SPL 144; see also 205).20 Because there is a “mutual Relation between the Understanding and the Will,” as the understanding becomes clearer, the will becomes more likely to choose the true and the good, and as the will improves in its choices, the understanding becomes clearer (SPL 130–31). But Astell assigns a role to the emotions in this process, too. While the improvement of intellect and will requires turning away from the “Vanity and Folly” of worldly pursuits (SPL 68), withdrawing “as much as may be from Corporeal things” (SPL 164), and eliminating “all irregular Inclinations” (SPL 72), this does not mean eliminating the passions. As a person seeks to pursue the true rather than the apparent good, she will come to develop a “lively relish” of that true good (SPL 144), an “inward and Spiritual Sensation” that will help counterbalance the pull of “Passion and Appetite” toward more worldly goods (SPL 143–44).21 Properly regulated emotions, combined with clear perceptions in the understanding, help lead the will to pursue the real good. In sum, Astell endorses self-determination as a component of freedom.22 However, freedom as autonomy need not entail freedom as an ability to choose between genuinely alternative possibilities; that is, acceptance of SD does not entail acceptance of AP. According to the interpretation defended earlier, while Elisabeth maintains that humans can be self-determining, she follows Descartes in holding that intellectual determinism is true in some cases; the will is sometimes compelled to judge that a proposition is true. For Elisabeth, AP is true only when the will is not so compelled. If Astell, like Elisabeth and Descartes, accepts some form of determinism in some cases, then she too would accept only a limited form of AP. The next two sections consider Astell’s views on natural and intellectual determinism, respectively.

15.6  Astell on Natural Determinism Jacqueline Broad has argued that Astell’s views on free will derive less from Descartes than they do from Malebranche and his English defender John Norris, with whom Astell corresponded (Broad 2012: 385). As Broad notes, Malebranche distinguished between the will’s natural, determined inclination toward the good in general, and the will’s free, undetermined ability to assent or not in any given case (Broad 2012: 385).23 To posit the first function, a natural orientation of the will to seek the true or the good in general, is to endorse natural determinism. This was clearly Astell’s view in both Serious Proposal and Christian Religion. She says that the desire for the true and the good is “inbred” (SPL 62), and that “Human Nature is so form’d that it incessantly pants after that which it takes to be its true Good” (CR §123: 121). She does not argue for this thesis, but seems to treat it as axiomatic, asking “for why do we Prefer a thing but because we Judge it Best? And why do we Chuse it but because it Seems Good for us?” and then asserting that “Good then is the Object of the Will” (SPL 205–06). The difficulty is ensuring that what seems good really is good; the understanding must be improved and the will “purified” so that in particular cases, one makes right judgments about what to believe and how to act. This is the other aspect of the will that Malebranche identified, the undetermined ability to assent or not in any specific case. As we will see, Astell’s stance on whether such alternative possibilities are always available to the will is complex.

15.7  Astell on Intellectual Determinism In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes proposes a rule to “simply refrain from making a judgment in cases where I do not perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness” (CSM 223

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2 41; AT VII, 59). Astell has a similar view, advising that in trying to achieve knowledge and avoid ignorance, we cannot Judge of things of which we have no Idea, but we can suspend our Judgment about these of which we have, till clearness and evidence oblige us to pass it. (SPL 159) The same is true of acting well and not sinning (SPL 207). That is, if we do not clearly and distinctly perceive what is true and good, we should not use the will until we do. But what if the intellect does clearly and correctly perceive something to be true or good? Must the purified will assent to or pursue that object? As we will see, Astell’s writings pull in different directions. In Serious Proposal, Astell offers a taxonomy of knowledge that distinguishes between science, faith, and opinion (SPL 149). Opinion occurs when we judge a proposition of which we are not entirely certain (SPL 149). “Science” here means the absolutely certain knowledge that Descartes called scientia, a paradigm example of which is mathematics (SPL 168).24 This occurs when we have a “clear perception which is follow’d by a firm assent to conclusions rightly drawn from Premises of which we have clear and distinct Ideas” (SPL 149). Truths known by “faith” are just as certain as those known by “science,” but are accepted on the basis of God’s authority rather than clear and distinct perception (SPL 149). As Alice Sowaal has observed, Astell thinks the will responds differently depending on whether the claim being considered is one of “science” or faith” (Sowaal 2017: 184–86). With the clear and distinct perceptions that are the subject of scientia, “we cannot withhold our assent from them without manifest violence to our Reason” (SPL 149). For example, “the Idea of Equality between 2 and 2 is so evident that it is impossible to doubt of it, no Arguments could convince us of the Contrary” (SPL 168). In contrast, truths known by faith can be clearly perceived to be true, but are not such that we understand how they are true; examples are the doctrine of the Trinity or the compatibility between divine foreknowledge and free will (SPL 147–48). Later Astell expresses this point in terms of distinctness: while we may have a clear idea of our own souls and God, such ideas are not distinct (SPL 172–73).25 Truths about the soul and God are not, then, of the sort that could impel our assent. This means that those who do assent are praiseworthy: “faith has a mixture of the Will that it may be rewardable, for who will thank us for giving our Assent where it was impossible to withhold it?” (SPL 151). Astell develops this point further in Christian Religion, where she argues that to be good Christians, women must understand and have chosen Christianity for themselves, rather than simply accepting it because they were raised to believe it (CR §5: 50–51). Genuine Christian belief requires free assent to the truths of Christianity, which requires the genuine option of perceiving the truths yet not accepting them. Thus Astell insists that there is no “inward and irresistible impulse compelling me to believe” in Christianity (CR §32: 62) and that “it can’t be supposed that [God] lays irresistible restraints upon [free agents], or gives them irresistible impulses” (CR §79: 93). Repeating a point she had made in Serious Proposal, Astell says that for God to give humans such an impulse would undermine “the reward and excellency” of faith (CR §32: 62). It would also “destroy His own work, to make me a necessary, instead of having made me a free Agent” (CR §32: 62–63; see also §24: 59), and would assign to God acts that we should do ourselves, which would be unworthy of his greatness (CR §32: 63). In sum, in cases of scientia, Astell accepts intellectual determinism, but in cases of faith—regarding truths about God and religious doctrine—she does not. There is, however, a tension in Astell’s views, which becomes apparent when we consider where the claims defended in Christian Religion fit into her taxonomy. While Astell says in Christian 224

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Religion that there are religious mysteries—“sublime Truth[s] concerning the Nature of GOD or His manner of Acting, which we could never have discover’d by mere human Reason” (CR §59: 78)—she seeks throughout the book to establish various claims by reason, such as that God exists (CR §7–10: 52–53) and that the Bible really comes from God (CR §19–40: 56–67). She says that the moral rules laid down by God can be known, not by “loose and confus’d Ideas,” but by means of “clear, distinct, and just Notions” (CR §110: 113). In other words, the claims Astell defends in Christian Religion meet the criteria for scientia, not faith, as that distinction is drawn in Serious Proposal. The principles defended in Christian Religion should, then, compel belief once clearly and distinctly perceived. But this conflicts with her claims that some people reject Christian principles despite fully understanding them and that those who do accept Christianity are praiseworthy. There may be a way to resolve this tension. In both Serious Proposal and Christian Religion, Astell concedes that reason is sometimes weak and “unable to maintain its Authority” against “the incursions of sense” (SPL 143–44; see also CR §90: 98). But she also thinks that a decision (an “elicit act”) to turn the will toward God can result in an “inward and Spiritual Sensation” of the good (that is, a love of God) that can assist reason and lead the will to assent to the truths reason perceives, even in the face of desires and passions that pull in a different direction (SPL 144). If a free act of will is required in order to acquire the love of God that leads to acceptance of Christian principles, then Astell may be able to claim both that these principles can be clearly and distinctly known and that, even so, they do not compel belief.26

Notes 1 My formulation here follows Ekstrom 2011. As Ekstrom points out, these conditions can themselves be interpreted in various ways; for example, compatibilists interpret AP “in terms of what the agent would have done had she willed, desired, or chosen otherwise” (Ekstrom 2011: 368). 2 Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) mentions freedom in various works, although commentators’ interpretations of her views vary; see Detlefsen 2007; Cunning 2016; Boyle 2017. Anne Conway (1631–1679) ascribes necessity to God and “indifference of will” to creatures (Conway 1996: 15; see Lascano 2017; Head 2019). Emilie Du Châtelet (1709–1749) discusses freedom in her Foundations of Physics (1740) and her essay “On Liberty” (Du Châtelet 2009 and 1947; see Hagengruber 2017). Discussions of political or social freedom can also be found in many works by seventeenth-century women writers; see Broad 2014; Broad and Detlefsen 2017. 3 For other interpretations of Elisabeth’s views on theological determinism and its compatibility with free will, see Schmaltz 2019 and Reuter 2021. 4 Shapiro 2007: 111. Subsequent in-text citations abbreviate this text as CPE. 5 See Adam and Tannery 1996: IV, 302. Subsequent in-text references abbreviate this text as AT, followed by volume and page numbers. 6 On Calvin’s attempt to reconcile freedom with providence and predestination, see Helm 2004: 122–28 and 157–83. 7 On Calvin’s claim that the postlapsarian human will is still free insofar as it can choose between alternatives, yet not choose between good and evil, see Helm 2004: 149–64 and Schreiner 1991: 67–70. 8 This might be a surprising view to ascribe to someone who later became abbess of a Lutheran convent. However, the letters in which Elisabeth seems more inclined to believe in free will than in theological determinism were written 15 years before she entered the Abbey of Herford, and 22 years before she became its abbess. Moreover, the Abbey was a refuge for Quakers, Labadists, and members of other persecuted religious groups (Shapiro 2013), suggesting that Elisabeth did not adhere rigidly to Lutheran doctrine. 9 Alanen 2002; Ragland 2006a, 2006b defend a libertarian interpretation of Descartes, while Lennon 2015 argues for compatibilism. 10 Cottingham et al. 1984: 41; subsequent references to this work will use the abbreviation CSM. 11 Of course, in choosing to do harm to another, such people must know (or at least believe) that their action will cause harm; nonetheless, they may believe (mistakenly) that harming others can be good, perhaps because they believe they should always do what promotes their own good. If they clearly saw what is right and good, they would not be able to choose to harm others.

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Deborah Boyle 12 That is, in cases where the will is not determined by the intellect, the will is “indifferent,” the term Descartes uses in the Fourth Meditation (although its meaning has been contested; see Lennon 2015). Elisabeth herself never uses the term, however. 13 For further discussion of Elisabeth on autonomy, see Shapiro 1999, 2019; Schmaltz 2019. 14 See Shapiro 2019 on Descartes’ views about medical treatments and the historical and philosophical context of his suggestion that bodily ailments can be cured by treating the soul. 15 On why Elisabeth might have mentioned being female, see Shapiro 1999: 510–11. Regardless of the explanation, Elisabeth stresses that mental autonomy can be affected by the state of the body (Shapiro 1999: 512). 16 Shapiro suggests that Descartes took Elisabeth’s suggestions to heart when he wrote (at her request) The Passions of the Soul (Shapiro 1999: 516). 17 In-text citations of Serious Proposal are to Astell 2002 and abbreviated SPL; in-text citations of The Christian Religion are to Astell 1717, abbreviated CR, followed by section number, as well as the corresponding page number from Astell 2013. 18 On the role of Cartesian clear and distinct perception in Astell’s epistemology, see Boyle 2011. 19 For further discussion, see Sowaal 2017: 180–81. 20 Astell says that the will should be directed toward God in an “elicit Act” (SPL 144). Traditionally, an “elicit” act was a decision by the will to act (or not), in contrast to the “commanded” act of will that is the action itself (see Ragland 2006b: 61). 21 Alice Sowaal has argued that Astell thinks these distinctive, non-bodily-oriented passions come from God (Sowaal 2017: 182). 22 For an argument that Astell has a conception of relational autonomy, see Detlefsen 2016. 23 On Malebranche’s conception of the will, see Sleigh et al. 1998: 1236–44. 24 What we know today as “science” was called “natural philosophy” in Astell’s day. 25 For further discussion, see Boyle 2011. 26 I am grateful to Tad Schmaltz and Lisa Shapiro for their very helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter.

References Alanen, L. (2002) “Descartes on the Will and the Power to Do Otherwise,” in H. Lagerlund and M. Yrjönsuuri (eds.), Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 279–98. Astell, M. (1717) The Christian Religion, as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England, London: Printed by W. B. for R. Wilkin. (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. P. Springborg, Peterborough: Broadview. (2013) The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, ed. J. Broad, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Boyle, D. (2011) “Mary Astell and Cartesian ‘Scientia’,” in J. Hayden (ed.), The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–112. (2017) “Freedom and Necessity in the Work of Margaret Cavendish,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 141–62. Broad, J. (2012) “Impressions in the Brain: Malebranche on Women, and Women on Malebranche,” Intellectual History Review 22(3): 373–89. (2014) “Women on Liberty in Early Modern England,” Philosophy Compass 9(2): 112–22. (2015) The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Oxford University Press. and K. Detlefsen. (eds.) (2017) Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Calvin, J. (1960) Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. J. T. McNeill and trans. F. L. Battles, Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Conway, A. (1996) The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. and trans. A. P. Coudert and T. Corse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cunning, D. (2016) Cavendish, London: Routledge. Detlefsen, K. (2007) “Reason and Freedom: Margaret Cavendish on the Order and Disorder of Nature,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 89(2): 157–91. (2016) “Custom, Freedom, and Equality: Mary Astell on Marriage and Women’s Education,” in A. Sowaal and P. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 74–92.

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Early Modern Women and the Metaphysics of Free Will Descartes, R. (1964–1976) Oeuvres de Descartes, Vols. I–XII, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Paris: P. Vrin/ C.N.R.S. [AT] (1984) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 2, trans J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [CSM] Du Châtelet, E. (1947) “De la liberté,” in I. O. Wade (ed.), Studies on Voltaire. With Some Unpublished Papers of Mme. Du Châtelet, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 92–108. (2009) Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, ed. J. P. Zinsser, trans. I. Bour and J. P. Zinsser, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ekstrom, L. (2011) “Free Will is Not a Mystery,” in R. Kane (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 366–80. Hagengruber, R. (2017) “If I Were King! Morals and Physics in Emilie Du Châtelet’s Subtle Thoughts on Liberty,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 195–205. Head, J. (2019) “Anne Conway and Henry More on Freedom,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27(5): 631–48. Helm, P. (2004) John Calvin’s Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lascano, M. P. (2017) “Anne Conway on Liberty,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 163–77. Lennon, T. M. (2011) “Descartes and the Seven Senses of Indifference in Early Modern Philosophy,” Dialogue 50: 577–602. (2015) “No, Descartes Is Not a Libertarian,” in D. Garber and D. Rutherford (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Vol. 7, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 47–82. Ragland, C. P. (2006a) “Descartes on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 44(3): 377–94. (2006b) “Is Descartes a Libertarian?” in D. Garber and S. Nadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Vol. 3, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 57–90. Reuter, M. (2021) “Elisabeth on Free Will, Preordination, and Philosophical Doubt,” in S. Hutton and S. Ebbersmeyer (eds.), Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Context, Cham: Springer. Schmaltz, T. (2019) “Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia on the Cartesian Mind: Interaction, Happiness, Freedom,” in E. O’Neill and M. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Cham: Springer, pp. 155–73. Schreiner, S. (1991) The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin, Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press. Shapiro, L. (1999) “Princess Elisabeth and Descartes: The Union of Mind and Body and the Practice of Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7(3): 503–20. (ed.) (2007) The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (CPE) (2013) “Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/elisabeth-bohemia/ (2019) “Psychic Therapeutics: Descartes, Princess Elisabeth, and ‘la bonté de me vouloir guerir le corps avec l’ame,’” in O. Ribordy and I. Wienand (eds.), Descartes en dialogue, Basel: Schwabe Verlag, pp. 79–93. Sleigh, R., V. Chappell, and M. Della Rocca (1998) “Determinism and Human Freedom,” D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, pp. 1195–1278. Sowaal, A. (2007) “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom,” Philosophy Compass 2(2): 227–43. (2017) “Mary Astell on Liberty,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 178–94. Watson, G. (1987) “Free Action and Free Will,” Mind, New Series 96(382): 145–72. Weiss, P. (2004) “Mary Astell: Including Women’s Voices in Political Theory,” Hypatia 19(3): 63–84.

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17 FRIENDSHIP AS A MEANS TO FREEDOM Allauren Samantha Forbes

17.1 Introduction Women thinking and writing about friendship in the early modern period were indebted to traditional interest in this topic dating back to Plato and Aristotle. This tradition was deeply antiwomen: real friendship was often claimed to be beyond the grasp of women, for women were not the equals of men.1 However, some women philosophers—most notably Marie le Jars de Gournay, Mary Astell, and Gabrielle Suchon—wrote about friendship in ways that both emerge from the history of Western philosophy and yet resist this inegalitarian framework. For these three philosophers, real friendship represents a means to obtain meaningful freedom. However, Gournay, Astell, and Suchon each conceive of the kind of freedom facilitated by friendship in a slightly different way. For Gournay, friendship supports a kind of epistemic freedom; Astell’s account of friendship promotes a moral sense of freedom; and Suchon shows that friendship facilitates a political sense of freedom. Freedom is complex: there are many ways in which one can be more or less free, and many dimensions along which one’s freedom can be analyzed. By epistemic freedom, I mean that Gournay thinks of friendship as the kind of relationship where one may experience epistemic justice, despite the hostile conditions in society at large. If I know things and cannot be taken seriously, if my epistemic agency is consistently frustrated, then it seems that I am being significantly undermined in the kinds of projects I can take on or execute. In this way, I am made less free. In Astell’s case, with moral freedom, I take it that Astell is deeply concerned with moral viciousness and lack of agency over the kind of self that one may be given the powers and incentives of society at large. As we shall see, her view of friendship is aimed at developing morally good, autonomy-affirming relationships. Finally, by political freedom, I mean something like the everyday sense of not being constrained in the kinds of lifepaths that one may choose. Suchon’s central project in her works is arguing for the celibate life, a third way of living which requires no commitments—not to marriage nor to the convent. Friendship makes this third life-path feasible, and so it supports a kind of political freedom. In Sections 17.2–17.4 of this chapter, I set out each philosopher’s account of friendship and illustrate how it is connected to freedom in her view.

17.2  Marie le Jars de Gournay Gournay offers an interesting and somewhat unusual insight into early modern theories of friendship insofar as her views are inextricably tied to her friendship with Michel de Montaigne. When 228

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Gournay was a young woman, she read Montaigne’s Essays and was so impressed that she sought him out.2 The two became friends, and Gournay and Montaigne both describe her as his fille d’alliance—his daughter, albeit by chosen friendship rather than blood.3 Their bond was such that after his death she was entrusted with his manuscripts and became the editor of the Essays; in this capacity, she wrote and included an extended preface to the 1595 edition of the Essays.4 It is unsurprising, then, that Gournay’s views seem to have much in common with Montaigne’s. However, she uses friendship for distinct philosophical ends. In this section, I will briefly describe Montaigne’s account of friendship as a philosophical backdrop against which Gournay offers her own theory of friendship. I will then give her account of friendship and how she uses its metaphysical commitments, drawn from Montaigne, to promote epistemic freedom via friendship as a relationship characterized by epistemic justice. In Essays—specifically, “Of Friendship”—Montaigne offers an Aristotelian and Ciceronian account of friendship. Following Aristotle, Montaigne characterizes friendship as rare, requiring time, love, and equality, and he casts the friend as a second self (Montaigne 1958: 136–39). And, in line with Cicero and the Neoplatonic thinking of his era, friendship is a calm, spiritual passion that includes the chief duties of friendly correction and mutual self-improvement (Montaigne 1958: 136–38). Friendship must be chosen for it to be genuine: a father and his child cannot be friends because this relation is inherently unequal and unchosen. He also contrasts it with common (instrumentalizing, false) friendships (Montaigne 1958: 136). Similarly, most women are personally incapable of real friendship, both in their capacities and in their very souls (Montaigne 1958: 138). There are two central features of this account: the metaphysical bonding of friends and the explicit connection between friendship and freedom. Montaigne casts friendship—articulated in the context of his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie—as being a complete fusion of selves and souls. He says, In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again. If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I. (Montaigne 1958: 139) If this is what real friendship looks like, then it is no surprise that Montaigne foregrounds freedom of the will in friendship. Though friendship includes certain obligations, the identification of one’s self with one’s friend means that these obligations are no longer external. Friendship requires some prior measure of freedom: friendship occurs only when both parties choose their friend freely, for “…our free will has no product more properly its own than affection and friendship” (Montaigne 1958: 137). Perhaps because of their shared soul, friends’ wills harmonize. Once the friendship obtains, the two friends share a single soul and a single will; their bond renders them complete and free. There are two dimensions to Gournay’s account of friendship: the metaphysical dimension, largely drawn from Montaigne’s view, though deployed in such a way as to suggest women’s equality to men; and the epistemic dimension, through which friendship, as a relationship characterized by epistemic justice, promotes epistemic freedom. I turn now to these two parts of her account. Gournay took herself to be continuing Montaigne’s view, especially insofar as real friendship is to be understood as one soul in two bodies (Deslauriers 2008: 8).5 Although it looks like Gournay is largely following her “father” here, as Marguerite Deslauriers points out, she is up to something 229

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much more: she uses friendship—and particularly, her friendship with Montaigne—to demonstrate both her equality to him and the equality of men and women. In her 1595 Preface to the Essays, Gournay offers a view that sounds like an expanded version of Montaigne’s. She says, “Truly, a friend is not a second person, and friendship is not a joining or binding; it is a double life: to be a friend is to be twice. … To be alone is only to half-exist” (Gournay 1998: 89). By linking what is ostensibly an extremely rare relationship to full existence, and in following Montaigne’s view that friendship requires equality, by claiming a friendship with Montaigne, Gournay seems to be elevating herself to the status of Montaigne and his friend La Boétie. This project extends further in Gournay’s discussion of her friendship with Montaigne. As Deslauriers has discussed, Gournay makes a series of identity claims linking herself to Montaigne. She does not only claim that she is his fille d’alliance, intellectual heir, and friend, but also that she is the posthumous embodiment of Montaigne himself. Indeed, Madame Montaigne’s choice to entrust Montaigne’s manuscripts to Gournay as editor represented a re-emergence of Montaigne through Gournay: “…having wished to rekindle and rewarm in me the ashes of her husband, … and so truly to restore to him a new appearance of life by the continuation of the friendship that he bore me” (Gournay 1998: 31). Deslauriers suggests that casting her friendship with Montaigne in these strong metaphysical terms allows her to act as Montaigne, to bring him back from the dead, to philosophize on his behalf, and to capitalize on his intellectual and political authority (Deslauriers 2008: 6; 8). After all, as friends, they are a single soul across two bodies. This allows her to demonstrate not only her own equality with Montaigne and but also that of women to men.6 Their friendship shows that sexual differences—the main axis for early modern women’s oppression—are merely accidental. If men and women can share a soul in friendship, as Gournay and Montaigne do, then bodily or sexual differences, differences which were thought to be essential and unchangeable, are not the source of gender/sex inequality or natural ability. So, the metaphysics of friendship resists gender/sex inequality. Gournay’s account of friendship has an epistemic dimension, too. In virtue of their close metaphysical relationship, friends know one another deeply; a crucial part of friendship is one’s spirit finding its equal and making itself known to that equal (Gournay 1998: 89). This “knowing” is clearly important to Gournay’s account of what friendship is, for “To be unknown is, in a way, not to be; for being has reference to acting, and action can hardly be brought to perfection, it seems, when directed towards someone who cannot relish it” (Gournay 1998: 91). Friends know each other at the deepest level: they are one and the same soul, and they are thus simultaneously knowers and known to one another. To be and be recognized as a knower and what is known seems especially important to Gournay, for whom epistemic justice and its failure to obtain is a persistent theme. In Preface and other works—especially Ladies’ Complaint, Apology for the Woman Writing, and The Equality of Men and Women—Gournay discusses the many ways in which her and other women’s contributions are devalued, dismissed, or otherwise not taken seriously just because they are women:7 If women possessed the arguments and the profound thoughts of Carneades, there is no man, however mediocre, who does not put them in their place with the approval of most of the company, when, with merely a smile or some slight shaking of his head, his mute eloquence pronounces, “It’s a woman speaking” (Gournay 2002: 101–02) Here, Gournay describes a failure to take a woman’s testimony seriously just because it comes from a woman—the content of and means of transmitting that testimony are treated as subordinate to what is assumed to be or is treated as a defective epistemic source. Gournay adds that, in comparison to this brilliant and articulate woman, “This fellow here, uttering thirty idiocies, will still 230

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take the prize by his beard…”: it is not his idiocy that people pay attention to, but his beard—that is, the fact that he is a man (Gournay 2002: 102). The phenomenon Gournay describes here is testimonial injustice, which occurs when a hearer bears an identity prejudice about a speaker’s group such that the hearer fails to accord proper credibility to the speaker (Fricker 2007: 4). Testimonial injustice is a kind of epistemic ­injustice—a kind of frustration of one’s epistemic agency due to bad socio-epistemic structures—that was given its name in Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice. It is especially egregious since testimony is crucial as a means of transmitting knowledge and participating in epistemic exchanges. Though the terms “epistemic injustice” and “testimonial injustice” are recent inventions, it seems clear that Gournay was concerned with precisely these concepts. Hearers seem preoccupied with the identity of the speaker rather than the content or methods of transmission—that is, hearers seem to be beholden to an identity prejudice impugning women’s credibility with respect to intellectual matters. There is a fundamental asymmetry in epistemic authority between men and women in Gournay’s time, not only because women are denied formal education, but also because men wield this power over them such that women are not taken seriously. This closes off possibilities—both in a loose metaphysical sense and in a more direct practical sense. How are women supposed to be free in any meaningful sense of the word when they cannot participate in basic exchanges, when they cannot contribute to their chosen professions (i.e., philosophy and literature) because they are not taken seriously as knowers? And, given women’s already subordinate social and political position, how are they supposed to persuade anyone to advocate on their behalf? Herein lies the promise of friendship as modeling epistemic justice and leading to a kind of epistemic freedom. To see how this is the case, Gournay offers the contrast case of false friends. In Apology, Gournay rails against fair-weather or false friends, “For a fair-weather friend is nothing but a hired flatterer, who wishes to be the slave, not the companion, of his friend” (Gournay 2002: 118). False friends do not unite souls or wills and they position themselves in subordinate positions, exchanging friendship for material or social benefit (ibid.). These are people who act like friends only as long as it serves their immediate interests. Importantly, for Gournay, false friends are epistemically damaging. Like Montaigne, Gournay takes one of the central duties of friendship to be friendly correction. One plausible way for this to play out is to help one’s friend accrue knowledge and develop her rationality—that is, to help her exercise the skills necessary for her epistemic agency. If one’s friend says something false, or fails to understand something, part of being a good friend is helping her improve. A false friend is fundamentally incapable of this, for he acts as a slave to curry favor rather than as an equal. False friends, then, as flatterers rather than as genuine epistemic resources, will say whatever they think their “friend” wants to hear. The importance of this epistemic dimension of friendship seems all the more pressing given the conditions that Gournay notes in the above: women are already subjected to identity prejudices that make their participation in epistemic exchanges difficult. If false friends would corrupt a central duty rendered even more important in virtue of social and political conditions, then women’s epistemic agency—their ability to be seen as knowers, to communicate their knowledge, to be participants in epistemic exchanges—is significantly curtailed. A real friend like Montaigne was valuable not only because his reputation lent her credibility but also because as a second self with a harmonious will, he would correctly recognize and value her epistemic agency. Gournay points out that women “…cannot cause themselves to be observed or recognized by means of their activities” (Gournay 2002: 143). Since women are subject to an epistemic credibility deficit, they can only be recognized indirectly by means of others’—friends’—claims about them. That is to say, it did not matter what great things Gournay achieved: she would be regarded as a woman first, and therefore be dismissed as a knower. Real friendship facilitates epistemic freedom by providing recognition of epistemic agency despite such structural credibility deficits. 231

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For Gournay, real friendship is a relation that models epistemic justice. I take my friend’s claims seriously because she is me, and I take my own views seriously; she takes my claims seriously because I am her. Even if others try to dismiss us because of a shared identity—that we are women, for example—we will always have the support and validation of a genuine friend that we are not the ones failing to grasp the truth of a situation. This may seem trivial, but it is not. As I have argued elsewhere, there is a kind of creeping effect such that if one is not taken to be a knower, one may no longer take oneself to be a knower, either (Forbes 2019). Epistemic injustice thwarts epistemic freedom, the capacity to know and be seen as a knower. And, if my friend is someone with epistemic authority or social standing—like Montaigne—then his recognition could very well turn the wider social tide of recognition in my favor. This is the promise of friendship for Gournay, but it also suggests why false friends are targeted in the Apology—friends perform a crucial function of epistemic recognition against a backdrop of injustice. All this is to say that Gournay conceives of real friendship as a relationship that not only includes a metaphysical linking of selves, but also a relationship that resists central epistemic injustices. Friendship of this sort represents a path to epistemic freedom, or rather, to the capacity to act as an epistemic agent where one’s claims are taken seriously by another, even if one is embedded in a larger, hostile social environment. Friends take each other seriously as knowers and sources of epistemic insights, and this facilitates further free action.

17.3  Mary Astell Mary Astell offers an account of friendship that is indebted both to the Aristotelian tradition of friendship and to her friend John Norris, a Cambridge Platonist. Astell’s thinking about friendship is intimately connected to moral freedom, to being good as per one’s own will and self-direction: for Astell, female friendship suggests the beginnings of an account of relational autonomy (see Forbes 2021)8. Astell seems especially frustrated that, given the practices and expectations of bad custom, women were made to value their physical appearances rather than their minds. In the first part of her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, she argues for a retreat where women can become virtuous, educated, and Christian.9 An important feature of this retreat is that women can then cultivate real friendships: “…we shall have opportunity of contracting the purest and noblest Friendship; a Blessing, the purchase of which were richly worth all the World besides! For she who possesses a worthy Person, has certainly obtain’d the richest Treasure!” (Astell 2002: 98). However, there are two tensions in Astell’s theory of friendship. First, it is not clear whether friendship helps friends obtain virtue, or whether friendship obtains only when the friends are themselves virtuous (Broad 2009, 2015). This is because she both describes friendship as helping one another to become good and virtuous people (e.g., Astell 2002: 100), and as “…a Vertue which comprehends all the rest; none being fit for this, who is not adorn’d with every other Vertue” (Astell 2002: 98). Second, it is not obvious whether friendship is meant to be extended widely and impartially, or if it is only possible between the virtuous few (Kendrick 2018). Astell connects friendship to one’s Christian duties of extending love of benevolence (i.e., good-will) widely and acting charitably, and so seems to endorse a broad set of possible friends. And yet, she also endorses claims similar to Montaigne and Gournay’s notion of friends as one soul in two bodies, suggesting that friends have mirrored souls, and that this mirroring is so rare and special that it must have been designed by Heaven (Astell 2002: 100). Though friendship is clearly important to Astell, her ambiguous discussions of it have inspired two very different interpretations: Jacqueline Broad (2009) has argued for a loosely Aristotelian, morally transformative account of Astellian friendship, while Nancy Kendrick (2018) has argued for an anti-Aristotelian account focused on the love of benevolence in friendship. Though 232

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both views capture important features of Astell’s theory of friendship, understanding Astellian friendship as featuring two degrees which lead to relational autonomy reconciles the differences between Broad and Kendrick’s accounts. Broad’s interpretation focuses on the first tension in Astell’s description of friendship, namely that there is a conflict between friendship producing and requiring virtue. To make sense of these seemingly disparate claims, Broad argues that Astell had a loose version of Aristotelian character or virtue friendship in mind. On this view, prior to friendship both parties must be minimally virtuous. Then, through the friendship itself, they discharge the duties of friendship of supporting and correcting their friends as necessary such that they become fully virtuous. For Broad, then, the central function of friendship is moral transformation: friendship is about and aimed at becoming virtuous. Given Astell’s concerns about how women are made vicious through bad custom and its attendant values and practices, this would fit with her overall project of helping women to become educated, good, and Christian (cf. Broad 2015, 2016). Kendrick, on the other hand, focuses on the distribution of good-will and so on the second tension in Astell’s theory of friendship. In Kendrick’s view, Astell is offering an explicitly antiAristotelian interpretation of friendship. On this view, we should extend friendship and thereby offer our good-will non-reciprocally and impartially. That is to say, Astell claims friendship is possible without a reciprocal good-will and without only befriending good people: I can be a friend to someone without expecting anything in return, for I will get all I need from my relationship to God, and my enemies can be my friends in that the challenges they provide can also function as opportunities for me to improve myself. In this view, friendship is not about virtue, but about God’s will as to how we ought to be. While each of these views is compelling and draws our attention to different dimensions of Astell’s rich theory of friendship, it is not clear that either account fully addresses what Astell herself says about friendship. With respect to Broad’s account, it seems strange for friendship to be about becoming virtuous given that Astell repeatedly states that friendship is a kind of crowning virtue. With respect to Kendrick’s account, Astell seems to explicitly reject the idea of a nonreciprocal friendship in Letters Concerning the Love of God, noting that it cannot be called friendship if only one party extends her love of benevolence toward the other.10 Moreover, the impartiality claim seems deeply unintuitive: while an enemy could give me an opportunity for selfimprovement or act the way a friend might, it would be misleading to refer to this as friendship. It is possible to reconcile these interpretations and Astell’s remarks on friendship by understanding her as offering a rich account of friendship that encompasses different degrees of friendship—a friendship that is general, morally transformative, and distributes love of benevolence widely, and a friendship that is true, virtuous, and more selective. In framing this as a difference of degree rather than kind, one can rightly call the two relations friendship yet acknowledge that one is more perfect than another. This also means that the tensions noted above are not genuine tensions: Astell is simply describing different degrees of friendship. This reading has the further advantage of not only explaining Astell’s remarks, but also capturing both the intuitive distinction of close friends and more casual friends as well as Astell’s own hints that there are different degrees of friendship (Astell 2002: 87, 98, 99, 100). The first degree of friendship, general friendship, obtains between all the women at the retreat. Though they are all in the process of becoming educated and virtuous, they may not yet be fully so, or they may simply lack the time, emotional energy, or symmetry of souls required to become true friends. Whatever the case may be, in virtue of their membership of this community, these women are well-positioned to support one another in becoming morally better, and, similarly, they are better able to extend their good-will to all others in the retreat. While they value each other for their burgeoning virtuous selves, these friendships lack the genuine closeness of true friendship and so they have a somewhat more casual and transactional feel. 233

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The second degree of friendship, true friendship, is more like Aristotelian character or virtue friendship. This is largely because, having undergone moral transformation through education and general friendships, these women are virtuous, and because the friends have a second self in the other. But this does not mean that they no longer need their friends. As Astell points out, the retreat is aimed at changing these women from the vicious and ignorant creatures they were before into knowledgeable and virtuous Christian women, a task that is onerous in the world that made them such, especially on one’s own: “Tis fit therefore, such tender Cyons shou’d be transplanted, that they may be supported by the prop of Vertuous Friendship, and confirm’d in Goodness by holy Examples, which alas! they will not often meet with in the world” (Astell 2002: 104). Although she seems to suggest that it would be best if women did not leave the retreat at all, most will need to, especially if they are to marry. True friends can be a source of support and moral guidance once one returns to society and is faced with temptations or bad custom. But it also seems that Astell was thinking about friendship as a means to procure moral freedom, namely, relational autonomy. Drawing on relational autonomy, though its formalization is a contemporary invention, helps us to understand why Astell has the view of friendship that she does: Astell’s account of friendship is a means of reckoning with the immense power and promise of friendship to improve women’s lives. Though the formal emergence of relational autonomy theory occurred in the 1980s, it was a result of feminist philosophers thinking about gendered oppression, power, and meaningful freedom; Astell, like many of her contemporaries, had similar concerns. Astell spends a lot of time talking about bad custom and how it circumscribes women’s options by shaping people’s understandings of women’s capacities and the resulting expectations for the kinds of lives that women could lead. This suggests that she was keenly aware of how social and political environments influence one’s freedom—this insight is central to relational autonomy. At its broadest level, relational autonomy is the view that being autonomous is not solely a trait of an individual, but the result of inter- and intrapersonal relations shaped by one’s social and political attitudes, relations, and values: it is a way of thinking about oneself that is inextricably tied to the regard of others. Catriona Mackenzie points to three interconnected strands of thinking woven through different theories of relational autonomy: self-determination, self-governance, and self-authorization. These three dimensions roughly equate to being the individual person one wishes to be, to have control over that self, and to regard oneself as having the authority to be self-determining and self-governing, respectively (Mackenzie 2014). General and true Astellian friendships include and produce each in turn. Astell integrates elements of self-determination and self-governance in general and true friendship. One is self-determining when one is able to make choices about the kind of person one is and how one will lead one’s life; it is incompatible with coercion. Astell intends general friendship as a chosen form of mutual moral self-improvement and thus a practice of self-determination. It is an active resistance to the coercive forces of bad custom. General friendship also aids in developing self-governance, or the capacity to make and carry out one’s own decisions; this requires that one is able to think well. In Astell’s terms, this is understood as moral and rational perfections. Bad custom undermines women’s intellectual and moral capacities through the pressures and incentives it incorporates. The retreat and particularly the general friendships possible within it are meant as part of the educational program designed to procure moral and rational perfections. Eschewing flattery, friendship, and its love of benevolence includes the duty to help one other develop one’s rational capacities through corrective conversation (Astell 2002: 74, 83, 101–02). Self-authorization, seeing oneself as being capable and empowered to be self-determining and self-governing, is especially clear in true friendship. Seeing oneself as rightly holding this authority depends largely on one’s social conditions and especially on the right forms of recognition; deficient social and political circumstances, like bad custom, undermine this capacity. However, 234

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true friendship, as a deep bond with another as a second and virtuous self, is precisely the kind of relationship that will provide the recognition necessary for self-authorization. Because my friend is virtuous, I will recognize and respond to her goodness, and she to mine. Because we are one, I cannot fail to recognize her subjectivity and experiences as legitimate nor can I fail to see her as my equal, and she must recognize these features in me, too. We are responsible to each other, for we are each other: we hold each other accountable. These relations may obtain in lesser degrees within general friendship, but true friendship is an especially powerful and close relationship, and as such, it is uniquely capable of providing the recognition denied to women in Astell’s time. Astell’s account of friendship and its potential to bring about a kind of autonomy suggests that Astell was thinking about how relationships could be used not only to undermine women’s moral freedom, as was the case of bad custom and the social practices and expectations it entailed, but also how relationships (particularly those between women) could be reformed into something that actually accentuated women’s freedom. In this respect, relational autonomy is somewhat paradoxical. It can be simultaneously true that my society and the relationships I have with others within it make me less free and yet still true that my friendships, in providing me with recognition of my value, capacities, and legitimacy of my self-rule, make me more free. In arguing for the retreat and the friendships integral to it, it seems that Astell’s theory of friendship was, albeit somewhat slyly, a way to obtain greater moral freedom for women.

17.4  Gabrielle Suchon Suchon’s discussion of friendship appears in a chapter of her book On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen called “Friendship is Necessary in the State of Celibacy.”11 The celibate life, or the life of the Neutralist, is the only way of life where women have a real possibility of freedom: it is a life free of commitments. This is not to say that Neutralists are idle or fickle, but rather that women had exactly two options, marriage or the convent, both of which were lifelong and largely chosen by others. The life of a Neutralist is a third path characterized by individual, rational choice based on one’s natural inclinations and which lacks institutional authority; it is thus a life based on self-governance. It also requires that the Neutralist set aside attachments since they undermine one’s capacity for self-rule. Here, one will see that friendship presents readers with a puzzle in how we ought to understand Suchon: how can friendship be compatible with—let alone necessary for—the celibate life?12 Unfortunately, we are missing some of Suchon’s writings about friendship.13 What we do have is her case for the many goods of friendship in Celibate, and by this account, friendship seems highly desirable. Suchon begins by claiming that friendship “…is essential to persons who do not have the protection of a religious community or a husband” (Suchon 2010: 279). This framing makes it seem as though Suchon will offer a practical account for the importance of friendship, but this is not the kind of justification that follows. Rather, Suchon is concerned not with Christian charity or benevolence, but singular friendship—that is, Aristotelian character friendship (Suchon 2010: 280, 281). Real friendship, on her view, can only exist between a few people, and it unites their souls into one (ibid.). Like Aristotelian character friendship, it is useful and pleasant, but it is ultimately about the good character of the friends (Suchon 2010: 281). Friends relieve our suffering, allow us to feel joy, and are the sources of mutually enriching conversations (ibid.). Real friendship is characterized by three features: sincerity, faithfulness, and steadfastness. It is sincere in that it distinguishes between mere social pleasantries or flatteries and real friendship, which can include admonishment (Suchon 2010: 281–82). Suchon’s claim is, similar to Gournay and Astell, that real friendship is not only about enjoying one another, but about making sure that one’s friend is 235

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always the best version of herself. It is faithful in that one’s friend is constantly in one’s thoughts, one keeps their secrets, and supports them through adversity (Suchon 2010: 282). Here, Suchon’s point is that friendship entails a serious emotional intimacy, one which “demands great strength,” which is not always pleasant or useful to one, but which is always honorable. Friendship does not depend on physical proximity, for “The communication of minds is the highest point where friendship meets freedom” (ibid.). For Suchon, friendship is a bond of great emotional and intellectual strength and mutual loyalty such that it endures through distance and grants strength and support that better enables one’s acting freely. This is consonant with her account of freedom, as we shall see momentarily. Finally, friendship is steadfast in that it is permanent, rather than “blind and flighty like love” (Suchon 2010: 284). Though one loves one’s friend, Suchon distinguishes between romantic or possessive love and the kind of love one has for a friend. Suchonian friendship sounds wonderful: it is a joining of souls, includes love, support, honor, sincerity, faithfulness, and steadfastness, it brings joy, it is useful, and it can improve us. “Friendship is, thus, so outstanding that it would cruel to deny it to persons living in celibacy. On the contrary, because they are deprived of social intercourse and the pleasure of secular unions, they must soften the rigor of a solitary estate by sincere and faithful friendship” (Suchon 2010: 285). This seems plausible, but one must recall that Suchon is describing friendship as necessary for Neutralists, people who are committed to remaining without commitments. While friendships are not the same kind of commitment as marriages or religious vows, the bond is strong enough that Suchon anticipates the readers’ concern that friendship …should serve to bind Neutralists, who would not, in fact, be true Neutralists if they were not as free of engagements of the heart as they are of intercourse of the body. And yet to propose a friendship without attachments might seem to separate substance from form, effect from cause, and attribute from its subject, since friendship is nothing but a reciprocal affection…Although free persons strive to love without being attached, they do not say that their friendship is any less pleasing, strong, or genuine. (Suchon 2010: 280; emphasis added) Here, Suchon seems to recognize the apparent tension between friendship of the intensity and permanence she describes with the overall way of life integral to being a Neutralist. Later, she adds: “After giving so many reasons that reveal the great advantages of friendship, we must nevertheless preserve the principle we have established — that in celibacy we must love without attachment” (Suchon 2010: 285). And yet, being free of external attachments is a cornerstone of how Suchon thinks about freedom. Though there are competing interpretations of Suchonian freedom—see Lisa Shapiro (2017, 2018) and Julie Walsh (2019)—these accounts share the commitment that Suchon’s conception of metaphysical freedom is God-given to all humans, albeit in a state of potentiality, and the view that bringing this freedom about in practice is at least partly constituted by engaging in selfdetermined (rather than externally mandated) action. This is why the celibate life is so appealing to Suchon—a life without commitments is one where there are no external structures enforcing constraints upon the Neutralist, either in choice of kind of life or in the details of what that life must consist in. For Suchon, the free person acts for the sake of herself, and her happiness is dependent only on what is interior to her—she need not act in the ways required of a certain role, as a wife or nun, and she has the knowledge and skills to be largely self-determining. Though Suchon takes the sense of freedom at issue in considering the celibate life to be metaphysical, I think it has an important political dimension, too: realizing one’s metaphysical freedom is, for Suchon, at least partly dependent on the social and political context in which one is embedded. Should I be forced into a convent against my will, it is true that I do not realize my full metaphysical freedom, but 236

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this is direct result of social, political, and economic pressures. Thus, the Neutralist life and the freedom it realizes are both metaphysical and political. Given both that Suchon’s central project is setting out the celibate life as a third path for women to take (and the only one on which freedom is even potentially possible), and this conception of freedom, friendship understood as requiring a bond and love with attachment (that is, the way it sometimes seems to be described) is puzzling. I cannot be free from external pressures if I am perpetually concerned with my friend’s needs, nor can I say that I am free from obligations if my friendship requires me to be sincere, faithful, and steadfast. Friendship may make the Neutralist unfree even if it did confer all the other benefits of friendship. Since freedom is natural and proper for humans—and is an objective of the celibate life—this is unacceptable. Thus, one might think that Suchon’s notion of friendship is internally incoherent, or that it cannot be as crucial to the Neutralist life as she has supposed. But one need not think this: the nature of friendship itself obviates her concern about attachment, and second, that friendship is necessary for the Neutralist not only because it brings her happiness, but because friendship supports a life without institutional commitments, and thus a kind of political freedom. I sketch such a view below. It is difficult to imagine a friendship with all the features Suchon describes that somehow preserves the friends as free of attachments that may undermine their freedom, but this also requires that the intuitive meaning of “attachment” to a twenty-first-century reader and a ­seventeenth-century philosopher are the same, which need not be the case. For Suchon, “attachment” seems to mean something more like a personal or professional obligation, a duty to an external authority (Shapiro 2017; Walsh 2019). If so, the nature of friendship is such that these kinds of attachments, which bring with them unfreedom through external impositions on one’s will and on what external things one must care about, are not an issue. The resources to explain this are within Suchon’s description of friendship itself. In adopting an Aristotelian conception of friendship, the friend is a shared soul. One may owe one’s friend certain things—loyalty, faithfulness, and so on—but not in the same way as one owes an employer or master. Friendship cannot be an institutional imposition on one’s will because one’s friend and oneself are the same. One of Suchon’s central points, as Walsh notes, is that servitude, even unfelt servitude, makes one unfree. But my friend is me: I am not and can never be attached to myself in a freedom-impeding way. Any obligations I have to myself from my own rational self-understanding or my duties to myself are not external, and so not problematic. This then demonstrates why friendships are crucial for Neutralists: friendships provide the life-enhancing aspects of institutional commitments like marriage or the convent—they procure our moral and intellectual perfections and make our lives meaningful—but without the external attachments that diminish one’s freedom. If one requires knowledge to be self-determining, then friends of the kind Suchon describes seem like an excellent tool to achieve and maintain this state. In offering corrections and stimulating conversations, friends can increase our knowledge and the skills at our disposal. Friends allow us deep emotional connections to others without subsuming our will to theirs. And, in becoming part of us, they allow us to benefit from the insights of external perspectives without being beholden to them. Friendship enables freedom and supports a third way of life—the celibate life—that represents a departure from the hegemonic social and political norm; that is, friendship makes freedom from domination or institutional commitments feasible by way of providing support without constraint.

17.5 Conclusion There are several striking similarities in these three accounts of friendship, not because these philosophers were in conversation with one another, but because they are all influenced by the same traditions in the history of philosophy and the role of friendship therein. Friends make us better. 237

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Friends procure perfections, support one another, and are one another in a deep sense. Moreover, friendship is a means to freedom, even if the particular dimension of freedom—epistemic, moral, or political—differs. Friendship is a powerful relation that can resist the harms of an epistemically, morally, and politically limiting society. For Gournay, friendship is a means to epistemic freedom, to being taken seriously as a knower and as a model for an epistemically just relationship in a context where identity prejudices against women constantly undermine them. Astell understands friendship to promote moral freedom or the freedom of the self as a virtuous, self-controlled subject. Given her other commitments, this moral freedom is necessary for political participation: women must become good before their roles can change. Suchon is more concerned with what is probably most recognizably freedom, or freedom in a political sense. Her view foregrounds the political potential of friendship as a means of support and comfort without sacrificing one’s freedom by way of external constraints. Each of these three philosophers is concerned with women’s freedom and the conditions that undermine and improve it. There is something exciting about these theories of friendship in that they represent a kind of subversion of an anti-women tradition for the ultimate benefit of women. They also suggest that women can have desirable things—freedom, a good life, virtue—without needing men to do so, though they do still need other women. Even though the formal advent of feminism came long after Gournay, Astell, and Suchon, the ways in which they think about friendship are recognizably pro-women, and, in some cases, anticipate the kinds of concerns feminists have been thinking about in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. This, too, is exciting, because it suggests that there is much for us to learn from them. It is important to remember that these women were firmly embedded in the traditions of their time; they were engaging with a long history and their peers, and it is incumbent upon us to integrate their views with care. But perhaps most importantly, it illustrates that even hundreds of years ago, philosophers recognized the importance of socio-political relations like friendship and the power it wields to improve our lives.

Notes 1 Editors and translators Domna Stanton and Rebecca Wilkin point this out in Gabrielle Suchon, A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings (2010): 279 n.129. For a broader discussion of philosophy and friendship, see Anderson (2012) and Lynch (2005). 2 The Complete Essays of Montaigne (1958), translated by Donald M. Frame; Stanford: Stanford University Press (hereafter, Essays). 3 Subsequent scholars have noted Gournay may have written this—see Essays p. 502 n.4. For more on Gournay and Montaigne’s friendship, see Horowitz 1986 and Ilsley 1963. 4 Gournay’s preface is largely excluded from subsequent editions of Montaigne’s Essays and it has been the subject of much ire and critique. See, for a discussion of this, the introduction to Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, by his Adoptive Daughter, Marie le Jars de Gournay (1998), edited and translated by Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel; Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies (hereafter, Preface). 5 As Deslauriers points out, this appears in her work Que par nécessité les grands esprits et les gens de bien cherchent leurs semblables. It also appears in Preface and, to a lesser extent, in Apology for the Woman Writing. 6 For more on Gournay and equality, see O’Neill (2011). 7 Translations of these works appear in Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works (2002), edited and translated by Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel; Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hereafter, these works are referred to as Complaint, Apology, and Equality, respectively. 8 See Forbes 2021, “Astell, Relational Autonomy, and Friendship,” European Journal of Philosophy 29(2): 487–503 for a more comprehensive discussion of the relationship between Astell’s theory of friendship and relational autonomy/freedom. 9 The edition used here is A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II (2002), edited by Patricia Springborg; Toronto: Broadview Press Ltd; hereafter, Proposal. 10 See E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New’s (2005) edition of Astell and Norris’ Letters Concerning the Love of God, London: Ashgate, p. 102.

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Friendship as a Means to Freedom 11 The translation used here appears in Stanton and Wilkin’s (2010) A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex; On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen is pp. 229–86 (hereafter, Celibate). 12 Suchon seems to endorse contrary claims—that friends are necessary for a state close to or constituting freedom, and that they are impediments to it. This tension has been noted by Stanton and Wilkin (in Suchon 2010) and Walsh (2019). 13 Stanton and Wilkin (in Suchon 2010) point out that although Suchon refers to a text that she wrote enumerating the differences between love and friendship, such a text has unfortunately not been recovered.

References Anderson, P. (2012) Friendship’s Shadows, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aristotle. (1984) Nicomachean Ethics in J. Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (vol. 2), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Astell, M. (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Pts. I & II), ed. P. Springborg, Toronto: Broadview Press Ltd. Astell, M. and J. Norris. (2005) Letters Concerning the Love of God, ed. E. D. Taylor and M. New, London: Ashgate. Broad, J. (2009) “Mary Astell on Virtuous Friendship,” Parergon 26(2): 65–86. (2015) The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2016) “Mary Astell and the Virtues,” in A. Sowaal and P. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, University Park: Penn State University Press. Deslauriers, M. (2008) “Marie de Gournay and Montaigne,” Angelaki 12(2): 5–15 Forbes, A. S. (2019) “Mary Astell, Bad Custom, and Epistemic Injustice,” Hypatia 34(4): 777–801. (2021) “Astell, Relational Autonomy, and Friendship,” European Journal of Philosophy 29(2): 487–503. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12578 Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gournay, M. de. (1985) Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne (1594), Delmar: Scholar’s Fascimiles & Reprints. (1998) Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne by his Adoptive Daughter, Marie le Jars de Gournay, ed. and trans. R. Hillman and C. Quesnel, Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. (2002) Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works, ed. and trans. R. Hillman and C. Quesnel, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Horowitz, M. C. (1986) “Marie de Gournay, Editor of Editor of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne: A CaseStudy in Mentor-Protegee Friendship,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 17(3): 271–84. Ilsley, M. H. (1963) A Daughter of the Renaissance: Marie le Jars de Gournay Her Life and Works, The Hague: Mouton & Co. Kendrick, N. (2018) “Mary Astell’s Theory of Spiritual Friendship,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26(1): 46–65. Lynch, S. (2005) Philosophy and Friendship, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mackenzie, C. (2014) “Three Dimensions of Autonomy: A Relational Analysis,” in A. Veltman and M. Piper (eds.), Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender, pp. 15–41. New York: Oxford University Press. Montaigne, M. (1958) The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. D. M. Frame, Stanford: Stanford University Press. O’Neill, E. (2011) “The Equality of Men and Women,” in D. M. Clarke and C. Wilson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on Early Modern Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shapiro, L. (2017) “Gabrielle Suchon’s ‘Neutralist’: The Status of Women and the Invention of Autonomy,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2018) “Assuming Epistemic Authority, or Becoming a Thinking Thing,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society cxviii: Part 3. Suchon, G. (2010) A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings, ed. and trans. D. C. Stanton and R. M. Wilkin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walsh, J. (2019) “Gabrielle Suchon, Freedom, and the Neutral Life,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies. DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2019.1657169

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18 MANAGING MOCKERY Reason, Passions and the Good Life among Early Modern Women Philosophers Amy M. Schmitter 18.1  Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Silencing In 1693, a young Mary Astell wrote to the established author and cleric John Norris with several questions about his recently published views. This started a lengthy correspondence about the nature, grounds and effects of love for God, published in 1695 as Letters Concerning the Love of God. The collection made a joint case for considering the love of God “the leading and Master Passion,” capable of regulating all the passions if it itself is “wisely regulated” (Astell and Norris 1695: Letter VII). Its publication in turn prompted a response from Damaris (Cudworth) Masham, a Discourse Concerning the Love of God (dated 16961). Masham had little time for the views developed by Norris and Astell, directing barbs particularly at the views of “Mr. N,” but with enough outrage to go around. Masham was unsparing in her criticism, deriding “the unserviceableness of an Hypothesis lately recommended to the World for a Ground of Christianity, and Morality” and exclaiming against “the farther injuriousness of that Hypothesis to True Religion, and Piety” (Masham 1696: Preface). Nonetheless, Astell and Masham did share one important feature of their authorships in common: both published anonymously. Norris did not.2 The letters that preface Norris’s and Astell’s collection give some of Astell’s reasons for remaining unnamed: “The Censure therefore that abounds in the World is one Reason why I am against Printing.” Allowing herself to be persuaded, she grants publication on these Conditions; first, that you make no mention of my Name, no not so much as the initial Letters; and next, that you dedicate them to a Lady whom I shall name to you, or else give me leave to do it. (Astel and Norris 1695: Preface) Astell got her wish: the collection was dedicated to Lady Catherine Jones, and both she and Masham continued to publish anonymously,3 adopting a practice common among women philosophers and intellectuals – and fairly frequent among their male counterparts. But anonymous and pseudonymous authorship is only one way of remaining unnamed. Some of the most famous examples of philosophic writing by early modern women were never meant to see the light of day. Elisabeth of Bohemia insisted at the start of her correspondence with René Descartes that her letters be kept private (Elizabeth and Descartes 2007: 62), even requesting that they be burned (Elizabeth and Descartes 2007: 91; see further Shapiro 2007: 1–3). Anne Conway’s one philosophical treatise stems from a seemingly private notebook, published and edited posthumously. The 240

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reluctance among early modern women philosophers to attach their names to their views, or to air their views at all is noteworthy.4 Perhaps the most poignant example of an early modern woman confronting issues of naming, publication, and silencing comes from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in her Respuesta, the reply to the Admonishment by Sor Philothea, itself a pseudonym of Bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz. Sor Juana entered the Hieronymite Convent of Saint Paula in order to pursue her intellectual interests (de la Cruz 1988: 212). There she was able to establish a small literary circle, sheltered for several decades by various viceroys and vicereines, but still facing threats from disapproving superiors (de la Cruz 1988: 224–26). Although the Admonishment takes Sor Juana to task specifically for her attention to humane and secular learning, her response displays many of the distinctive challenges she faced in leading a life devoted to reason. Sor Juana opens La Respuesta with various plays on silence, stating that she had almost decided “to let silence be my answer” (de la Cruz 1988: 207), and declaring her resolve to remain mute on spiritual and religious matters (de la Cruz 1988: 209).5 In this she echoes the Pauline edict, cited already in the Admonishment, that commands the silence of women in church and forbids them to speak there: mulieres in Ecclesiis taceant, non enim permittitur eis loqui (de la Cruz 1988: 229). In response, Sor Juana insists repeatedly that she had never undertaken to teach, or even to make her views public: “not merely my name but the very decision to publish has been out of my hands, a liberty taken by others, for which I am not responsible” (de la Cruz 1988: 242; see also 210 and 239).6 Furthermore, she insists that her devotion to learning is central to her very nature, endowed by God, and beyond her control: …from my first glimmers of reason, my inclination to letters was of such power and vehemence, that neither the reprimands of others – and I have received many – nor my own ­considerations – and there have been not a few of these – have succeeded in making me abandon this natural impulse which God has implanted in me… (de la Cruz 1988: 210) Clearly, Sor Juana conceives of the good life as the life of the mind, devoted to the pursuit of letters and reason – which would generally have been considered “philosophy” in her day. Reinterpreting the Pauline prohibition, she contrasts what is forbidden to women, “to lecture publicly in the classroom and to preach in the pulpit,” with “studying, writing, and teaching privately” (de la Cruz 1988: 229). She takes these private activities to be in accord with 1 Tim 2:11, “mulier in silentio discat” [“let the woman learn in silence”], which she notes, thereby implies that women may learn (de la Cruz 1988: 232). But it is the good life particularly, and perhaps peculiarly, for her; she makes no general claim that the pursuit of letters is a good for everybody. Indeed, she maintains that many women – and likewise many men – are not “properly endowed” for learning (de la Cruz 1988: 229). At the same time, Sor Juana voices her desire for educational companions, both students and teachers (de la Cruz 1988: 216–17), stressing how much she would have appreciated the guidance of learned teachers rather than being left to her own devices. For reasons of both modesty and to avoid distractions, she envisions a fellowship of “older women of learning… [with] instruction… passed down from one group to another” (de la Cruz 1988: 233). The private life of learning may not be for everybody, but Sor Juana maintains that it is “the best sustenance and the very life of the soul” for people like her, particularly when realized through a select community (de la Cruz 1988: 231). Sor Juana’s caution about silence and privacy eventually proved inadequate to secure even a solitary version of the life she craved. The events leading up to La Respuesta preceded the breakdown of her intellectual retreat. Although the biographical details are murky, we know that in 1692, she sold her books and instruments, that in 1694, she signed a statement of penance and recantation, and that she died a year later, nursing fellow-nuns through plague.7 Perhaps publication itself did 241

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not lead directly to an enforced censoring of Sor Juana; still, we can see that even what we might oxymoronically call an openly private intellectual life was hemmed in by a wide array of silencing restrictions. Mary Astell and many other European intellectual women not in religious orders did not face the same constraints as Sor Juana in her later years, whether from Paul’s edict or from disapproving superiors. Still, like Sor Juana, many had to prevail against discouraging circumstances to maintain that intellectual practice and the cultivation of reason were important to the good life, at least for themselves and for like-minded women. That they saw it as a good seems obvious: writing about and engaging in philosophy is a sign of valuing it, even without any quasi-Socratic claim that the philosophic life is the only life worth living. But women faced different and substantial hurdles, both societal and internalized, from those experienced by men following philosophy as a way of life. For the rest of this discussion, I will examine how certain early modern women philosophers conceived of those obstacles and of the goods that made philosophy worth overcoming them (spoiler alert: largely in terms of intellectual and emotional self-liberation and to promote religion), before turning to the strategies they adopted for overcoming those obstacles. The obstacles can be understood as diverse techniques for silencing, particularly ridicule, mockery and contempt. That may sound familiar, but as the case of Sor Juana illustrates, the silencing could be far more extensive and enforced with far greater institutional power than what today’s trolls wield. Moreover, many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century responses to those silencing moves framed the issues in terms of passions in a way that seems distinctively early modern. As we will see, it was common both to characterize the social and psychological barriers to philosophical education as matters of passions, and to hold that overcoming them would require remediating, regulating and governing passions. To be sure, early modern theories of education typically took the reformation of the passions to be central aims of any liberal education (e.g., Vives, Locke). But since women faced peculiar hurdles, some developed distinctive strategies – such as seeking changes of environment both to distance women from the sources of various problematic passions and to give them the ability for time management, crucial to the regulation of the psyche as a whole. These strategies were aimed both at individuals and at voluntarily formed communities. Not all were put into practice, and measuring their effectiveness would require more speculation than I will indulge in here. But I hope to show how at least some of these strategies were directed at the particular problems identified by early modern women philosophers.

18.2  Analyzing Structures of Censure and Ridicule When explaining her refusal to publish her correspondence with Norris under her own name, Astell explains how she expects to be attacked. In general, she maintains that the judgment of the public is warped both by “the Custom of the World” and by passion, particularly envy, such that were it to “behold a shining Virtue,… [it would] strive rather to reduce it to their Level, than to raise to its exalted Heighth” (Astell and Norris 1695: Preface). Norris too could expect to confront envy and habit-fueled criticism. But Astell fears finding herself singled out by a group she thinks will particularly delight in attacking her: “What think you then will the Beaux Esprits discover? How will it gratifie that which they call Wit, but is more truly ill Nature, to find so much Matter to work on?” (Astell and Norris 1695: Preface). That women are the particular target of spiteful wit becomes clearer in A Serious Proposal, Part I. Speaking of women who seek to break from the demands of social fashion to gain “opportunities for thoughtfulness and recollection” (Astell 2002: 94), Astell warns: For Custom has usurpt such an unaccountable Authority, that she who would endeavour to put a stop to its Arbitrary Sway and reduce it to Reason, is in a fair way to render her self the 242

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Butt for all the Fops in Town to shoot their impertinent Censures at. And tho a wise Woman will not value their Censure, yet she cares not to be the subject of their Discourse. (Astell 2002: 95) Later, Astell describes how her proposals – and as she says “vertue her Self ” – will be derided by “The Beaux perhaps, and topping Sparks of the Town [who] will ridicule and laugh at it” (Astell 2002: 108). Astell does not shy away from criticism as such. While admitting that she is not indifferent to public reputation, she allows that “when we expose our Meditations to the World, we give them a Right to judge, and we must either be content with the Judgment they pass or keep our Thoughts at home” (Astell and Norris 1695: Preface). So too does Sor Juana seem to allow the justice in certain kinds of evaluation, when she remarks that she had little fear to engage with “secular subjects, since heresy against art is punished, not by the Holy Office, but by the laughter of the intelligent and the censure of the critical” (de la Cruz 1988: 209). But we need to appreciate the particular kind of ridiculing Astell and others confront. Part I of A Serious Proposal describes custom as “tyrannizing” over society.8 What enforces that tyranny is censure and ridicule. For women with intellectual ambitions, the effect is collective silencing. The prospect of such silencing fuels Astell’s declared desire in the correspondence with Norris to rest with “my darling, my beloved Obscurity.” With a touch of irony, she declares her ambition “to slide gently through the World,” but also her ambition for “Glory and Reward” – though from an “infallible judge,” not feeble humanity. In the Serious Proposal, Astell develops her positive account of some kinds of ambition, while offering resistance to mockery: “We must be content to suffer a scornful steer, a parcel of hard Names and a little ridiculing, if we’re Resolv’d to do such things as do not deserve ‘em” (Astell 2002: 140). As we will see later, Part I of the Proposal advances yet other recommendations “to mate Custom and [deliver] us from its Tyranny” (Astell 2002: 94). Here, I want to emphasize how Astell frames her treatment both of the silencing moves of censure and ridicule and of the various responses to them in terms of passions and affects. The correspondence with Norris, which seems steered mainly by Norris’s interests, treats the love of God as the cure for all our ills, and in particular, as that which regulates the passions. But Astell’s prefatory letter of 17 July stands out from the collection in the relatively complicated play of passions and virtues it presents. Astell introduces new passions, and new relations among them, by tying the love of God to the hope of being justified before God and framing the love and hope in terms of ambition – both literary ambition and the ambition of gaining true glory. And although Norris and Astell had discussed the “love of the neighbor” as a form of benevolent love, it is only in the prefatory letter that Astell talks of the particularities of a friendship, shaped both by gratitude and an emotional solidarity with other women, in making her case for the dedication to Lady Catherine Jones. It is in this context that Astell discusses the censure, contempt and mockery that an ambitious woman could expect to receive. And it is in this context that it makes sense that an intellectually ambitious woman might feel considerable apprehension at the prospect, however much she loved God. For it is not simply a matter of criticism, but of attempts to delegitimize women’s standing to engage in the life of reason by silencing them. Again, the reaction to silencing and delegitimization can be understood in affective terms: they invoke fear, shame, and humility. But I think we should avoid thinking of the passions so invoked solely as a matter of individual psychology; Astell certainly invokes personal character, but also discusses its interplay with social custom, shaping how one might be expected, even obliged, to feel and react. Such fear, shame and humility are structural passions, built into the social relations, norms, and demands to which they respond.9 Because they are structural, simply ignoring censure and ridicule does not make their effects vanish, although it remains good advice to pay as little heed as possible. We can speak of silencing 243

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moves even if the response is the voluble fury of Marie de Gournay in her Ladies’ Complaint, or the “full-speed-ahead-and-damn-the-torpedoes” attitude of Margaret Cavendish, or the silencing of oneself in preference to being silenced of those who refused publication. A particularly good analysis of the structural effects of passions in silencing and otherwise marginalizing intellectually ambitious women (as well as women with other aspirations) appears in the discussion of wonder, prejudice and ridicule in On the Equality of the Two Sexes, by François Poulain de la Barre. Whereas Astell speaks of how “custom” tyrannizes over our practices, beliefs and passions, Poulain analyzes how mere habits and customs generate what, in a nod to Descartes, he calls “prejudice.” Poulain prefaces his On the Education of Ladies with an explanation of “prejudice” as “judgments made rashly and without examination, or sentiments, opinions, maxims embraced without discernment:” the “opinions” he speaks against are views into which one has entered simply on hearsay and on the authority of one person or of several, without being able to understand the reason why it is good or bad, true or false, except that one has heard someone say it is thus. (de la Barre 1673: 141) Such prejudicial opinions thus are reinforced, even constructed, by their social circulation, particularly by “hearsay” (de la Barre 1673: 126). They are embedded in practices – that is, customs, or habits – and the views we form about customs and habits are typically mere prejudices (de la Barre 1673: 126).10 Moreover, these prejudicial opinions are themselves habits, entrenched practices of thought and belief (de la Barre 1673: 53). The result is that we form prejudices in favor of the customary and habitual: “if some practice is well established, then we think that it must be right” (de la Barre 1673: 125). We tend to confuse a habit, whether of belief or of action, with a reason for belief. And so, Poulain’s analysis shows how prejudices can become deeply entrenched: how “people are confirmed in one prejudice by another” (de la Barre 1673: 146). Poulain’s main example of a pernicious, entrenched, socially circulated prejudice is the subject of his 1673 work, On the Equality of the two Sexes: namely, the inequality of the sexes. By dismantling the prejudicial opinion that sexual difference is significant, favorable to men, and innate, Poulain hopes both to show the structure of prejudice and to establish that the “mind has no sex” (de la Barre 1673: 157). Since there is no difference in kind between men’s and women’s minds, it may follow that philosophy and the life of the intellect are as much goods for women as they are for men. But Poulain leaves it until his 1674 On the Education of Ladies to make the case for women’s pursuit of reason and letters. On the Equality, instead, gives us a keen analysis of how initially trivial conditions differentiating the sexes can trigger practices and opinions that ossify into self-reinforcing prejudices – as well as diagnosing how those prejudices can draw on the passions to generate silencing mechanisms. To illustrate how men tend to view women, Poulain sketches some thought experiments showing women exercising intellectual authority and social power: a woman in a university chair and teaching rhetoric or medicine as a professor, or marching down the streets followed by police commissioners and seargeants to execute the law, or pleading before judges as a lawyer, or sitting on the bench to render justice as the head of a parliament, or leading an army into battle, or speaking before republics or princes as head of a diplomatic mission. (de la Barre 1673: 8–9, altered from 2002: 124–25) Poulain stresses that such sights would be novel and unexpected, running against custom. How would men react to such novelties? They would be surprised – and in their surprise, they would 244

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scoff, and treat it all as a bit of a joke [ce seroit une chose plaisante de voir] (de la Barre 1673: 8). The surprise Poulain speaks of here can be understood as a species of what Descartes called “wonder” [admiration].11 Combined with the prejudice against what is unfamiliar, it breeds ridicule. In these passages, Poulain not only analyzes the toxic interplay of surprise and prejudice, he attempts to defuse some of the novelty in his thought experiments, particularly by asking his audience to consider what we would be accustomed to had women experienced a different historical destiny. The aim is to induce familiarity in his readership by developing their sense of what is possible, their moral and political imagination. The audience here is clearly male:12 it does not need a case made to allow it to pursue intellectual goods and authority; it needs to stop poisoning the wells of opportunity for women.13 That is not the audience Mary Astell sees for herself. A Serious Proposal is addressed specifically “to the ladies,” her works are typically dedicated to female friends, and even when coauthoring with Norris, she sets herself apart from both him and their expected readership. Despite such different approaches, Astell and Poulain converge on strikingly similar diagnoses. Both see censorious mockery as one of the chief obstacles in the way of like-minded women pursuing a life of the intellect. Both find entrenched practices, habits, or customs to be sources for mockery, and mechanisms for its proliferation. Astell tends to locate the source in envious ambition and privilege giving rise to a spiteful mockery, while Poulain emphasizes the way in which prejudice sets expectations and generates scornful surprise and wonder. But both thereby find the passions to be instrumental in the mockery, particularly insofar as passions are generated, shaped, and reinforced by custom – a custom they in turn reinforce. However, neither Astell, nor Poulain takes their analyses to be grounds to condemn the passions as such; indeed, they do not take even the particular passions they identify as spurring the mockery to be inherently problematic. Envy may always be a green-eyed monster, but Astell is pretty unapologetic about her own ambition: it simply needs to be directed at the right targets in the right ways. Poulain makes a similar point in On the Excellence of Men: “inclinations, temperaments, and passions are instruments the soul can put to either good or bad use, depending on the circumstance and the way they are used” (de la Barre 2002: 293). Surprise, I have already suggested, is a variation on the passion of wonder, which many Cartesian philosophers, including Descartes himself, took to be crucial to learning (Descartes 1985: AT XI 384, CSM I 354). Astell too treats ambition as a crucial spur to the intellect. So, despite all the problems that particular passions may stir up, they are to be regulated, not extirpated. Astell is unusually vociferous in this point in Letter VII: … I am not for a Stoical Apathy, I would not have my Hands and Feet cut off lest they should sometimes incommode me. The Fault is not in our Passions considered in themselves, but in our voluntary Misapplication and unsuitable Management of them. (Astell and Norris 1695: Letter VII) Whereas in their correspondence, Norris and Astell agree that the love of God is “the Master and Leading Passion” to regulate the other passions (Letter X), Part II of Astell’s Serious Proposal offers a more complicated program of affective regulation as part of epistemic “method.”14 Again, the point is discipline, not elimination of the passions.

18.3  Regulating the Passions and the Concrete Conditions of Women’s Lives Here, I want to pause to make a small methodological point. The sorts of criticisms Astell mounted against Stoic ideals of “apathy” were common among early modern philosophers, including men (and even some neo-Stoics). Very few wanted to defend the view that the emotions are ipso facto 245

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bad or antithetical to reason. But almost everybody held that the passions, affects or sentiments needed to be remedied, governed, or as Astell puts it, “regulated.” To understand how early modern women understood the remedy and regulation of the passions, I suggest that we look to aspects of the passions that had particular implications for the material conditions of their lives. Consider how Elisabeth of Bohemia may seem at first to denigrate the passions as a whole in her correspondence with Descartes, particularly in contrast to Descartes’s rosy view of their functionality.15 In several letters, Elisabeth attributes what she considers faults in her understanding to her being only “a little rational,” a state she associates with her body insofar as it is “imbued with a large part of the weaknesses of my sex,” subject both to illness and to disruptive passions that interfere with the exercise of her reasoning powers through such mechanisms as the proliferation of the “vapors” (see Elisabeth and Descartes 2007: 88–89). Although tricky to translate into Descartes’s terms, Elisabeth’s claim poses a challenge to Descartes’s sanguine account of how we can exercise mastery over the passions and other states stemming from the body. That account rests on our power to direct our mind’s attention, diverting it from troubling adventitious perceptions that originate in or through the body to considerations of what we truly value, a diversion that in turn affects bodily systems in a salutary way. In her response, Elisabeth does not dispute the efficacy of this technique; instead, she stresses that she has “never known how to put this into practice until the passion has already played its role” (Elisabeth and Descartes 2007: 93). She follows this with a general point about the obstacles to directing attention through will alone when suffering diseases such as Epicurus’s kidney stones (Elisabeth and Descartes 2007: 100). But the course of the correspondence expands the scope of the problem; Elisabeth several times mentions the struggle with constant demands on her time and attention, particularly coming from needy family members over whom she has no control and little say, which frustrates her ability to think through how to deal with demands on her time and attention.16 To practice Descartes’s proposed remedies would require time and at least some ability to escape to a room of one’s own, neither of which Elisabeth has at her disposal. Perhaps the prospect of kidney stones should haunt us all, but Elisabeth raises difficulties that have a particular application to the conditions of her life, conditions Descartes had failed to appreciate. Doing so prompts Descartes to admit that implementing his remedies and achieving what Elisabeth calls “true happiness” requires “the assistance of that which does not depend absolutely on the will” (Elisabeth and Descartes 2007: 100; see also 107f ). Time and attention management are crucial to most of the ways philosophers have thought about remedying or regulating the passions. Elisabeth recognizes this by working from the concrete, material considerations that distinguished her life. I think something similar can be said about Astell’s reflections on ambition, mockery and custom – which are also unwelcome distractions that need to be dealt with in some way. Both take general – and widespread – philosophical concerns, but raise problems grounded in the particularities of certain women’s lives.

18.4  Passions, Independence, and a Taste for Study Similar methodological considerations also apply to how many early modern women philosophers and their allies made their case for a life of study. Again, although plenty of early modern men thought a life devoted to the highest forms of reason as the best life for human beings, affording the sweetest pleasures, or perhaps allowing for the greatest degree of freedom and beatitude, they did not need to engage in special pleading for their own suitability to make philosophy a life-time pursuit. But pretty much every woman philosopher did, either explicitly or implicitly. There are a number of different tactics that different women could use, often appealing to multiple kinds of goods. Whereas Mary Wollstonecraft later appeals both to the social goods served when educated

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women raise children and to the goods of personal development, Astell describes the cultivation of reason as a religious duty and a means to perform other duties: if God had not intended Women to use their Reason, He wou’d not have given them any, for He does nothing in vain. If they are to use their Reason, certainly it ought to be employ’d about the noblest Objects, and in business of the greatest Consequence, therefore Religion. (Astell 1705: sec. I.5, 6) Astell does not direct women’s use of reason solely to religious subjects, important though they may be; Part II of A Serious Proposal develops an entire method of education directed at epistemic and affective regulation. Nor does she confine her justifications for the cultivation of women’s reason to the religious ones, appealing also to ends of personal happiness, even pleasure. But here I want to turn to Emilie du Châtelet, who offers a thoroughly hedonic case for women “of quality” (and presumably, of brains) to pursue a life of study. In her short Discourse on Happiness, a work unusual in her corpus, although part of a recognizable eighteenth-century genre, du Châtelet describes “happiness” both hedonically and through the lens of the passions: happiness depends on satisfying tastes and (particularly) passions: “One is only happy because of satisfied tastes and passions; I say tastes because one is not always happy enough to have passions, and lacking passions, one must be content with tastes” (du Châtelet 2009: 349). The greatest happiness requires passions, but cannot be measured by a simple arithmetic of pleasures.17 Some passions resist satisfaction, and so not all passions are equally desirable from a hedonic calculus. Du Châtelet also maintains a number of mostly negative conditions that must be met even to be in a position to satisfy the passions; one must be, e.g., free from prejudice, healthy, and virtuous enough to avoid what she considers the inevitable pains that follow vice. The passions must be disciplined, for which she offers many tips (du Châtelet 2009: 351–52). At the same time, du Châtelet admits that there are a number of circumstances necessary for our happiness that our beyond our absolute control (although we can court them), including what she describes as a certain susceptibility to “illusions.”18 In this context, she introduces the suitability of the “love of study,” perhaps the most important passion for “people of quality” to cultivate over a lifetime. Du Châtelet starts her case by reiterating that “[o]ne must have passions to be happy.” But she stresses “they must be made to serve our happiness, and there are some that must absolutely be prevented from entering our soul.” Here she does not mean intrinsically vicious passions (however much we should avoid them), but passions such as “ambition.” Ambition, she admits, is a passion that can both be satisfied, and if satisfied, give great pleasure. But “ambition, of all the passions, makes our happiness dependent on others… [and] the less our happiness depends on others the easier it is for us to be happy” (du Châtelet 2009: 357). Du Châtelet does not think we can eliminate dependence; the point is to minimize our vulnerability, to be as independent as possible. And she tells us, “[i]f we value independence, the love of study is, of all the passions, the one that contributes most to our happiness” (du Châtelet 2009: 357). Up until this point in the Discourse, du Châtelet says nothing about her own sex or that of her readers, only assuming that both she and her audience are “people of quality.” But in eulogizing the love of study, she suddenly declares this passion “is much less necessary to the happiness of men than it is to that of women” (du Châtelet 2009: 357). This is not because, or not solely because, of the independence it affords. Rather, it is because it offers opportunities for “glory.” Despite warning against “ambition” just a few sentences before, du Châtelet declares that “[t]his love of study holds within it a passion from which a superior soul is never entirely exempt, that of glory.” For those “superior souls,” the love of glory is “the source of… many pleasures of the soul

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and… many efforts of all sorts that contribute to the happiness, the instruction, and the perfection of society,” even if it is nonetheless “entirely founded on illusion” (du Chatelet 2009: 357). This may be the respect in which glory differs from ambition: the love of glory seems to involve the hope for the “plaudits of posterity,” rather than from one’s contemporaries, the desire for “future reputation,” rather than present fame. Although du Châtelet is clear-eyed enough to admit that there is a kind of vanity and illusion about this desire for temporally distant glory, she holds that it can be genuinely pleasurable in the here and now. And as a strategy for dealing with current sexist prejudice, it bears comparison to what Astell says about her ambition to be evaluated by an “infallible judge.” Both Astell and du Châtelet know that they should not rest their hopes on getting their dues from their contemporaries, but they do want to enjoy the prospect of getting their due sometime and somehow. And this is why du Châtelet holds that the love of study is more critical to the happiness of women than to men. The love of study holds within it a passion of glory, and as she puts it, “[f ]or half the world, glory can only be obtained in this manner, [although it is precisely this half whose education made glory inaccessible and made a taste for it impossible” (du Chatelet 2009: 357). She elaborates: Men have infinite resources for their happiness that women lack. They have many means to attain glory, and it is quite certain that the ambition to make their talents useful to their country and to serve their fellow citizens, perhaps by their competency in the art of war, or by their talents for government, or negotiation, is superior to that which one can gain for oneself by study. But women are excluded, by definition, from every kind of glory, and when, by chance, one is born with a rather superior soul, only study remains to console her for all the exclusions and all the dependencies to which she finds herself condemned by her place in society. (du Chatelet 2009: 357) Du Châtelet goes on to suggest that, in fact, the love of study is not secondary to other passions that might provide glory. But the end of the Discourse offers additional considerations for cultivating the passion. In a highly personal turn, du Châtelet treats two very different passions, passions to which she presents herself as particularly susceptible: a love for gambling, and romantic love. Both, she maintains, offer prospects of enormous pleasure, but both thwart independence. Romantic love, in particular, puts one at the mercy of another’s often whimsical passion, as well as time and changing affections. Du Châtelet’s reflections turn intimately personal, describing the end of a long love affair, the breaking of her heart, and at last, some reconciliation in “the peaceful feeling of deep affection; [which] sentiment, together with the passion for study, made me happy enough” (du Chatelet 2009: 362). Du Châtelet expresses some doubt that she at least can be satisfied “by a sentiment as peaceful and as weak as that of close friendship,” a feeling she considers a form of “apathy.” But she also takes it that the opportunities and our suitability for the passions of romantic love fade with age. What is left may be simply a “taste for study,” and so she ends by again recommending that a “taste for study [is] a taste which makes our happiness depend only on ourselves” (du Chatelet 2009: 365).

18.5  Strategies of Retreat and Communities of Resistance Du Châtelet does not voice worries in the Discourse about facing active mockery, even if she had no ambition for applause from her contemporaries. By aristocratic status, wealth, and the good fortune of a supportive circle, she may have been insulated from the most immediate silencing moves that affected many women (her legacy was another matter, though19). But as we have seen, many 248

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early modern women and their allies were keenly aware of the mockery and other silencing moves they would face from the world at large. To end, I would like to sketch just a few of the strategies they proposed to counter those moves and pursue philosophy as a form of life. Above all, I hope to show how these strategies involve affective regulation, particularly by altering the structural social relations in which the silencing moves gain their power. One of the most common strategies is that of a kind of retreat – or to put it more positively, the formation of a space for intellectual and affective development shielded from jeering, social hostility and condemnation. We can see this in On the Education of Ladies, which sketches what Poulain calls a “science of ourselves” as a counter to standard views of education. It is directed particularly at Eulalie, the youngest of the four characters in conversation, who must overcome the sexist prejudices imbibed from “authorities” to gain trust in her own abilities. I have discussed this work in several recent articles,20 so here I will only point to the setting: a garden retreat in the house of the character Sophia, away from the carping pedants and Eulalie’s mother who refuses to allow her even to read the Bible (de la Barre 2002: 153–55, 204–05). The characters in the garden form a cell of mutual support and resistance to prejudice, and the work ends with a plan to continue their conversations there (see de la Barre 2002: 251). Astell goes yet further in Part I of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, proposing to institutionalize the vision of retreat: As to the Proposal it is to erect a Monastery, or if you will… Religious Retirement, and such as shall have a double aspect, being not only a Retreat from the World for those who desire that advantage, but likewise, an institution and previous discipline, to fit us to do the greatest good in it… (Astell 2002: 73) Astell emphasizes the many functions this female monastery would serve: it would be an educational institution and study center, encouraging contemplation, knowledge and love of God (Astell 2002: 76). In so doing, it would allow women the opportunity to engage in projects of self-improvement, of the development of their minds and wills. Astell paints the inhabitants as capable of the highest forms of self-perfection and perfect happiness, describing the retreat as a new Eden, but without the serpent (Astell 2002: 74). The retreat offers myriad advantages enabling the moral, religious and intellectual development of the women under its shelter. For one, it allows women to delay or even avoid marriage, while making them “suffer no other confinement, but to be kept out of the road Of Sin” (Astell 2002: 74). It likewise places them out of the marriage market, and the social world built around it, full of “temptations,” impertinencies, “deceitful flatteries,” rivalries, envy, covetousness, and all the “folly and temptation” of the world (Astell 2002: 74–75). Some of the chief follies and temptations of the world are concentrated in several dangerous and aggravating kinds of men, particularly Fops and the licentious. A woman who bucks custom and “reduce[s] it to Reason, is in a fair way to render her self the Butt for all the Fops in Town to shoot their impertinent Censures at.” Retreating, “as the Israelites did out of Egypt,” is the only way to avoid their spleen (Astell 2002: 95). Astell stresses the enormous savings in time conferred by removing such distractions and aggravations, as well as simple social demands: “no impertinent Visits, no foolish Amours, no idle Amusements to distract our Thoughts, and waste our precious time; a very little of which is spent in Dressing, that grand devourer, and its concomitants…” (Astell 2002: 89). Even if we resist common expectations, remaining in the world at large leaves us “betray’d to a great loss of time, a Treasure whose value we are too often quite ignorant of till it be lost past redemption” (Astell 2002: 94). Immersion in the greater social world, however we deal with it, comes only at a great cost in time, attention and effort. And that, Astell maintains, robs us of all “opportunities for 249

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thoughtfulness and recollection,” and “renders Improvement impossible, because it will not permit us to consider and recollect”(Astell 2002: 94). The institutionalized retirement Astell proposes returns women’s time and attention not just by the removal of external distraction, but because “it helps us to mate Custom and delivers us from its Tyranny” (Astell 2002: 94). As we have already seen, Astell traces a host of ills to “custom” much as Poulain does to “prejudice.” Although she credits “ignorance and a narrow education” as the beginning of vice, it is “Custom and Imitation [that] rear it up.” Indeed, she ultimately declares that “’Tis Custom… that Tyrant Custom, which is the grand motive to all those irrational choices which we daily see made in the World, so very contrary to our present interest and pleasure, as well as to our Future” (Astell 2002: 67–68). It is why the Fops mock reasonable women. So the importance of “mating Custom” cannot be overestimated. But one of the crucial features of the monastic institution Astell recommends is that it is able to replace the Tyrant Custom “and turn its own Cannon against it self ” (Astell 2002: 101). Part II of A Serious Proposal provides a great deal of the moral psychology to sort out Astell’s claims in the first part. There she distinguishes between custom and prejudice: “As Prejudice fetters the understanding; so does Custom manacle the Will,…” (Astell 2002: 139). Astell certainly wants us to enlarge and free the understanding: the Religious retreat is specifically directed to education. But that is not enough. Astell also wants a reformation of the habits of willing that we have been trained into, that is, custom. The will should be directed by the understanding (Astell 2002: 80). But without fully developing and educating the understanding, the will can readily fall back into customary paths. And Astell does not seem to think that we can easily give this up: following custom can itself become habitual, so much so that either the understanding alone cannot overcome it or that the prevalence of custom blinds the understanding. The institution Astell envisages undermines the tyranny of unthinking social customs by replacing them with new disciplines and habits, which do not waste our time on follies and temptations, but promote the ends of the retirement itself. And it does so by providing its members with the time and opportunity to develop their minds and reflect on religion, while putting them in a new social milieu. Astell emphasizes that there will be a real community of women in this religious retreat, even going so far as to say that “this happy Society will be but one Body, whose Soul is love, animating and informing it, and perpetually breathing forth it self in flames of holy desires after GOD, and acts of Benevolence to each other” (Astell 2002: 87). A major goal of this society is education, both self-education and the instructing of others (Astell 2002: 84). Rather like Sor Juana, Astell makes no claim that women should teach in church (Astell 2002: 81), only holding that women should “be enabled to inform and instruct those of their own Sex at least” (Astell 2002: 83). But she does propose to make “part of their employment be the Education of those of their own sex” (Astell 2002: 84). The community will also work to establish the right kind of habits and behavior in its members: correcting with “sweetness,” “friendly Admonitions” and simple example (Astell 2002: 89). Perhaps the most efficacious way to establish new customs is by providing models of happy lives and the support of true friends.21 Astell stresses: Farther yet, besides that holy emulation which a continual view of the brightest and most exemplary lives will excite in us; we shall have the opportunity of contracting the purest and noblest Friendship… For Friendship is a Vertue which comprehends all the rest; none being fit for this, who is not adorn’d with every other Vertue. (Astell 2002: 98) Astell describes true friendship as “Charity contracted” and declares it “the best Instructor to teach us our duty to our Neighbor and a most excellent Monitor to excite us to make payment as far as our power will reach.” (Astell 2002: 98–99). Such true and rare friends enter into “an holy 250

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combination to watch over each other for Good, to advise, encourage and direct, … The truest effect of love being to endeavour the bettering the beloved Person” (Astell 2002: 100). As Astell describes it, only through retreating from the world can we find such true, unfeigned friendship; it both works to fit us for the retreat and is one of the greatest benefits and pleasures the retreat can offer. So, her ideal strategy might be separatist in one sense, but in another, it aims at reshaping community and allowing friendship to flourish. Retreating to form a space for friendship and community is a combination that seems attractive to many other early modern, proto-feminist philosophers, including Sor Juana and Poulain, and arguably du Châtelet (as well as others not considered here, e.g., Gabrielle Suchon). One might even argue that Mary Wollstonecraft – for all of her republican ambitions to reform public and family life – aims at making public life itself a space where friendships can flourish. Her refusal to require that we retreat in order to gain such a space is a revolutionary move. But perhaps what enabled that move was others’ thinking through the importance of retreat.22

Notes 1 But seemingly published in the next year, see Broad (2015) 81 n.97. 2 The full title of the 1696 publication is Letters concerning the love of God between the author of the Proposal to the ladies and Mr. John Norris, wherein his late discourse, shewing that it ought to be intire [sic] and exclusive of all other loves, is further cleared and justified. Publication is attributed only to Norris. 3 However, as Astell’s fame grew, her publishers offered definite descriptions of her authorship. Probably many anonymous publications were, in fact, readily attributable to their authors. 4 For instance, few of the seventeenth-century précieuses and salonistes with a philosophical bent wrote much (see Harth 1992). 5 See Bokser, J. A. (2006). On the “sin of curiosity” in La Respuesta, see A. Brooke (2017). 6 This refers to the publication of La Carta Athenagorica, discussed below. 7 For various speculations on the connections among these events, see Trueblood in de la Cruz, S. J. I. (1988: 7–10), and Arenal and Powell in de la Cruz, S. J. I. (2009: 5, 2–14). 8 See further Forbes (2019). 9 Thanks to Colin Chamberlain for pressing me on this point. Alas, space does not permit me to develop it further here. 10 Although it is ambiguous, I suggest reading the passage cited above de re, not (merely) de dicto: it is the beliefs we form about what are customs and habits that constitute prejudices. “Cependent, cette persuasion comme la plupart de celles que nous avons sur les coûtumes & sur les usages n’est qu’un pur prejugé, que nous formons sur l’apparence des choses (de la Barre 1673: 12). 11 Poulain here picks up on Descartes’s description of wonder as a response to novelty (Descartes 1985: AT XI 373; CSM I 350). 12 Throughout On the Equality, Poulain refers to “our sex.” 13 I examine these issues further in Schmitter (2018). 14 See further Sowaal (2007). 15 On this see, Hatfield (2008), Schmitter (2007), Brown (2012), among others. 16 See further Lloyd (2006). 17 For instance, she argues against those who decry the passions as likely sources of displeasure that we tend to overestimate the unhappiness of frustrated passions because of availability biases and that the prospect of great pleasure simply outweighs the importance of unhappiness. 18 For further discussion of “illusions,” see Lascano (2021), also Lascano, forthcoming. 19 For more on du Châtelet’s management of her own image, see Janiak (2022). 20 See Schmitter (2018), part 5, and Schmitter (2020), especially 169ff. 21 See further Broad (2009) and Kendrick (2018). 22 I’d like to offer thanks to several audiences and readers for help with this chapter in late 2021 and early 2022: students and faculty at the philosophy colloquium, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee who pressed me on various points, including the strategy of retreat; the workshopping group at the Extending New Narratives Workshop, the University of Pennsylvania; Karen Detlefsen for helpful comments; Júlia Diniz e Carvalho and Eduardo Melo de Andrade Lima for much help with finishing up the chapter; and students in several seminars, who helped me try out various thoughts before they went into this chapter.

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Bibliography Astell, M. (1705) The Christian Religion, as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England, London: Printed by W.B. for R. Wilkin at the King’s-Head in St. Paul’s-Church-Yard. (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. P. Springborg, Peterborough: Broadview Press. Astell, M. and J. Norris. (1695) Letters Concerning the Love of God, London: Samuel Manship and Richard Wilkin. Bokser, J. A. (2006) “Sor Juana’s Rhetoric of Silence,” Rhetoric Review 25(1): 5–21. Broad, J. (2009) “Mary Astell on Virtuous Friendship,” Parergon 26(2): 65–86. (2015) The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooke, A. (2017) “‘Las ciencias curiosas’: Curiosity, Studiousness and the New Philosophy in the Carta de Sor Filotea de la Cruz and the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 94: 697. Brown, D. J. (2012) “Cartesian Functional Analysis,” Australasian Journal of philosophy 90(1): 75–92. de la Barre, F. P. (1673) De l’Égalité des Deux Sexes. Discours physique et moral, Paris: Chez Jean du Puis. (1674) De l’education des dames pour la conduite de l’esprit dans les sciences et dans les moeurs: entretiens, Paris: Chez Jean du Puis. (1675) De l’Excellence des hommes, contre l’égalité des sexes, Paris: Chez Jean du Puis. (2002) Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, trans. V. Bosley, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (2013) “A Physical and Moral Discourse Concerning the Equality of Both Sexes,” in D. M. Clarke (ed. and trans.), The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. de la Cruz, S. J. I. (1988) “Admonishment: the Letter of Sor Philothea de la Cruz,” and “The Reply to Sor Philothea,” in A. S. Trueblood (ed. and trans.), A Sor Juana Anthology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (2009) The Answer (La Respuesta): Including Sor Filotea’s Letter and New Selected Poems, ed. and trans. E. Arenal and A. Powell, New York: Feminist Press at The City University of New York. Descartes, R. (1985) “The Passions of the Soul,” in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothooff, and D. Murdoch (ed. and trans.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published in 1649. Du Châtelet, E. (2009) Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, ed. J. Zinsser, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia and R. Descartes. (2007) The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, ed. and trans. L. Shapiro, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forbes, A. S. (2019) “Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice,” Hypatia 34(4): 777–801 Harth, E. (1992) Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Hatfield, G. (2008) “Animals,” in J. Broughton and J. Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes, Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing. Janiak, A. (2022) “How Emilie Du Châtelet Fought to Shape Her Reception during the French Enlightenment,” Presented at the Extending New Narratives Workshop, University of Pennsylvania Philosophy Department, April 23, 2022. Available at: https://philosophy.sas.upenn.edu/events/ extending-new-narratives-workshop. Kendrick, N. (2018) “Mary Astell’s Theory of Spiritual Friendship,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26(1): 46–65. Lascano, M. P. (2021) “Émilie Du Châtelet on Illusions,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7(1): 1–19. (forthcoming) “Émilie du Châtelet’s Theory of Happiness: Passions and Character,” Journal of the History of Philosophy. Lloyd, G. (2006) “Busy Lives: Descartes and Elisabeth on Time Management and the Philosophical Life,” Australian Feminist Studies 21(51): 303–11. Masham, D. (1696) A Discourse Concerning the Love of God; Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, London: [No publisher]. Schmitter, A. M. (2008) “How to Engineer a Human Being: Passions and Functional Explanation in Descartes,” in J. Broughton and J. Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes, Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.

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Reason, Passions and the Good Life (2018) “Cartesian Prejudice: Gender, Education and Authority in Poulain de la Barre,” Philosophy Compass 13(12): e12553. (2020) “Cartesian Social Epistemology? Contemporary Social Epistemology and Early Modern Philosophy,” Roczniki filozoficzne. Annales de philosophie 68(2): 155–78. Shapiro, L. (2007) “Volume Editor’s Introduction,” in L. Shapiro (ed. and trans.), The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sowaal, A. (2007) “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom,” Philosophy Compass 2(2): 227–43. Wollstonecraft, M. (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London: Joseph Johnson.

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19 VIRTUE AND MORAL OBLIGATION Sandrine Bergès

Did Early Modern women philosophers abandon virtue ethics in favor of theories of moral obligation? Or does looking at the history of philosophy from their perspective help tell a different story? Feminist historian of philosophy Karen Green has suggested that Early Modern women may well have a moral theory of their own (Green 2015). After all, the idea that we are obligated to others regardless of how it benefits us is not news to women, who, especially in the past, are responsible for caring for infants, the sick, and the elderly. It must also be noted that both ancient virtue ethics and Early Modern theories of moral obligation are problematic for women in that they expect them to abide by the same standards as men without receiving the same benefits. In both theories, as they were developed by men philosophers, women obey men and have no real political existence. So the realities of women’s moral and political existence are not taken into account by ancient and Early Modern theories, and, perhaps because of this, they are never fully integrated as agents in those theories. In this chapter, I show how Early Modern women philosophers in France and England tried to navigate the problem stated above by mixing elements from virtue ethics and theories of moral obligation, in particular, the concept of the body politic and the idea that reason and God are the sources of obligation, and/or the way of accessing it.

19.1  A Gendered Historical Account of How Virtue Gave Way to Moral Obligation In this first part, I look at the received line that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers perceived that virtue ethics, separated from its questionable teleological metaphysics, could not account for the “internal ought.” The internal “ought” is what moves us to do the right thing even when that thing seems to go against our interest, and the need for this kind of motivation is at the source of theories of moral obligation. I will argue that this way of locating obligation is derived from an understanding of moral decision-making that leaves out the sort of strategies for understanding obligation developed by women philosophers. In his influential monograph, The British Moralists and the Internal Ought 1640–1740, Stephen Darwall explains that the move away from Aristotelian metaphysics is in great part responsible for the abandonment of virtue ethics (Darwall 1995). Aristotle’s teleology, a view shared by many ancient philosophers from Plato to the Stoics, presupposes that all activity is measured according to an end, and that there is an end to human life, which fits into an ordered universe. The rejection of Aristotelian science was a product of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, with 254

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the views of Copernicus and Newton dominating scientific research and a general philosophical move away from the all-powerful Catholic church which had adopted all things Aristotelian via Thomas Aquinas. Without a teleological framework postulating the rightness of human flourishing or happiness, virtue ethics, it seems, operates as an egoistic theory. I develop my character and become virtuous because it is good for me and makes me happy. But there is no longer a tie between my happiness and the happiness of others (beyond certain personal and practical considerations), so if it turns out that doing the right thing by an unknown other goes contrary to my happiness, then I have no compelling reason to do it. Without the teleological framework, virtue ethics loses its status as a rather noble moral theory and becomes more like a form of “wellness” theory, where the main objective is for the individual to be healthy and happy and have good relationships, but whether they benefit society as a whole is only a side consideration. Early Modern (male) philosophers, according to Darwall, saw the gap that had been created by their metaphysical change of heart and began to ask different questions: why should I do the right thing when it is not in my personal interest? What is the nature of my belief that I “ought” to do that thing? Darwall considers a string of British Early Modern philosophers from Hobbes to Hume. Some of these, such as Cumberland and Butler, are not part of the canon, so that the picture he offers is more varied than many drawn in the late twentieth century. But the picture is still exclusively male, and because it is, we have a legitimate question to ask: did women philosophers also make the move from virtue ethics to moral obligation, and if so, were their motivations the same?

19.2  Women and Moral Theorizing If the history of Early Modern moral philosophy as we know it is gendered, then where should we look for a better account? In her 1985 paper “What do Women Want in a Moral Theory,” Annette Baier suggests that virtue ethics may be the best model of moral theorizing for women. Virtue ethics, she said, make the emotions central to morality, and it requires that we observe closely the situations in which we act, the reactions of others who are influenced by our actions. Virtue does not happen in an intellectual vacuum but in a society where people depend on each other. Baier further links virtue ethics to the ethics of care: indeed, her argument is motivated by having read Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, in which Gilligan argues that women’s moral deliberations are often motivated more by considerations of caring responsibility in a moral community than they are by disembodied principles and the application of reason to solving moral puzzles (Gilligan 1982). Gilligan’s argument is motivated by a reading of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Kohlberg, who applies Piaget’s stagial development theory to moral reasoning skills, finds that the highest stage is Kantianism, while the lowest other than egoism is moral relativism. He also observes that while only a few men reach the highest stage, women tend to stay at the relativism stage. Gilligan challenges Kohlberg’s methods through his findings. Women, she argues, reason better with real-life moral problems. This is not some failure of abstraction on their part but a reflection of the fact that they are deeply embedding in a moral community where care and problem-solving are ever-present features. Gilligan illustrates her response to Kohlberg by recalling her reaction to one of Kohlberg’s lectures on abortion. The large majority of students debating the rights and wrongs of abortion were men. Gilligan reflected that there was something wrong about this, that the level of abstraction at which the discussion had to take place because none of those men would ever contemplate aborting, meant that the resulting moral discourse lacked the requisite depth.1 In order to gather data for her theory that women’s moral theorizing tended to be more applied and less abstract than men’s, Gilligan conducted a number of interviews. She spoke to women who were caring for children, struggling to make a living while doing so, sacrificing careers, or else 255

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cutting corners in their domestic lives. This different perspective, she argued, was what made for the different voice. Did Early Modern women philosophers also have cause to develop a different voice? It is likely that the sort of concerns that motivated the women Gilligan spoke to also motivated women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – after all, it is not the case that having the main responsibility of caring for children has only recently become women’s responsibility. The circumstances that make up women’s moral universe have certainly not changed beyond recognition. Christine de Pizan, for instance, although a courtly author, was nonetheless responsible for running her household and bringing up her children, with the help of her elderly mother, and she was certainly responsible for earning their keep. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess, childless, and married to a man who encouraged her unconventional career as a published writer, still felt the pressure to engage in womanly activities such as weaving and making preserves in order to escape the criticisms of neighbors.2 Mary Wollstonecraft, who is sometimes dismissed as a bourgeois writer, brought up her first daughter alone, in Revolutionary France and in comparative poverty, with part-time help from a young maid, while writing her history of the French Revolution. It is quite safe to assume that even women who wrote were not free from the caring responsibilities they have now. There is a big step between recognizing that women who wrote moral philosophy had the experience of caring for others (or the experience of being expected to care for others), to the claim that this experience translated into a different style of moral philosophizing, and again another step to the claim that this style was at least in part virtue ethical. In the following sections, I will begin to develop a narrative, starting from pre-modern philosopher Christine de Pizan, and going up to late Early Modern thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, showing that women philosophers did theorize their experience as part of a community of carers into a theory of moral obligation that owed something to virtue ethics.

19.3  An Enduring Love of Virtue: Aristotle from the High Middle-Ages to the Enlightenment Before showing how women philosophers claimed part of virtue ethics as their own when their male counterparts were turning away from it, it is important to acknowledge that Aristotelian virtue ethics was not a theory built for women. Aristotle takes pains to emphasize that women’s virtues are not the same as men’s, and that while men’s virtue is best demonstrated in the political forum or at war, for women, silent obedience is the most admirable character trait (Aristotle 1992: 96, 1260a24). Christine de Pizan was a virtue ethicist perhaps of necessity – as a Renaissance, or High Middle-Ages philosopher, she came before Early Modern theories of obligation. Nonetheless, because she is philosophizing about the experience of being a woman in a society that does not value women as much as it values men, her approach is useful in understanding women philosophers that came later. The approach to moral theories may be different, but the attitude toward women was not. Pizan’s most famous work, The Book of the City of Ladies (1401), reads very much as a protofeminist book. The author starts by complaining that male authors, from Aristotle onward, treat women unfairly and then proceeds to demonstrate, through references to history and mythology, that women are, in fact, equal to men in all respects. The “City,” which she builds in the book, with the help of the allegorical figures Ladies Reason, Justice, and Rectitude, is meant to be a refugee for women who want to grow to the full of their capacities without being hindered by the rampant and harmful sexism of society. Yet, the conclusion does not recommend that women, outside of the metaphorical city, should aim to achieve equality: Pizan tells women that they

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should obey their husbands, even when these husbands are drunken and violent brutes (Pizan 1999: 404). Why does Pizan draw this conclusion? Because, she argues, to be virtuous is to participate in the flourishing of one’s community. And the most pressing concern for France, the book written during the hundred years war, is peace and stability. For women to rebel would compromise that peace and stability. Hence they must not. This theory of virtuous participation in a community is taken, in Christine’s case, from Aristotle (Aristotle 1992: 61, 1253a29; Pizan 1994: 91). It is the theory of the body politic, whereby each individual flourishes as part of a political organism, much as a body part flourishes as part of a body. Each part has its own crucial role to play, and each part receives the sustenance it needs from the whole. For a member of a community to try and overturn the order of things would be tantamount to a hand severing itself or strangling the neck attached to the same body: destruction and no benefit for anyone (Pizan 1994: 58). One may think that the cost of belonging to a body politic for some individuals is not worth the benefits one gets out of it: this is true of slaves, for instance, for whom death and destruction may be preferable to living in a state where they are possessions. And it may be true, to some extent, for women, who may well have felt, in some parts of the world or at some times in history, that they were the toenails of the body politic. But Pizan does not wish for destruction: on the contrary, when she wrote The City of Ladies, she, and almost everyone else in France, was desperate for order, for the English to go and the French monarchy to be restored. The hundred-year war between France and England had already occasioned plenty of “discord,” and many who had decided to rise in protest against their rulers had indeed “perished together.” This context gives us some insight into the apparent contradictions in Pizan’s thought (Green 2007). On the one hand, she needed to argue against women challenging their role in society because that was likely to lead to even more chaos, on the other, given her commitment to equality of men and women in all respects, she could encourage individual women to rise about their station and help bring back order. This explains why she dedicated a copy of her works to Isabelle of Bavière, the Queen Regent, and why she sang the praises of Joan of Arc, who defeated the English and led the king to be crowned. Thus Pizan’s conservatism is deeply contextual and leaves open the possibility that some later political community may make it possible for women to claim a different role for themselves, to demand a rearrangement, if not the destruction, of the body politic. Women’s agency is tied to their place in the body politic, but what matters is the survival and flourishing of all, so that in situations where change or reform does not endanger the whole, women could, in principle, take up a more equal role.

19.4  Obligated to Obey? A growing philosophical alternative to Aristotelian ethics during the Early Modern period was ethical theories that attempted to derive moral obligation from God, reason, moral sense or even fear of punishment. We do what is right because we have a sense of obligation – philosophers agreed. It is not just that we are acting out some natural function, but we have a sense that we ought to do certain things, even if they appear to be against our natural interest. The obligation itself may come from theoretical or practical reasoning, God’s command, or sentiment, including religious sentiment. Even if it is not the source of obligation, reason helps us by showing us that obeying God’s command is our duty, and in some cases, reason is able to tell us what our duty is and why acting according to it is imperative (Darwall 1995: 17). The role of the divine law (or the law of reason) is to bind us to do what we do not perceive to be in our interest. In Hobbes’s words, it is what stops us from claiming our “right to all things” say, killing our neighbor to steal his possessions, and what forces us to obey a ruler who tells us to pay taxes.

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This way of explaining the need for a theory of obligation seems very odd. As an explanation, it is steeped in a world perceived as adversarial, where everyone thinks of their own interest first and of how they might enrich themselves. One leading question behind the philosophical quest for obligation seems to be, “Why can’t I have what he has?” Something has to stop us from infringing on others’ rights or safety, and the corresponding attitude of fearing that others will want to harm us to get what they want. As Hobbes says, before we can implement what the natural law says we should: a social contract, we are motivated by diffidence, glory, and competition (Hobbes 1985: 185). However, if we approach the question of obligation from the perspective of a woman’s experience, we come up with very different questions. There are two kinds of obligations women typically need to make sense of. First, there is the sort of obligation that binds them to the will of a husband or father, regardless of whether they are reasonable masters, and often in conflict with what reason would tell them to do. “Why should I do what he says? Why should I stay?” are very reasonable questions from a woman’s perspective. But is this moral obligation rather than merely a lack of choice? For many women, it would have seemed that they were acting from an inner sense of obligation, i.e., of what was due from them toward others. But perhaps their sense of obligation was a form of self-deception, a way of glorifying a role they could not escape. Secondly, women may well feel morally obligated to do something that no-one else will do in their stead, that is, care for babies. Here the question may not be “why should I stay?,” as in many cases, women do not wish to abandon their children, but “why do I feel obliged to stay?,” or “why is this more than just something I do because someone has to and it might as well be me?” This question is particularly salient as some women would have had the option of paying others to care for their infants and children, divesting themselves of the work, but nonetheless retained the obligation, in so far as they expected to be valued by their children in exchange for their parental care. Early Modern women were overwhelmingly concerned with obligation as duty: marital – obeying their husbands – and parental – caring for their children. These obligations, however, are not entirely derivable from reason. They are reasonable in the sense that it makes sense for a woman to look after her child if she knows no-one else will and to obey her husband if she faces expulsion otherwise. But they cannot be derived from reason in the stronger sense that they follow from a principle that men are better suited to make decisions on behalf of women and that women are better suited to serve men and raise their children (beyond the immediate fact of giving birth and breastfeeding). Women as reasonable beings knew this and yet had to justify to themselves, somehow, the need to obey. But if reason cannot justify it, then what can? For some women, this justification took the form of an argument from divine authority. Reason by itself is unreliable, according to such arguments, and must give way to divine command. So if reason appeared to tell women that they ought not to subordinate themselves to men, but divine authority said otherwise, then reason had to be put on a backburner at least concerning that question. An example of a woman philosopher trusting divine authority before her own reason is that of Jacqueline Pascal. Pascal was a Jansenist, i.e., member of a Catholic sect that followed the thought of Augustine. Augustine distrusted human reason and believed that to follow one’s reason is to commit the sin of pride. This would entail that any reason women might have to question their duty toward men would carry less weight. Pascal’s ambiguous relationship to reason as a source of obligation is the topic of Section 19.5. A different approach toward the reconciliation of women’s actual subservience, and arguments that claim obligation is either derived from or revealed to us by reason, is one that begins a progress between Pizan’s attitude that women must remain in their place for the good of the community, and the belief that community should be reformed so that women can take their proper – equal – place in it. As a strategy, it uses a Stoic version of the Aristotelian concept of the 258

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body politic and the view that virtue is aimed toward fulfilling our nature, which is to live well as a community. I will explore this strategy as it developed in the early eighteenth century through the writings of Catherine Trotter Cockburn in Section 19.6 and follow it to its conclusion at the end of the eighteenth century with Mary Wollstonecraft in Section 19.7.

19.5  Jacqueline Pascal and the Distrust of Reason Jacqueline Pascal joined the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal in Paris in 1652, aged 27. She joined it against the wishes of her brother (Blaise), who wanted her to stay by his side, and fought her brother and sister (Gilberte Périer) for the right to dispose of her share of their father’s inheritance as a dowry.3 Like her brother, she became an important advocate for Jansenism, publishing a text about the education of girls in the convent and several letters in theology. The Jansenist church was already persecuted by the Vatican, and in particular, their creed book, The Augustinius, was declared heretical, and all members of the Jansenist sect were required to sign a Formulary saying that it was. The response of the sect’s leader, Antoine Arnauld, was to draw a distinction between “fait” (empirical fact) and “droit” (right) and declare that as it was right to obey the catholic church, Jansenists should sign the Formulary, but that doing so did not constrain them to believe that, as a matter of fact, Jansenius’s book was heretical. Jacqueline Pascal refused to sign nonetheless, and she encouraged other nuns at the convent to do the same. When the convent became the direct object of persecution, she agreed to sign, but with a codicil. She died shortly afterward. The debate around the Formulary, which Pascal was asked to sign, is enlightening as to her thoughts on moral obligation. Whereas Arnauld thought that the Jansenists were obligated to obey the rule of the church no matter what, Pascal disagreed. Her disagreement can be interpreted both as in line with Augustine’s theory of obligation and in reaction to the Aristotelianism of the Jesuits. The key aspect of Jansenism (spelled out in Jansenius’s The Augustinius) is an Augustinian reliance on faith and grace. For Augustine, the taint of original sin is such that it is impossible for human beings to rely on their earthly selves for moral improvement. Political arrangements have little or no effect on morality either, and as far as Augustine is concerned, they have to be borne in the sense that all earthly life has to be borne; if a choice is to be made, a stricter regime will be more beneficial as it will somewhat curb our worst sinful impulses. Jansenists opposed the Jesuits precisely because they adopted a version of Thomistic/Aristotelian perfectionism, which allowed them to make judgments, on each occasion, as to what the right course of action is. Phronesis in the hands of the Jesuits becomes casuistry and moral laxity. So whereas a Jesuit would expect to find out what the right course of action would be through reasoning about the particular case in which they were called to act, the Jansenist distrusted this method and claimed that it amounted to the sin of pride (in so far as one’s reason was a match for God’s commandments) and a certain amount of disingenuity. Pascal’s brother, Blaise, used this propensity of the Jesuits toward moral laxity to ridicule them in his Provincial Letters, where he cites the example of a monk temporarily defrocking himself to go to a brothel (Pascal 1847: 59–60). Going back to the Formulary, it is clear that Pascal was modeling her own resistance on what she thought Augustine would recommend. She offers a hypothetical situation and argues that had Augustine been required to make a decision using a similar distinction between fact and right, he would have refused. The situation she describes is as follows: Had a tyrant come to require Augustine to sign a document defending the plurality of worship in order to prevent the spread of Christianity, Augustine could have, she says, decided to read that document as a statement of the Trinity. But as it would be clear to him that the 259

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intention of the document was to establish polytheism through political tyranny and had nothing to do with the Trinity, he would not have signed. Although [the Trinity] is a truth no faithful Christian would doubt, this was not the time nor the manner to say so. You will easily understand the workings of this comparison. (Pascal 1845: 410) The distinction between “fact” and “right” here looks like little more than a Jesuit twisting of words and appealing to Augustine himself, Pascal shows that a Jansenist should have nothing to do with it. (Conley 2019: 74–75) Despite its rejection of casuistry, Pascal’s position sounds surprisingly Aristotelian: in order to judge what the right thing to do is, we should not look simply to the principle of action (tell the truth!) but to the circumstances in which one is called to act (the time, the manner). However, Pascal’s position is radically distinct from an Aristotelian one in other ways. The relevant obligation here is, to tell the truth simply, without looking for sophisticated ways of making it more palatable. A true disciple is one who has no will of their own, who has given their mind over to God entirely and has not sufficient pride to attempt to deceive the oppressor through clever conceptual manipulations. For Pascal, we are obliged to do as God tells us and to educate ourselves sufficiently to be able to understand what God wants from us, and not to use that education to deceive or manipulate, even in defense of the faith. In the conclusion of the previous section, I suggested that for some women philosophers, appeal to divine authority as the source of moral obligation would be a way of accepting their own position of subservience to men in society. However, it seems clear that Pascal’s decision to place divine authority above her own reason does not do that. As far as she is concerned, men, as well as women, ought to refrain from being guided by reason. And in cases where it is not clear that divine authority has anything to say, as in the case of her dispute with her siblings about whether she could use her inheritance as a dowry, Pascal did not refrain from argument. Nor did she put her reasoning powers on hold when the male leader of her sect, Arnauld, asked her to sign a petition she did not believe right. So by claiming that reason is always less trustworthy than divine command, she places all reasonable beings on the same level, achieving a form of negative equality that went beyond social position.

19.6  Catherine Trotter Cockburn: Adapting the Body Politic to Early Modern Theories of Obligation One of the most interesting arguments seeking to reconcile reason and women’s subservience, perhaps, is one that also takes into account the eighteenth-century theories of moral obligation developed by male philosophers: Catherine Trotter Cockburn’s theory of moral fitness, developed more particularly in her defense of Samuel Clarke’s moral theory. Clarke’s view is that moral obligation is derived from the moral relationships that necessarily follow from the order of the universe, in particular, from the essential natures of God and humans. In that sense, it is as much connected to teleological virtue ethics as it is to Early Modern theories of obligation: the obligation is derived from the natural order of things, which includes human beings, God, and their relationship. Fitness theory is then the view that obligation comes from an understanding of human nature and its relation to God, i.e., that human beings are meant to obey God and therefore that it is right that they should. Objectors to Clarke argued that the obligation still has to come from God’s divine nature or something derived from it, such as divine punishment, otherwise humans might decide that it is 260

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not in their interest to obey. This objection relies on the following (mis)understanding of teleological virtue ethics. The only reason we have to be good citizens and to be virtuous is that by living in political societies we will be more successful human beings. One can, however, understand this and choose, for other reasons, to act in a way that is not virtuous. One can decide, for instance, that one had rather live fast and die young than flourish. So an understanding of human beings as living in a certain relationship to God is not enough – there is still a sense in which we are not obligated but simply acting in our own best interest. The only way to fix that, objectors to Clarke argue, is to introduce the fear of divine retribution, with the understanding that God’s rewards and punishment are such as to take out the element of choice completely from moral deliberation. All that is left is the reasoning about how best to fulfill our obligations, not whether to fulfill them. Cockburn is quick to spot the weakness of this solution: threats and promises may help determine whether we act according to our obligations, the sense that we are obligated or not remains unaffected. Having recourse to the will of God and the prospect of a future reward is not to supply the defects of the obligation but the defects of our strength and resolution to comply with it. The right of obliging may be full, the obligation indispensable, and yet there may be great need of assistance to our frailty for the discharge of it in cases of severe trial. The prospect of future rewards and punishments is allowed to be the only motive suited to all capacities and conditions: And therefore, no divines have more strongly pressed the consideration of the will of God, and of future retributions, than those, who maintain a full obligatory power in the relations and fitness of things. (Cockburn 2006: 115) Cockburn accepts Clarke’s moral fitness theory and rejects the opponent’s view that obligation is derived from consideration of rewards and punishment attached by God to the moral law, which is derived from his will. But Cockburn’s defense of Clarke is more than providing the obvious response to a poor objection. In that same text, she also offers an elaboration of moral fitness that is useful for our purposes as it appeals to the concept of the body politic and thereby ties her theory to that of Christine de Pizan. Mankind is a system of creatures that continually need one another’s assistance, without which they could not long subsist. It is, therefore, necessary that everyone, according to his capacity and station, should contribute his part towards the good and preservation of the whole and avoid whatever may be detrimental to it. For this end, they are made capable of acquiring social or benevolent affections (probably have the seeds of them implanted in their nature) with a moral sense of conscience that approves of virtuous actions and disapproves of the contrary. This plainly shows that virtue is the law of their nature and that it must be their duty to observe it, from when arises moral obligation, tho’ the sanctions of that law are unknown; for the consideration of what the event of an action may be to the agent, alters not at all the rule of his duty, which is fixed in the nature of things. (Cockburn 2006: 114) Cockburn describes mankind as a “system” and claims that the nature of this system is to be social, rational, and sensible so that it is natural that we should feel an obligation to help one another and to obey God’s law. God makes these laws explicit and adds rewards and punishments as an aid to reason, which can otherwise only grasp the law dimly, and as an aid to motivation, which may fail us. But it is natural fitness, not God’s will, nor its manifestation in afterlife rewards 261

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and punishments, which constitutes obligation. Her argument draws its influence from Stoicism. Cockburn would likely have known Cicero’s De Finibus – a popular book at the time, and this discusses the social nature of humanity, drawing on Diogenes Laertius’ Zeno and the Stoic concept of moral development, oikeiosis.4 Epictetus also may have influenced Cockburn’s version of Fitness Theory. The following passage from Epictetus is a clear example of the sort of arguments the Stoics used:5 As long as the future is uncertain to me, I always hold to those things which are better adapted to obtaining the things in accordance with nature; for God himself has made me disposed to select these. But if I actually knew that I was fated now to be ill, I would even have an impulse to be ill. For my foot too, if it had intelligence, would have an impulse to get muddy. (Long and Sedley 1987: Epictetus 58J) Indeed Cockburn does refer to the Stoics favorably when she says that their only error is a “partial consideration of human nature,” as they thought of us as “rational and social being[s] only,” omitting our “sensible” aspect (Cockburn 2006: 130). But this, she concludes, is a “noble error,” which an Early Modern theory such as hers and Clarke’s can easily solve simply by reinstating the emotions into moral thinking. Cockburn’s insistence that “mankind is a system of creatures that continually need one another’s assistance without which they could not long subsist” is in stark contrast with the contract theories of obligation of some of her contemporaries, which assume that the benefits of co-operation only become known to human beings as an afterthought. For Hobbes, as for Rousseau, human beings are fundamentally asocial, and they only come to rely on each other in order not to destroy each other. Cockburn’s phrasing points to the absurdity of the belief – we cannot survive at any point of our lives without each other. We do not need the ability to trust each other merely when we meet a grumpy neighbor who might be inclined to hurting us or stealing from us, but from the very beginning of life, and right until the end (and especially at these two extremes of life). Human beings are not, Cockburn reminds us, perpetually young and always healthy men eager for a fight. They are also babies in need of feeding and people at various life stages in urgent need of care. There is no survival without care, no growing up to be mean to one’s neighbor without a community that helps us reach that point. For Cockburn, the understanding of our human nature brings obligation, not simply the understanding that we are God’s creatures and that we must obey (and that it is good for us), but also the understanding that we only exist as part of a human community, and that we depend on its growth and stability for our wellbeing. This is very much a virtue ethical understanding of moral obligation and one that carries with it a different take on what is involved in understanding human morality, with less focus on the individual sense of obligation and more on the social nature of that obligation.

19.7  Beyond Resolution to Revolution: Mary Wollstonecraft Cockburn’s social-based moral fitness theory raises questions, of course, about the place of women and children in human societies. By arguing that obligation is grounded in the social existence of human beings and the constant dependence of individuals on each other, not just for their wellbeing, but for their survival, Cockburn is reasserting the place of women and children in philosophical debates. Women hardly feature in Hobbes (Sreedhar 2012). In the Second Treatise (chapter 7), Locke does discuss “conjugal society” and the civil existence of women and children, with the emphasis that although men should rule because they are naturally stronger and more able (section 82), their rule must allow the women some freedom, including the freedom to separate 262

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(Pfeffer 2001). This would likely have been quite satisfactory for Cockburn in practice, for Locke was a great deal more progressive than most other philosophers at the time (and although this was perhaps a small step to propose, greater leaps are often harder to imagine). But Locke’s framework makes the relations between men and women, or adults and children, prior to, or even independent, perhaps from moral obligation. Moral obligation is what we owe after the “express promise and compact” that joins men and their families to a political society. Women and children need not be concerned with it, but as weaker dependents on men, it is in their interest to obey. Retaining the framework of virtue ethics – despite the obvious sexism of its early manifestation – is helpful in reinserting women and children into the debate. If the political community is as “natural” as the family community, then there is no call to account for the moral ties that hold a wife and husband together differently from those that force an individual and their neighbor to be civil to each other. One major obstacle that the women philosophers discussed here, from Christine de Pizan onward, encountered in attempting to explain moral obligation was the expectation that women were always going to be obliged to obey their husbands and that in any body politic, women would never hold a noble place. But this changed in the late eighteenth century once women began to think that reform was underway. Between the American and the French revolution, there was a hope that women would be henceforth considered as citizens in their own rights. “Remember the ladies” wrote Abigail Adams, hopefully, to her husband, who was busy drafting the American Constitution. In France, Olympe de Gouges drafted a Declaration of the Rights of Woman, matching the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791, clause by clause, but emphasizing marriage and family as part of humanity’s civil existence. One of the more significant attempts at including women in moral and political theories by offering a civil grounding for a moral obligation is perhaps that of Mary Wollstonecraft (Taylor 2007). Virtue cannot be relative, she argues in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as otherwise, they are not virtues at all (Wollstonecraft 2014: 65). So if women are to be virtuous, they are to be so in the same way as men. She gives the example of chastity, arguing that too much is expected of women and not enough of men and that a proper appreciation of what is appropriate sexual behavior for both sexes is really what is called for (Wollstonecraft 2014: 153). At the same time, as she writes off Aristotle’s almost foundational argument that women’s virtues are specific to their (inferior) nature, she also addresses her contemporaries’ belief that reason is what God gave us to help us become virtuous. This is true, she says. But like virtue, reason cannot be gendered, and it must be the case that men and women are equally capable of grasping their obligations to each other and God, and therefore should be given equal ranks in human societies. Only miseducation will make a human being, man or woman, unequal to the role of full citizenship. Wollstonecraft’s argument is powerful because it relies on tenets that her contemporaries, on the whole, accept: the correspondence between reason, knowledge, and virtue. Education is what makes us virtuous, but it has to be done according to reason, it cannot be merely “rote learning” without understanding. Wollstonecraft also argues that contemporary conceptions of femininity that weaken human nature in women and in men: fashionable sensibility, or the affectation of weakness and fragility, on the part of women, and extreme poetic sensitivity on the part of men. If we strip human beings of this nonsense, she argues, all we have left is reason and the capacity for knowledge and virtue. And because reason does not come in a male and female version, but is only strong or weak depending on the effort put into developing it, we owe it to both sexes to educate their reason. And because reasonable citizens are better for society than unreasonable ones, we owe it to humankind to educate all. Wollstonecraft’s argument is not instrumentalist here: she claims that we are obligated to treat men and women as equal and obligated to educate both in all classes. And the 263

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reason for this obligation is that we are God’s creatures and that we are created in his image, i.e., as rational beings. But in order to make that point, she needs to address the obstacles that her predecessors stumbled against: what about women’s “traditional obligations,” i.e., as wives and mothers? Wollstonecraft’s strategy in answering this question is motivated first by a recognition that society morals of her times are mostly hypocritical and that the concept of virtue for women has lost any connection it may have originally had to a genuine sense of right and wrong. Eighteenth-century women are taught to care for their sexual reputation and little else: The leading principles which run through all my disquisitions, would render it unnecessary to enlarge on this subject, if a constant attention to keep the varnish of the character fresh, and in good condition, were not often inculcated as the sum total of female duty; if rules to regulate the behaviour, and to preserve the reputation, did not too frequently supersede moral obligations. (Wollstonecraft 2014: 165) The answer, she argues, is a progressive but radical transformation of society so that the same virtues are taught to women and to men, and the same behavior is expected of both. Chastity, in particular, she says, should be nothing more than a modest demeanor and fidelity to one’s partner. Men and women ought not to rely on their sex appeal to get others to serve them, and they ought to treat each other with respect. Loss of reputation can, of course, happen to someone who is perfectly innocent, but it is only a big issue if reputation itself matters more than virtue. So in a society where morality is not fixed in appearances, a loss of reputation would not lead to social destruction. Despite her view that morality is derived from reason and hence that it has to be the same for men and women because reason is universal, Wollstonecraft’s theory of moral obligation still owes much to the Aristotelian framework of the body politic. Obligation, we saw, is what we owe each other as members of a flourishing society, a republic, where we are all equal. Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies was bound by the historical fact of a Kingdom in danger of total collapse – so her body politic had a king for a head and a society carefully divided into nobles, clergy, soldiers, peasants, men, and women. But for Wollstonecraft, the ideal society looks much more like a circle of equals, and there is no crowned head, no weapon carrying arm, and no laboring inferiors. The work of keeping the society healthy and flourishing belongs equally to all, in that all should have a say in its government. Of course, there will be soldiers and laborers, and some will be richer than others (very few eighteenth-century writers considered the possibility of economic equality), but none of this will affect their value as citizens. The body economic may still look like a humanoid, but the body politic no longer does. There is one apparent exception to this in Wollstonecraft’s writing: women, she says, when they are mothers, have a duty to feed their children themselves, and if they do not, they do not deserve the title of citizen. Caring for infants, she says, is a “grand duty,” suggesting that it is a duty that supersedes others (although she does tend to overuse that epithet for rhetorical effect). In this discussion, Wollstonecraft is reacting to a bit of historical context worth knowing: aristocratic English women did not breastfeed their own children but sent them out to live in the home of wet-nurses. This often had the effect of ill health for the infant and the absence of a family bond between the child and its parents (especially if a boy, as he would be sent to school just a few years after coming back from the wet-nurse). Rousseau denounced the practice in his Emile, and his enthusiasm for breastfeeding one’s own (which he hardly experienced himself ) infected women writers such as Wollstonecraft, at least in part because it made women important, somehow, giving them a crucial role in the upbringing of future citizens. 264

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Wollstonecraft, who argued so vehemently against Rousseau’s claim that men and women had different natures and hence had to be educated differently and held to different moral standards, now finds herself in agreement with Rousseau. It is nature, she says, that makes women qua mothers better suited for the job of caring for infants, therefore it is women’s moral duty to do so when they are mothers. However enthusiastic Wollstonecraft is about breastfeeding, and however harshly she appears to condemn women who do not (they do not deserve the title of citizen), it is good to take her pronouncement with a pinch of salt (Bergès 2016) First, she does not believe that the duty of mothers is more fundamental than their duty to themselves as rational beings, and the duties of motherhood are only part of their duties as citizens “in the current state of things.” This can be taken as meaning two things. First, it is possible Wollstonecraft envisions a future in which women’s duties to their infants are less demanding and more easily shared. But the present solution, she says, of sending children out to nurse, is not one we should tolerate. Secondly, there is a sense in which the nature of citizenship influences our duties. As Cavendish wrote, being excluded from the political forum makes one free from obligations. And it is not strange that women who are not treated as citizens should not grasp their obligation to feed future citizens. They may be forced to do so or prevented from doing it (by a husband who wants to keep his wife to himself ), but this is not the same as being morally obligated. So a large part of what Wollstonecraft is saying is that women are more likely to be good mothers if they are considered citizens in the same way as men.

19.8 Conclusion The question of moral obligation, like many questions of practical philosophy, is steeped in the lived experience of those who seek to answer it. And the lived experience of Early Modern women when it came to the problem of obligation was significantly distinct from those of Early Modern men to give rise to answers that were different in interesting ways. The story we tell about how moral obligation was a move away from virtue ethics, in particular, becomes less plausible when we look at the works of women philosophers of the same period. Women, it seemed, understood obligation best when they saw its subjects as members of a community, members who relied on each other for their wellbeing and survival. Hence their account of obligation retained some elements of virtue ethics: the idea that individuals flourish as part of a body politic. Virtue ethics brought with it a set of sexist attitudes that sat uncomfortably with women authors and that were not eliminated by men’s theories of obligations. But it seems the solution once again could be found in the remnants of Virtue ethics: the body politic had to change; it had to assume a more woman-friendly shape.

Notes 1 See Bergès 2012. 2 Although we do not have clear evidence that this was something she struggled with personally, her Sociable Letters, which are sometimes read as autobiographical, refer to an anecdote where the author is moved to act to prevent gossip. See Cavendish 1997: Letter 150. For a discussion of the letter, see Bergès 2018. 3 For a presentation of the Pascal family, see Conley. 2019. I owe my acquaintance with Jacqueline Pascal’s philosophy, the dowry and Formulary controversies to a paper by Dwight K. Lewis and Daniel Collette presented at the Pacific APA in 2019: “Women’s Autonomy in Jacqueline Pascal.” 4 On the social nature of humanity in Cicero, see Elton 2015. 5 Whether Cockburn had this passage in mind depends on whether she read Greek, as Elizabeth Carter did not begin her translation till two years after Cockburn wrote her defense of Clarke, and it was not published till after her death. Patricia Sheridan (2018: 251–52) argues that the Stoics were a strong influence in Cockburn’s moral theory.

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References Aristotle (1992) The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair, revised and re-presented by T. J. Saunders, London: Penguin. Baier, A. (1985) “What do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” Noûs 19(1): 53–63. Bergès, S. (2012) “Moral Development,” in R. Chadwick (editor-in-chief ), Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, 2nd edition, Elsevier, pp. 145–51. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/referencework/ 9780123739322/encyclopedia-of-applied-ethics (2016) “Wet-Nursing and Political Participation: The Republican Approaches to Motherhood of Mary Wollstonecraft and Sophie de Grouchy,” in S. Bergès and A. Coffee (eds.), The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, Oxford: OUP. (2018) “Lucretia and the Impossibility of Female Republicanism in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters,” Hypatia 33(4): 663–80. Cavendish, M. (1997) Sociable Letters, ed. J. Fitzmaurice, New York: Routledge. Cockburn, C. T. (2006) Philosophical Writings, ed. P. Sheridan, Guelph, ON: Broadview Press. Conley, J. (2019) The Other Pascals: The Philosophy of Jacqueline Pascal, Gilberte Pascal Périer, and Marguerite Périer, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Darwall, S. (1995) The British Moralists and the Internal Ought 1640–1740, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elton, E. (2015) “Self-Love in Adam Smith and the Stoic Oikeiosis,” Polis 32: 191–212. Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Green, K. (2007) “Phronesis Feminized: Prudence from Christine de Pizan to Elizabeth I,” in J. Broad and K. Green (eds.), Virtue, Liberty, Toleration, Dordrecht: Springer. (2015) “A Moral Philosophy of their Own? The Moral and Political Thought of 18th Century British Women,” Monist 98: 89–101. Hobbes, T. (1985) Leviathan, ed. with an introduction by C. B. Macpherson, London: Penguin Books. Lewis, D. K. and D. Collette. (2019) “Women’s Autonomy in Jacqueline Pascal,” presented at the Pacific APA. Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley. (1987) The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pascal, J. (1845) Lettres, Opuscules et Mémoires de Madame Périer et de Jacqueline, Soeurs de Pascal, et de Marguerite Périer, sa Nièce, Publiés sur les Manuscrits Originaux par M.P. Faugère, ed. A. P. Faugère, Paris: Auguste Vaton. (1847) Provincial Letters, trans. M. Villemain, London: Seeley. Pfeffer, J. L. (2001) “The Family in John Locke’s Political Thought,” Polity 33: 593–618. Pizan, C. (1994) The Book of the Body Politic, ed. K. L. Forhan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1999) The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. with an introduction and notes by R. Brown-Grant, London: Penguin Books. Sheridan, P. (2018) “On Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Metaphysics of Morality,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 247–65. Sreedhar, S. (2012) “Hobbes on the Woman Question,” Philosophy Compass 7(11): 772–81. Taylor, N. F. (2007) The Rights of Woman as Chimera: The Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, New York: Routledge. Wollstonecraft, M. (2014) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. with an introduction by E. H. Botting, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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20 MEN, WOMEN, EQUALITY, AND DIFFERENCE Marguerite Deslauriers

20.1 Introduction That there is some tension between the recognition of sexual differences and claims for the equality of men and women is a commonplace of contemporary feminist philosophy (see, e.g., ­MacKinnon 1987; Pateman 1988, 1992; Scott 1996). One way in which philosophers have reconciled that tension is to allow that sexual differences are physical and “objective,” while arguing that they are detached from the gender identities that are socially acquired and mark us off as men and women, so that “women” are made, not born. Another way has been to deny that sexual differences are politically innocent: since our bodies differ in myriad ways, to focus on the differences that we associate with sex and claim that these produce different kinds of people is to elevate an arbitrary set of physical characteristics to a metaphysical status that is not warranted. On this view, all purported sexual differences are in fact gender differences, socially constructed. Both of these attempts to reconcile the tension between sexual equality and sexual difference deny that (purported) differences in the bodies of men and women are pertinent to the question of political equality. It has not always been so. The tension between claims of equality and discussions of sexual difference has a history. It starts in the ancient world, with Plato’s observation that whatever sexual differences there might be in bodies, those differences may be immaterial to the social and political roles of women and men. Plato observes that bald men are different from hairy men and suggests that we can all agree that neither baldness nor hairiness marks off a person as either adept or unqualified as a cobbler (Republic V 454c). In the same way, then, he concludes, we should not suppose that the differences that characterize men and women somehow justify the political elevation of one sex and the degradation of the other – certainly not unless we can demonstrate that sexual differences, unlike baldness, affect a person’s intellectual or moral capacities (Republic V 454d-456b). In the Renaissance and the early modern period, the question emerges again, when a series of authors, both women and men, argues for the equality of the sexes (often appealing to Plato as an authority) while continuing to debate the nature, and the importance, of sexual differences in bodies. The question is in the first instance about the basis of equality – what it is that makes men and women worthy of equal treatment – and subsequently about the implications of that basis: what the equality of the sexes might require of a political community.1 Because there was broad (if not perfect) agreement that men and women shared the same rational soul and species form, which was the foundation of claims of equality, the discussion focused primarily on the impact of DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-25

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bodily sexual differences on the operations of the soul.2 What was at stake was this: if the sex of the body might affect the intellectual or affective activities of a person, then even if the soul as a set of capacities is the same in both sexes, the development and exercise of those capacities – their manifestation in the choices, feelings, and actions of a person – might be quite different, and of different value. Feminists pursued two different strategies toward the equality of the sexes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First, while the misogynist writers of the time argued that women’s bodies undermined their intellectual activities and moral capabilities, many feminists argued, on the contrary, that women’s bodies were better suited to these peculiarly human activities. On the face of it, that sort of argument for the superiority of women is anti-egalitarian, but arguments for the superiority of women were introduced to gain for women pragmatic equality – the equal treatment that might have seemed to follow, but did not in fact follow, from a concession of metaphysical equality – when it became apparent that establishing the fundamental metaphysical equality of men and women, bestowed on them by the possession of a rational soul, was insufficient (see Deslauriers 2022). That is, the arguments for the superiority of women’s bodies, and for the effects of that superiority on the operations of their souls, were employed to gain equal treatment for women with respect to liberty (of movement, of person, and of property), education, and political participation, once it was clear that a general consensus on the basis of equality between the sexes would not by itself lead to those gains. Many feminist writers assumed that it was hopeless to argue for the equality of male and female bodies in a context where equality was understood as an assertion of sameness, but knew that the prejudice that female bodies somehow undermined the operations of reason was widespread; as a result, they usually argued for the identity of the rational soul and the superiority of the female body. Second, and at the same time, some feminists argued that the metaphysical equality of the sexes should be sufficient to gain equal treatment for women, and hence that there was (or should be) no need to advance claims for the physical superiority of one sex over the other. This chapter considers the views of four women from that period – Moderata Fonte (1555– 1599), Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653), Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), and Marguerite Buffet (16xx–1680) – on equality and sexual differences. It aims to show that (i) the rational soul was the basis of nobility or dignity – the intrinsic value and elevated status of the human being – that gave women a claim to equality with men, (ii) that most feminists who argued for the importance of differences between the sexes believed those differences had their source in the body, but at least one (Marinella) thought there were also differences in the degree of nobility of the soul, (iii) the differences in question were believed by many to affect the quality of intellectual and moral (affective, desiderative, and judging) activities, and hence to affect the equality of the sexes and yet (iv) some authors argued for putting aside any discussion of physical differences between the sexes on the grounds that they did not affect the rational soul. Fonte, Marinella, de Gournay, and Buffet were writing in the context of the querelle des femmes, a debate about the nature and worth of women spanning several hundred years (about 1400–1700) and a number of European languages (French, Italian, German and Spanish, in particular) (see Kelly 1982; Dubois-Nayt et al. 2012). The debate began with Christine de Pizan’s responses to Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung’s allegorical poem, Le Roman de la rose; the debate that ensued came to be called la querelle de la rose (Piaget 1891; Hicks 1977). Both women and men contributed to this debate, in a variety of genres (letters, poems, dialogues, treatises). Two points in particular about the querelle are important for understanding the work of Fonte, Marinella, de Gournay, and Buffet. The first is that the feminist participants in the debate were responding to a number of widely-circulating, detailed, and licentious misogynist tracts. For example, Marinella makes clear that she is responding to Guiuseppe Passi’s I Donneschi Difetti (Defective Women) (1599), and de Gournay was contributing to the querelle de l’alphabet, provoked 268

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by Alexis Trousset’s Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes, dédié à la plus mauvaise du monde (Alphabet of the Imperfection and Wickedness of Women, dedicated to the Worst Woman in the World, 1617), a compilation of misogynistic platitudes (Berriot-Salvadore 2002: 84). The structure, arguments and sources of the pro-woman works are influenced by, and responses to, these misogynist tracts. The second point is related: the works of Marinella, de Gournay, and Buffet considered here are polemical treatises, and the demands of the polemic are evident in their tone and phrasing and in their selection of themes. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s De nobilitate et praeccellentia foeminei sexus (On the nobility and superiority of the feminine sex) (1996; originally published 1529) was an early and influential pro-woman polemic, and the source of many of the arguments found in later feminist works. It may also have influenced the choice of genre of later feminists. Fonte’s Il merito delle donne (1600), by contrast, was a dialogue, another popular form in the querelle, particularly because it allowed for the representation of the contrasting views of feminists and misogynists and the social relations between them (Cox 1992: 6). Book Three of Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1959; originally published in 1528) is a dialogue on the worth of women; just as Agrippa’s treatise De nobilitate established the polemic as a form for feminist arguments, so Cortegiano established the dialogue as a form in which elements of the querelle could be represented. While the extravagances of the polemic form and the indeterminacies of the dialogue might induce us to doubt the seriousness of feminist authors, the evidence suggests that Fonte, Marinella, de Gournay, and Buffet aimed to provide philosophically informed arguments for the equality or superiority of their sex – and the popularity and reach of the debate were such that these arguments had persuasive power with a broad audience.3

20.2  Persons, Souls, and Bodies To understand the arguments for equality, consider first the conception of the person, and of the soul, to which such arguments appealed, a conception influenced both by Aristotelian and by Platonic philosophical traditions.4 A person was composed of an organic body, informed by an immaterial, but complex soul. The soul was understood to have a number of parts, faculties or capacities, some shared with non-human animals (e.g., digestion, reproduction, desires, and aversions). The capacity for rational thought (often called “the rational soul”) was peculiar to human beings, and constituted their species form or essence; the possession of reason was thought to be distinctive of the human species.5 While most soul faculties required the organs of a body as instruments for its operations, the extent to which, and the ways in which, the rational soul might depend on the body was an open question. Reason as a faculty comprised two primary capacities: theoretical or speculative reason, and practical reason. The former was a capacity to grasp the truth about things that are immutable or cannot be otherwise: mathematical and metaphysical objects, as well as the essences or forms of natural kinds. The latter was a capacity to identify and choose the good in cases where different actions are possible for us, both as individuals and as political communities. In some cases, these two capacities of the faculty of reason were grouped together as the “intellect,” and reason was held to include a capacity of will and one of memory along with the intellect.6 Human virtue was both intellectual (various excellences associated with the practices of reason) and moral (excellences associated with correct desires and practical choices: for example, courage, justice, and generosity) (See Aristotle, EN I. 13 1103a4–10). Aristotle offered biological as well as psychological accounts of the operations of the nonrational faculties of the soul (digestion, reproduction, sensation), and allowed that the body and its physiology might affect the rational operations (see, e.g., Parts of Animals II. 2 648a2–14). In the Renaissance accounts of the soul, its interactions with the body were usually believed to be mediated by spiritus (spirit), “a subtle vapour or exhalation produced from blood and disseminated 269

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throughout the body by the arteries and nerves, which were assumed to be hollow,” often referred to as the “first instrument” of the soul (Park 1988: 469).7 In the debate about men, women, and their differences, as we will see, much depended on how an author understood sexual differences in the body to affect the production and circulation of the spiritus. This picture of the human person, the soul, and its interaction with the body is the framework within which Renaissance arguments for the equality of the sexes were articulated. The rational soul, with both speculative and practical intellect, memory, and the will that allowed persons to express their freedom in sinful or virtuous action, marked off the human species from all other created beings, at the same time that it constituted the species form or essence of human beings. The identification of the species form with the rational soul implied that women, like men, possessed the capacities of the intellect, memory, and will, and in the possession of those capacities were the equals of men. This equality was understood not only as an empirical claim about capacities, but also as a normative claim. Nobility, or dignity, was strongly associated with reason, and so human beings were supposed to have greater dignity than non-human animals, where dignity designated both a superior capacity and an elevated status.8 In saying, then, that women had the same capacity for reason as men, feminist authors were saying also that women had the same dignity as men. This was a claim about the capacity of women to cultivate human virtues, both intellectual and moral, and many feminist authors focused on the virtues of women in an effort to counteract the denigrating descriptions misogynist authors offered of women’s moral incapacity. It was also a claim about women’s human capacity to exercise a free will – to choose virtue or sin, and to be accountable for those choices. At the same time, asserting the equal dignity of women was a way of making a claim for certain entitlements for women – not only respect, but also the liberty to be self-governing, an education to allow for the cultivation of reason and the acquisition of human virtue, and political participation, including political rule.

20.3 Equality Feminist arguments for the equality of the sexes in the Renaissance often began with arguments from the origins of the sexes, based on Genesis 1–3 and on Aristotelian metaphysics and causal theory. It was common to quote the passage, “So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1, 27–28 [The New English Bible with the Apocrypha]), before drawing the conclusion that God’s intention in creating human beings was that male and female should together constitute the species, and share a single and identical form or soul (see, e.g., Goggio 1487: fol. 8v; Equicola 2004: 2 (originally published in 1501); Domenichi 1551: fol. 9r). This is sometimes supplemented with an argument from Aristotle’s Metaphysics X. 9 1058a29–b25, that sex does not divide a species into sub-species, and so sexual differences are not differences in the essential form; and from Aristotle’s Categories 5 3b32–4a7, that any given instance of a substance cannot be more, or less, that kind of substance than any other instance (so, e.g., no squirrel is more a squirrel than any other). These arguments focus on the origin of the species in God’s creation and its implications for the unity of the sexes in the species. Another set of arguments from origins relies on Aristotle’s theory of causation from Physics II. 3 194b24–32 to show that men and women have the same material cause (human flesh), the same efficient cause (God), the same formal cause (the rational soul), and the same final cause (beatitude or happiness). The point is that the natural causes that are responsible for the generation of human beings are the same in men and women, which renders them the same in all important respects: materially, formally, in their aims and their origins (see, e.g., Strozzi 1501, fol. 16v; Equicola 1501: 7; Buffet 1668: 219–23; Marinella 1999: 52–54).

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While most feminist authors mention, at least in passing, the argument from causal origins, the feature of this argument that is most elaborated is the claim about formal causes; and the feature that is most qualified is the claim about material causes. I focus here on the claim that men and women have identical formal causes, which was intended to establish the metaphysical equality of the sexes, and turn in the next section to the question of material causes, in qualifying which many authors sought to establish the superiority of women, and to gain equality of treatment for women. The most influential Renaissance statements of the identity of the rational soul in men and women, and hence the identity of their species form, are found in two works mentioned above, Castiglione’s Cortegiano and Agrippa’s De nobilitate. Agrippa says: [God] has attributed to both man and woman an identical soul, which sexual difference does not at all affect. Woman has been allotted the same intelligence, reason, and power of speech as man, and tends to the same end he does, that is, happiness, where there will be no restriction by sex. (1996: 43) Castiglione says: For just as no stone can be more perfectly a stone than another, as regards the essence stone, nor one piece of wood more perfectly wood than another piece – so one man cannot be more perfectly man than another; and consequently the male will not be more perfect than the female as regards their formal substance, because the one and the other are included under the species man, and that in which one differs from another is an accident and is not of the essence. (1959: 214) Together these passages capture the important points: that women are equal in reason to men, that the sexes have the same aim or purpose in life, and that women are as perfect (in the sense of complete) as human beings as men, in virtue of having the same formal cause or species form. At the turn of the sixteenth century two Venetian women, Fonte and Marinella, assert the equality of the sexes on the basis of the identity of the rational soul. Fonte, in her dialogue Il merito delle donne (published posthumously in 1600) makes reference to the equality of the sexes with respect to the rational soul when she represents the character Leonora, who is arguing for the worth of women, as asking “For are we not of the same species as them [men]?” (1997: 146); to be of the same species is to share the same essential form. Marinella, in her work The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, cites another work of Fonte’s, Tredici Canti del Floridoro (1581), in which Fonte challenged the idea that men and women are different in essence.9 Marinella herself says that “women have the same rational souls as men,” quelle hanno la medesima anima ragioneuole, che ha l’huomo, (Marinella 1601: 37). She acknowledges that this is generally taken to be sufficient to establish the equality of the sexes, since most philosophers “will say that man’s soul is equally noble to woman’s because both are of the same species and therefore of the same nature and substance” (Marinella 1999: 55). This is the standard argument for the equality of the sexes: if we accept that men and women are members of the same species, we must attribute to them the same species soul; and if they have the same species soul then they have the same substantial form or essence, and so are the same “in nature and in substance.” That is, the sexes have the same capacities by nature, and differ only in incidental or non-essential respects. Marinella, as we will see below, qualifies this claim in two ways: she claims (i) that while the rational soul of men and women is identical in kind, that of women has greater nobility, which means that

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it has a greater capacity for human activities and (ii) that sexual differences in the body lead to differences in the operations of the soul, which means that women are better at the execution of human capacities. In the seventeenth century, Marguerite Buffet argued, like Fonte and Marinella, for the sameness of the rational soul in the sexes, emphasizing that if men and women were members of the same species they must be equal in dignity. She says, If the forms of bodies that are intellectual substances are infused into individuals by a superior principle, from which they emanate directly, [these forms] are without doubt equal in power, dignity, and movements (égales en puissance, grandeur & mouvemens). (1668: 221–22) Her reasoning is this: if the souls of individuals in the same species were different in these respects, two unacceptable consequences would follow: (1) there would not in fact be a single species, but “an infinite multiplication of beings, superior and inferior” (1668: 222) – i.e., if they are superior and inferior they must be different in kind and (2) to distinguish the souls of women from the souls of men would require that the souls themselves should be sexed; but since sex is a feature of bodies, that would be to espouse a conception of the soul as a body, which would be “an outrageous error” (1668: 223). The first of these arguments seems flawed – since two things might be of the same kind although one is better than another – but the second is more persuasive. Buffet adds a theological argument: if we believe (as she does, along with Marinella) that God infuses the soul into the human body, and we believe that our souls are puffs of his breath (que nos ames soient des soufles de sa Divinité), then we should accept that our souls are “equal among themselves in dignity, strength, power, goodness, and in everything” (1668: 223). Buffet seems to argue that the sameness of the rational faculty bestows equality on men and women in everything: There is no more difference between one sex and the other than there is often between the individuals of each sex, and that is why we may with as much reason as truth say that they are equal in everything. (1668: 224) Buffet is asserting that the rational faculties of men and women are the same and hence that the capacities of men and women are equal not only in kind but also in degree. The specification of the nature of the equality in question makes clear that she will not allow that the souls of men are more powerful, or greater (in the sense of more dignified or worthy), or capable of undertaking certain operations that women’s cannot. But, like Marinella, she leaves open the possibility that the effects of the souls of men and women might be different. Those “effects” are the outcomes of the operations of the soul as exercised in a sexed body. Buffet’s equality claim, like that of Marinella, is at once natural and theological. When she says that women are as closely aligned with God as men “whether in relation to nature or grace” she means to say that whether we consider the souls of women as part of their nature – as what gives a person the capacities that are natural to their species – or as creations of God, they are no different from men (1668: 199). Like many pro-woman writers before her, Buffet emphasizes the role of God in two ways. First, she is claiming that women resemble God in the same way that men do. Second, she is claiming that women are created by God in the same way that men are, and in particular, that they are “infused” with the same kind of soul that men are. While Marinella would agree with this latter point, Buffet’s view departs from Marinella’s in insisting that because the forms (i.e., the souls) of men and women “emanate from” a “superior principle” (i.e., God) they must be the same in nobility or dignity, and equal “in everything.” 272

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20.4 Differences 20.4.1  Sexual Differences Establish the Superiority of Women 20.4.1.1  Differences in the Soul While most feminist authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began with an assumption that the rational souls of the sexes were both the same in kind and of equal nobility or dignity, Marinella, although she accepted that the rational soul was the same in kind in both sexes, argued for the superiority of women in two respects: a higher degree of nobility of the soul, and a physiology better suited to rational activity. She conceded the identity of species. It is possible, however, says Marinella, that some individuals within a species might have souls that are “from birth nobler and more excellent than others,” citing Peter Lombard (Sentences 2.32) (Marinella 1999: 55). Marinella supposes that God can create human souls that are the same in kind, but different in degree of nobility, and infuse them into human bodies. She asserts that women’s souls are in fact “created nobler than men’s,” on the basis of two kinds of evidence: (i) the “effects” (gli effetti) that women’s souls have, i.e., the operations of the soul as performed by women and (ii) the beauty of women’s bodies, (1999: 55).10 So there can, on her view, be equality of rational capacity without equal nobility or dignity. Marinella was exceptional in arguing for differences in the degree of nobility in the souls of men and women, but not in arguing that women’s bodies were superior in ways that influenced the quality of the operations of the soul, which was a common strategy of feminist authors in the period.

20.4.1.2  Anatomical and Physiological Differences Fonte and Marinella take the fundamental difference in the bodies of men and women to be physiological rather than anatomical: a difference in the complessione, or constitution, of the sexes. They accept the ancient view that males are hotter and women colder by nature. In Il merito delle donne Fonte’s character Corinna suggests that women’s cold and phlegmatic complexion makes them calmer, but also weaker, more apprehensive, and more credulous than men; in response, the character Helena says that because women are less hot and choleric than men, they are also kinder, gentler, and more restrained in acting on their desires (Fonte 1997: 83–84). Like many of the feminist authors of the querelle, Fonte thus concedes to misogynist authors some of the purported negative features of women’s complexion, while disputing others. Marinella’s innovation was to contest all negative implications of the cooler temperature of the female. She argues that because heat is an “instrument” of the soul, which is to say, a tool used by the soul to produce its effects on the body, the right degree of heat is crucial to producing the best effects (1601: 119). Where in the Aristotelian tradition the assumption was that men have the perfect degree of heat and women a lower, and inadequate, degree of heat to serve as the best instrument of the soul, Marinella insists that women, because they are cooler than men, have in fact a moderate degree of heat which is optimal for all the operations of the soul (1999: 130). A great deal follows from this, on her account. Because women are cooler they also have more moderate desires, which align more closely with the judgments of reason. Those more moderate desires make women more inclined to moral virtue because they are less troubled by the excessive and vicious desires that the heat of men provokes in them (Marinella 1999: 77–78, 131; Marinella 1601: 136). More moderate desires also interfere less with the operations of reason and in particular with deliberation, so that women are better able than men to reflect, deliberate, and decide on courses of action that are consistent with rational judgment. Marinella’s view, is, then, that there are two significant differences between the sexes, compatible with their shared rational 273

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faculty: first, the souls of women are “nobler” from their origins; second, the bodies of women are cooler in ways that allow them to serve the ends of reason and pursue the good more easily than can men. Buffet, who, as we have seen, denies any significant difference between the souls of men and women, nonetheless asserts that there are important differences between the sexes with respect to their bodies. At first glance, Buffet appears to minimize the bodily differences between men and women. She replies to those adversaries who say that there are formal differences – i.e., differences in the soul as form – between men and women that …it is necessary that there should be some dissimilarity, because they are destined by nature to different effects for the maintenance and preservation of species, [but] that this has no bearing on the actions that depend on the will. The faculties of the soul of one sex and the other being all equal; otherwise the soul and mind would be dissimilar, contrary to what has been demonstrated above. (1668: 224–25) This implies that physical differences between the sexes are restricted to the activities of generation and thus irrelevant to their activities as human beings. But Buffet qualifies that claim in her response to another set of claims put forward by those she calls “our adversaries.” Those adversaries believed that the ventricles, the cranial sutures, and the brains of women are smaller and more compressed than men’s, and that as a result they [the ventricles] are filled more readily (because there is very little evaporation) with bitter, cloudy, prickling humours that excite the nerves and membranes of women more quickly and violently, because of the gripping and compression of the sagittal and coronal sutures, and this is what transports them [women] so often to capricious and impulsive movements. (1668: 225)11 This is an example of a physical explanation of the purported moral infirmity of women. It is supposed that women are given to capriciousness and impulsivity, and the cause of that is traced to a disputed anatomical feature of their bodies, and the physiological effects of that feature. The “humors” that Buffet mentions (which she associates with “spirits”), like the moderate heat of the female body that Marinella argued had salutary effects on the moral and intellectual abilities of women, were supposed to mediate between the soul and the body, and hence act as instruments of the soul. The assertion of the adversaries that the cranium and brain of a woman are more compressed than that of a man is accepted by Buffet, just as Marinella accepted the claim that women are colder than men. Buffet, again like Marinella, disputes not the empirical claim of a physical difference between men and women, but the argument that that distinction is one which has effects that are negative for women. She says, in response: “I reply that so far from being a disadvantage for women, this is what raises them far above men, who, because the spirits and humours are incomparably heavier, are with great difficulty moved and agitated” (1668: 226). That is, she agrees that spirits and humor of women are quicker than those of men, but maintains that rather than being a disadvantage, it makes women better at the operations of the soul, since “all composite entities are that much more excellent if all of their parts act more quickly” (1668: 227). Moreover, Buffet points out that since philosophers acknowledge that although the size of the cranium in the case of donkeys, buffalo, and oxen is larger than that of man, those animals “do not for all that have more brains nor better minds”(1668: 228). Buffet’s position ultimately, then, is that although the “soul and mind” is the same in men and women, the compression of the space 274

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within the cranium in the female affects the operations of the soul and mind, producing better “effects and actions” in women (1668: 228). Buffet’s equality claim, like Marinella’s, is more qualified by assertions of superiority, then, than it first appears: she does allow that there will be no difference in the actions of the soul, but she indicates that we must consider “the means, the organs, or the instruments through which they act,” i.e., the body and its organs. While these she says are similar or equal or only slightly different, they may produce differences “in the effects” (les differences dans les effets) (1668: 223); this is close to what Marinella has said (1601: 119). It is worth noting that while Fonte, Marinella, and Buffet agree that the relative coldness of women’s bodies amounts to an advantage in (at least some of ) the operations of the soul, making them superior to men, Buffet’s understanding of the physiological implications of that coldness is quite different. This is some evidence that feminist arguments that trace the purported superiority of women’s intellectual and moral activities to their physiology persisted despite variations in the conception of the interaction of physiology and psychology in different philosophical and medical contexts.

20.4.2  Sexual Differences Are Trivial: The Sexes Are Equal At least one woman in the seventeenth century rejected these attempts to argue for the superiority of women, while maintaining the equality of the sexes. It is significant that in doing so she rejected the idea that differences in the body might affect in any way the activities of the soul. It suggests that arguments for the superiority of one sex over the other (whether misogynist or feminist) were closely associated with claims of the significance of bodily differences between the sexes and of their power to impact on distinctively human capacities for intellectual activity and for moral and political engagement. Marie de Gournay’s position on the rational soul is unqualified. She says that “the unique form, and only differentia, of this human animal consists in the rational soul” (2002: 303 (Egalité)). On her view, this implies that the human animal is neither a man nor a woman, which is to say that men and women do not have different essential forms, since the sexes do not constitute different species. She claims that the sexes were made “for the sole purpose of reproduction,” as we have seen Buffet suggest, i.e., to allow the species to generate new individuals, and not as a way of assigning different purposes or degrees of worth to the lives of men and women. That is, sex is a distinction in the bodies, and not in the essential forms, of men and women; moreover, the physical differences that distinguish the bodies of men and women have no bearing on the capacities or activities of the rational soul. In another treatise, Chrysante, Ou Convalescence D’une Petite Fille, de Gournay repeats the point, expanding it to the entire species and phrasing it as a hypothetical, but one which no one could reasonably question: “If it is true that the human species is born to intellectual capacity and to equality (à la suffisance et à l’équité), which no one of right mind could doubt…” (2002: 313). The claim, again, is that the equality of persons is founded on a rational capacity. In asserting the sameness of the rational soul in men and women, de Gournay agrees with Fonte, Marinella, and Buffet. But, like Buffet and unlike Marinella, she takes the implication of that sameness of reason to be a comprehensive equality of being, as is evident in her stress on the rational soul as the unique form, and only difference distinguishing human persons from other animals (2002: 330). De Gournay extends her claim of equality beyond the nature of the soul to the realm of action, arguing that where natures are the same actions will be the same. This distinguishes her position from those of Marinella and Buffet, and indeed almost every feminist writing before her. The implication of her view is that there is no reason to expect different behavior from men and women, nor to assign them different tasks. And yet even de Gournay seems to assume that there are observable differences in the capacities and actions of men and women. The originality of her 275

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position is not then that she denies the existence of what we would call gender differences, but that she refuses to trace those differences to anatomical or physiological differences that condition the effects and actions of the soul. Instead, she attributes most gender differences to education: If then women achieve [higher] degrees of excellence less often than men; it’s astonishing that the lack of a good education (ce deffaut de bonne education), and even [more] the application of a purposefully and explicitly bad [education], does not produce worse results, and does not prevent her [a woman] from achieving anything. (2002: 299 (Egalité)) Moreover, in the concluding phrase of a passage we have seen above, de Gournay suggests that while equality of intellectual capacity is natural, that capacity must be cultivated through education, without which it will not be realized: If it is true that the human species is born to intellectual capacity and to equality, which no one of right mind could doubt: it is consequently more true, that if education does not contribute to it [intellectual capacity], man’s character rejects them [intellect and equality]. (2002: 313 (Chrysante, Ou Convalescence D’une Petite Fille)) The point applies not only to women, but also to men, and so does not undermine but rather reinforces the claim of equality. As de Gournay asks, just after making the general claim about the importance of education for the actualization of intellectual capacities, “are there greater differences between men and [women], or among women, according to the education (l’institution) they have received, depending on whether they are raised in the city or a village, and depending on their nation?” (2002: 299 (Egalité)). In other words, it is not only sexual differences that we should attribute to differences in education, but also class and cultural differences. She refuses, then, to attribute not only sexual differences, but also other sorts of differences sometimes taken to be “natural,” to physical causes.

20.5 Conclusion In the Introduction to this chapter, I mentioned a distinction between equality as a conception of something that is the ground or basis of equal treatment, a shared feature that bestows (by nature or divine action) on all members of a kind or a group equality of worth, and equality as a conception of what is required socially and politically in light of that equality of worth – what the political community should provide to equals, whether it be equal liberty or education or political opportunity. The authors discussed in this chapter focus on establishing the equality of worth of women with men, both by pointing to the shared feature of the rational soul, and by arguing against the view that the female body somehow impedes the operations of reason (often arguing, on the contrary, that the differences that distinguish the female from the male body are advantageous to rational activity). While some commentators have argued that demands for political equality only emerged later in the seventeenth century, or later still in the revolutionary period, there is evidence that feminist authors in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century (including Fonte, Marinella, and de Gournay) were already suggesting that because women had rational souls they should be free from subjection to men, have access to education, and be entitled to participate in political governance.12 That is, they were already demanding equal treatment with men, not merely asserting their metaphysical equality. The idea that a shared capacity for reason is the basis of human equality has a long history after the period discussed here; it remains a popular, if contested, view.13 It is worth remarking 276

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in closing, however, that there were competing notions of equality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One was the view, held both by Hobbes and by Cavendish, that persons are equal because equally capable of inflicting violence on each other, and equally vulnerable to that violence, with the implication that no one is by nature subject to another (Hobbes 1994: 74; Cavendish 2002: Act III, Scene 8).14 What these different conceptions demonstrate is that feminists were engaged in thinking about equality and in conceptualizing the features – whether reason or strength – that were presumed to be the basis of equality, and moreover that they were thinking about the ways in which reason and the body interacted.

Notes 1 See Waldron (2017: 1–3) for the distinction between “equality” as the basis of equal treatment (what he calls “basic equality”) and “equality” as a strategy for treating people as equals. This is not a distinction drawn by feminists in the period under discussion in this chapter, but it is a useful way to think about what they were asserting. 2 While we might now think in terms of the effects that certain physiological processes have on psychological processes (to take a neutral example: extreme thirst might impair cognitive capacity; or a gendered example: that the production of oxytocin post-partum might promote a desire to nurture the infant), in the period that is the focus here authors were concerned with the impact of anatomy and physiology on the operations of the soul, understood as an immaterial but complex entity that bestowed capacities peculiar to human beings on men and women. 3 Benson (1992: 2) and Cox (1997: 15–16) suggest that male authors in the querelle may have been insincere in the presentation of feminist arguments; the evidence for that seems to be lacking (see Kolsky 2005: 180, and Flood 2014: 27). But at any rate most commentators seem to assume the sincerity of the female authors. 4 I say “traditions” because while some of these authors had certainly read, and been influenced by, the works of Plato and Aristotle, in Latin, Italian, or French translations, the ideas of the ancient philosophical schools also exerted influence through their interpretations, especially those of Augustine, Aquinas, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and other medieval authors; moreover textbooks, handbooks, compilations, and other secondary sources were widely available. Katharine Park and Eckhard Kessler note that “The period was a complicated and confused one, and the diversity of the philosophical materials, collected from different schools and traditions, makes it burdensome to exhume the position of a given author” (1988: 463). 5 On the rational soul as distinguishing human beings, see Aristotle, De Anima II. 3 414b18–19; for the soul as the form of the body, see Aristotle, De Anima II. 2 414a4–19. 6 For an analysis of the understanding of the structure of the soul in Renaissance psychology, see Park (1988: 465–667). Park points to the textbook by Gregor Reisch, Margarita philosophica (Philosophic Pearl) (1503–1517), an introduction to Aristotelian philosophy, as an influential source of opinion on the soul. 7 The notion of spiritus came from the concept of pneuma in ancient philosophical contexts; its status as material or immaterial was contested. According to Gerard Verbeke, St. Augustine rescued spirits from the materialism of pneuma, but in the Renaissance there was a return among Galenic doctors to the more material definition of the ancients (1945: 489). In the seventeenth century the physician Marin Cureau de la Chambre conceived of the spirits as emanations from the humors, differing from person to person according to a variety of parameters, including sex, and believed to be responsible not only for interactions between the body and soul of a person, but also for certain phenomena (including contagion and “l’amour d’inclination”) external to the body. See Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin (2020: 146–47). Albert Darmon (1985: 18) says that Cureau de la Chambre’s Nouvelles pensées sur les causes de l’amour d’inclination is directly borrowed from Ficino’s De Amore. 8 Some early sources of the notion of nobility as an intellectual and moral capacity influencing Renaissance feminists included Cicero, On Obligations, I, 105–06, Dante’s Convivio Book IV, where he describes nobiltà as the “seed of happiness” (IV XX, 9) and identifies it with the intellect (IV, xxi, 4–5). Many other works on nobility circulated in the fifteenth century, of which the most widely influential, according to Albert Rabil, Jr., were Buonacorso da Montemagno, De nobilitate (~1428), Poggio Bracciolini, De nobilitate (1440), and Bartolomeo Sacchi (Il Platina), De vera nobilitate (~1475–1477) (1991: 2). The notion of dignity, sometimes used interchangeably with nobility, often emphasized the elevated status of human beings relative to animals; see Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496) and Pietro Pomponazzi’s Immortality of the Soul (1516).

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Marguerite Deslauriers 9 Marinella alters the wording somewhat. Fonte wrote “E perché se commune è la figura/ Se non le sostanze variate?” Marinella replaced “figura” with “natura”; the lines in Marinella are translated by Dunhill as: “And why if their nature is shared, if their substances do not differ?” 10 Marinella understood women to be superior to men in beauty, but she took beauty to be a sign of the superiority of women’s souls, rather than an independent form of superiority. 11 For the background to these anatomical claims, see Stolberg (2003). The description Suchon offers here of the trapped humors may be drawn from contemporary medical discussions: Cureau de la Chambre spoke of humors as “acrimonious” to indicate that they were particularly dense when unable to escape the body (Caractère, vol. II, pp. 68–69); Furetière, in his Dictionnaire universel (1690) defined “acrimonie” as “aigreur piquante” (prickling bitterness). For both these references, see Pellegrin (2020), notes 41 and 42. 12 For the view that demands for political equality emerged only later, or that there is a divide between Renaissance and modern feminism, see Cott (1989), King (1991), and Gottlieb (1997). But Marinella argued that women were entitled to share in political governance; Moderata Fonte and Arcangela Tarabotti argued that women should enjoy the liberty of person and of movement enjoyed by men; and de Gournay asserted women’s entitlement to education. These are demands for political equality. 13 Some criticisms of rationality as the basis of equality can be found in Arneson (2015), Christiano (2014), and Lucas (1965). 14 I am grateful to Mary Jo MacDonald for drawing this point to my attention.

References Agrippa, H. C. (1996) Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, ed. and trans. A. Rabil, Jr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published 1529. Arneson, R. (2015) “Basic Equality: Neither Acceptable Nor Rejectable,” in U. Steinhoff (ed.), Do All Persons Have Equal Moral Worth?, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 30–52. Benson, P. J. (1992) The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Berriot-Salvadore, E. (2002) “Une femme qui écrit,” in M. de Gournay (ed.), Oeuvres complètes, Tome I, Paris: Champion, pp. 83–89. Buffet, M. (1668) Traité sur les Eloges des Illustres Sçavantes, Anciennes & Modernes (Nouvelles observations sur la langue française; où il est traitté des termes anciens et inusitez et du bel usage des mots nouveaux avec les Éloges des Illustres Sçavantes Anciennes et Modernes), Paris: Jean Cusson. Castiglione, B. (1959) The Book of the Courtier, trans. C. S. Singleton, New York: Anchor. Originally published 1528. Cavendish, M. (2002) Bell in Campo and the Sociable Companions, ed. A. G. Bennett, Peterborough: Broadview Press. Christiano, T. (2015) “Rationality, Equal Status, and Egalitarianism,” in U. Steinhoff (ed.), Do All Persons Have Equal Moral Worth? Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 53–75. Cicero (2000) On Obligations, trans. P. G. Walsh, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cott, N. (1989) “What’s in a Name? The Limits of ‘Social Feminism’ or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 76(3): 809–29. Cox, V. (1992) The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue and its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1997) “Introduction,” in M. Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. V. Cox, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dante (2018) Convivio: A Dual-Language Critical Edition, ed. and trans. A. Frisardi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darmon, A. (1985) Les Corps Immatériels: Esprits et images dans l’œuvre de Marin Cureau de la Chambre (1594– 1669), Paris: Vrin. De Gournay, M. (2002) Oeuvres complètes (2 vol.), ed. J.-C. Arnould, E. Berriot, C. Blum, A. L. Franchetti, M.-C. Thomine, and V. Worth-Stylianou. Paris: H. Champion. Deslauriers, M. (2022) “The Superiority of Women in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8(1): 1–19. Domenichi, L. (1551) La nobiltà delle donne, Venice: Giolito. Dubois-Nayt, A., N. Dufournaud, and A. Paupert (eds.) (2012) Revisiter La Querelle Des Femmes: Discours Sur L’égalité-L’inégalité Des Sexes, De 1400 À 1600, Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne.

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Men, Women, Equality, and Difference Equicola, M. (2004) De Mulieribus – Delle Donne, ed. G. Luccesini and P. Totari, Pisa/Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici. Originally published 1501. Flood, J. (2014) “Rhetorical Play in Cornelius Agrippa: The Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex,” in K. E. Olsen and J. R. Veenstra (eds.), Airy Nothings, Leiden: Brill, pp. 25–39. Fonte, M. (1581) Tredici Canti del Floridoro, Venice: Rampazetti. (1600) Il merito delle donne. Ove chiaramente si scuopre quanto siano elle degne e più perfette degli huomini, Venezia: Imberti. (1997) The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. V. Cox, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published 1600. Goggio, B. (1487) De mulieribus, Ferrara (manuscript.) Gottlieb, B. (1997) “The Problem of Feminism in the Fifteenth Century” in R. Blumenfield-Kosinski (ed.), The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Hicks, É. (ed.) (1977) Le Débat sur “Le Roman de la Rose,” Paris: Honoré Champion. Hobbes, T. (1994) Leviathan, ed. E Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett. Kelly, J. (1982) “Early Feminist Theory and the ‘Querelle des Femmes’, 1400–1789,” Signs 8(1): 4–28. King, M. (1991) Women of the Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kolsky, S. (2005) The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy, Turnhout, Belgique: Brepols Publishers. Lombard, P. (2007) The Sentences, trans. G. Silano, Toronto: PIMS. Lucas, J. R. (1965) “Against Equality,” Philosophy 40(154): 296–307. MacKinnon, C. (1987) “Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination” in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marinella, L. (1601) La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne co’ diffetti et mancamenti de gli uomini (The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men), Venice: Giolito. (1999) The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men, ed. and trans. A. Dunhill, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published 1601. Park, K. (1988) “The Organic Soul,” in C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 464–484. Park, K. and E. Kessler (1988) “The Concept of Psychology,” in C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 453–463. Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity Press. (1992) “Equality, Difference, Subordination: The Politics of Motherhood and Women’s Citizenship,” in G. Bock and S. James (eds.), Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, London: Routledge, pp. 14–27. Pellegrin, M-F. (2020) Pensées du corps et différences des sexes à l’époque moderne. Lyon: ENS Éditions. Piaget, A. (1891) “Chronologie des Epistres sur le Roman de la rose,” in Études romanes dédiées à Gaston Paris, Paris: Bouillon, pp. 113–120. Rabil, A. Jr. (ed. and trans). (1991) Knowledge, Goodness, and Power: The Debate over Nobility among Quattrocento Italian Humanists, Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Reisch, G. (1503) Margarita philosophica (Philosophic Pearl), Freiburg: Johannes Schott. Scott, J. W. (1996) Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stolberg, M. (2003) “A Woman Down to her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Isis 94(2): 274–99. Strozzi, A. (1501 (uncertain)) Defensione de le donne, Firenze (manuscript). Published in F. Zambrini (ed.), La Defensione delle donne d’autore anonimo. Bologna: G. Romagnoli, 1876. The Holy Bible. Anonymous. The New English Bible, with the Apocrypha, in the Joint Committee on the New Translation of the Bible (trans.), New York: Oxford University Press. Trousset, A. (1617) Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes, dédié à la plus mauvaise du monde (Alphabet Compendium of the Imperfection and Wickedness of Women, dedicated to the Worst Woman in the World), Paris: Petit-Pas. Verbeke, G. (1945) L’évolution de la doctrine du penuma du stoicisme à St Augustin, Étude philosophique, Louvain: Editions de L’Institut supérieure de Philosophie. Waldron, J. (2017) One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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PART II Section D: Social-Political Philosophy

21 AUTONOMY AND MARRIAGE Kelin Emmett

The greater contemporary attention paid to women’s philosophical writings in the early modern period has revealed a common emphasis among these works on the illegitimacy and injustice of women’s subjugation to men. Women, who have the same natural capacities and inherent moral worth as men, are deprived of their freedom and agency by cultural and institutional arrangements that serve men. Yet most women tend to view their subordinate position as natural and just, rather than as a socially imposed dispossession that can be remedied. So, many of these texts take aim at women’s heteronomy and register its social origin. We also find criticisms of patriarchal marriage common enough, along with complaints that it is an institution corrupted by the dowry system and unscrupulous interests in wealth and status, into which young women are often pressured, and even coerced. In marriage, women lose what little capacity they may have for self-determination since they are subjected to the arbitrary rule of a husband and additionally must shoulder marital responsibilities that consume them. So it is principally linked with women’s subordination, through it they come under the rule of specific men. Yet, it is also the institution most central to their lives, through which they gain access to financial and material subsistence and the possibilities of social recognition allowed to them. Women are trained from the earliest ages to aspire to become wives and to structure their lives and preoccupations so that they are most favorable to securing a marriage successfully. Thus, it also becomes increasingly common to find critiques of women’s heteronomy explicitly linked with the conditions that subjugate them to the rule of men and the social structures that are most oppressive to them. Since chief among these is the institution of marriage, we find corresponding arguments for the “single” or “celibate life” as an alternative mode of existence in which women, unbound by marriage (and the cloister), would preserve, at least in some respects their capacities for self-rule (see, e.g., Cox 1995; Fonte 1997; Tarabotti 2004; Suchon 2010). In what follows, I will take Moderata Fonte’s1 work The Worth of Women (1600) as an early example of a text that criticizes women’s subjugation to men and closely examines the link between marriage and heteronomy. This dialogue contains arguments for women’s equality as well as stinging critiques of marriage. Interpreters agree that its radical elements depart from earlier critiques of women’s inequality in Europe (King 1991; Cox 1995, 1997; Kolsky 2001; Broad and Green 2009; Deslauriers 2019), which defended women’s inherent equality without contesting their inferior social position or the social conditions that limited them (Cox 1995: 518–19, 525). Indeed, what is remarkable about Fonte’s dialogue is the way in which it contests women’s subordinate position vis-à-vis men and links it explicitly with the social structures that deprive them of their freedom. Yet interpreters also agree that Fonte’s dialogue does not offer any DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-27

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straightforward feminist vision or appear to offer any clear prescription for social redress (Broad and Green 2009: 122). Margaret King, for example, suggests that because Renaissance society was ‘irreparably dominated by male concerns’, women, like Fonte, who confronted their situation as oppressive, tended to propose ‘retreat’—taking refuge among women—rather than advocate for social change: Within the structures [Fonte’s] critique left undisturbed there was no place for women: no role for women in cities where only men could be citizens or kings. Until those ancient structures fell to a male assault in the name of civil rights and natural law in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, no truly modern feminist claim could be made. (King 1991: 237) King’s analysis implies that retreat could not also be a concrete practical strategy adopted on the basis of a truly modern feminist claim. Modern feminism is regarded as developing out of the eighteenth-century republican critiques, which paved the way for modern egalitarian social relations based on individual rights to liberty and property—and so presupposes political developments, which were not yet in place at the end of the Renaissance. In the following discussion of Fonte’s critique of male patriarchy and patriarchal marriage, I challenge this view. I argue that Fonte’s critique anticipates a shift to the modern paradigm in political philosophy which regards the legitimate relations of power and authority as having their source in the voluntary will, or the autonomous authorization of the individual. But since Fonte could more clearly recognize the conditions that were most oppressive to the women of her class and time, her critique of heteronomy and its conditions is prior to any positive conceptualization of the general social and material conditions necessary for women’s autonomy. The conditions for autonomy are primarily characterized negatively, as a retreat from the social structures most intimately linked with heteronomy. Thus, retreat, especially from marriage, is a practical, if ultimately partial, strategy to reclaim conditions for self-determination.

21.1  A Modern Argument The dialogue begins with a description of the free and self-ruled city of Venice, within which live a group of women ‘who would often steal some time together for a quiet conversation … and … safe from any fear of being spied on by men or constrained by their presence, they would speak freely on whatever subject they pleased’ (Fonte 1997: 45). The group consists of seven women: young widow Leonora, who has vowed never to remarry, newly married Helena, unmarried Virginia, and Corinna—a sort of anomaly among them—who is also a young, unmarried girl, but who is intent on never marrying and pursuing a scholarly life instead. There is also Adriana, Virginia’s mother, who is bent on young Virginia marrying, and two other married women, Cornelia and Lucretia, both dissatisfied with their marriages, the former significantly more caustic. The dialogue’s main themes are established quickly—whether men are universally bad, for example—and prominent among them are critiques of marriage, which are directed at Virginia for whom marriage is imminent. After a brief exchange about the falsity and abusiveness of men and the naiveté of young brides (who ‘have yet to learn how quickly a wedding cake can go stale’), the group retreats to the garden where they undertake a debate about the nature of men and the relation between the sexes (Fonte 1997: 55). Adriana, the ‘Queen’, assigns Corinna, Cornelia, and Leonora to argue the case against men, and they quickly proffer several biting criticisms. Virginia then returns an obvious, yet inconspicuous, question: ‘…if men are as imperfect as you say they are, then why are they our superiors on every count?’ (Fonte 1997: 59). If men are so flawed, how is it that they have come to hold a general position of authority over women in every respect? This 284

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question sets the stage for one of the text’s most interesting philosophical arguments; for is not men’s superior (social) status itself proof of their intrinsic superiority? Corinna replies: This pre-eminence is something they have unjustly arrogated to themselves. And when it’s said that women must be subject to men, the phrase should be understood in the same sense as when we say that we are subject to natural disaster, diseases, and all other accidents of this life: it’s not the case of being subject in the sense of obeying, but rather of suffering an imposition…But they take the phrase in a contrary sense and set themselves up as tyrants over us, arrogantly usurping that dominion over women that they claim is their right, but which is more properly ours. (Fonte 1997: 59) This is the main thesis of Corinna’s central argument (of which this passage is only the first part), namely, that men have unjustly usurped their positions of authority over women. Despite her wit, Corinna’s likening men’s rule to other natural calamities underscores its contingent and unlicensed basis. Women do not obey men in the sense of discharging legitimate obligations, rather they suffer them in the same way one might be ‘subject’ to ‘all the other accidents of this life’, but men mistakenly claim their dominion over women as their right. Fonte draws the reader’s attention to the distinction between de facto and de jure authority; women are ‘subject’ to men in fact—and many men (as well as many women) might believe that this subjection is legitimate—but this is not the same thing as its actually being legitimate and thus grounding a corresponding obligation. Men fail to heed this distinction and so they equivocate when they treat their de facto authority as de jure. Corinna next takes aim at the Aristotelian argument that women’s inferiority is rooted in their nature and that their social roles, and the qualities and activities appropriate to them, are rooted in biological differences (Fonte 1997: 59n). For don’t we see that men’s rightful task is to go out to work and wear themselves out trying to accumulate wealth, as though they were our factors or stewards, so that we can remain at home like the lady of the house directing their work and enjoying the profit of their labors? That, if you like, is the reason that men are naturally stronger and more robust than us—they need to be, so they can put up with the hard labor they must endure in our service. (Fonte 1997: 59) Deliberately ‘paradoxical’, Corinna accepts misogynist premises and draws the opposite conclusion (Fonte 1997: 59n). Since men are naturally the stronger and more active sex, they should labor in the service of women. Whatever natural differences might exist between men and women, they do not ground women’s subservience to men any more than they could ground men’s subservience to women. Lucretia then reminds Corinna that men were created before women, so that women stand in need of their help, thus prompting the second step in Corinna’s argument. Corinna agrees that men were created before women, but argues that this proves women’s superiority since they are the most final of God’s creations. Moreover, women are made of superior material—living flesh, rather than ‘lifeless earth’ (Fonte 1997: 60). Neither the temporal nor the material priority proves men’s superiority. With these arguments, Corinna challenges any scriptural basis for women’s inferiority. Thus, in answer to Virginia’s question, Corinna argues that men have unjustly usurped the power they in fact wield over women. If the traditional justifications for women’s inferiority are unsuccessful in grounding men’s claims to de jure authority, then their de facto authority is without 285

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justification. Corinna crucially calls attention to a justificatory vacuum; neither scripture nor nature mandate men’s dominance, so what else could carry the justificatory burden? Helena suggests that Corinna speaks out of envy (Fonte 1997: 60). Leonora corrects her and spells out the full implication of Corinna’s argument: We are not speaking ill of them out of envy…but out of respect for truth…For if a man steals … he must be called a thief. If men usurp our rights, should we not complain and declare that they have wronged us? For if we are their inferiors in status, but not in worth, this is an abuse that has been introduced into the world and that men have then, over time, gradually translated into law and custom; and it has become so entrenched that they claim (and actually believe) that the status they have gained through their bullying is theirs by right…Does this seem a matter of such little interest to us that we should be quiet and let things pass in silence? (Fonte 1997: 61) With the traditional justifications defeated, it becomes clear that men have stolen their status and usurped women’s natural rights. The only accounting for their de facto authority is force. This expropriation of authority, grounded only in bullying, gradually became the custom, and once institutionalized, secures the semblance of legitimacy. But force does not make right, and men’s de facto authority does not make it de jure, no matter how much men believe that it does—dressing it up with erroneous justifications. Here, Leonora proffers a clear moral principle: status should track natural worth. If women are not inferior to men in their worth, but are found to have an inferior status, this is a human intervention, the result of force. And this theft of status and of the recognition they are owed is a manifest injustice that women should not let ‘pass in silence’. What is particularly striking about this argument—the argument that men have unjustly usurped their authority such that their rule is tyrannical—is that it anticipates the prototypical arguments of the later social contract theorists, arguments which become increasingly predominant in the following centuries, and which criticize the heteronomous political condition, that is the condition of being ruled by another—as illegitimate and therefore, unjust. For these thinkers, the legitimacy of a ruling power must derive from the voluntary will of the individual, that is, it must be autonomously authorized. Indeed, contemporary political philosophers characterize the modern period in terms of this convergence on method and standard for political legitimacy that is closely associated with the theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau (Riley 1982; Bobbio 1993; Rawls 2007). In these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century contractarian critiques of authority, we find a break with the ancient and medieval Aristotelian view, according to which social positions, and corresponding rights and obligations, are determined ascriptively in accordance with ‘natural’ categories (Bobbio 1993: 8–9). These theorists employ an argument by elimination, which rejects traditional justifications for authority and leaves force or consent as the only remaining explanations for de facto authority. Since force, cannot give rise to a legitimate obligation, the negative argument logically gives way to a positive defense of ‘consent’ as the only possible principle of legitimate authority. So, for example, Hobbes rejects that earthly authority is grounded in divine command and argues that natural differences among individuals are not substantial enough to ground categorical distinctions or natural claims to authority (Hobbes 1994: 74–75). It is force alone that begins relationships of domination and subordination in the pre-political condition. Locke rejects arguments that derive authority from ‘Adam’s private dominion and paternal jurisdiction’ (1993: 115), and further argues that all men are naturally without ‘subordination or subjection’, so that if we are not to conclude that all existing governments are ‘the product only of force and violence’, we must identify ‘another original of political power’ (Locke 1993: 115–16). And Rousseau argues against the Aristotelian view that ‘some are born for slavery and some for domination’ (Rousseau 286

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2011: 158). Aristotle mistakes the ‘effect for the cause’ because if ‘there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves contrary to nature, force has produced the first slaves…’ (Rousseau 2011: 158). He further denies that descendancy from Adam can establish legitimate authority. This leaves force as the only remaining explanation for much de facto authority, submission to which is an ‘act of necessity, not of will’, and so can never give rise to a duty (Rousseau 2011: 159). ‘Let us then agree that force does not bring about right and that one is obliged to obey only legitimate powers’ (Rousseau 2011: 159). These arguments share a core structure: they reject justifications for differentials in power and authority that appeal to nature or scripture, and they agree that force is all that is left to explain de facto authority unless some other ‘original of political power’ is identified. They thereby wrest from traditional hierarchical models a principle of natural equality that grounds a positive argument for the only possible standard of legitimate authority. ‘Since no man has a natural authority over his fellowman, and since force does not give rise to any right, agreements alone therefore remain the basis of all legitimate authority among men’ (Rousseau 2011: 159). Each of these classic theorists argues that obligations, therefore, begin only with ‘consent’ (though, for Hobbes, force sufficient to compel obedience necessarily begets consent (1971: 127)). According to the standard narrative, this core belief that legitimate authority requires the consent of those to whom it applies is the ‘key idea’ that marks the modern period (Riley 1982: 1; Rawls 2007: 11). Henceforth, de jure authority is regarded as a product of convention rather than nature, and its principle of legitimation is consent (Bobbio 1993: 2, 9). Correlatively, any de facto authority not grounded in ‘consent’ is revealed as the product of force, and, at least for Locke and Rousseau, is therefore arbitrary and so ‘despotic’ (Locke 1993: 123–24; Rousseau 2011: 160–63). As Locke puts it, ‘he who would get me into his power without my consent’ can only desire ‘to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom, i.e., make me a slave’ (Locke 1993: 123). Locke and Rousseau further argue that one cannot ‘consent’ to their own slavery or give themselves over to a despot rightfully; for Locke it is immoral (Locke 1993: 126), for Rousseau it is ‘absurd’—an agreement that is wholly at one’s own expense and wholly to another’s advantage is nonsensical (Rousseau 2011: 162). Fonte’s dialogue contains this same argument by elimination. Dismissing the Aristotelian view that women are naturally inferior and rebuking a scriptural foundation, she concludes that force, enshrined in both the laws and customs, is the only remaining explanation for men’s de facto authority over women. She further distinguishes between compulsion and obligation, and claims that the former cannot ground the latter (Fonte 1997: 59). If women must suffer male dominance, it is not because men are entitled to their obedience. Men’s de facto authority is therefore illegitimate, and so arbitrary; men usurp women’s natural rights to liberty (and property) through their bullying and thereby ‘set themselves up as tyrants’. It is force then, the true genesis of male power, that first produces women as inferior, but, setting itself up as the law and custom, it feigns legitimacy and maintains them in this subordinate status. Men themselves ‘forget’ this real origin of their ‘superior’ position and misrepresent this usurpation as their right (Fonte 1997: 61). Indeed, it is possible to extract from these arguments a critical moral principle that enables a more systematic critique of women’s artificial inequality and heteronomy. If women are equal to men in their natural worth and yet we find them everywhere in inferior social positions, then this is an ‘abuse’, which, regardless of its many social guises, ultimately rests on force (Fonte 1997: 61). This implies that Fonte thinks that women, given the opportunity, would not really agree to their general subordination to men, or what is perhaps the same thing, that insofar as they do ‘agree’ to it, such agreement is fraudulent, still resting on ‘an abuse’ (Fonte 1997: 61). With this principle in mind, the ensuing discussions of the discrimination and mistreatment women endure from their male relatives take on a more politicized tenor, and the context is set for criticizing marriage and the dowry system as the institutional arrangement through which their subjection to men primarily occurs. 287

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Thus, like the arguments that the social contract theorists later make challenging the rule of some men over others, an argument standardly thought to commence the modern period in political philosophy, Fonte makes a similar argument challenging the rule of all men over women much earlier. But she does not press the positive argument; she never explicitly says that legitimate relations between the sexes are therefore governed by voluntary agreement. It is, however, remarkable, and I think not coincidental, that we find the notions of choice, resistance, and women’s lack of self-determination so thematized in her text. This is especially the case in her discussion of the connection between women’s heteronomy and marriage.

21.2  Marriage and Heteronomy As the women go on to discuss the inequality of the sexes, sexual double standards (conventions introduced by men for their benefit), the merits of women and the demerits of men, the various abuses men make of their unlawful power, and the search, ultimately for a cure for what can only be described as systematic misogyny, marriage is front and center in these discussions. Corinna declares early in the dialogue that she would ‘rather die than submit to a great rough man who would want to rule her life’ (Cox 1997: 48). Leonora, on no uncertain terms, objects to remarrying: ‘I’d rather drown than submit again to a man! I’ve just escaped from servitude and suffering and you’re asking me to go back of my own free will and get tangled up in all that again?’ (Fonte 1997: 53). Throughout, marriage is represented as benefiting only men. Adriana, for example, likens an unmarried man to ‘a fly without a head’, and likens their ‘filthy and messy’ houses to ‘workhouses’ (Fonte 1997: 116). But the comedic accompanies a more serious criticism of the marriage transaction, and the inequitable distribution of its benefits and burdens. After extolling the virtues of daughters, the birth of whom men foolishly lament, Corinna claims that daughters, caring and devoted, simply require ‘a dowry for them to buy themselves a husband’ (Fonte 1997: 113). Helena disagrees, ‘[t]hat’s not true…[d]owries are paid to husbands because when a man marries, he is shouldering a great burden; and men who are not rich could not maintain a household without the subsidy of a dowry’ (Fonte 1997: 113). Corinna corrects her: You’ve got it all wrong… the woman when she marries has to take on the expense of children and other worries; she’s more in need of acquiring money than giving it away. Because if she were alone, without a husband, she could live like a queen on her dowry (more or less so of course according to her social position). But when she takes a husband, especially if he is poor, as is often the case, what exactly does she gain from it, except that instead of being her own mistress and the mistress of her own money, she becomes a slave, and loses her liberty and along with her liberty, her control over her own property, surrendering all she has to the man who has bought her … Look what a good deal marriage is for women! They lose their property, lose themselves, and get nothing in return, except children to trouble them, and the rule of a man, who orders them about at his will. (Cox 1997: 113–14) Corinna objects to the injustice of the dowry system, which treats women as an appendage to their own property and forces them to purchase their own slavery. The benefits of marriage accrue only to men, whereas women lose any semblance of autonomy, deprived of their liberty and entitlement to (their) property, they become ‘slaves’, subject to the arbitrary rule of their husbands. Thus, marriage is a bad bargain for women, an ill-advised transaction. Leonora suggests that they might even ‘endure’ it if men treated women with some ‘parity’, but instead they ‘insist on 288

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exerting such absolute control over us and in such an arrogant manner, treating us like slaves who cannot take a step without asking their permission or say a word without their jumping down our throats’ (Fonte 1997: 61). Consider Virginia’s hesitation to marry. Adriana warns her that she will ‘have to stay within four walls all day and dress soberly, without any of the fineries and fripperies you’re allowed now because that’s what happens to young girls who don’t want to get married’ (Fonte 1997: 239). On the other hand, the women have made a compelling case that women who marry are subject to the arbitrary inclinations of their husbands, and very often deprived of their liberty. There are many husbands who keep their wives on so tight a leash that they almost object to the air itself coming near them; so that the poor things, thinking that by marrying, they are winning for themselves a certain womanly freedom to enjoy some respectable pastimes, find themselves more constricted than ever before, kept like animals within four walls and subjected to a hateful guardian… (Fonte 1997: 68) And the dialogue opens with Helena reporting that she’s ‘dismayed’ to find that her new husband is ‘quite insistent’ that she does not leave the house, not even to attend weddings and banquets (Fonte 1997: 47). Since a young noble woman was generally kept more secluded before marriage than after (Fonte 1997: 47), that Helena finds herself forbidden to partake in activities typically allowed to married women underscores the fact that women are subject to the arbitrary will of their husbands. Thus, we come to realize that women are deprived of their liberty whether they marry or not.2 These contradictions demonstrate women’s constricted set of options, and the penalties, censures, and deprivation that accompanies each of them, thus giving tangible expression to a prominent feature of their oppression. Throughout, it is consistently shown that women have little liberty, before, during, or after marriage. Nevertheless, given women’s limited options, Leonora concedes that if she can surely find one, a woman is advised to take a good husband, [b]ut there are so few good ones around that to be on the safe side (remembering that once you’ve chosen there is no going back), I would urge her in the strongest possible terms to shun marriage like the plague. (Fonte 1997: 240; emphasis mine) Concerned about her impending fate, the discussion troubles Virginia. Adriana offers advice on how she might weather her future tyrant (Fonte 1997: 238–39), but these aggrieved maternal attempts to alleviate Virginia’s misgivings are really intended to reconcile her to the inevitable. For when Virginia hints that if it were up to her, she might not marry, but that she has to obey her family’s wishes, Adriana says, [w]hen it comes to that dear … I’d be quite happy to respect your opinion, but your uncles have decided that you must marry, because you’ve inherited such a fortune and it needs to be in safe hands, so I don’t really know what else I can do with you. (Fonte 1997: 48) She has ‘no choice but to find her a husband’ (Fonte 1997: 238). This exchange illustrates that neither daughter nor mother really has a ‘choice’ in whether Virginia marries, underscoring the grim reality that the ‘sacrifice of the daughter’ is a hard fact of life (Kolsky 2001). One of the dialogue’s central themes, then, whether to marry or resist marriage, given the bad deal it presents 289

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for women, is, in the end, revealed to be no choice at all; or one fraught with censure and social and material penalty. Marriage then is the institution most central to the women’s oppression, through it they are thoroughly controlled by their male relations and further subjected to the arbitrary rule of a particular man. It is chiefly represented as the domain of ‘servitude and suffering’—in which a woman loses everything and gains nothing, such that it would be absurd for any woman who has escaped it and regained her freedom to use it only to resubmit to the tyranny of a husband (Fonte 1997: 53).

21.3  Feminist Implications The implications of Fonte’s arguments for the illegitimacy of male dominance in general, and husbandly authority in particular, are radical. They are certainly more radical than those that the classic contractarians themselves were willing to embrace. The distinctive accomplishment of these contractarian arguments was their demystification of relations of power and the related insight that hierarchical relations not originating in the voluntary acts of the individuals’ own will are the result of force. These theorists are celebrated for introducing a profound break in political thinking about relations of authority and domination, yet their arguments were not reasonably extended to women and their subordination in the patriarchal family. To see this, consider the transformation that the notion of the ‘marriage contract’ undergoes in seventeenth-century England where the newly emerging contractarian framework articulated a challenge to the source and limits of monarchical authority. This challenge precipitated a set of political debates about the nature and source of husbandly authority and the marriage/social contract analogue (Shanley 1979).3 Parliamentarian and republican writers in the Civil war era argued for limits to monarchical authority by appealing to ‘consent’ as the foundation of legitimate authority. Royalists responded by pressing the analogy between monarchical and husbandly authority, citing the ‘marriage contract’ as exemplary of a divinely ordained contract that each entered by their free ‘consent’, but in which the husband has a permanent and natural right to rule over his wife (Shanley 1979: 80). In the marriage contract, each of the parties consents to a relationship that is essentially hierarchical and unalterable, and so, similarly, the people, having ceded their original rights to their sovereign, had to endure his tyranny; ‘once the agreement was struck, the sovereign’s powers were as fixed as those of the husband’ (Shanley 1979: 80–81). Parliamentarians thus rejected the analogy; while advocating for the right to resist or separate from a king who oversteps his limits, they were unwilling to extend these limitations to husbandly authority due to firmly entrenched views about a women’s lawful subjection to her husband in marriage. By the time of the Restoration, republican writers were committed to the view that women were naturally free and equal and that hierarchies were instituted by voluntary agreement and so also rejected the notion of any essential hierarchy in marriage (Shanley 1979: 85). A woman therefore agreed to her subordinate position, and in so doing, established the terms of the marriage contract (Shanley 1979: 86). Eager to demonstrate the absurdity of patriarchal justifications for royal authority, James Tyrrell (a close associate of Locke), argued that a husband’s authority over his wife was established only by consent; a woman (rational enough to recognize her inferiority) agreed when she married to become ‘as a Slave’ (Tyrrell 1681: 110; cited in Shanley 1979: 86). Thus, these later republicans embraced the analogy between monarchical and husbandly authority, and explained the difference between the limited rule of the monarch and the absolute rule of the patriarch in terms of a woman’s agreement to her absolute subordination. Even as these writers recognized natural equality and the corresponding idea that legitimate distinctions in hierarchy and authority are grounded in a voluntary agreement, they had not come to grips with the implications of their arguments for the subordination of women in marriage. 290

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It is Locke, Shanley argues, who most clearly ‘saw the implications of contractarian ideas for marriage’ (1979: 80). Crucially, however, Locke ‘emphatically’ rejects the analogy between husbandly and civil authority (Shanley 1979: 87). For Locke, marriage is based on a ‘voluntary compact’ (1993: 153), itself terminable and its terms negotiable, but only insofar as these are consistent with its ‘chief end’—procreation and the nurturing of children—which set the only ‘natural terms’ to marriage (Shanley 1979: 89; Locke 1993: 153–54, 156). The absolute authority of the husband being unnecessary to this end, Locke rejects it (1993: 156). He nevertheless thinks it is necessary in a marriage that ‘the rule should be placed somewhere’ and claims that ‘it naturally falls to the man’s share, as the abler and the stronger’ (1993: 155), and so ‘does not question this aspect of the traditional patriarchal family’ (Schochet 1969: 85). Now, Locke emphasizes that husbandly authority reaches only ‘to the things of their common interest and property’ (including their children) and therefore leaves ‘the wife in full and free possession of what by contract is her peculiar right’ (1993: 155). But notice that this would be predetermined in a marriage contract that a woman could only rarely find herself in a position to negotiate since she is a daughter before she is a wife. Consequently, although Locke acknowledges that a contract sets the terms of the marriage, these negotiations take place within a well-defined set of ‘natural’ limits that would subject a woman first to the rule of her father, and then to the rule of her husband. Thus, the subjection of a woman in marriage is still based on a ‘natural qualification’ (Butler 1978: 145). So while Shanley argues that Locke is most modern in thinking through the implications of contractarian ideas for marriage, in fact, he shares much in common with the early republican thinkers. He rejects the analogy between monarchical and husbandly authority since he sees the marriage contract as having certain non-negotiable terms set by its natural ends (procreation and the rearing of children), terms which are essentially hierarchical. While Locke jettisons any absolute patriarchal license not having to do with this end, he nevertheless conceives of the woman as a ‘natural’ subject of her patriarch, and thus reinscribes the idea that in marriage a woman consents to a relationship that is essentially and naturally hierarchal. Hobbes and Rousseau more readily confront the implications of their arguments for women’s subordination, though each still treats a woman’s subjection to her husband’s rule in marriage as ‘natural’. Hobbes acknowledges that the natural equality of human beings entails that parental dominion does not automatically fall to the father (Hobbes 1994: 128), but he also explains that in commonwealths, where there are ‘matrimonial laws’, parental power goes to the father ‘because for the most part commonwealths have been erected by the fathers, not by the mothers of families’ (Hobbes 1994: 128). Though not essentially patriarchal, Hobbes treats marriage as an exclusively patriarchal association, later even claiming that ‘the Father of the Family by the Law of Nature was absolute Lord of his Wife and Children’ (Hobbes 1971: 159; cited in Okin 2013: 199). Rousseau argues that men and women originally lead an identical and separate existence. Thus, contrary to the other natural law theorists, Rousseau opposes the idea that the family is ‘natural’, and he explicitly criticizes Locke’s ‘biological explanation’ for it (Horowitz 1987: 77; Rousseau 2011: 115). Instead, he sees the patriarchal family as a historical product, already mediated by the division of labor (Horowitz 1987: 97; Botting 2006: 35; Rousseau 2011: 73–74). Nevertheless, he later claims that the family is the ‘most ancient’ and the only ‘natural’ society (2011: 157), and defends gendered social practices, including women’s confinement to the home and her subordination to her husband, on the grounds that they are ‘closer to nature’ (Rousseau 1979: 357–480, esp. 478; Botting 2006: 35). Each of these classic theorists then, at some point, posits a natural basis for the patriarchal family and for women’s confinement to the domestic sphere, even as they acknowledge women’s natural equality and the origin of all hierarchies in consent. The authority that husbands exercise over wives is largely exempted from their ‘modern’ critiques of other forms of authority. Yet, these are 291

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the arguments (and omissions) that have shaped the historical legacy with both intellectual and social costs. To illustrate, consider a passage from Allen Wood’s introduction to Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in which he writes that in the conception of social institutions Hegel inherits from his contractarian predecessors, the ‘family’, a ‘private society’, can ‘only refer to the patriarchal bourgeois nuclear family’ since the extended ‘feudal family’ no longer has legitimacy in a world structured around ‘modern individuals [who] are persons with rights of property’ (1991: xviii, xxii–iii, emphasis mine). The nuclear patriarchal family is, ‘naturally’, omitted from the modern contractarian critiques (based on the equality of persons with natural liberty and property) that reshaped narratives about institutional legitimacy. It is then quintessentially premodern: in it, property is communal, ‘administered by the husband and father’, who ‘alone exercises the rights of personality in the sphere of civil society’, while the wife and mother remain ‘naturally confined to’ its sphere (Wood 1991: xviii). Wood accurately depicts the reception of this intellectual history in the canonical texts: the patriarchal family, and with it, women, are mired in premodern, natural, and sentimental ties that even Hegel accepts uncritically. So when Noberto Bobbio characterizes the modern break with the ancient/medieval model of political society in terms its critical contrast between ‘political society’ and ‘natural societies’ like the ‘family’, the characterization is true to its history: political societies are based on contract, their principle of legitimation is consent, but this is explicitly and ‘specifically not true of domestic society, that is of the family/household’ (1993: 2). In this tradition, the family (whose common purpose is set by nature), and the state rest ‘altogether on different moral bases’ (Schochet 1969: 93; Locke 1993: 115); the justification of authority in one realm is not the same as the justification of authority in the other (Shanley 1979: 90). And the principle of legitimation for the patriarchal family, if one were to ask for one, would be ‘necessity or nature (natura rerum)’ (Bobbio 1993: 2, 9). Thus, the contractarian critique of authority and its submission of hierarchical institutions to a principle of consent is lauded as launching the modern era in political philosophy and initiating the transformation social and political life into a realm of civil freedom based on voluntary agreement, and yet this critique was not sincerely extended to women and the patriarchal family. While other forms of authority, previously thought natural, were delegitimized as resting merely on force, women’s subordination to men, and to the authority of their husbands in marriage, was still justified on the grounds that it was natural, in other words, on the grounds that women’s heteronomy was natural. In this respect, Fonte’s critique of patriarchal marriage as illegitimate and unjust is radical; it is certainly more radical than the contractarians’ own views on marriage, and even more radical than those writing well into the contemporary period who accept its ‘natural’ basis. Fonte’s critique of male dominance, which contains a similar model of argument to later contractarian critiques of authority, shows that it is neither essential nor natural, but based on force. She therefore drives a wedge between male power and its legitimacy, revealing a justificatory vacuum. While Fonte does not explicitly theorize marriage as resting on a contractual basis, she clearly highlights a natural right of self-determination, and she problematizes the notion of a woman’s ‘choice’ in the marriage decision given the lack of genuine alternatives. Moreover, and contrary to Locke and the early republicans, her arguments imply that there is nothing essential in the marriage relation that requires or justifies a woman’s subordination to the authority of her husband. And in direct contradiction with later republican explanations for women’s subordination in marriage, such as Tyrell’s, far from consenting to make herself ‘as a Slave’, insofar as a woman’s particular circumstances might allow her the liberty to do so, Fonte encourages her to resist marriage like the plague. For what does a woman gain from marriage? ‘…except that instead of being her own mistress … she becomes a slave, and loses her liberty and along with her liberty, her control over her own property… and gets nothing in return’ (Fonte 1997 113–14). A woman is discouraged from using her ‘freedom’ to make an agreement that is wholly at one’s own expense and wholly to 292

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another’s advantage. Fonte agrees with Rousseau on this point; the absurdity of such an agreement exposes any such decision as fraudulent. Men’s domination over women, even in a marriage a woman has ostensibly ‘chosen’, is nevertheless a consequence of force, and, to borrow from Locke: insofar as one is compelled by force to that which is against the right of their freedom, they are made into slaves (Locke 1993: 123).

21.4  Heteronomy and Tyranny This background reveals a richer texture to Fonte’s discussion of tyranny and slavery. Recently, Marguerite Deslauriers has emphasized the philosophical content of Fonte’s critique of male power (2019: 721). By framing her critique of male dominance in terms of ‘tyranny’, Fonte was able to represent women’s subjugation as unjust. Deslauriers (2019) places Fonte, along with Lucretia Marinella (1999) and Arcangela Tarabotti (2004), in a tradition of Venetian pro-woman writers who began to philosophically substantiate the increasingly prevalent claim that male rule is ‘tyrannical’. Influenced by sixteenth-century republican discussions of tyranny, which had roots in Aristotle’s political philosophy, these writers began to conceive of women’s condition as analogous to a slave’s and regarded male dominance as ‘tyrannical’ (Deslauriers 2019: 719). Especially influential in this context were works by Machiavelli and Castiglione, which associated tyranny with inequality and ‘a mistaken form of rule’, and defined the ‘tyrant’ as one who subverts the law, acting (excessively) in his own interests (Deslauriers 2019: 719). Likewise, the patriarch is ‘tyrannical’ insofar as ‘he acts in his own interest and fails to recognize the equality (or superiority) of those over whom he rules’ (Deslauriers 2019: 718). Rejecting Aristotle’s view that men naturally rule over women, these pro-woman writers nevertheless appeal to his critique of tyranny and rely on ‘his view that free women ought to be ruled on a basis of equality, and not despotically’ (Deslauriers 720). Deslauriers points out that central features of these republican critiques of tyranny show up in Fonte’s arguments. Men act as ‘tyrants’ insofar as the dominion they exercise over women is neither justified by their own merits nor by women’s demerits (Deslauriers 2019: 723). In Deslauriers’s reading, Fonte holds that women’s equality is grounded in their having free will and the capacity to reason, such that ‘nothing destines them for subordination’ (Deslauriers 2019: 723, 731). Women are endowed with a ‘natural liberty’, which, driven by ‘venal and self-interested’ motives, men usurp ‘against all reason and justice’ (Fonte 1997: 157; Deslauriers 2019: 723–24). Thus, by showing that men exercise their power in ways that ‘conform to the motives and practices of tyranny’, Deslauriers suggests that Fonte was among one of the first to conceptualize the unequal relationship between men and women as a form of political injustice (2019: 733). She concludes that Fonte’s critique of male tyranny belongs to the history of political philosophy, adding that her ‘focus on tyranny in domestic relations adds an important dimension to the history of feminist philosophy’ (Deslaiuriers 2019: 722). This recognition, however, also constitutes an important ‘shift’ in the discussion (Deslauriers 2019: 733). For it is not simply that the despotic ruler governs excessively in his own interests and against the interests of those he may otherwise legitimately rule, rather the tyrant, even the benevolent tyrant, is unjust insofar as he infringes on the natural liberty of an equal (Deslauriers 2019: 733). This presents a challenge to the legitimacy of the underlying structure of patriarchal power relations, particularly the institution of patriarchal marriage: [I]f women as a sex are … equal, and if they have a free will … then the subjection of women in itself, and not only the cruelty of certain men, is wrong, arbitrary and illegitimate – an injustice, and a political injustice. (Deslauriers, 733) 293

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I think this is right and the significance of this shift deserves further elaboration. I have argued that Fonte’s argument that male dominance is tyrannical, especially in marriage, anticipates a distinctively modern development in the history of political philosophy insofar as she conceptualizes the usurpation of women’s self-rule as unjust. If this is right, it casts further light on the injustice of male ‘tyranny.’ The significance of Fonte’s critique of patriarchal rule is not simply that patriarchs take excessive license with the women in their dominion. Rather, the crux of her analyses is that male rule is tyrannical because it involves ‘an exercise of power beyond right’ (Locke 1993: 216). It forcibly violates women’s natural rights to self-determination—because they do not, and indeed they could not, agree to it. In a similar vein, Fonte criticizes the use of force to subvert the natural freedom of an equal and thereby make her like a ‘slave’. Men ‘set themselves up as tyrants’ by arrogantly usurping that dominion over women, which ‘more properly’ belongs to women (Fonte 1997: 59). And this usurpation of women’s self-rule is a robbery that is ‘against all reason and all justice’ (Fonte 1997: 157). Women have a natural right to their self-determination, a right, which implies that any rightful association ensues from that authority that women dispose over themselves. Reason and justice ‘demand women’s liberty and autonomy’ (Deslauriers 2019: 723).

21.5  Fonte’s Feminist Vision Fonte’s dialogue calls attention to women’s constricted set of choices, laying groundwork for the argument that the ‘single life’ must be a real possibility in order for a woman’s ‘choice’ to be, even ostensibly, a free one, but she never explicitly claims that just relations between women and men ought to originate in a voluntary agreement. Instead, focusing on the relations that most obviously undermine women’s self-determination, namely, patriarchal marriage, her concern to recover women’s freedom manifests primarily, as King suggests, in withdrawal and retreat from their male relations. This strategy of extraction is itself interesting and worthy of further attention. Indeed, Fonte’s argument implies that reorganizing marriage and the dowry system by providing women with a genuine option of opting out would have gone some way to supporting women’s autonomy and bringing about a more just relationship between the sexes (Cox 1995). However, when the kind of ‘carefree single life that the speakers propose as an ideal was an impossible fantasy for the vast majority of women’ (Cox 1997: 17), this would have been, though perhaps radical, a concrete and even urgent proposal at a time when dowries were decreasing and with them, upper-class Venetian women’s marriage prospects (Cox 1995, 1997: 17). But marriage is not the only patriarchal institution that the women challenge. Leonora targets the ‘laws and customs’ which have incorporated men’s fallacious claims to authority and argues that the broader political and institutional context is complicit in women’s illegitimate oppression. For right after Lucretia praises the good-government and wise leaders of the republican city, Leonora incredulously protests: What on earth do magistrates, law courts, and all this other nonsense have to do with us women? Are not all these official functions exercised by men, against our interests? Do they not make claims on us whether we are obliged to them or not? Do they not act in their own interests and against ours? Do they not treat us as though we were aliens? Do they not usurp our property? (Fonte 1997: 204) The women agree that Leonora makes an ‘essential’ point (Fonte 1997: 204). Venice’s republican political structure has little to do with women or their interests except insofar as it is a further apparatus employed by men to subvert women’s interests to men. Here too, men, in these ‘official functions’, mistake their de facto authority for de jure, and claim entitlements to which women are 294

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not legitimately obligated. They treat women like ‘aliens’, and, especially through marriage and the dowry system—relations of power secured by law—they usurp their liberty and property. So, while the critique of women’s heteronomy is primarily focused on its link with patriarchal marriage, Fonte extends her critique to the social and legal scaffolding that sustains it. Indeed, she recognizes that women have no say in the ‘official functions’ that make up public and political life, which only help to secure their subordination to the furtherance of men’s interests. Far from simply exclusionary, they are positively opposed to women’s interests, supporting the institution of marriage, and sanctioning the usurpation of women’s liberty and property through it and against their will. In a republic in which men are active citizens, women are treated as falling outside of the law, undoubtedly heightening the contradictory nature of their experience. So, the dialogue presents a challenge to the contemporary social relations between the sexes, and to the dowry system which is the lynch pin of the institution most fundamental to the women’s oppression. Though marriage is the primary institution through which women are enslaved, all other exercises of government, as far as the women are concerned, are further instruments of men’s power over them. Near the end of the dialogue, Cornelia proposes extracting themselves from men’s dominion: … Let’s wake up, and claim back our freedom, and the honor and dignity they have usurped from us for so long … we shan’t really care what the outcome is, just as long as we are no longer subjugated to them. (Fonte 1997: 237) These exclamations to reclaim their freedom, honor, and dignity, coupled with Leonora’s and Corinna’s assertions that ‘drowning’ or even ‘dying’ would be better than subjecting oneself to male tyranny, suggests that such dispossession is the greatest possible deprivation. The deprivation of autonomy is the deprivation of oneself. Recall Leonora’s opening: ‘I’d rather drown than submit again to a man! I’ve just escaped from servitude and suffering and you’re asking me to go back of my own free will and get tangled up in all that again? God preserve me!’ (Fonte 1997: 53, emphasis mine).

Notes 1 Moderata Fonte was the pen name adopted by Modesto Pozzo (1555–1592). 2 Fonte consistently, perhaps even deliberately, depicts Marilyn Frye calls the ‘double bind’: situations in which one’s options are reduced to very few, and all of which ‘expose one to penalty, censure, or deprivation’, situations, which are ‘characteristically and ubiquitously experienced by oppressed people’ (1983: 2). 3 The following two paragraphs are much indebted to Shanley’s (1979) discussion.

References Bobbio, N. (1993) Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. D. Gobetti, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Botting, E. H. (2006) Family Feuds Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family, Albany: State University of New York Press. Broad, J. and K. Green. (2009) A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe 1400–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, M. (1978) “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy,” The American Political Science Review 72: 135–50. Cox, V. (1995) “The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 48: 503–581.

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Kelin Emmett (1997) “Moderata Fonte and the Worth of Women” in M. Fonte (ed.), The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–23. Deslauriers, M. (2019) “Patriarchal Power as Unjust: Tyranny in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27: 718–737. Fonte, M. (1997) The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, Ed. and Trans. by Virginia Cox, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frye, M. (1983) “Oppression,” in M. Frye (ed.), The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, pp. 1–16. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. Wood and trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, T. (1971) A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, ed. Joseph Cropsey, Chicago: Chicago University Press. (1994) Leviathan, ed. E. Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Horowitz, A. (1987) Rousseau, Nature, and History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. King, M. (1991) Women of the Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kolsky, S. (2001) “Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Giuseppe Passi: An Early Seventeenth-century Feminist Controversy,” The Modern Language Review 96(4): 973–989. Locke, J. (1993) Two Treatises of Government, ed. M. Goldie, London: Orion Publishing Group. Okin, S. M. (2013) Women in Western Political Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rawls, J. (2007) Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. S. Freeman, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Riley, P. (1982) Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1979) Emile, ed. and trans. A. Bloom, New York: Basic Books. (2011) The Basic Political Writings, ed. and trans. D. Cress, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Schochet, G. (1969) “The Family and the Origins of the State in Locke’s Political Philosophy,” in J. Yolton (ed.), John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 81–98. Shanley, M. (1979) “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English Political Thought,” The Western Political Quarterly 32: 79–91 Suchon, G. (2010) A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings, ed. and trans. D. C. Stanton and R. M. Wilkin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tarabotti, A. (2004) Paternal Tyranny, ed. and trans. L. Panizza, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tyrrell, J. (1681) Patriacha non Monarcha, London: Richard Janeway. Wood, A. (1991) “Editor’s Introduction” in G. W. F. Hegel Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. vii–xxxii.

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22 SLAVERY AND SERVITUDE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FEMINISM Arcangela Tarabotti and Gabrielle Suchon Hasana Sharp In the preface to the third edition of her Reflections on Marriage (1706), Mary Astell famously asks: “If all men are Born Free, how is it that all women are born slaves?” (1996: 18). When she insists that women at the mercy of their husbands endure “the perfect Condition of Slavery,” Astell does not appear to take notice of those in her midst who work as domestic servants or of the enslaved people in the Americas and the Caribbean (Perry 1986: 8). The representation of the husband-wife relationship as analogous to the master-slave relationship proved popular and persistent into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the cultures and idioms of feminism and abolitionism became intertwined in the late eighteenth century, the slavery to which women’s subjection was increasingly compared included the racial domination of Africans in the colonies. The analogy to racial, colonial slavery was sometimes predicated on deep or willful misunderstandings of the treatment to which slaves were exposed. Moreover, it obscured the experiences of Black women subjected to chattel slavery with their own complex relationships to marriage regulations (e.g., Mill 2006). According to historian Karen Offen, the symbolic connection between women’s status and slavery in French language, culture, and politics… can be traced… back to the mid-seventeenth century, well before the slavery of blacks from Africa in the French colonies had even become subject to public discussion. (2008: 59) The symbolic analogy between the domination of women and slaves or servants was made by European feminist and pro-woman writers advocating for the liberation of women from the oppressive aspects of social roles, such as marriage or religious service, anathema to their moral and intellectual development. While servants and enslaved women were typically worse off, non-working class, early modern European women were strictly subordinated to men and the needs of their families. They had few legal and social protections from sexual and physical abuse, or from having their resources squandered by fathers, brothers, or husbands. They were moved about, subject to different authorities, with little regard for how they understood their own interests and welfare. They were discouraged from study, writing, and even speaking (Wiesner-Hanks 2019). Nevertheless, analogies between the subjection of white, European women and the experience of the enslaved are equivocal and problematic. If Offen is correct that racial slavery was not the paradigm such writers had in mind, what did they mean by slavery and servitude? How did DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-28

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ideas of slavery function in their analyses and complaints? Why did they reach for this idiom to advance their causes? This chapter considers two of the earliest known, philosophically supported calls for emancipation from gender subordination written by women. Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny, published posthumously in 1654, is described as “the first manifesto about women’s inalienable rights to liberty, equality, and universal education” (Panizza 2004: 1). And Gabrielle Suchon (1632–1703) is acknowledged as “the first female philosopher to have left a substantial body of work devoted solely to the subject of women” (Stanton and Wilkin 2010: 1). Although their contexts and lives were somewhat different, both Tarabotti and Suchon were separated from their families and confined against their wills to convents by the time they were 13.1 Due to the expense of marriage dowries, it was common practice in early modern Venice to select some daughters, especially those less likely to make a marriage advantageous for the family, for life in the cloister. And when a family suffered financial misfortune, such as when Suchon’s father died, daughters might have found themselves suddenly delivered to lifelong religious service. Exiled from the family home and enclosed within a highly regimented, institution for girls and women, both Tarabotti and Suchon dedicated themselves to advocating for the emancipation of their sex. Both frequently employ the idiom of slavery to signal the intensity of their complaint and to revalue the destinies chosen for women of their class. In this contribution, I will show how the language of servitude plays a distinctive role in their writing, the examination of which locates them in wider traditions of moral and political thought and helps us to understand their complaints. They adapt familiar and widely understood concepts of slavery to feminist purposes. In particular, they draw upon ideas of “moral slavery,” prominent in ancient and Stoic philosophy, as well as in scripture and Roman literature. This notion of slavery refers to being controlled by external forces, alien or hostile to one’s “nature” as a human being. They likewise draw upon the idea of “political slavery” articulated in classical republican thought, which refers to being controlled by an arbitrary will, indifferent or contrary to the welfare and interests of those who are subject to it. In addition, they both emphasize how forced confinement severs them from their kinship networks. As they describe it, their isolated, religious servitude tears them from the fabric of the social worlds of friendship and family: they are “buried,” “hidden,” and “forgotten.” We can understand their accounts to depict a kind of “natal alienation” that contributes to “social death,” features that Orlando Patterson identifies as common among diverse institutions and practices of slavery (1982). Being torn from kin, losing one’s civil status, and being dispossessed of rights over property and personhood are typically most extreme in cases of chattel slavery, though these kinds of deprivation occur with other forms of domination (incarceration, deportation, refugee displacement, some marriages, sex trafficking, etc.). When we reflect upon Tarabotti’s and Suchon’s complaints about the mortification of their social existence, the accent of their complaint changes in comparison to many male Republican thinkers who frame slavery as, first and foremost, subjection to bad laws and hostile government. Their emphasis on the cost to their relationships and the loss of their places in the hearts and memories of their loved ones brings out a feminist concern with the damage that political domination does to relationships of care, affection, and kinship. Like their male forebears and contemporaries, the language of servitude and slavery is calculated to shock and challenge perceptions and values. They represent gender roles and ways of life that are widely regarded as honorable, noble, and appropriate for girls and women as “servile,” coercive, and damaging in order to lay claim to moral and political freedom for their sex. With the idiom of slavery, they insist that women, like their enfranchised male contemporaries, are harmed by domination and are by nature free. I will proceed by outlining how Tarabotti and Suchon use the language of slavery to describe, analyze, and criticize the domination of women and girls. After reviewing their appropriations of the discourses of moral and political slavery as well as their descriptions of the destruction of 298

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the social lives suffered by those forcefully confined, I will reflect on the status of the language of slavery. Should we regard it as metaphorical or literal? Is it figurative or real? I will conclude with some thoughts about how to take seriously the philosophical, moral, and political language of slavery in the seventeenth century without marginalizing or erasing the contemporaneous rise of the trade in African lives and the proliferation of racial slavery. Such a task is by no means easy, and I have no simple answers to offer. As we have begun to uncover the buried voices of some early modern women, we must strive to acknowledge the often invisible presence of servants and slaves that structured and formed their worlds.

22.1  Against Nature The idea of “moral slavery” draws upon philosophical literature from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, but only indirectly concerns institutions and practices of enslavement. “Moral slavery” can be understood broadly as subjection to forces – paradigmatically, the passions and false beliefs – that prevent individuals from actualizing those abilities characteristic of their natures. This understanding belongs especially to Platonic and Stoic doctrines that represent being controlled by passions as a kind of slavery (Garnsey 1996). It is part of the human project to strive to master oneself through the exercise of reason and virtue. To do so, one must resist being overwhelmed by irrational and dangerous passions (such as sensual pleasure or love of money and fame) or being led astray by superstitious or deranged doctrines. This kind of slavery is widespread and does not require a human master. Yet, if some people are, by nature, unable to act from their rational powers, as Aristotle maintains, this propensity to be ruled by passions calls for a master, someone to direct the servile person. For Aristotle, natural slaves lack a deliberative faculty and women somehow participate in deliberation without possessing it (Aristotle 2013). Therefore, they do not benefit from certain kinds of education and cannot be entrusted to reason independently. Tarabotti and Suchon address widespread misogynist views – embedded in philosophy, religious culture, and institutions – that understand women to be governed by passions to a greater extent than men. Even if women are not called “slaves,” they may be considered “slavish,” or “servile,” and thereby incapable of freedom, virtue, and human excellence. Suchon and Tarabotti seek to show that the servility and frailty women may exhibit are not expressions of their inferior natures. If women are sometimes, for example, excessively emotional or prone to superstition, it is a result of being inferiorized through subordination. If women exhibit human excellence more rarely than men, it is because girls are only exceptionally permitted to develop their rational natures. In this section, I will outline how Suchon draws upon this traditional understanding of moral servitude, according to which we are unfree insofar as we are unable to develop the powers characteristic of our natures, and act according to them (2010: 87). Tarabotti relies on a similar notion when she maintains that all humans are born free, naturally love freedom, and consider freedom’s deprivation to be most odious (2004: 79–80). Freedom, in their views, belongs fundamentally to our natures, or essences. Freedom is something toward which we strive by nature, and both Tarabotti and Suchon observe that women, like anyone else, experience its deprivation as a form of violence and deformation. Appealing to scripture, Tarabotti emphasizes how God gave humanity freedom of the will and the power to choose (2004: 51, 61). Suchon places a heavier accent on our rational natures, insisting that ignorance and whatever interferes with our intellectual development is slavery (2010: 132–35). Even while asserting a metaphysical foundation for freedom, both authors tend to support their arguments in phenomenological terms. Experiences of freedom as joyful and empowering contrast sharply with a life of forced confinement to the convent or to the marital home, in which women and girls are constrained, controlled, and deceived. In the words of Suchon, “We 299

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cannot deny the legitimacy of the passion with which we hate all that both denies our freedom and binds us in constraint.” The regularity, consistency, and intensity of our aversion disclose to us our free natures. Like a stone that falls downward according to the law of gravity, “beings who are dislodged from our rightful place suffer continuous anxiety” (Suchon 2010: 117). For Tarabotti, “Once vows have been made, duty commands their fulfillment.” Yet, those forced into religious service usually find that “the heart is contrary” and “sentiments are not in accord with its own verbal assent and satisfaction” (2004: 81). The natural and robust aversion we have to the deprivation of our freedom discloses to women that we are, like men, born free. Suchon and Tarabotti do not frame constraint as something only imposed by others. Suchon describes desire as a “tyrant that enslaves and abuses our hearts” (2010: 104). When we are moved, for example, by our desires to possess ephemeral things or to control things outside of our power, “our heart becomes a tempestuous sea agitated by the winds and waves of various emotions” (2010: 105). Passions are not dangerous or enslaving simply because they do not arise from reason. There are passions that animate our intellects and agree with our natures, such as wonder, the pleasures of learning, and the admiration of virtue. Passions enslave us only when they undermine our efforts at self-perfection. Yet, passions that precipitate our bondage, even if they get the best of us, are not masters whose interests are served by our subordination. They are simply tendencies or forces, within or without us, that drive us away from the development of the powers that essentially define us. The powers that most define the essence of human beings vary for different thinkers. Thus, if discourses of servitude aim to alert us to what prevents us from actualizing our natures, the forces of servitude that discourse picks out reflect a particular picture of human existence. For example, for the Stoics, it is especially important not to be driven by one’s fear of death (e.g., Epictetus 1998). If we allow ourselves to be ruled by our fear of death, we will not prize sufficiently the only true goods, which are internal properties of the soul. It is possible to be physically restrained, tormented, or even owned by another person, while remaining free, since freedom is a moral quality belonging to the soul. It is a power of rational self-control that is indifferent to external circumstances. This reflects an idea of human beings as fundamentally rational and free. To be a sage, however, is rare, demanding, and exceptional. The free and wise are few; the rest are slaves (see Garnsey 1996: Ch. 9). The Stoic view of human nature only allows for very few to be free, but Descartes universalizes the ideal of self-mastery through the rational education of the will: “There is no soul so weak that it cannot, if well-directed, acquire an absolute power over its passions” (Descartes 1984: 348; Passions of the Soul, article 50). For Tarabotti and Suchon, like Descartes, fundamental to human being is the exercise of free will, informed by discerning and cultivated judgment. Women, Tarabotti and Suchon contend, are deprived of intellectual and civic educations that would allow them to prioritize what matters most and to cultivate their self-possession. Their arguments also suggest that external goods, especially education but also the ability to move about freely and determine one’s own social relations, matter a great deal for the exercise of freedom. Importantly, the notion of slavery to the passions is not reserved for those condemned to a lower social status, or for those deprived of the social support for developing their reason. Tarabotti, for example, insists that men are the greater servants of vice. In her words, “What liars you men are! True strength lies in conquering one’s own passions. Which sex is stronger than the female one in this respect – forever virtuous, resistant to every push and pull of ill-conceived thoughts and desires?” (2004: 47). Tarabotti’s discourse often performs a kind of reversal – typical in ancient literature and scripture – according to which those who enjoy the highest social status are, at the same time, the most (morally) enslaved. Discourses contrasting slavery and freedom often aim to challenge popular values. Classically, orators and philosophers urge readers to see rational self-possession and intellectual perfection as higher goods than sensual enjoyment, fame, 300

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or wealth. They urge contempt toward self-indulgent, violent rulers who are unconcerned with the good of their subjects. The tyrant has power over others but none over himself. He does as he pleases, indulges every lust without regard for the cost to others, and is wholly ignorant of any costs to himself. As Plato writes in the Republic, “the real tyrant is, even if he doesn’t seem so to someone, in truth the real slave… he is most in need of the most things and poor in truth” (1968: 579e). In the rhetorical tradition of “anti-tyrannicism,” he who respects only the law of self-gratification is represented as a figure of pathos, a true slave (Nyquist 2013: Chs 1–2). Such a pathetic creature devoid of self-control is an object of disgust, who is nevertheless dangerous. Cicero declares that “the whole of that noxious, sacrilegious breed [tyrants] should be banished from human society.” He compares tyrants to an abscess that must be “excised… from the body of humanity which we all share” (Cicero 2001: 95). Whereas anti-tyranny discourse typically criticizes rulers for acting like the city is a household, and treating subjects as if they are slaves, Tarabotti draws upon anti-tyranny discourse to defame patriarchal abuse of power within the household. Tarabotti brings a feminist lens to this tradition when she condemns those patriarchs empowered to discard their daughters for base goods that they prize more than their flesh and blood. They confine their young daughters to avoid paying a marriage dowry and thus cherish the indulgence of their lusts more than the souls of their children (Tarabotti 2004: 112). These heads of households, who perpetuate the deception that fragile girls require the protection of (conveniently less expensive) enclosure, are themselves weak. They are playthings of their desires, slaves to sin, unworthy of obedience and respect (see also Suchon 2010: 121). Of course, women subject to paternal tyranny suffer debilitating passions as well. Whereas Tarabotti emphasizes the venal and craven desires that enslave the hearts of men who hold women in subjection, Suchon declares that, deprived of freedom, women are tormented by their fear and anxiety: “a heart forever in fear, shadowy eyes denied all sorts of light, a soul deprived of tranquility and interior joy, and uncertainty in all things” (2010: 116). We will see below that Tarabotti describes how her forced religious enclosure, which she describes also as dwelling in shadowy unreality, yields harmful passions. What I aimed to show in this section is that Tarabotti and Suchon represent women as subject to servitude because their circumstances conflict with the development of the powers essential to human being; they are against nature. Naming “external” forces, such as passions and lack of learning, “servitude” or “slavery” insofar as they prevent the realization of human nature is a common feature of classical and early modern philosophical and literary discourse. This notion of “servitude” has only an indirect relationship to chattel slavery. The susceptibility of some to moral slavery was sometimes used to justify legal slavery. And failures of self-mastery are rhetorically contrasted with chattel slavery in, for example, parables that represent tyrants as “more enslaved” than their “lowest” servants (e.g., Plato, Republic, Bk. IX). And Stoic literature will insist that a slave can be better and wiser than a free person if they have greater power over their emotions, and a firmer grasp of those internal goods that matter most. The idea of moral slavery is distinct from legal slavery yet intertwined with it. Moral slavery is a longstanding philosophical, political, and literary trope that we can analyze. These feminist texts draw upon these figurative and polemical representations of slavery and servitude, but with a distinct objective. Rather than heralding the virtues of the “wise man” in contrast to the many fools, and rather than urging everyone to self-mastery through esteeming only what depends on us, they challenge popular conceptions of what a good life for women should look like. Establishing that women’s natures are not served – but are in fact opposed – by constraint and confinement grounds their more confrontational claims about male domination. They maintain that women are stunted, unfulfilled, and violated by being forcibly confined, uneducated, or yoked for life to a husband, which allows them to conclude that women are subject to arbitrary rule, or political slavery. 301

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22.2  Arbitrary Rule In the early modern period, influenced by the works of Roman moralists and classical republicans, the term “slavery” was widely used to refer to objectionable forms of political rule. Drawing on Aristotle (often via Cicero), political power would be accused of instituting slavery if rulers organized the commonwealth to serve themselves rather than their subjects (Aristotle 2013: 1259a19–23). A state could be free if and only if, to invoke Cicero’s motto, “the people’s welfare is the highest law” (1999). Whereas moral slavery entails being subject to haphazard, aimless forces and thereby diverted from one’s good, political slavery names a kind of rule that benefits another. Tyrants, patriarchs, and masters might be governed by their own arbitrary passions as much as, if not more than, those they rule. Yet, political slavery names a relationship of domination: it is subjection to an arbitrary and hostile will, constrained to serve another rather than oneself. Julie Walsh argues that Suchon defends a republican conception of liberty according to which freedom requires “non-domination” (2019: 7–8). In the republican tradition, freedom is compatible with constraint and interference – such as laws, parental discipline, or community codes – just as long as such compulsion aims at the good of the one who is commanded. Yet, it is not sufficient for laws merely to be compatible with the interests of the ruled. Popular welfare must be the purpose of the commands, and there must be ways of holding rulers accountable to realizing that aim. Suchon defends women’s participation in the business of ruling, which would allow women to articulate and defend their interests for themselves. In addition to requiring consultation of those affected, political liberty must respect objective features of human existence. For Suchon, non-dominating and non-arbitrary rule must provide the means for subjects to cultivate their mental powers, and thereby actualize their rational natures. Tarabotti wavered between naming her tract Paternal Tyranny or Innocence Deceived. It was first published under the title Innocence Deceived, which scholars suspect was an effort to reduce the emphasis upon the agency of fathers and others who confine women for self-interested reasons (Weaver 2016: 284). The centrality of her concern with deception suggests that Tarabotti objected strongly to the epistemic and cognitive harms of domination. The “arbitrariness” of arbitrary rule points both to the caprice of the dominating will and to the arbitrary lies, stories, and misogynist ideologies that conceal from girls (and maybe from the liars themselves) the real motives for their confinement. In response to the notion that confinement serves to protect women’s chastity, Tarabotti replies: “this does not justify the arbitrary authority of cruel men to dispose of thousands of innocent lives at whim by thrusting them into prisons and barbarically sacrificing them to Pluto” (2004: 54). Paternal tyranny acts upon girls and women to serve the interests of men in power, while damaging the welfare of girls and women. Their welfare includes the satisfaction of their desire to know and understand. It harms their native desire for knowledge to be deceived and cajoled into permanent, forced service to religion. Marguerite Deslauriers, in her analysis of Venetian feminists including Tarabotti, locates them in the republican tradition. She outlines how they object to male domination as both (i) the imposition of external, arbitrary control and (ii) as a usurpation of their power of selfgovernment. Deslauriers maintains that “While Tarabotti is most famous for her criticism of the forced confinement of women religious, her arguments aim more generally to demonstrate the injustice of requiring women to submit to the decisions of husbands and fathers” (2019: 731). Aligned with Walsh’s interpretation of Suchon, Deslauriers determines that patriarchal power is dominating because its source is an alien will, and because that will is itself governed by arbitrary “whim.” The imposition of external authority is contrary to their natures, not only because the decisions condemn women to an excruciating and miserable situation. This imposition also denies women their divinely endowed power to exercise their free will, and thus prevents them from educating and governing themselves. 302

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In an article on Tarabotti, Elissa Weaver also assures her reader that Paternal Tyranny is “much more than a complaint against enforced confinement.” It is “a complaint against the source of the misogynist belief in women’s inferiority, inconstancy, and intellectual weakness” (2016: 282). Nevertheless, I would like to dwell briefly upon Suchon’s and Tarabotti’s descriptions of the devastating consequences of their enforced confinement. Attention to how they describe these effects contributes to our understanding of what was so vicious about the domination they experienced. The systematic confinement of young girls such as Tarabotti and Suchon, especially at such an early age (before “the age of reason”), is an instance of severe political domination. Neither Suchon nor Tarabotti object to a life of enclosure for those women who feel a calling to pursue a religious vocation and devote themselves to service as an expression of their faith. They object to being compelled or lured through deception into irrevocable enclosure. Tarabotti and Suchon both describe women’s subjection as a kind of “social death.” It is striking how often both Tarabotti and Suchon use the language and imagery of death to describe their own situations. Tarabotti and Suchon point to how confinement precipitates the loss of civil personhood and their claims to property. At least as devastating, is the loss of those kinship and social relations that give life its vitality and meaning. In both marriage and the cloister, women lose their possessions (or their control over them); their ability to move about is further restricted; the opportunities to engage in activities they choose, such as learning, contract; and, they lack jurisdiction over their own bodies. For women of means like Suchon and Tarabotti, both the convent and marriage increase their constraint; they provoke a loss, a death of personhood. Even for women of the more powerful classes, their status is not sufficient to guard them against the greatest violations. Tarabotti decries how it is “legal to kill [wives] on the slightest suspicion” of infidelity, while husbands can commit any vile act with impunity (2004: 111). The form of domination a girl or woman of their class endures is typically determined by the fortune of their families and the decisions of their fathers or brothers. It is then enforced by culture, the law, and the institutions to which they are delivered. In addition to the legal erasure and the contraction of their freedom to move about and to dispose of their property, there are devastating psychological and epistemic consequences of exclusion. Enclosed girls are severed from the fabric of the family life that they have so far known. If they enjoyed it before, they no longer have the possibility of quotidian affection, games, and duties that texture life in a household. They are, in the words of our authors, “forgotten,” “inaudible,” “hidden,” and “buried.” It becomes difficult for them to express themselves, to speak, or to be believed. They both speculate that they are lost to the memories and affections of their loved ones. They describe their experience as one of radical isolation and imprisonment, which renders them “unreal” and their existence “shadowy.” Physical, psychological, and epistemic isolation profoundly damages one’s social being and interferes with the intersubjective co-constitution of reality that typically characterizes human life (Guenther 2013). Tarabotti portrays forced confinement as a living death, even soul murder. She says it again and again: “you bury the women you brought into the light, entombing them alive” (2004: 83); “buried alive…their still breathing corpses in coarsely woven rags among a thousand neverdying deaths” (92); “shut up”; “buried”; unable to look “up at the sky” (100). Clothed in “funereal garments” and dead to the world (90), daughters endure a “live burial in hell’s raging jaws” (117). Tarabotti’s heartbreaking cries testify to the experience of being excised, discarded, cut off. She compares patriarchal confinement of daughters to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, pointing to the distinctive harm of destroying one’s own kin and disregarding any special obligation to them. She describes herself as caged, muted, unable to see the limitless horizon of the sky. She is shrouded in darkness, bereft and alone. Suchon’s discourse is considerably more tempered than the anguished despair of Tarabotti, yet she conveys a similar desolation in an elegy. There, she represents the “unhappy sex” as “Deprived 303

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of freedom and subservient, too/ Perpetually scorned and in darkness so deep.” She suggests that men profess their love but do not seek the happiness of girls and women. They use tender words to “snuff their memory/ Consigning them cruelly to obscurity… They would have women’s minds still buried/ Mired in dirty dust” (2010: 227). Domination imposes upon women a form of what Patterson, in his monumental study of slavery, calls “social death.” Although his aim is to identify the distinctive features of concrete practices of slavery throughout history, Patterson’s analysis of social death provides rich insights into a range of social and political practices that target the social life of a person for erosion or destruction. Patterson describes how a slave, by definition, lacks civil status. Slavery, especially in war or incarceration, is often a substitute for death. Instead of being killed in war, for example, the victor suspends the death sentence of the vanquished and uses him, or (more often) his wife and children, as he wishes. They are legally and morally killable, and thus they can be enslaved. Their rights have been forfeited through martial aggression or crime; their social claims die. Slavery produces social death in various other ways, too. It isolates people from their natal groups and severs their ties to the languages and traditions of their ancestors (1982). Tarabotti and Suchon both report feeling as though they have disappeared. They feel inaudible, invisible, and unbelievable. It is not only that they are hidden from the world, but that they see very little themselves. “Deprived as she is of looking up at the sky,” she cannot enjoy either the beauty of nature or a plurality of human relationships. She is enclosed with others, dressed identically, subject to the same rules, and reciting the same prayers. Domination interferes with the development of their human capabilities not only through denying girls an intellectual and civic education. It erodes the social character of their being. Forced confinement severely curtails the ability to determine the character of their relationships, and it deprives them of the social and kinship ties that give human life meaning. One of the most persistent features of feminism is its protest against the traditional place of women and girls in the household. Tarabotti and Suchon testify as well to the crushing harm of being abandoned and separated from their families. In addition to protesting the harms of exclusion from legal rights and recognition, feminist voices denounce the cruel destruction of our relationships of care and kinship. Tarabotti and Suchon, as I have outlined, both draw upon the idea of political slavery. Typically, political slavery refers to the unchecked power of a tyrant or a foreign nation over “free men.” In the words of Mary Nyquist, “vituperation against political slavery protests a generalized assault on the citizenry’s dignity or the humiliating loss of honor entailed in the reduction of status from ‘free’ to ‘slave’” (2013: 6). It highlights the disgraceful injustice of subordinating those who ought to be free to the capricious demands of vulgar, “beastly,” vicious rulers. Classically, it is a masculine discourse that stigmatizes servility as animal, lowly, and feminine.2 It exhorts men to fight for independence from monarchical or foreign rule and bring honor to themselves and their country (Nyquist 2013: 49–53). Tarabotti and Suchon subvert this discourse by representing women as rightfully free and thus as debased by their domination. By declaring their domination to be a form of slavery, they lay claim to freedom. Whereas their male republican contemporaries were concerned primarily to defame monarchy, promote civic participation, and defend the popular welfare against elites, Tarabotti and Suchon dedicate themselves to highlighting the moral, psychological, and physical damage domination wreaked upon their social being. They emphasize the profound harm of isolation and natal alienation, describing their experience as a kind of death. Instead of enjoying eternal life, promised by righteousness and service to Christ (The Holy Bible: Romans. 6:22), they experience mortification, darkness, and “hell’s abyss” (Tarabotti 2004: 58). They want to be seen, heard, and remembered. They oppose being buried, hidden, forgotten, and smothered. They yearn to be related and bound to others, able to develop their intellectual and moral powers in families

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and communities aimed at the good of everyone. With their invocation of classical republican discourse, they declare that, like “free men,” girls and women should not be mere servants of the good of their families, the city, or religious orders, especially when those social and political bodies aim only at their own advantage. So, while they subvert and expand a traditionally masculine political discourse of political slavery, how should we understand the relationship of their protest to chattel slavery?

22.3  Slavery as Reality or Metaphor? At a time when there is greater reckoning with the legacy of transatlantic slavery and racial domination, we are confronted with the need to make sense of the relationship between chattel slavery and early modern discourses that describe various kinds of oppression suffered by white Europeans as “slavery.” Some scholars stipulate that the language of slavery among early modern pro-woman and feminist writers ought to be understood as “metaphorical,” as an instance of poetic license. Ruth Perry, for example, says of Mary Astell that she “used the word ‘slavery’ strictly as a metaphor when bemoaning the plight of women” (1986: 8). In contrast, when a character in Moderata Fonte’s sixteenth-century feminist dialogue declares that men treat women like slaves, Marguerite Deslauriers remarks: “This is not a figure of speech.” Deslauriers cites the complaint of another character in the dialogue who is describing the deprivation that marriage imposes: “when a woman marries she ‘loses her liberty and […] her control over her property, surrendering all she has to the man who bought her’” (2019: 723). Deslauriers thus suggests that the treatment of women as property, as things to be “bought,” and as subject to the capricious control of the head of household (technically, the “despot”) should be understood as real rather than figurative. How should we understand the relationship between the idiom of slavery and the reality of gender domination? How do we take seriously the descriptions of early European feminists without obscuring the very different reality of racial slavery? Let us consider these two, contrary impulses. For some critics, early modern women can only metaphorically be called “slaves” or “like slaves.” For others, the early modern writers meant this sincerely, approximating or analogizing the situation of women to that of slaves. My own hypothesis with respect to the metaphorical status of the language of “slavery” is complex (and, I confess, ambivalent). Early modern, European daughters of enfranchised men were not literally enslaved. Most women of this class were barred from participation in intellectual and civic life, married off or conscripted to religious service without consultation, and usually lacked the standing to demand redress for even extreme abuse. They may have been beaten, killed, imprisoned temporarily or long-term in their homes or in convents. They were often (but not always) unable to control the resources they inherited. The subjects of seventeenth-century feminist and prowoman writing did not bear the legal or social status of slaves, and there are more dissimilarities than similarities between their quotidian experience and that of enslaved people in the colonies. Even if they were really dominated, they were “enslaved” only metaphorically. Nevertheless, I have tried to show that the seventeenth-century metaphorical use of the word “slavery” is not casual, ornamental, or even imprecise. Metaphor, for Aristotle, involves a departure from ordinary language that applies the name of one thing to a different thing (Hawkes 2017: 7). Yet, metaphor is not necessarily fanciful. Metaphor (and analogy, which is, for Aristotle, a species of metaphor) can evince a power of grasping resemblances and making them perceptible to others. It is an unexpected use of language that, by disrupting our habits of association, provokes new patterns of thinking: “strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh” (Aristotle 1877: 1410b). Referring to early modern, European

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women of (at least moderate) means as subject to “servitude” unsettles the typical association of “slave” with a rightless person, who “despite being human… is a piece of property” (Aristotle 2013: 1254a). Applying the name “servant” or “slave” to the wives and daughters of free men interferes with other ways of understanding the place of girls and women in middle- and upperclass European family or society. Early feminism, as we find in the writings of Tarabotti and Suchon, carries properties from the institution and experience of slavery over to the situation of the women of their class. It is a deliberately disturbing gesture, designed to produce a new meaning, or a new set of associations (Hawkes 2017: 1–2), and thereby provoke a new evaluation of their situation. Some critics bluntly contrast the metaphorical to the real. Susan Buck-Morss, for example, refers to the “real” slavery of stolen African people in the colonies in contrast to the “metaphorical” slavery of the philosophers. The “slavery” of, for example, England to Spain, the object of John Locke’s bitter complaints, is “metaphor for legal tyranny” with no meaningful relationship to institutions and practices of slavery (Buck-Morss 2009: 28). Buck-Morss is correct to reject the conflation of legal tyranny and chattel slavery. The real/ metaphorical distinction, however, discourages us from understanding the precise relationship between discourses of political slavery and the realities of legal slavery.3 Republican discourses appealed to the definition of slavery in the Justinian’s Digest: “Slavery is an institution of the ius gentium (law of all peoples) whereby, contrary to nature, one person is subject to the control of another” (1.5.4.1). The concept of political slavery, as it is used by early modern republicans drawing on thinkers such as Cicero or Machiavelli, relies on the established legal language of slavery, even as they apply this definition analogically to forms of political rule. In addition to the legal definition, classical republicans draw upon representations of slavery from literary history and philosophy to develop models of the unacceptable, unjust, and devastating negation of freedom. Even if we might find the analogy problematic or even abusive today, I do not think the “metaphorical” or analogical slavery of political domination is an empty signifier. The term has a technical and precise meaning, with reference to actual institutions and effects of slavery. The idea of political slavery appeals to analogy to identify how individuals, groups, or nations can stand in relationship to an arbitrary power in a similar way to how a slave stands in relationship to a master, or dominus. To use analogy (a kind of metaphor commonly used in philosophical discourse) is not to say that a subject of early modern England or a girl forcibly confined for life to a convent is in an identical situation to someone subject to chattel slavery. It is to identify shared properties in the relationships of two kinds of domination. It highlights what is intolerable in the relationship between two kinds of subjects and two kinds of socially authorized, yet uncontrolled power. Even if we accept, as I do, that the idea of slavery draws out the contours of unfreedom in an illuminating way, we may still worry that these discourses instrumentalize the experience of enslaved people to illuminate what is bad, wrong, and intolerable about the domination of non-enslaved people. Highlighting the misery and objectionable character of slavery could and should stress why no one should ever be subject to such a “vile and miserable estate” (Locke 1988: 141). Historically, however, it has often not done so. Thus, the use of slavery as a metaphor and a model to identify and object to domination is a fraught, morally ambiguous enterprise. A foundational metaphor of western political thought since the ancients, it was eventually seized upon by feminist thinkers at least since the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was also re-deployed by abolitionists and writers who endured chattel slavery (see, e.g., Rogers 2020). Thus, I think we can acknowledge that early modern thinkers articulate their complaints by appealing to metaphorical and analogical notions of slavery and servitude, but without treating this moral and political idiom, in the words of Cicero, “decorous,” vague, or meaningless. 306

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22.4 Conclusion While I have only begun to explore Tarabotti’s and Suchon’s discourses on servitude, I sought to show that their discourses of servitude grow out of particular traditions in moral and political thought. At the same time, they transform the objectives and emphases of these traditional notions through their distinctively feminist perspectives. They both object to how members of their sex are prevented from developing their natures, the powers characteristic of human being. They characterize forced confinement as a form of political slavery, in which girls and women are controlled and deprived for the advantage of fathers or households. They likewise decry how enclosure poisons and deranges bonds of kinship. Tarabotti and Suchon communicate their experience of being buried, hidden, inaudible, and erased from memory. Because they lose their social ties, life itself loses its texture, color, and reality. It is “mired in dust.” Tarabotti and Suchon, however, do not make the logical step from their conviction that slavery is anathema to human existence to advocating expressly for slaves and servants. In conclusion, let us briefly consider who the slaves are to which they compare themselves. Tarabotti alludes to Biblical slavery when comparing fathers to the Pharaoh (2004: 72). She points out Plato’s good fortune to be born a Greek rather than a slave (79). She bitterly and sarcastically suggests that the dowry system might make more sense if, rather than family resources being consumed to buy a master for a daughter, a man were “to pay out money when taking a wife, just as you do in purchasing slaves” (95). With these rather different examples, Tarabotti does not seem to have a particular model of slavery in mind. The word “slavery,” first and foremost, signals a fierce complaint. In classical republican discourse on political slavery, in contrast to moral discourse, masters are represented unfavorably, as greedy, heartless, and sinful. While one ought to aspire for self-mastery morally speaking, enslaving those who are by nature free is dishonorable and loathsome. She draws freely on different images of slavery to insist that forced confinement is a devastating form of domination, and to assault the esteem enjoyed by patriarchal authority. Her text is a specific, targeted intervention. She does not observe the plight of servants or enslaved people, let alone join them to her anguished cry for freedom. Suchon also refers to various institutions and practices of slavery, but she directly refers to the traffic in human beings. Although the name ‘slave’ refers particularly to those who in the past were trafficked throughout the world, and still today in the Indies, Turkey, and other places, it still includes all people, who by misfortune of their condition or their conduct, find themselves entangled in the same miseries and calamities. (1693: 1.4.21) 4 While acknowledging that “slave,” strictly speaking, refers to those who are bought, sold, and traded, either due to misfortune or as punishment for a crime, she suggests that those who suffer the same miseries are also included in the definition. She does not call for an end to the institution of slavery, which she acknowledges to be ongoing, and we may doubt the justice of extending the scope of reference for the name “slave” exactly as she does. Nevertheless, she is unusual among her contemporaries for the fact that she regards slavery as an unequivocal evil. Later in her text, she offers a somewhat elliptical justification for understanding slavery more broadly. If we take “servitude” in its most rigorous sense, the word would pertain only to those who are slaves, whether owing to the misfortune of their birth, to wars, or to poverty. But if we consider matters more broadly, “servitude” can be applied to everything that reveals the 307

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effects of servitude, even though shrewd diplomacy gives them more pleasing and honorable names. (Suchon 2010: 118) Here, we see that slavery and “everything that reveals the effects of servitude” provides a model of domination, which she represents as a profound evil, with devastating consequences. In the case of women and girls, “shrewd diplomacy” endeavors to disguise this evil as a good. Like many authors of the period, Suchon refers also to Greek, Spartan, and Roman slaves (Suchon 2010: 128). She mentions that, in contrast to Roman slaves who worked as teachers and who, albeit rarely, led intellectual lives, women are denied education (Suchon 2010: 137). She cites Augustine’s denial that there are slaves by nature approvingly, and seems, like the Stoics, to identify slavery with worldly misfortune (2010: 162). Like many Christian authorities, Augustine insists on natural human equality and advocates for the interests of enslaved people without calling the institution of slavery into question (Garnsey 1996; Ramelli 2017). Given the diversity of representations upon which both Tarabotti and Suchon draw to articulate their protests against the severity of constraints imposed upon their sex, they do not have a clear or univocal model of slavery to which they compare gender domination. Moreover, given that their discourses draw upon traditional moral and philosophical tropes, colonial slavery and the traffic in human lives do not seem to be the predominant forms of enslavement they have in mind. Nevertheless, Suchon shows awareness of the reality of chattel slavery, and feels the need to justify her extension of the name beyond the boundaries of this “great evil.” In defending the natural equality of women, both Tarabotti and Suchon provide metaphysical and phenomenological support for their views that the interests and natures of women are not different from those of men. They use the language of slavery to articulate the injustice and harm of (physically and psychologically) confining women and girls and otherwise subjecting them to the authority and control of men. Yet, their liberal use of the idiom of slavery ultimately aims to serve their own cause and not the causes of servants or slaves. It thus appears that, at its origins, early modern European feminism invokes and excludes women subject to legal slavery. Early modern feminists are attuned to how male discourses of freedom and complaints against domination exclude the women and girls in their own homes. They pose a strong challenge to early modern republican ideals of freedom, which went unheard by most in the seventeenth century. They illustrate how challenges to paradigms of freedom and servitude tend to reflect particular experiences and practices of domination. To diversify and contest our own notions of what it takes to be free from servitude, we have much to learn from early modern women. At the same time, we must remain alert to how we have only begun recovering the voices of early modern women. Others remain buried and hidden.5

Notes 1 There is unconfirmed speculation that Suchon may have read Tarabotti (Broad and Green 2009: ­256–57), but the overlap in their analyses may simply be owed to the similarities in their situation. 2 Consider Plato: And he, whose soul is so gourmand, alone of the men in the city can’t go anywhere abroad or see all the things the other free men desire to see; but, stuck in his house for the most part, he lives like a woman. (Republic 579b) 3 Mary Nyquist dedicates her substantial and fascinating study to making sense of this relationship, but with no attention to early modern women or feminist writers (2013). 4 This citation contradicts Karen Offen’s findings that seventeenth century French feminists make “no references” to racial slavery (2008: 64).

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Slavery and Servitude in Seventeenth-Century Feminism 5 I owe thanks to the audience of the Quebec-Ontario Workshop in Early Modern Philosophy for their probing questions of an earlier version of this chapter. I am grateful to my perspicacious research assistant, Pratik Mahajan, for helping me to survey and sort through the arguments of a wide range of early modern pro-woman and feminist texts. I benefitted also from the exceptionally helpful comments of Lisa Shapiro and William Clare Roberts. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Works Cited Aristotle. (1877) The Rhetoric of Aristotle, ed. E. M. Cope and J. E. Sandys, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2013) Aristotle’s Politics, 2nd edition, trans. C. Lord, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Astell, M. (1996) Political Writings, ed. P. Springborg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broad, J. and K. Green. (2009) A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, Leiden: Cambridge University Press. Buck-Morss, S. (2009) Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cicero, M. T. (1999) On the Commonwealth and on the Laws, trans. E. G. Zetzel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2001) On obligations [De Officiis], trans. P. G. Walsh, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Descartes, R. (1984) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deslauriers, M. (2019) “Patriarchal Power as Unjust: Tyranny in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 27(4): 718–37. Epictetus. (1998) Discourses, ed. R. F. Dobbin, Oxford: Clarendon Press Garnsey, P. (1996) Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guenther, L. (2013) Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hawkes, T. (2017) Metaphor, London: Routledge. Locke, J. (1988) Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mill, J. S. (2006) On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, ed. A. Ryan, London: Penguin. Nyquist, M. (2013) Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Offen, K. (2008) “How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France, 1640–1848,” in K. Sklar and J. Stewart (eds.), Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 57–81. Panizza, L. (2004) “Volume Editor’s Introduction,” in A. Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny, ed. L. Panizza, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Patterson, O. (1982) Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perry, R. (1986) The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plato. (1968) The Republic, trans. A. Bloom, New York: Basic Books. Ramelli, I. L. E. (2017) Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogers, M. (2020) “Race, Domination, and Republicanism,” in D. Allen and R. Somanathan, (eds.), Difference without Domination: Pursuing Justice in Diverse Democracies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.59–90. Stanton, D. C. and R. Wilkin. (2010) “Volume Editors’ Introduction,” in G. Suchon, A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings, ed. D. C. Stanton and R. M. Wilkin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Suchon, G. (1693) Traité de La Morale et de La Politique, Divisé En Trois Parties. Sçavoir La Liberté, La Science, et l’autorité... Avec Un Petit Traité de La Foiblesse, de La Legereté, & de l’inconstance Qu’on Leur Attribuë Mal à Propos Par G. S. Aristophile (Gabrielle Suchon). Imprimé aux dépens de l’Auteur, Chez B. Vignieu. (2010) A Woman Who Defends all the Persons of her Sex: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings, ed. D. C. Stanton and R. M. Wilkin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tarabotti, A. (2004) Paternal Tyranny, ed. L. Panizza, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Holy Bible. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (2001). M. D. Coogan, M. Z. Brettler, C. A. Newsom, and P. Perkins (eds.), 3rd edition, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Hasana Sharp Walsh, J. (2019) “Gabrielle Suchon, Freedom, and the Neutral Life,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 27(5): 685–712. Weaver, E. B. (2016) “‘With Truthful Tongue and Faithful Pen’: Arcangela Tarabotti against Paternal Tyranny,” Annali d’Italianistica, 34: 281–96. Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2019) Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 4th edition Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Further Reading Broad, J. and K. Detlefsen. (eds.) (2017) Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Datta, S. B. (2003) Women and Men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History, Aldershot: Ashgate. Desnain, V. (2013) “Gabrielle Suchon: Militant Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century France,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 49(3): 257–71. Sabourin, C. (2017) “Plaider L’égalité Pour Mieux La Dépasser: Gabrielle Suchon Et L’élévation Des Femmes,” Philosophiques 44(2): 209–32. Shapiro, L. (2017) “Gabrielle Suchon’s ‘Neutralist’: The Status of Women and the Invention of Autonomy,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.50–65. Weaver, E. B. (2006) Arcangela Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice, Ravenna: Longo. Wilkin, R. (2019) “Feminism and Natural Right in François Poulain De La Barre and Gabrielle Suchon,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80(2): 227–48.

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23 RACE AND GENDER IN EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY How Amo and Astell Wrote behind the Veil Margaret Watkins It is a peculiar situation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (Du Bois 2015: 5)

W.E.B. Du Bois writes these words from the perspective of an American Black man in the generation after the end of the Civil War. The concept of double-consciousness has proved fruitful for helping us understand the perspective of anyone writing from within a hegemonically structured society but not from a dominant position within that structure. It is the perspective of those who feel the power of their own ideas and words alongside the blunting of that power from the gaze of others. There never was a more musical writer than Du Bois, yet he struggles to claim his place as “a co-worker in the kingdom of culture” (Du Bois 2015: 5). It is the perspective shared by all philosophers writing in early modern Europe who were not white, Christian, European men. Women philosophers and Black philosophers of the period share a space behind the veil of double-consciousness. Such philosophers therefore had to develop strategies to continue their work behind this veil. After a brief consideration of the context that generated this need, I will explore two different strategies addressing it. Anton Wilhelm Amo, who for a time gained entrance to the academy in an official capacity, thoroughly adopts the forms and conventions of his university setting. His writing style presumes membership in the German Academy. At the same time, his extreme commitment to the impassivity of the soul grounds an assertion of agency impervious to racist abuse. Mary Astell, in contrast, employs assertive rhetorical techniques crafted to enable male readers to hear criticism. These techniques include an early obfuscation of her gender, the use of an analogy to slavery with which the men in her audience could identify, and brilliant sarcastic irony. In calling these strategies, I am not suggesting that these thinkers are intentionally using them for the explicit purpose of overcoming something like double-consciousness. They may be, but the point is that the experience of these philosophers demanded such strategies if they were to continue their work. The alternative would be, as Margaret Cavendish puts it, to give in to the “dejectednesse” occasioned by the scorn of those in power and “quit all industry towards profitable knowledge” (Cavendish 1655: preface).

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-29

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23.1  The Gaze of the New Science Discussions of race in early modern thought often make much of polygenesis—in this context, the theory that different groups of humans had different origins. Debates about David Hume’s racist footnote in “Of National Characters,” for instance, include intense discussion about whether his reference in the original note to “species of men” implies a polygenetic account of humanity.1 The terse passage does not provide much to decide the question, yet no answer could mitigate the note’s racist implications, which asserts that “the negroes [are] naturally inferior to the whites” (Hume 1987: 208n). In his aptly titled chapter, “The Specter of Polygenesis,” Justin E. H. Smith shows how early polygenetic theories served to explain, after the discovery of the “new world,” how there could be people inhabiting lands so apparently disconnected from those already known, as well as perceived differences between these people and Europeans. This explanation was radical, challenging literal interpretations of the Biblical creation story in which all humans were descended from Adam and Eve, and could ground strongly racist views and policies. But those who resisted polygenesis did not, with few exceptions, believe in substantive equality across races; they simply explained the inequalities in different ways. Particularly popular were theses of decline or degeneration: “there was an original perfect type, at the creation, and variation is to be accounted for in terms of deviation from that type” (Smith 2015: 79). To deviate from the perfect is to introduce imperfection: this deviation can only be degeneration. Belief in such inferiority was enough to justify political oppression of “degenerated” people for many monogenesists. As Smith says, these thinkers saw the “differences between human populations as significant enough to justify claims of real racial inequalities, which in turn justify a political order that reflects these inequalities” (Smith 2015: 100). Belief in multiple kinds within humanity does not alone justify inequality or oppression. It is not the belief in types alone, but that belief combined with the assumption that one of those types is “original” and “perfect” that generates discriminatory racism. There seems to be a latent Platonism at work here, according to which a kind is defined by an exemplar to which all other instances are compared. The exemplar here is not an immaterial form, but the mythical abstract universal of the European male. Like members of other races, women were seen as degenerated or defective men.2 The dominance of this belief—that European males represent the standard against which all other humans were to be judged—means that all other philosophers writing in the early modern period were necessarily writing from a significantly different perspective than their white male counterparts. It is not that women or people of color could not accept the belief. But such philosophers could not accept it self-referentially; they could not believe that they represented the standard against which the majority of readers judge humanity. They could not write from the perspective of someone who could honestly say to himself, “I write as the exemplary human, and I can reasonably expect my audience to receive my writing as such.” They wrote instead from a double-consciousness, seeing the world as a philosopher, but seeing themselves through the eyes of those who counted them inferior specimens of humanity. As the “new science” continued to develop through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it promised objectivity, an observer-neutral perspective available to those with the proper tools and methods. “This grand book, the universe,” Galileo writes, “stands continually open to our gaze,” although to understand it we must become fluent in mathematics, the language in which it is written (Galileo 1957: 237–38). But the gaze of white men, directed at non-whites and women, was far from neutral. Andrew S. Curran details how early modern anatomists made numerous “discoveries” about African bodies, including dark bile and blood, dark or bluish brains, and “coarse ‘strings’” between their brains and bodies (2011: 4). Londa Schiebinger reports that the German anatomist Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring claims that “the ‘cold facts’ of anatomy showed [blacks] to be ‘nearer the ape’” (Schiebinger 1990: 395). 312

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Investigations of women’s bodies showed similar prejudice. Anatomical differences between the sexes were taken as confirmation of women’s inferiority. The absence of beards, for example, was seen as a signal of an absence of the capacity for philosophical or profound thought (Schiebinger 1990: 391–92). (Similar assumptions were made about males of races less prone to facial hair.) We find even women taking for granted the correspondence between the alleged weakness of the female frame and weakness of intelligence or character. Intersectional issues arise as anatomists divide the varieties of humankind according to Eurocentric standards of beauty and exhibit prurient fascination with the breasts and genitals of African and indigenous American women.3 Reading Margaret Cavendish’s criticisms of the microscope4 might induce some cringing, but she is right to suspect that the male scientific gaze is not as objective as it purports to be. Both Amo and Astell worked under that gaze.

23.2  Anton Wilhelm Amo The outlines of Amo’s story are beginning to be well-known thanks to the work of a few scholars, including Smith, Stephen Menn, and Dwight Lewis.5 Amo arrives in Amsterdam sometime near the beginning of the eighteenth century and ends up in the court of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Lüneberg in Wolfenbüttel. He studies at the University of Halle and the University of Wittenberg and teaches at Wittenberg, Halle, and the University of Jena. We have only three surviving works: On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (De humanae mentis ἀπαθεία), A Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those things that Pertain Either to the Mind Or to our Living and Organic Body (Disputatio philosophica continens ideam distinctam eorum quae competunt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo et organico), and the Treatise on the Art of Soberly and Accurately Philosophizing (Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi). The scarcity of material presents an obstacle to interpreting his ideas, let alone speculating about how he experienced himself as a Black man writing in the academy of early modern Europe. We know, as Smith has argued, that “he was explicitly interested in the problem of his own status in Europe, in the complicated situation of an African slave among German nobles and philosophers” (Smith 2015: 211).6 We can infer this from the title of his lost thesis, On the Rights of Moors in Europe (De iure Maurorum in Europa) and from contemporary reports that he argues in this work that Black Africans in Europe had a legal status conferred on them by Roman law, prohibiting their enslavement (Smith 2015: 210).7 Smith goes further, however, arguing that in his later work, Amo chooses a metaphysics that separates the mental from the physical and thus precludes any hierarchy of humanity based on physical appearance. To see why Smith makes this claim, we must have some grasp of the main tenets of Amo’s philosophical anthropology. I will focus on On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, but there is a tight relationship between his three extant works that makes each illuminating for and dependent on the others. Amo’s choice of the Greek “apatheia” in his title is significant: the term had long been associated with Stoic thought and even divine impassibility. It denotes the freedom from emotional disturbance characteristic of the Stoic sage and the Christian God. Amo’s audience would have been unlikely to mistake it for the negative state we now call “apathy” or for the lassitude we associate with “impassivity.” In keeping with the formal dissertation structure within which he is working, Amo begins by clarifying the terms within his thesis—that the human mind is impassive. The mind falls under the general category of “spirit,” where “a spirit is any purely active, immaterial substance which is always in itself understanding and operating spontaneously and intentionally on account of a determinate end of which it is conscious” (Amo 2020a: 159). The dual reference to “understanding” and “operating” indicates that Amo means to ascribe pure activity to the mind in what we might consider its epistemic and practical functions. Both in understanding, which he indicates 313

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is the same as becoming “conscious of some thing,” and in undertaking intentional action, the mind is self-determining; it “is not compelled by anything else to operate” (Amo 2020a: 159, 167). Sensation and the faculty of sensing, which are passive, reside in the body, not the mind. Space precludes full treatment of this claim here. But two clarifications may illuminate where Amo is coming from. First, sensation, as he understands it, is not itself conscious. The faculty of sensing is “a disposition of our organic and living body, by means of which [disposition] the animal is affected by things material and sensible and immediately present” (Amo 2020a: 175). As Smith writes, sensation “is simply a mechanical being-affected, by contact or penetration or communication, by an external object” (Menn and Smith 2020: 127). The eye is capable of being stimulated by reflected light and processing that stimulation into what we might call visual data— e.g., shape and color. This reception is what counts as sensation for Amo, not conscious awareness of shapes and colors. (The phenomenon of blindsight, where people who are cortically blind can respond to objects in their visual field without being consciously aware of seeing anything, suggests that some such processing is possible.) According to Amo, conscious knowledge of sensory objects is an active function of the mind’s attending to bodily sensations, not a passive reception of input from the sensible world or our sense organs. To begin to understand this active function of the mind, we must understand a little about Amo’s theory of intention and resist our tendency to associate intention with voluntary action. This is intention in its older sense as a straining or stretching toward, including the stretching of the mind toward an object. “A spirit,” Amo writes, “operates from an intention, i.e., from a precognition of a thing that is supposed to come about, and of an end that it intends to attain through its operation” (Amo 2020a: 167). All acts of the mind include intention, and Amo says in the Distinct Idea that acts of the mind include “the mind’s act of understanding, or intellect,” “the mind’s act of willing and nilling,” and “the mind’s act of effecting, or effective act” (Amo 2020b: 205). Understanding does not occur from the mind passively receiving input from sensible things. Rather, the mind attends to the sensations present in the body, which with the mind has a “very tight bond and commerce” (Amo 2020a: 167). Once such attention has occurred—viz., once the mind has become conscious of something—it might “inquire into the origin, existence, and essence of ” that thing, or it might not.8 But whatever the mind is doing, it is active and not the passive receptor of external forces. Nothing is simply received from the body; the mind directs its attention toward events in its associated body and thereby comes to know “that its body has been affected” and “that it itself has not been affected” (Amo 2020a: 181). There is a strong union between body and mind: “we concede,” Amo says, “that the mind acts together with the body by means of a mutual union. But we deny that it suffers together with the body” (Amo 2020a: 179). This is an odd union between a living entity and a non-living one, since Amo thinks that the mind is not alive. It does not contain the principle of life; it has no circulating blood. In arguing that a spirit exists, but does not live, Amo quotes the gospel of Matthew: “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28; Amo 2020a: 185). That which lives can die; but the human mind, according to Amo, is not alive. Amo is clearly advancing dualism, but is it a dualism that undermines the theoretical grounding of racism and therefore serves as a weapon against the dark side of double-consciousness? In his earlier work, Smith situates Amo’s dualism in the context of a dispute between medical Pietism as advocated by Georg Ernst Stahl and Leibniz’s commitment to a pre-established harmony between body and soul. Stahl believes that bodily faults reflect mental faults; Leibniz’s rejection of this view implies a commitment to human equality. Any mind-body dualism “effectively helped prevent the fragmentation of the human species into different races,” since the specific differentia of humanity, on such a view, “is placed beyond the scope of naturalistic study of human variety” (Smith 2015: 224). According to this reading, Amo adopts a “broadly dualist and harmonist philosophy” according to which “human nature is entirely independent of the material conformation 314

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of the body, residing instead in an immaterial soul that harmoniously accompanies the body but has no real connection to it” (Smith 2015: 224, 227). In his 2020 introduction to Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations, however, Smith argues that his earlier interpretation depended on an oversimplified understanding of Amo’s Halle as housing a partisan debate between Enlightenment Wolffians and conservative Pietists (Menn and Smith 2020: 54). More importantly for our purposes, the claim that Amo thinks that the soul “has no real connection” to the body is mistaken. In fact, although he denies that the body can act on the soul, he affirms that the soul can act on the body;9 the mind “uses the body (1) as the subject in which it is present, and (2) as an instrument and medium of its operation” (Amo 2020a: 169). In fact, “all of [the mind’s] operations depend on its commerce with the body in one way or another” (Menn and Smith 2020: 128). In his introduction to Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations, Stephen Menn cautions against understanding Amo’s theory as “an ‘interactionist’ model in which, say, an event in the body... would cause an event in the soul (an act of willing or nilling) which would in turn cause an event in the body” (Menn and Smith 2020: 145). The interactionist model would admit an influence of the body on the soul prohibited by Amo’s theory. The mind does not change in response to bodily changes. In the Distinct Idea, Amo defines the will as “an act of the mind by means of ideas, for attaining some end, but with regard to the agreement and disagreement of the immediately concurring natural instinct with the premeditated decision of the mind” (Amo 2020b: 213). Menn takes this premeditated decision to refer to “an already fixed mental state, a moral character or set of maxims, which, on the occasion of something happening to the body, produces an action through the body” (Menn and Smith 2020: 145). On Smith’s earlier reading of Amo, his commitment to substance dualism acts as a bulwark against a philosophically grounded commitment to racial inequality. If humans are essentially immaterial souls, no difference in skin color could justify seeing some humans as less equal than others. But again, plenty of thinkers committed to dualism found enough inequality remaining to justify in their own minds the worst form of oppression. If one admits that the soul can affect the body—as Amo in fact does—one can also consistently posit that defects of the soul can create defects of the body, and blackness was widely seen as such a defect. On Menn’s proto-Kantian interpretation of Amo, however, the human soul is given not just a form of equality, but a form of significant power. The individual’s soul, impassive and unchanging, expresses itself through actions but cannot be hurt by passions. Thus Amo ends the Distinct Idea with the Corollary: “Whatever is immutable in man pertains to the mind, but whatever is mutable with time pertains to the body” (Amo 2020b: 223). Without denying a strong relationship between mind and body, Amo presents the soul as partaking in an apatheia resembling that of the Divine. Such impassivity can do little in itself to change social structures or political systems. But it is a profound assertion of local power—of the imperviousness of the individual to the abuse of others. I am not suggesting that Amo’s theory of the impassive mind developed in response to his experience as a Black man of African descent in the world of white Europeans. Given the paucity of available evidence about his life, we cannot claim such insight into his motivations. I am suggesting, however, that his theory serves (as forms of Stoicism always have) as an assertion of the power of the single person against the attacks of the many. This has been true when the thinker was a prisoner of the state like Boethius and when the thinker was a leader of the state like Marcus Aurelius. It is a shield rather than a sword against the hegemonic gaze. Amo’s theory could do nothing to protect him from the pillory of white men: we know that Johann Ernst Philippi satirized him in a poem for falling in love with a German woman, accusing him of having a “vile nature.”10 Other reports have him returning to Africa after becoming melancholy (Smith 2015: 2). What his theory offers instead is the consolation that such attacks cannot alter the power of 315

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acting possessed by a person of good character, whose strength lies in his impassive soul. Amo’s contribution to the understanding of the human person (which we are only now beginning to appreciate) stands aloof, laid out in the form of the early modern dissertation—precise, uncompromising, and powerful.

23.3  Mary Astell Our efforts to understand Mary Astell’s strategies for dealing with double-consciousness need not depend so much on speculation. Here we have an author who directly engages the dominant group on the issue of her status. The oppression of women is a central theme of at least two of her books: A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (in two parts, published in 1694 and 1697) and Some Reflections upon Marriage. I will focus on the third edition of Some Reflections upon Marriage, arguing that Astell uses several rhetorical strategies to admonish male readers about their vicious behavior as husbands. The Reflections are not just another proposal to the ladies, but also a rebuke and admonition to the men. One indication of this audience stems from two problems of interpretation, the first concerning Astell’s comparison between women’s experience of marriage and slavery. In the preface, she introduces the comparison explicitly: “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves? as they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery?” (Astell 1996: 18–19). The italicized text comes from Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, in which he argues that “whenever the Legislators endeavour... to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience” (1988: 412). Elsewhere, however, Astell is critical of such theories, defending obedience to divinely sanctioned authorities and accepting subordination as a necessary consequence of order. The Reflections include strong statements about the duties of submission to sovereign and husband. Astell writes that she “heartily wishes that our Masters wou’d pay their Civil and Ecclesiastical Governors the same Submission, which they themselves exact from their Domestic Subjects” (Astell 1996: 8). Later she says that a woman who marries “ought to lay it down for an indisputable Maxim, that her Husband must govern absolutely and intirely, and that she has nothing else to do but to Please and Obey” (Astell 1996: 62). Some scholars have therefore concluded that Astell is not seriously portraying wives as enslaved but only indicating the hypocrisy of adherents to Locke’s contract theory who demand freedom from the domination of their sovereign that they would never grant their wives. Patricia Springborg, for instance, argues in the introduction to Astell’s Political Works that the Reflections’ “target is less the injustice of traditional Christian marriage than the absurdity of the voluntarism on which social contract theory is predicated” (Astell 1996: xxviii).11 Related questions arise when considering Astell’s apparent suggestion that women may do better not to marry at all. The title page of the third edition uniquely includes two scriptural quotations from Corinthians 1, seeming to warn both maiden and widow against marriage. Astell only quotes the italicized words in this verse: “But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned; nevertheless such shall have trouble in the flesh: but I spare you (1 Corinthians 7:28; KJV).” What she leaves out is significant: Paul warns virgins of the trouble “in the flesh” that they will have if they marry—viz., bodily trouble or trouble in this life.12 But Broad notes that Astell cautions in The Christian Religion as well as in the Reflections against the moral pitfalls of marriage, which prevent “women from thinking of higher things and attaining moral perfection” (Broad 2014: 730). The language Broad refers to is very strong: Astell notes that once women have succeeded in the effort to “purchase a Master,” they wrongly think that their “business” is “the economy of his and [their] own Vanity and Luxury, or Covetousness,” rather than what is truly “our only Business”— “the service of God and the Salvation of our Souls” (Astell 316

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2013: 110–11). For Astell, marriage is dangerous not just for the flesh but for the spirit, threatening the afterlife as well as temporal life. Unlike Paul, who was anticipating the parousia within a generation or so, Astell faces a moral obstacle to counseling against marriage in general. To do so would be read as threatening the species’ continuance or countenancing extramarital sex. Perhaps she is recommending only that women with means and status not marry.13 There is support for this interpretation in the text, 14 yet it faces a serious problem: Astell would be recommending against marriage for that class of people whom she sees as specially placed to educate themselves for higher things, to focus on cultivating religious devotion, and for performing acts of charity. It cannot be an acceptable result that this class of people does not reproduce.15 In both cases, Astell’s conservative views appear to conflict with the message of The Reflections. If the Lockean analogy between marriage and slavery is serious, does this imply that women with tyrannical husbands may consider themselves free from the marriage contract, as did the Duchess of Mazarin, whose case inspired The Reflections? If Astell warns women against marrying in the first place, does this encourage women to choose earthly happiness over participating in an institution ordained by God as the Anglican marriage ceremony says, “signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church” for good purposes? Note that both of these issues arise from the assumption that the primary audience of The Reflections is women who find themselves in miserable marriages or are considering marriage. But suppose the audience were men—not just political philosophers interested in the validity of Locke’s contract theory—but literate men who are or may become husbands. Then the messages might be: give your wives no reason to feel enslaved or to fear being married. Instead of a recommendation to women that they overcome enslavement, it would be a challenge to men to cease their tyranny. Further evidence that Astell is addressing such men comes from her intentional obfuscation of her gender. Like all of her works, the Reflections were published anonymously. The original preface begins with scolding the curious reader who would seek to discover the name of the author and indicates her awareness that something about her might prejudice her readers. “’Tis a very great Fault,” she writes, to regard rather who it is that Speaks, than what is Spoken; and either to submit to Authority, when we should only yield to Reason, or if Reason press too hard, to think to ward it off by Personal Objections and Reflections. (Astell 1996: 7) It seems clear that Astell is experiencing a form of double-consciousness here: realizing that her gender will be an obstacle to her being heard. In the third edition, Astell admits her gender. But the text carried over from the original edition suggests that she had intended her readers to assume she was a man. Criticizing “Satyrs” against marriage, she writes: Could there be no such thing as an happy Marriage, Arguments against Marriage would hold good, but since the thing is not only possible, but even very probable, provided we take but competent Care, Act like Wise Men and Christians, and acquit ourselves as we ought, all we have to say against it serves only to shew the Levity or Impiety of our own Minds. (Astell 1996: 36) The use of “we” and “our own” in this passage puts the author in the company of the men who wrote satires on marriage.16 317

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Women have often written under male pseudonyms or anonymously in hopes of being taking seriously by readers. But Astell steps further into the circle of male readership, asking them to accept admonition from one of their “own minds.” After she reveals her gender in the third edition, she moves from asking to be seen as a member of a fraternal circle to demanding recognition as a fellow citizen. “With an English Spirit and Genius,” she says, she had “set out upon the Forlorn Hope, meaning no hurt to any body, nor designing any thing but the Publick Good, and to retrieve, if possible, the Native Liberty, the Rights and Privileges of the Subject” (Astell 1996: 8). Astell’s comparison between marriage and slavery also shows her efforts to bring men into a shared perspective. This is a theme throughout the text, but we may miss it by conceiving of slavery only under the model most present to the twenty-first-century imagination. Astell does not primarily have in mind the system of colonial chattel slavery but instead appeals to the widespread fear of civil or political slavery, whereby subjects were deprived of natural liberties by a tyrannical sovereign.17 The suggestion that subjects of a tyrant were enslaved was common. The defender of Scottish liberty Andrew Fletcher, for example, argues that “the consequence” of allotting customary taxes to the monarch would be that “our parliaments shall be abolished, our kings shall become tyrants, and we, of subjects, slaves” (Fletcher 1997: 49). In claiming that her desire to restore the “Native Liberty” and “Rights and Privileges of the Subject” reflected an “English Spirit and Genius,” moreover, Astell relies on the entrenched belief that Britain’s “ancient constitution” uniquely protected the people against unjust rulers.18 She appeals to this respect for just relations between sovereign and subject throughout the Reflections. She asks men to consider that government does not “invest the Possessor with a superior Understanding as well as Power”; therefore, women being ordained to subjection within marriage for the sake of order does not imply that they are truly inferior to men (Astell 1996: 16). She argues that even a woman who marries wisely is extremely vulnerable, since he who has Sovereign Power does not value the Provocations of a Rebellious Subject, but knows how to subdue him with ease, and will make himself obey’d; but Patience and Submission are the only Comforts that are left to a poor People, who groan under Tyranny. (Astell 1996: 46) Later, she notes that “Covenants betwixt Husband and Wife, like Laws in an Arbitrary Government, are of little Force, the Will of the Sovereign is all in all” (Astell 1996: 52). White men would have been unlikely to see themselves enslaved in the service of a manor or plantation. The English took great pride at having eliminated such slavery in favor of a system of paid domestic servants.19 But they could see themselves as potential subjects of political tyranny: resisting such subjection was the object of active struggle and had been for several centuries. Such tyranny is usually the form Astell compares marriage to.20 Rhetorically, this comparison encourages male readers to empathize with the position of the women under their power and, hopefully, to wield that power with the constraints they desired from their political rulers. Finally, Astell’s use of sarcastic irony evinces her posture toward her male audience. By concealing her gender, and comparing wives to civil subjects under tyranny, Astell leads men to see themselves as members of the communities that she belongs to. As I suggested above, this puts her in the position of one offering admonition. She sees admonition as an important and neglected duty, even when the correcting person is inferior “in rank and worldly circumstances.” (Astell 2013: 166). As an unmarried woman, Astell is not subjected to the authority of any particular man; she thus has the right—perhaps obligation—to reprove the vice of men who become husbands to others. Christian admonition between friends must be undertaken gently, prudently, and with due caution of insinuating pride. But the admonition Astell attempts here is not between friends, 318

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raising a difficult question of what the tone should be. The Reflections’ tone seems influenced by those being admonished. We have seen Astell referring to “satyrs” upon marriage. Lister argues persuasively that the Reflections are “primarily a response to a lively tradition of misogynist satires on marriage” (Lister 2004: 45). These satires portray women as hypersexual, inconstant, and domineering. Their cruel humor may explain why the difference between true and false wit is a sub-theme of the Reflections.21 True wit is not that “which injures the absent”; it instead serves “to awaken and fix the Attention, that so we may Judge rightly” (Astell 1996: 41). The primary mode of wit that Astell uses throughout the Reflections to “awaken and fix the attention” is sarcasm—a biting form of irony. She remarks that advising women “to think [their husband’s] Folly Wisdom, [or] his Brutality that Love and Worship he promised in his Matrimonial Oath... required a Flight of Wit and Sense much above her poor Ability, and proper only to Masculine Understandings” (Astell 1996: 8–9). She pretends to credit men with “all the great Actions and considerable Business of this World,” and then describes this greatness as men’s “Subtlity in forming Cabals and laying deep Designs, their Courage and Conduct in breaking through all Tyes Sacred and Civil to effect them” (Astell 1996: 77). She refers to the “Great and Wise Reasons Men may have for despising women,” and the “mighty Opinion of himself ” so likely “to make an admirable Husband” (Astell 1996: 28, 52). And in one sentence, Astell reduces to absurdity the parallel between mental and physical strength: “Strength of Mind goes along with Strength of Body, and ’tis only for some odd Accidents which Philosophers have not yet thought worth while to enquire into, that the Sturdiest Porter is not the Wisest Man!” (Astell 1996: 77). Attending to Astell’s sarcasm is essential for avoiding misinterpretations. Does the passage cited above about virtuous wives having “nothing else to do but to Please and Obey” really recommend extreme subservience? She adds that the wife must believe her husband “Wise and Good and in all respects the best, at least he must be so to her” (Astell 1996: 62). Yet the preface indicates that she had no intention of telling women to believe their husbands’ “folly” to be “wisdom,” and she argues that a “Blind Obedience is what a Rational Creature shou’d never pay, nor wou’d such an one receive it did he rightly understand its Nature” (Astell 1996: 75). The entire passage may be sarcastic, so that Astell had something nobler in mind for women who martyr themselves as wives. Yet she does portray marriage as martyrdom, which might, by educating “Souls for Heaven,” “bring Glory to God and Benefit to Mankind.” But a woman capable of sustaining this performs “a more Heroic Action than all the famous Masculine Heroes can boast of ” (Astell 1996: 78). Astell cannot be representing this as wise strategy for women in general. This would be far too risky a recommendation. If we consider the Reflections, however, as being a proposal to the men, such passages prove less confusing and illustrate Astell’s strategic genius. She pays lip service to the Duchess of Mazarin’s fault in escaping her husband’s tyranny: An ill Husband may deprive a Wife of the comfort and quiet of her Life; may give her occasion of exercising her Virtue, may try her Patience and Fortitude to the utmost, but that’s all he can do: ’tis her self only can accomplish her Ruin. (Astell 1996: 34–35) Yet she also indicates that such a husband is responsible for his wife’s sin. Tyrants provoke rebellion, and even if the rebellion be wrong in itself, “both Parties indeed are Guilty, but the Aggressors have a double Guilt, they have not only their own, but their Neighbours ruin to answer for.”22 The Reflections suggest that since the responsibility for wifely rebellion lies with men, the remedy must as well. Astell’s continual use of the most assertive form of irony constitutes evidence that men are among her primary audience. These men include more than those political philosophers who 319

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might have been receptive to a critique of Lockean voluntarism. They include authors of satires against marriage, but also the herd of literate men likely to become tyrannical husbands. Sarcasm is a form of humor that indeed serves to “fix the attention,” but it does so in a posture of attack that makes little sense were she only speaking to women. It is a defensive posture: Astell lives in a world in which women are openly maligned as inferior, where “Laughter and Ridicule that neverfailing Scare-Crow is set up to divide them from the Tree of Knowledge” and where women who manage to acquire some learning are “star’d upon as Monsters, Censur’d, Envy’d, and every way Discourag’d” (Astell 1996: 28). Like Socrates’ irony, Astell’s forces men to see themselves in the views she pillories. She states views that a certain kind of man would agree with—that strength of mind correlates with strength of body, e.g., — and then shows the absurdities to which such views lead: the sturdiest porter is the wisest man! The methods that Astell uses to challenge her male readers encourage them to see themselves in the position of the women over whom they tyrannize or to recognize the face of the tyrant in the mirror. Such efforts are consistent with her own advice at the end of The Christian Religion: Moral discourses unless they are very particular do no good upon a reader, everyone being apt to justify or excuse his own conduct, and to believe he is unconcerned. So that a book is only so many words to no manner of purpose, except the reader, even him whom the author never so much as heard of, finds his own picture in it, and is forced to say to himself, “I am the Man.” (Astell 2013: 263) 23 It is true that Astell sometimes “seems understandably skeptical of men’s ability to change,” as Karen Detlefsen points out, citing a passage of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies in which Astell says that she “will not pretend to correct [men’s] Errors, who either are, or at least think themselves too wise to receive instruction from a Woman Pen” (Astell 2002: 56; Detlefsen 2016: 90). But initially, Astell attempts to conceal that her recommendations were from a woman’s pen. Even after her gender becomes known, she strives to motivate men to see her as a fellow subject and a fellow Christian rather than just a woman. The added preface includes an extended critical interpretation of scripture, showing that neither the letters of Paul, nor the story of the Fall, nor the examples of Biblical women imply any natural inferiority of women or the right of men in general to rule over women. Here she evinces a broad and deep knowledge of scripture; her deference to religious authority does not prevent her approaching scripture confident of her right and ability to judge for herself. The preface also includes the observation that a commitment to the universal right of men to rule would be treasonous under the reign of Queen Anne, and it ends with an encomium to her and a warning that if men will still not “do Justice to her Sex,” they will frustrate the possibilities of “all the great things that Women might perform, Inspir’d by her Example” (Astell 1996: 31). What acts of justice does the text of the Reflections demand? They are numerous: men should choose a wife with friendship foremost in mind (Astell 1996: 37). He should look for an intelligent and virtuous wife equal to him in station, to avoid making a woman he claims to love endure a life worse than the one she might have without him. He should refrain from reminding her of her duty, since she will not need any such reminders (Astell 1996: 53). He should be grateful for her trust and dependence on him (Astell 1996: 55–56). He should not treat her with scorn and contempt. He should protect her reputation and promote her improvement through education (Astell 1996: 75). In short, he should do all he can to make marriage less a martyrdom. Any other behavior turns marriage into a close occasion for sin. The husband in such a case commits “one of the biggest Transgressions”: the “damage we do to one another’s souls, by tempting them to sin, by turning them off from a virtuous course, or stopping and hindering them in it, and in a word, by laying any sort of impediment or stumbling-block in their way to heaven” 320

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(Astell 2013: 158–59). Despite her double-consciousness, Astell attempts to turn her male readers toward a virtuous course, using rhetoric that asserts her equality while evincing her superiority.

23.4 Conclusion I have highlighted aspects of Amo’s and Astell’s work that suggest a deep difference between them. Amo writes in the voice of the dispassionate defender of an early modern dissertation, prosecuting a thesis that implies his status as equal to his white readers. The logic implies this equality; the expression demonstrates it. Astell’s Reflections acknowledges her readers’ prejudice and uses a rhetorical style that engages and attacks it, demanding a remedy to injustice. These approaches are far from the only possible ones: the varieties of these are part of what makes seeking “new narratives” in the history of philosophy so fascinating. We could consider Ottabah Cugoano’s explicit descriptions of the brutality and cruelty of slavery, or Cavendish’s use of fantasy, dialogue, and conversational voice. All of these can be understood as responses to double-consciousness. I could have highlighted as well the theological views Amo and Astell have in common: they both believe themselves rational souls created for and by God, whose end is in another life. While their rhetoric in different ways asks white men to see beyond their physical nature, each posits a perspective superior to the most powerful of those men—from which anatomical difference is a passing illusion, never something powerful enough to inspire double-consciousness in the first place. Yet there were many white European men in positions of power who would have assented to such views as well while continuing to oppress those anatomically different from themselves. And neither Astell nor Amo were willing to accept the moral sometimes derived from such a view— that nothing in this world much matters, since it will all be overcome in the next. Astell worked to ameliorate the position of women and remedy the injustices they suffered. But it is fair too to see Amo as part of the resistance: by claiming his place among the academic elite, he asserts his own right to be seen as an equal citizen of the republic of letters—able and willing to criticize what was arguably the most influential revision of our understanding of the human person since Aquinas. Despite their hopes in another world, both Astell and Amo demand that their souls not be measured by the tape of this one.

Notes 1 See, e.g., Popkin 1978 and Valls 2005. 2 This view goes back at least to Aristotle. Perhaps its most infamous formulation is Aquinas’s. See Summa Theologiae I, q. 92, a.1. 3 See Schiebinger 2013: 126–29. See also Malcolmson’s discussion of “the ideological work inherent to [early modern] studies of imagination and the birth process” (2013: 149). 4 See, e.g., Cavendish 2001: 50–53. 5 Lewis 2018 offers a helpful introduction to Amo’s thought, particularly in relation to Descartes’ metaphysics. I have also found Meyns 2019 helpful for understanding Amo’s dualism. 6 Menn and Smith’s introduction to Amo’s Dissertations questions whether Amo is properly categorized as having been enslaved (2020: 4–7). 7 In conversation, Dwight Lewis has also noted that no Black man living in Europe, participating in the academy during the height of the slave trade could not have his experience affected by being racialized. 8 See Amo 2020b: 211 for the distinction between “momentary” and “reflexive” intellective acts of the mind. Inquiring into the origin, existence, and essence of something is reflexive. 9 See Smith and Menn 2020: 59. 10 See Smith 2015: 2. 11 See also Astell 1996: 18n20. For a critique of Springborg’s interpretation, see Broad (2014). 12 Both the NRSV and the NIV render the Greek here (which literally means “in the flesh”) as “in this life.”

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Margaret Watkins 13 See Lister 2004 and Broad 2014: 733. 14 See Astell 1996: 52–53. 15 Astell cautions against marrying outside one’s station; the class cannot survive just by men marrying women of a lower station. 16 Of course, “wise men” could mean “wise people,” but the context reveals that Astell is talking about those who choose a marriage partner. Women have no such genuine choice; all that is allowed them is “to Refuse or Accept what is offer’d” (1996: 43). 17 Astell’s support for hereditary monarchy in no way suggests approval of tyranny; “tyranny” by longestablished usage implied injustice and even violation of the natural law. See Broad 2015: chapter 8 on Astell’s theory of passive obedience in relation to her critique of tyranny. 18 For a study of the complexity of this myth’s roots and influence, see Pocock 1987. 19 See Watkins 2013: 109–13 for a discussion of Hume as an example of this pride and how it managed to subsist alongside the surge in colonial slavery. 20 There is at least one passage in which Astell seems to have domestic slavery in mind. See 1996: 50). 21 See, e.g., Astell (1996): 34–35 and 41–43. 22 Ibid., 91. Cf Christian Religion, section 199. 23 Astell refers here to 2 Samuel 12.

References Amo, A. W. (2020a) Inaugural Dissertation on the Impassivity of the Human Mind, in S. Menn and J. E. H. Smith (trans. and eds.), Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2020b) Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of Those Things That Pertain Either to the Mind or to Our Living and Organic Bod, in S. Menn and J. E. H. Smith (trans. and eds.), Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Astell, M. (1996) Political Writings, ed. P. Springborg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. P. Springborg, Peterborough: Broadview Press. (2013) The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, ed. J. Broad, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Broad, J. (2014) “Mary Astell on Marriage and Lockean Slavery,” History of Political Thought 35(4): 717–38. (2015) The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavendish, M. (1655) Philosophical and Physical Opinions, London: Martin and Allestrye. Available at: http:// digitalcavendish.org/complete-works/philosophical-and-physical-opinions-1655/ (2001) Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curran, A. S. (2011) The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Detlefsen, K. (2016) “Custom, Freedom, and Equality: Mary Astell on Marriage and Women’s Education,” in A. Sowall and P. A. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, University Park: The Penn State University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2015) The Souls of Black Folk, New Haven: Yale University Press. Fletcher, A. (1997) “Two Discourses Concerning the Affairs of Scotland,” in J. Robertson (ed.), Andrew Fletcher: Political Works, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galileo, G. (1957) The Assayer, in S. Drake (trans.), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, New York: Anchor Books. Hume, D. (1987) Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Lewis, D. (2018) “Anton Wilhelm Amo: The African Philosopher in 18th Century Europe,” Blog of the APA, 8 February. Available at: https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/02/08/anton-wilhelm-amo-the-africanphilosopher-in-18th-europe/ (Accessed: 28 February 2021). Lister, A. (2004) “Marriage and Misogyny: The Place of Mary Astell in the History of Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 25(1): 44–72. Locke, J. (1988) Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malcolmson, C. (2013) Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society, New York: Ashgate. Menn, S. and J. E. H. Smith. (2020) Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body, New York: Oxford University Press. Meyns, Chris. (2019) “Anton Wilhelm Amo and the Problems of Perception,” in B. R. Glenney and J. F. Silva (eds.), The Senses and the History of Philosophy, London: Routledge.

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Race and Gender in Early Modern Philosophy Pocock, J. G. A. (1987) The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, a Reissue with Retrospect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popkin, R. H. (1978) “Hume’s Racism,” Philosophical Forum 9: 211–26. Schiebinger, L. (1990) “The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science,” ­Eighteenth-Century Studies 23(4): 387–405. (2013) Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Smith, J. E. H. (2015) Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Valls, A. (2005) “‘A Lousy Empirical Scientist’: Reconsidering Hume’s Racism,” in A. Valls (ed.), Race and Racism in Early Modern Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Watkins, M. (2013) “A Cruel but Ancient Subjugation? Understanding Hume’s Attack on Slavery,” Hume Studies 39(1): 103–21.

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24 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION Van Schurman, Pascal, Maintenon and Astell Michaela Manson1 24.1 Introduction Philosophy of education is a notoriously amorphous discipline (for an overview, see Phillips 2010). Answers to the question “what is philosophy of education?” are easily open to criticism for erroneously including or excluding putative contributions to the field (e.g. Siegel et al. 2018). If the historian of philosophy of education had to satisfactorily answer this question first, the project of evaluating historical instances of philosophy of education might never begin. Fortunately, standards of philosophical and historical rigor do not bind us to this approach. The amorphous nature of the contemporary discipline could be taken to justify a certain lassitude on the part of a historian when it comes to identifying past philosophical works about education. While some might criticize this approach for introducing conceptual confusion through the misidentification of particular texts as instances of philosophy of education, a fair reply holds that such criticisms fail to appreciate the relevant selection criteria. Of course, this invites a question: what criteria should the historian of philosophy of education use when deciding which works are worth her attention? Critics have long noted that scholarly resources about the history of philosophy of education rarely include any historical women who wrote on education (Titone 2007; Martin 1982: 131). However, the problem persists. Of course, this absence does not reflect a lack of historical writings on education by women, for there are many such texts. Instead, the omission of women from these histories invites further speculation about the criteria for counting as a historical, philosophical work about education. At the end of this chapter, I briefly argue against some putative criteria for deciding what counts as philosophy of education that could be invoked to rationalize excluding these works. However, the primary task of this chapter is to introduce the reader to a few representative works of philosophy of education by early modern European women philosophers. By attending to these works and what makes them philosophically interesting, reasons for including them in a history of philosophy of education will become clear. In turn, these reasons can inform a set of general criteria for discerning what makes a work count as an instance of philosophy of education while also dispelling those misconceptions that hinder the appreciation of contributions made by women to this field. The sections of this chapter are organized around four figures: Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), Jacqueline de Pascal (1625–1661), Madame De Maintenon (1635–1719) and Mary 324

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-30

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Astell (1668–1731). Focus on these figures is justified by how their works speak to questions about the subjects, means and ends of education. While their accounts differ in important respects, joint reflection on these works reveals a few thematic connections through which early modern European women’s philosophies of education can be understood. These themes include whether education ought to aim at moral and/or intellectual improvement, what these two kinds of improvement consist in and how they relate to each other, including whether education ought to aim at promoting a particular relation to the divine, or, whether the ends of education ought to be construed in more secular terms. Another theme concerns the possibility and value of selftuition or auto-didacticism versus the benefits of institutional educational settings. Perhaps more significantly, some of their reflections anticipate what seem to be contemporary perspectives on education. This emerges in how these women think about who is educable, how education should reflect the social realities of its subject and how educating a member of a socially subordinated group can stand to benefit other members of that group. While the writings of van Schurman, Pascal, De Maintenon and Astell merit attention in their own right, the comparisons that emerge from considering them within the same chapter provide a useful heuristic for appreciating the variety and richness of women’s thinking about education in early modern Europe.

24.2  Anna Maria van Schurman’s Dissertatio Often identified as the first European woman university student, Anna Maria Schurman (1607– 1678) attended lectures at the university of Utrecht in 1636 alongside Descartes and Huygens, though she was required to sit in a screened-off portion of the lecture hall (Bulckaert 2010: 21). Biographies about her often note her linguistic and artistic abilities (Wyles 2016: 62–63; Irwin 1980: 70). Later in life she became a member of the Labadists, a quasi-mystical religious community, during which period she recanted her earlier views about education (Pal 2012: 237–48; Irwin 1980: 79–82). Nevertheless, van Schurman remains best known for her contribution to philosophy of education, that is, A dissertation concerning the capacity of women for learning, and their aptitude for noble letters (1638). First published in 1638, the Dissertatio was re-published both in Latin, as well as in translation for Dutch, English and French audiences over a period of 20 years (Bulckaert 2010: 23). In one letter, van Schurman writes that the Dissertatio is intended to persuade young women to pursue studies, and that its translation could serve this end (van Schurman 1641: 38–39). In the Dissertatio itself, van Schurman sets out to defend the thesis that it is fitting for a Christian woman—specifically one of means and leisure—to study letters. In this, van Schurman recognizes that there are few educational institutions in which women could formally enroll. Instead, it is suggested that studies be undertaken in the home, attributing responsibility for supervision either to parents, or, if their finances permit, a private tutor (van Schurman 1641: 11–12). By so limiting her thesis, van Schurman circumvents a potential objection pointing to particular social and economic exigencies that would render impractical the choice to educate a woman in various circumstances. Such carefulness characterizes van Schurman’s Dissertatio. The text begins by disambiguating important terms: ‘Study’ is clarified as the “attentive and active application of the mind,” while “letters” is said to consist in “knowledge of languages, history, and all disciplines, not only the superior ones which they call faculties, but also the lower ones they call philosophic sciences” (van Schurman 1641: 9–10).2 The distinction here reflects the traditional division of studies in European medieval and early modern universities. The faculties included Arts, Law, Medicine and Theology, the latter three of which came to be known as the Higher Faculties. Roughly, the curriculum of Arts faculty followed the traditional notion of the seven liberal arts, though it was expanded to include elements of the disciplines of physics, metaphysics and moral philosophy. In van Schurman’s context, the faculty of Arts would have likely been referred to as the faculty of 325

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Philosophy, and therefore her term “philosophic sciences” here probably refers to the trivium (Leff 1991: 307–36). Formally, the main of the text employs traditional syllogistic argument with the advantage of rendering explicit her reasoning in defense of the thesis. Some scholars contend that this functions to distance van Schurman from her thesis, as if she is not presenting her own personal endorsement but simply an unimpassioned logical conclusion (Irwin 1998: 9). This may be. Still, this method adds to the Dissertatio’s rhetorical force in that it demonstrates the fruits of van Schurman’s own education: she is able to conform her reasoning to the period’s still widespread standards of scholastic argumentation. This demonstration is furthered by many references to both the authority of reason, as well as authoritative philosophical figures (van Schurman 1641: 16). In this, van Schurman displays her facility with a philosophical tradition, substantiating her own knowledge and authority to address such questions about women’s education. Given that actuality is proof of possibility, van Schurman’s own authorship of the Dissertatio demonstrates some of the promise she holds for women’s education. Accordingly, after limiting the subject of her thesis, van Schurman articulates the aims of such education: the glory of God, and the salvation of her soul; not only so that she may become so much the better and happier, but so that she may instruct and guide her family (should that duty befall her), and so that, to the extent that she is able to, she may profit her entire sex. (1641: 12) That women can profit other women through their own education is a theme that echoes through early modern women’s writing on education. While van Schurman writes little else about how women may do so, it is suggested here that they may become educators even if only within their families. Besides this, having been raised a Dutch Calvinist, it is unsurprising that van Schurman holds personal salvation and the glorification of God as the ends of education; presumably, she would think these the ends of most human activities. According to van Schurman, glorification of God consists in love and reverence for Him. Study promotes these attitudes by teaching one “to recognize God and observe his divine works” and thereby achieve “a better knowledge [of Him]” (van Schurman 1641: 22–23). In turn, this knowledge is said to excite greater love for Him. For, according to van Schurman, whatever is “most beautiful and most perfect, to the degree that it is better known, so much more does it deserve to be appreciated, either in reverence or celebration” (van Schurman 1641: 23). Being the most beautiful and perfect, God and His works are most deserving of such appreciation, that is, most deserving of love and reverence. Van Schurman thinks one can learn this much through the kinds of study recommended: “Of all things that lead to an easier and more distinct cognition of God and his Divine works, nothing does so more than study” for, according to van Schurman, “[such is] the goal and the effects of sciences” (van Schurman 1641: 22–23). Still, it may be doubted whether knowing that God is most deserving of one’s love suffices for actually so loving God. Van Schurman addresses this challenge by affirming a kind of intellectualist moral psychology according to which one’s cognitive activities, evaluative judgments and the like, direct one’s practical activities, their pursuit of various purported goods. This being so, genuinely recognizing that something is deserving of love would result in actually loving it. Evidence of van Schurman’s moral psychological commitments appears in the Dissertatio’s arguments that study prevents vices such as vanity, pride and arrogance, while also promoting a student’s intellectual and moral virtue. In the Dissertatio’s final argument, ignorance is identified as the source of particular vices, while study is recommended as both a corrective and preventative measure (van Schurman 1641: 28). Elsewhere, van Schurman points to how women may be guarded from the sin of heresy by acquiring the ability to detect deceptions. She writes, “[for] right reason can more 326

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easily conquer false or corrupt reason, which heresies depend on most of all” (van Schurman 1641: 24). According to van Schurman, study helps overcome sin and vice by “perfecting the natural powers of the human intellect” (van Schurman 1641: 22). In avoiding sin and acquiring virtue, human moral agency appears conditioned on one’s cognitive abilities and activities such that moral improvement is a function of intellectual improvement. In all this, the Dissertatio responds to a traditional prejudice about women’s ineptitude, that they either lack or possess weakened capacities necessary to achieve virtue and wisdom. Sometimes this prejudice is expressed as weakness in women accounting for their apparent liability to vice. However, even granting this prejudice for the sake of argument without actually endorsing it, van Schurman contends that this only further supports the case for women’s education in that more assistance stands to help those with greater disadvantages. Rather, the opening of the Dissertatio endorses a view about women’s capacities for education, defending the claim that “[study is] appropriate to whoever has the innate capacity, principles, or powers for pursuing the study of arts and science” (van Schurman 1641: 15). The first argument contends that women possess the relevant capacity, and takes the fact that women are human beings as evidence for this point (van Schurman 1641: 15). The crucial point is that qua human beings, women too are distinguished as possessing the capacity to reason, and that this capacity is what explains the ability for anyone to study arts and sciences. To further substantiate this point, the Dissertatio argues from observations about what is already the case, namely, that there are examples of women who participate in various arts and science, a pursuit which would not be possible if such women did not possess the relevant capacity for reason. Besides satisfying the capacity requirement, the subsequent argument cites Aristotle’s authority in support of the claim that qua human beings who in general desire to know, women also possess a desire for knowledge. Coupled with the commitment that “nature makes nothing in vain,” the Dissertatio concludes that it is fitting for women to pursue arts and sciences, as “it is generally fitting for whatever has the desire to know to pursue these forms of learning, lest the desire for such learning be in vain” (van Schurman 1641: 15–16). In its final section, the Dissertatio concludes by replying to foreseeable objections, including an objection that infers a general lack of desire for learning among women from the observation that there are not many women who pursue learned goals, despite “an abundance of examples” that should lead one to conclude otherwise. To this, van Schurman urges caution, asking minimally that one reserve judgment until “we [women] have been urged to take up study by the greatest arguments and measures, while at the same time giving us a taste of its sweetness” (van Schurman 1641: 32–33). If women have not shown as great an interest in the studies recommended in the Dissertatio, this may simply owe to a lack of opportunity and encouragement. As it stands, this contingent social circumstance does not undermine the more basic claims about what makes women fitting subjects for education, namely, their nature as possessing the capacity to reason and their innate desire for knowledge.

24.3  Jacqueline Pascal’s A Rule For Children Turning to Jacqueline Pascal (1625–1661), the case for including her in a history of philosophy of education proves more challenging. Her most obviously educational work, written in 1657 and first printed posthumously in 1665, A Rule For Children bears little resemblance to more familiar forms of philosophical writing. Instead, it adopts the form of those documents called “rules” that detail the structure, activities and responsibilities for members of a religious order. Nevertheless, Pascal is included here for how her text speaks to a significant theological and philosophical controversy of her day, even if only obliquely, namely, the question of whether, by their own freedom, humans can do anything to merit salvation. 327

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By way of introduction, it will prove useful to highlight a couple biographical details. In 1646, the Pascal family was introduced to the Catholic sect of Jansenism. In 1647 Jacqueline began attending the Port-Royal convent, the seat of Jansenism (Conley 2019: 20–22). There, Pascal’s spiritual formation eventually led her to profess a religious vocation, entering the convent in 1652 and pronouncing her vows the following year. Once a nun, Pascal assumed the role of headmistress for the convent’s school (Conley 2019: 23–26). In turn, this role informed her A Rule For Children (1657) in which she articulates a conception of education’s aims and methods, focusing on, as Pascal writes, “what I do for their spiritual and corporeal formation” (Pascal 1665: 424).3 More specifically, it is this work that suggests a peculiar tension in the context of Jansenist theology. Inspired by Saint Augustine’s writings, Jansenism holds human nature to be so corrupted by original sin that, on their own, humans are incapable of meriting salvation. Jansenism further maintains that redemption is only possible with the assistance of God’s irresistible grace and that God only grants this grace to the predestined elect, membership of which group is unknowable to humans during this life. Significantly, despite attributing freedom to humans, these commitments seem to force Jansenism to deny any role for human freedom in accepting God’s grace. On this view, humans seem to lack genuine moral agency; instead, their status as moral creatures is seemingly a matter of moral luck. For present purposes, what matters are the core Jansenist tenets about predestination and human corruption, both of which seem to preclude any contribution humans might make toward achieving salvation, either one’s own or that of another. It is here that the tension with Pascal’s educational writings emerge. For, if such commitments are foundational to a particular religious and philosophical outlook, it is hard to see what education could really be good for and how it could be effective. That is, a minimal notion of education as somehow improving its subject seems incompatible with the thought that, due to the absolute corruption of human nature, humans are incapable of fostering their own moral improvement. Admitting these claims, it seems that the project of trying to educate would prove vain. Yet, as both a Jansenist and an educator, Jacqueline Pascal rises above this tension. To be sure, Pascal’s Rule initially seems to ignore the problem. While it is possible to see failure to acknowledge this tension as a kind of cognitive dissonance on Pascal’s part, a more charitable interpretation is suggested by her 1661 response to the ecclesiastical interrogation of Port-Royal nuns. There, to the morally troubling implications of Jansenism’s views about predestination, Pascal prefers an epistemic response: this is a mystery that cannot be satisfactorily understood by human’s limited cognitive capacities (Pascal 1733: 122). If Pascal similarly prefers an epistemic response to the above-described tension between Jansenism and education, then it seems reasonable to read her Rule as offering a kind of pragmatic solution. As it is unknowable which humans will receive God’s grace and achieve salvation, it is epistemically possible that any human will.4 If it seems possible that any human will be saved, then, pragmatically speaking, it is reasonable to treat all humans as such. The question then becomes: what is the appropriate way to treat someone who might receive God’s grace? Answering this question depends on another feature of Jansenist and Catholic theology, namely that when humans sin, they do so through their own free agency. This being so, even if there is nothing an individual can do to merit God’s grace, there is much they can do to fall further from it. Inversely, it seems possible that one could minimize sin wherefore a Jansenist education could, with conceptual consistency, aim at this possibility. That is to say, the conjunction of the epistemic possibility that anyone may receive God’s grace, and the real possibility that humans can both sin and avoid sin suggests that a Jansenist education aim at helping its pupils avoid sin. Something of this approach finds expression in Pascal’s introduction to her work. There, writing to the mother superior, Pascal voices a desire for correction of her Rule lest any mistakes in her educational program further distance her pupils from God’s grace. As she writes, “the faults that I commit do not 328

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only ruin what God is able to accomplish through me but introduce great obstacles to the graces he places in these souls” (Pascal 1665: 424). At the very least, inasmuch as it is possible, the goal of preventing sin and the concomitant goal of impeding one’s further fall from grace provide some rationale for the methods prescribed in Pascal’s Rule and its emphasis on self-examination, explanation, moral virtue, habituation and the ability to apply their spiritual and moral lessons to particular situations (Pascal 1665: 425, 426, 429–30, 431, 436, 441–42, 449, 450–52, 485, 487, 499, 503, 504–08, 521). In this way, more than mere memorization, Pascal’s educational project promotes both internalizing and understanding doctrines and their prescriptions thereby encouraging a kind of authority and expertise about such matters on the part of her students. Thus, despite its apparent religious conservatism, in a context where access to and understanding of religious texts and doctrine was not always a privilege afforded to wider society, let alone women, Pascal’s Rule prescribes a curriculum that challenged traditional religious authority that might otherwise limit women’s Christian literacy and facility with its conceptual schemata.

24.4  Madame De Maintenon’s Dialogues and Addresses Not unlike the educational writings of Jacqueline Pascal, Francoise, D’Aubigne, Marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719) offers a practically-inflected vision of women’s education. Perhaps a reflection of her own unpredictable biography, born to a criminal father and ultimately becoming the “secret queen” of France, De Maintenon’s writings evince concern for her students’ ability to cope with changes of fortune and particular exigencies that attend their social stature. Through her relationship with Louis XIV, De Maintenon secured funding for the school at Saint-Cyr. Established in 1686, Saint-Cyr was intended for students from genteel families that had lost their fortunes. While serving as the school’s first headmistress for nearly 30 years, De Maintenon wrote on education. Besides private correspondence, she authored dialogues, short morality plays and speeches, the last of which were addressed either to students or to faculty at the school. Significantly, De Maintenon’s dialogues were used as educational materials at the school in that students are reported to have performed them (Wilson 1991: 757). In some of these writings, De Maintenon anticipates that, after leaving the school, students will return to a state of dependence, either in marriage, or by making religious vows. For this reason, she conceives of the education at Saint-Cyr as preparing her students for either eventuality. In one address, she warns of choosing a single life, “a state without commitments” writing, “[if ] you want to find a state where you won’t depend on anyone, where you can do your own will morning and night, and where there is neither constraint nor subordination, you are looking for the impossible” (De Maintenon 2004: 107). Foreseeing a life for women in which they would experience challenges peculiar to their socially subordinate status, De Maintenon’s writings suggest that the goal of education should be to prepare students by cultivating virtues and habits that would make them able to weather such challenges. Accordingly, De Maintenon’s dialogues and speeches address such topics as the virtues of courage, civility and piety, as well as how to maintain a good reputation and the value of an education such as the one offered at Saint-Cyr. In an address about the benefits to be gained from a demanding upbringing, she recommends to her students, “[by] your own free will, you should try to toughen up your upbringing” (De Maintenon 2004: 132). After providing examples of individuals who voluntarily create obstacles for themselves in order to more easily meet other challenges, De Maintenon relates “[such examples are meant] to encourage you to develop the habit of voluntarily restraining yourself from seeking what is most comfortable” (De Maintenon 2004: 133). The idea is that by developing a habit of avoiding comforts and seeking challenges, students may inure themselves and experience less loss and suffering when they encounter future hardships. In 329

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another address, De Maintenon expresses the concern that her students fear hard work. Recognizing that the life awaiting most of her students would not allow them to avoid such work, she enjoins them to accustom themselves to its demands, even going so far as telling them to approach it with a positive attitude (De Maintenon 2004: 100). Other speeches offer examples of people that De Maintenon holds to be reasonable as a way to encourage her students to become reasonable themselves. What stands out about these examples is that they illustrate individuals who establish a daily routine for themselves, outside particular institutional structures that provide order to one’s daily activities. In essence, Maintenon suggests that a reasonable person is one who is able to govern oneself, as she writes, “My children, this should help you to see that you are not the only people who have to follow rules and regulations. Every reasonable person needs to have a rule of life” (De Maintenon 2004: 96). Maintenon recommends that, with their spiritual instructor, her students conceive of an order they wish to follow in their lives, and that they commit to following that order. Elsewhere, she recommends that students take the opportunities they have for reflection to consider the kind of life they would like to pursue (De Maintenon 2004: 97). By reflecting on what they want in their lives and designing their own rules through the guidance of a mentor, Maintenon’s students stand to regard the rules not as imposed from without, but as issuing from their own authority and reflective endorsement. In this way, by being the authors of their own structure, students might better achieve the ends of self-government. Accordingly, the account of education one finds in De Maintenon’s writings aims much less at philosophical pursuits, or even religious formation, but more toward how one ought to live given certain practical limitations. Maintenon seeks to prepare her students to be able to cope with changing circumstances in their lives. This difference in the aim of education seems to reflect the social status of the individuals to be educated, Saint-Cyr being intended for girls from families who had lost their fortunes. These realities may also account for De Maintenon’s methods, performance of conversations and lectures from a headmistress. For, learning particular social skills and virtues could help these pupils navigate the realities of their social position.

24.5  Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Finally, whereas different criteria might yield divergent answers as to what counts as a work of philosophy of education, I contend that, no history of philosophy of education would be complete without including Mary Astell’s (1666–1731) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, 1697). Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1666, little is known about Astell’s own education; though, it is often conjectured that she received some instruction from her Cambridge-educated uncle, Ralph Astell (Perry 1986: 53). Once comfortably middle-class, the decline of the Astell family’s fortunes was accelerated by her father’s death in 1678, leaving the family to survive on the charity of their community. This economic situation left little prospect for Astell to marry well, an expectation common for women of her social rank (Perry 1986: 57–59). Instead, presumably drawn by its reputation for learning and letters, Astell moved to London on her own sometime between 1684 and 1686. Records indicate that by 1688 Astell was unable to support herself, submitting a plea for charity from the Archbishop of Canterbury (Perry 1986: 66). With his help, Astell was eventually able to earn a living through both her writing and the generosity of a community of learned women. Astell found these connections close to her neighborhood of Chelsea, an area then hospitable to intellectually ambitious women (Perry 1986: 63–64). It is here that Astell lived until her death in 1731. During her life, she wrote on subjects ranging from the nature of love, philosophical method, social mores and political conflict. However, it is one of her earliest works, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, which stands out as a piece of philosophy of education.

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Composed of two parts, the namesake of the work as a whole seems to be the proposal of its first part. There, Astell challenges her audience, the Ladies, both to abandon prejudices about women’s incapacity for education and to commit to a project of women’s education: Now as to the Proposal it is to erect a Monastery, or if you will…we will call it a Religious Retirement, and such as shall have a double aspect, being not only a Retreat from the World for those who desire that advantage, but likewise, an institution and previous discipline, to fit us to do the greatest good in it. (Astell 2002: 73) Here, Astell signals some of the advantages of an institutional education as she envisions it. For one, it may help minimize worldly distractions that she sees as contributing to women’s mistaken judgments about themselves, their value and their interests (Astell 2002: 94).5 Second, the education offered by such an institution would prepare its pupils to help others, either as educators to other women or by performing charitable deeds (Astell 2002: 84, 73). In particular, Astell thinks that the friendships forged in this setting will promote virtues like charity and prudence, while undermining vices such as envy (Astell 2002: 87). To this end, she thinks that the conversations among women will help to improve their own understanding, presumably because it demands that one articulate and communicate one’s ideas and reasons thereby laying them open to critique and revision (Astell 2002: 126).6 On the more theoretical side, Astell anticipates that such an education will “furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful knowledge” (Astell 2002: 77), by providing an opportunity “serious enquiry after necessary and perfective truths” (Astell 2002: 78). Among these truths, Astell might include particular metaphysical views about God, the material world and the natures of mind and body. For, Astell’s thoughts in this regard not only help justify her proposals about women’s education, she believes that by learning such truths, women will make better judgments about their own lives and what they ought to do (Astell 2002: 62, 64). For, Astell believes that women possess immaterial and rational souls and that their greatest good lies in using and improving their understanding in accordance with divine providence (Astell 2002: 70, 95–96). For, like van Schurman and Pascal, Astell conceives of salvation, and as much as it is possible, securing one’s happiness in both this life and the next, as the ultimate end of intellectual and moral improvement (Astell 2002: 200). Despite the promise Astell held for such an institution, she was unsuccessful in securing the necessary funding to bring her vision to reality. Nevertheless, in 1697, she published the Second Part of A Serious Proposal, subtitled “wherein a method is offered for the improvement of their minds.” There, Astell shifts to recommending auto-didacticism as opposed to a communal educational setting. Of course, this change in recommended approach does not undermine the value Astell perceives in group education. Rather, as she writes, the first part did not provide much detail about what methods might be effective in achieving its ends (Astell 2002: 126). The Second Part therefore provides a more specific answer to the question of how women’s intellectual and moral improvement may be achieved. Significantly, it offers a method that can be applied even in the absence of some benefits afforded by such an institutional setting. More precisely, the second part addresses the twin challenges of prejudice and habituation which may stand in the way of a woman’s intellectual and moral flourishing. Accordingly, the method that Astell proposes in the second part begins by addressing the vices of sloth, indifferency, irregular self-love or pride. There, Astell articulates the character of these vices and the adverse effects they can have on one’s moral and intellectual development. From this, Astell discusses prejudices and the need to abandon them in the process of acquiring knowledge. Astell recognizes

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the challenge in overcoming both prejudices and the habits of vice, recommending that her reader form a strong resolution bolstered by lively conceptions of one’s good, including the advantages to be gained by such undertakings (Astell 2002: 144). Once the foundations are cleared of both error and bad habit, Astell endorses a Cartesian method of thinking mirroring that prescribed by Arnauld and Nicole’s Port-Royal Logic (Astell 2002: 166). According to this approach, a subject should begin by withholding judgment except when she has formed a clear and distinct idea. From such ideas, a subject can form chains of reasoning based on the relations of ideas, ultimately building up a sound and consistent set of ideas to inform one’s thinking, and, ultimately, one’s practical activities (Astell 2002: 166–70). In all this, there is no denying that methods of the Second Part appear woefully individualistic. Accordingly, differences between the two parts of A Serious Proposal invite speculation about whether Astell thinks institutional settings are merely expedient in achieving the goals of education, or whether she thinks there are educational ends that can only be achieved in a communal context. To this, I tentatively suggest that Astell thinks of the difference as merely one of degree and not kind. The process of society’s negative enculturation that Astell outlines in the first part may be undone more easily by removing subjects from that context and exposing them to contrasting norms. However, Astell and women like her are testaments to the possibility of seeing through social convention while still inhabiting one’s own culture. Similarly, an individual’s flaws and vices might be more easily recognized by others, and, if pointed out carefully, this may lend to an easier correction. Again, a communal setting would serve this end; though not impossible, challenges of self-knowledge may make the process of such inventory vastly more difficult when performed alone. In these ways, then, it seems the benefits and application of Astell’s method of auto-didacticism may fail to reach as widely as the institutional model of education she proposes. Accordingly, for reasons of potentially promoting broader social change, Astell would no doubt have preferred to see the proposal of the First Part become reality.

24.6  History of Philosophy of Education To return to a question from the introduction of this chapter, after reflecting on the works of Van Schurman, Pascal, Maintenon and Astell, it is difficult to justify their exclusion from histories of philosophy of education. This leads to the obvious question: what could be taken to justify their former absence from such histories? One attempt to rationalize this absence might emphasize the philosophy of education while denying that women’s writing on education from the past is properly philosophical. Naturally, this invites the question: what makes a work about education properly philosophical? In the introduction to Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty provides a starting point; she offers a series of questions about the aims of education, how these aims may be achieved and to whom the responsibility for educating falls, as well as questions about the proper subjects of education, who they are and in virtue of what (Rorty 1998: 2). To the extent that a work takes up any of these questions, it seems to satisfy a necessary, though perhaps not sufficient, condition for qualifying as a piece of philosophy of education (Shapiro 2016). Of course, as this chapter has illustrated, these women are concerned precisely with such questions. Still, one might contend that to count as philosophy of education, a work must further conform to a particular method and/or style of philosophical discourse. Yet, the problems with such criteria are well established; there are many familiar ways of practicing and writing philosophy such that it can hardly be said to have a unique method or style (Shapiro 2016: 379). This is well illustrated by one of the paradigmatic texts in the history of philosophy of education: Rousseau’s Emile. To one accustomed to philosophical works like Locke’s Essay, Hume’s Treatise, or Kant’s first Critique, the style of Emile can seem unfamiliar and strange: it presents an extended narrative 332

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thought experiment addressing the question of how best to raise a man so that he can achieve the fullest realization of his humanity as both a natural and a moral being. Yet, if we accept that the method or style of Emile does not undermine its canonical status in the history of philosophy of education, then it seems no work should be disqualified from this category merely on the basis of its unorthodox structure, method, or style. Alternatively, it could be argued that, whatever its method or style, for a work to count as a piece of philosophy of education it must achieve a particular standard or level of quality. Of course, one challenge for the notion of standards is apparent when considering standards of taste, of which there is famously no accounting. Still, not all standards are subjective or relative preferences; some are public and inter-subjectively accessible such that anyone can potentially cite them, albeit sometimes with a little training. For example, one philosophical standard requires that reasoning for a particular thesis be cogent. That being said, historians routinely encounter the challenge that past thinkers did not always write out their reasons in obvious truth-preserving forms. Sometimes this is done intentionally as a means to practice the reader’s enthymematic reasoning skills. Often, interpreters adopt the task of articulating what an author might plausibly have intended, both in terms of what she is taken to claim, and what she took herself to have adduced in support of her claims. However, this task falling to the interpreter does not usually lead to the conclusion that, say, Descartes’s or Aristotle’s writings are not philosophical. Nor is it clear that reconstructing deductive arguments is always the appropriate mode of interpretation or engagement, as in, again, cases like Rousseau’s Emile. In some cases, contemporary anglo-analytic approaches to a text may drastically change or inhibit their intended purpose as happens, for example, with Descartes’s Meditations (Secada 2012). Instead, with admittedly little space to defend this position except perhaps on intuitive grounds, I propose that clusters of qualities are part of what constitute a standard for a work to qualify as an instance of philosophical thinking or writing. Cogency, validity, soundness, systematicity, originality, clarity, engagement with a tradition, precision, generality, and non-obviousness or non-triviality, are potentially some, and likely not all, of what variously constitutes the standards for a work to qualify as a piece of philosophy. On their own, none of these qualities seem necessary or sufficient; however, keeping in mind considerations of content, a few of them together might jointly-suffice for a particular work to qualify as philosophical. Plenty of philosophical work fails to achieve either clarity, soundness, originality, or generality, many do not even aim at systematicity. Still, depending on its content, a work that is clear, general and systematic, could potentially qualify as a work of philosophy. Of course, as noted above, how, if at all, a work embodies any of these qualities is not always obvious. So, again, it falls to the interpreter to show how a given work embodies a sufficient number of these qualities to justify its recognition as a work of philosophy. Accordingly, a text’s status as a piece of philosophy of education seems to require that (1) it take up a philosophical question about education, and (2) it reflects on this question with some sufficient conjunction of qualities that distinguish it as exhibiting philosophical thinking. My efforts in this chapter have been aimed at articulating some of the respects in which the writings by van Schurman, Pascal, Maintenon and Astell achieve precisely this. At the same time, it is worth noting that failures to appreciate such qualities in these works may not be accidental on the part of their authors. Given that these women write in ways that challenge particular prejudices, in a context that is potentially skeptical, or worse, hostile, to their views, these authors may adopt a mode of presentation for their ideas that could encourage uptake while not coming across as too heavy-handed, a kind of rhetorical double-bind. Lastly, Rorty claims that “reflection on education from Plato to Dewey [has been] directed to the education of rulers, those who are presumed to preserve and transmit – or to redirect and transform – the culture of society, its knowledge and its values” (Rorty 1998: 1). While true that historical discussions of education often restrict their focus to a particular social class, this 333

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contention elides some important distinctions. For instance, Plato focuses on rulers whose qualities merit them that role while the (mostly medieval) genre of speculum principis focuses on rulers as inheritors of power regardless of merit. If Rorty’s generalization were true, then, as women’s writing on education largely concerns women, a group often lacking in relative power, then this might justify excluding them from histories of philosophy of education. Yet this seems wrong. While it is true that early modern European women’s writing on education often concerns the education of women, appealing to such sex-specificity while assuming the concerns of philosophy are more general and non-sexed betrays a double standard.7 This is apparent when considering canonical treatments of education; Montaigne and Locke write about the education of boys while Rousseau treats the education of Emile and Sophie separately. Sex-specificity is certainly no disqualification for counting as philosophical. Rather, it is only in retrospect that interpreters routinely abstract from sex, seeing the ways in which certain educational, social, ethical and political proposals could be interpreted more equitably. Yet, that this kind of abstraction has become a norm, to the degree that it has, depends on historical developments whereby women could be equally regarded as the proper subjects of education, autonomous action, political power, etc. (O’Neill 1998: 36–39). Arguably, this development has occurred as a consequence of past thinkers writing about, among other things, women’s education. What is more, insofar as historians are licensed to make this abstraction in light of various developments in anti-essentialist or liberal egalitarian thinking, so too could one abstract from the sexed dimensions of works written about women’s education to uncover more general philosophical lessons about education.

24.7 Conclusion If women’s historical writings on education are not justifiably excluded from such histories on the basis of content, method, style, standard or sex-specificity then it seems this omission is a mistake. The goal of this chapter is to begin to remedy this mistake by illustrating how careful attention to these women’s writings challenges particular preconceptions about the philosophy of education, its history and women’s place therein. More significantly, considering the writings of Van Schurman, Pascal, Maintenon and Astell together highlights some common themes. Some of these can be cast prescriptively: education should take account of the social realities of its subject, it should aim not merely at intellectual but also moral improvement, and a good education should prepare its subject to face an uncertain world. Other themes are descriptive: women are educable, one person’s education stands to benefit others in that person’s community, and many methods, both individual and communal, can be useful in a student’s formation. Perhaps most significantly, these writings share a commitment to the transformative power of education. Both by their content and their author’s achievements, they challenge traditional prejudices about the possibility and value of educating women. In this, perhaps there are further lessons about the education of socially-subordinated groups, for instance that as a member of such a group one has a duty, or, at least, an interest, in promoting the education of its other members and that qua human, regardless of one’s socially-subordinated status, anyone may reap the potential benefits of education.

Notes 1 I would like to acknowledge Donald Ainslie, Melissa Reese, Zachary Weinstein, an audience at the 2022 UPENN Method and the History of Philosophy Conference, as well as Louise Daoust, Alluaren Forbes, Charlotte Sabourin and Simona Vucu for their helpful feedback on this chapter. 2 Translations of van Schurman’s Latin are my own.

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Early Modern European Women and the Philosophy of Education 3 Translations of Pascal are my own. 4 Epistemic possibility refers to the modal status of propositions relative to a subject’s knowledge. A proposition “P” is said to be epistemically possible for a knower or knowers if they do not have, and cannot acquire, knowledge that “P” is false (De Rose 1991: 593–94). 5 Scholars debate how far Astell really challenged the mores of her day given her conservatism (Kinnaird 1979; Hartmann 1998). Detlefsen argues that these apparent tensions among her commitments can be resolved in light of a more nuanced understanding of just how Astell understands custom, religious faith, autonomy and friendship (Detlefsen 2016: 82–83, 88–89). 6 For an exploration of this topic in the writings of another early modern woman philosopher, see Forbes (2022). 7 The term “sex” was commonly used in early modern writings to identify a categorical distinction between men and women. Kelly contends that such writers deployed the concept of gender as a social construction (Kelly 1984: 67). However, while these writers seem to be aware of the constructive processes that go into shaping women, it is not obvious that the term “sex” is exclusively used to pick out a socially constructed category as opposed to say tracking a distinction based on reproductive capacities. Accordingly, for present purposes, I mirroring the historical usage of using the term “sex” to track a distinction between men and women; answering the question of what this distinction amounts to in this period would require the space of an additional paper. However, following this usage should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any particular thesis about human sexual and gender diversity.

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25 CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON RELIGION Charlotte Sabourin

Persons of the fair sex, who suffer the deprivation of the greatest advantages of moral and political freedom, are often overwhelmed by the intolerable weight of constraint. Constraint controls their youth, rules their condition, and accompanies them throughout their life. Most of the time women are moved about, rather than moving, and take on as many forms and countenances as others give them. They should recall the words of Saint Jerome, who reasons that since we are formed in the image and likeness of God, it is an extreme baseness and infirmity to accept any other form. – Gabrielle Suchon, Treatise on Ethics and Politics1

Perhaps surprisingly to the modern eye, biblical references and religious narratives played a major role in the development of feminist arguments during the early modern era.2 Feminist authors who took part in the querelle des femmes3 were concerned with refuting the alleged inferiority of women, exploring the ways in which women could improve their situation, and emphasizing how they could positively contribute to society provided they are given the means to do so. There would be a lot to say in that respect about the importance of the rejection of religious institutions for early modern feminist writers. One can think, for instance, of Marie de Gournay’s criticism of the hypocrisy surrounding confession;4 or of how Gabrielle Suchon’s voluntary celibacy (in French: neutralisme),5 a revolutionary new way of living, is presented as a valuable alternative to the two vocations that were deemed acceptable for women in her day, i.e. married life and cloistered life. While these criticisms are important, this chapter focuses instead on critical appropriations of religious references and their incorporation into early modern feminist arguments. As I show, these critical appropriations prove to be just as innovative, subversive, and philosophically complex as are the rejection of other religious ideas and institutions. The specific context investigated here is that of Catholic France in the seventeenth century, which allows for a comparison between works building on a specific religious tradition and engaging with similar references. Within that context, I focus on a selection of authors (Marguerite Buffet, Marie de Gournay, and Gabrielle Suchon) who argue for the equality of men and women and whose arguments significantly engage with religious sources. It is important to note that the querelle unfolded for the most part within the realm of what would be called today “public philosophy.” Unlike some other philosophical issues investigated and debated in the early modern era, topics pertaining to the equality of men and women, sexual difference, etc., were topics that scholars were eager to discuss publicly and in a popular way. In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France, the publication of a few misogynist pieces sparked a renewed interest in the querelle: in particular, the Cacogynie by the Sieur de Fierville, and the Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes [Dictionary on the Imperfection and Naughtiness of Women] DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-31

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by Jacques Olivier.6 These two essays were in high demand for the time: over 2,000 copies of the former were sold within ten years, and over 10,000 copies of the latter were sold within 14 years. They were read by people belonging to different social classes: nobles and bourgeois, but also working-class people in some cases.7 In order to reach out to a large public, contributions to the querelle took many different forms: treatises and essays, but also lampoons, eulogies, poems, declamations, and plays (that last genre being particularly popular in England). While a certain level of erudition was expected by some of the authors who took part in the querelle, most of them attempted to rely on common knowledge or on well-known authorities, such as other participants of the querelle, but also ancient Greek philosophers, Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and scripture. Gournay, Suchon, and Buffet’s contributions to the querelle are no exception: they heavily rely on religious sources. The considerable amount of religious references in these contributions is in part due to the historical and cultural context in which they were written, and to whom they were addressed. As emphasized in the above, most feminist contributions written at the time were addressing a rather large public: in some cases, their main purpose was to convince women to work toward the betterment of their condition; in some other cases, they were intended to convince their readers, men and women alike, of the accuracy of their feminist stance by providing persuasive responses to misogynist pieces.8 In other words, since these writings were generally intended for a large public (and not just for a handful of specialists), it became all the more important to appeal to sources that would be known and respected by readers. The important contextual nature of misogyny and feminism should also be emphasized. Since misogynist writers were heavily relying on religious sources to argue for the physical, intellectual, and moral inferiority of women, feminist writers responding to them had to engage with the same sources to prove their opponents wrong.9 Two forms of critical engagement with these religious sources for feminist purposes will be investigated here: (i) selective appeals to religious authorities (in particular of Fathers of the Church and Doctors of the Church) and unconventional ways of using these sources; and (ii) the reinterpretation and appropriation of scripture, in particular with respect to narratives of the Creation and of the Fall. This will allow us to see that early modern women have been using religious ideas and authorities for feminist purposes in ways that were philosophically innovative.

25.1  Arguments of Authority The number of references to authorities (religious and classical) in early modern feminist pieces is generally quite high. This abundance of religious references can come across as surprising, especially given the propensity of writers to refer to authorities without providing exact references or to quote truncated passages in a way that evokes cherry picking. For this reason, feminist writers of the querelle have been criticized on several fronts. On the one hand, they have been faulted for not having an extensive knowledge of the sources they are citing. Ronzeaud, for instance, in an otherwise informative article investigating defenses of women’s access to political power in early modern treatises, faults Suchon for her inconsistent use of Aristotle: “A better-informed ‘aristophile’10 cannot fail to smile at this incorrect use of the Stagirite’s thought” (Ronzeaud 1975: 29; my translation). On the other hand, women have also been blamed for hiding behind the ideas of others. See for instance in Angenot’s monograph on the pro-woman side of the querelle:11 17th century women who discussed their situation, such as Miss de Gournay, Miss de Nervèze, and Anne-Marie van Schurman, do so by taking up and sharing arguments written by men, and therefore experienced themselves as a paradox. (Angenot 1977: 53)12

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Yet the abundance of references (sometimes accompanied by imprecision in the citation data) was a common practice in the querelle in general – and not only in works written by women. As recalled by Maclean, there were three standard methods of argumentation used in the querelle: authority, example, and ratiocination (Maclean 1977: 35 sq.; see also Kelso 1956: 12). These three methods are explicitly identified and used by several participants of the querelle, such as Gournay, Suchon, and Poulain de la Barre. Suchon refers to this trio of methods in the preface of her Treatise on Ethics and Politics (hereafter, Treatise): I show by advancing good and solid reasons, citing accepted authorities, and listing examples that women are capable of freedom, knowledge, and authority. We can never doubt this truth if we consider that these privileges belong to women by birthright, as well as by the authority of holy scripture and of learned people of centuries past. The examples left by women who had rare qualities and great perfections are also incontestable. (Suchon 2010: 74–75)13 Providing multiple references to authorities, far from being odd, was expected from authors contributing to the querelle, both on the misogynist and on the feminist side.14 Gournay, Suchon, and others are thus embracing an existing practice. Furthermore, women writing contributions to the querelle had to prove their erudition to their readers – something that their male counterparts generally did not have to worry about.15 Citing well-known and respected authorities was a good way for them to establish their credibility as authors, as well as to prove by their own example that women can be the intellectual equals of men.16 I will now analyze two distinct examples of the use of religious authorities. A first example of this practice can be found in Gournay’s The Equality of Men and Women: Man was created man and female—so says scripture, not reckoning the two except as one; and Jesus Christ is called Son of Man, although he is that only of woman—the whole and consummate perfection of the proof of this unity of the two sexes. I speak thus according to the great Saint Basil in his first homily on the Hexameron: the virtue of man and of woman are the same thing, since God bestowed on them the same creation and the same honor: masculum et feminam fecit eos. Now in those whose nature is one and the same, it must be concluded that their actions are so as well, and that the esteem and recompense belonging to these are equal, where the works are equal. There, then, is the declaration of that powerful champion and venerable witness of the Church. (Gournay 2002: 87; emphasis mine) In the above passage, Gournay first gestures at scripture without providing an exact reference – which is not surprising in that she could reasonably assume that her readers would be familiar with the passage she is referring to (Genesis 1:26–27). She then uses Saint Basil’s authority to further support her point – although, as noted by Hillman and Quesnel in their critical edition of Gournay’s work, Gournay should be referring to the first of two later additions Basil made to his homilies instead of to the first homily itself. It is worth noting, however, that while Gournay is correct in claiming that Saint Basil equates the virtue of man and woman in the later addition to his homilies, he does so in order to argue that they will consequently be equally rewarded and, more importantly, equally condemned.17 He thus proves to be more concerned with moral punishment than with the equality of men and women. Gournay, on the other hand, is mainly interested in arguing that men and women are moral equals.

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A second example of the use of religious authorities can be found in the first part of Suchon’s Treatise, in a chapter analyzing constraint in the secular estate (i.e., the constraint imposed on married women by their husbands): According to Saint Paul, married people do not have power over their own bodies. Although this law upholds the same rights equally for both parties, men always interpret its dispensation more readily in their own favor. Indeed, the imperious authority men exercise over women violates the gentleness that should govern their relationship. The law, which is, in truth, made for the first sex, usually degenerates into extreme abuse, and its rigorous application affords no defense for women except to suffer with patience. (Suchon 2010: 124–25; emphasis mine) While Suchon correctly provides a reference to the passage she is referring to (1 Corinthians 7) and accurately shares Paul’s views,18 she is also, just like Gournay, using the reference to serve her own purposes: to emphasize the egalitarian implications of the religious claim at stake. Paul does stress the reciprocate duties of spouses toward one another,19 but unlike Suchon, he remains silent on the more frequent and extreme abuses of authority happening on the side of the husband. Suchon’s citation of Paul is introduced in the context of her condemnation of violent marriages, and she even goes as far as noting that the law put forward by Paul is really made for men and harmful to women in its application – something that he would most certainly not have endorsed. The above two examples are useful in giving us a better sense of the practice of using biblical and religious references to serve feminist purposes during the querelle. Gournay and Suchon’s use of authorities is thus anything but an uncritical use of the words of the Fathers of the Church: it is a critical appropriation that is to some extent deferential, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a subversive practice.20 This use of religious sources is thus equally thoughtful and selective: the Fathers of the Church and other religious authorities are invoked when it serves the feminists purposes of the author. Suchon makes explicit her interpretative stance: The writings of the learned can be interpreted differently and adapted to varying spiritual needs. […] Material things rightly have various uses and serve different functions. (Suchon 2010: 79) Suchon further argues that as long as the interpretation remains in conformity with orthodox Catholic faith, it should be received as good and fruitful. While giving examples of authors who have themselves sought inspiration in the work of others, Suchon further emphasizes the benefits of such an approach: after all, “[…] what [Plato] attributes to his master is so well adapted that the borrowed parts appear to be his own” (Suchon 2010: 82). One can infer that her own use of citations is meant to be not merely an appeal to authority, but also an appropriation of the ideas at stake. Importantly, this kind of work also shows that feminist ideas on the equality of the sexes are not bound to conflict with the Catholic faith – or at least with the sometimes unorthodox interpretation that early modern women like Suchon had of Catholic faith.21 The idea that the feminist use of religious sources is not merely deferential but also creative and critical is further confirmed by the explicit objections raised by some authors to a few canonical sources. Saint Paul in particular, despite often being cited as an authority, has made various derogatory claims about women that early feminist writers were eager to prove wrong. These claims mostly insist on the importance of women’s subordination and their duty

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to remain silent in public, like, for instance, in the following excerpt of the First Epistle to the Corinthians: Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. (1 Cor. 14: 34–35; see also 1 Tim. 2: 12–14) Gournay and Suchon, among others, understandably found it important to engage with that passage in particular. Their argumentative strategies differ on that point. Gournay provides a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the passage: she claims that Paul’s remark is free of contempt, and that he might have been understandably worried that if women were to minister and preach, they might end up distracting men with their superior grace and beauty (Gournay 2002: 89).22 Suchon engages with the passage in a more combative way: the entire second part of her Treatise can be read as a response to Paul’s claim and to his followers. The preface of the second part of the Treatise is unequivocal: Saint Paul bans women from the science of speech, and does not permit them to speak in public. But even if they had such a privilege, men would not give them a tribune and would never want to listen to them. Staying quiet and not talking much is all the education we grant to persons of the sex. (Suchon 1693: part II, 24–25; my translation) The second part of Suchon’s Treatise, “On Knowledge,” argues for the importance for women to have a proper education. She emphasizes the importance of public speech in that respect, and also suggests that in light of the damages caused by sexual hierarchy in education, women would be better served by having women teachers. While Suchon engages with Paul’s ideas and cites him in a positive way in other contexts, this specific claim is very clearly at odds with her own views and, as such, could not be quietly dismissed. Suchon is thus eager to be critical of the sources she is engaging with. Finally, the use of religious authorities also serves another feminist purpose for Gournay, Suchon, Buffet, and other early modern women: that of providing examples of women that have some religious authority. Suchon, in particular, uses examples of illustrious women to serve specific purposes. For instance, when emphasizing the benefits of travel for women (traveling being a form of exercise of one’s external freedom), she gives several examples of saints who traveled: among others, Saint Paula, Saint Fabiola, and Saint Bridget (Suchon 2010: 112 sq.) Her reasoning is that the practice she is praising (in this case, traveling) cannot possibly be contrary to religious ideals if even saints embraced it. More generally, catalogues of virtuous women were frequently provided in early feminist works, always including several religious figures.23 These catalogues do more than just celebrating the life and achievements of these women: they also provide a proof by example that the existence of virtuous women is far from being impossible, and put forward moral examples set by women.

25.2  (Re)interpretations of Scripture In line with Suchon’s admitted willingness not only to cite, but also to interpret religious texts, I will now further investigate some examples of early feminist interpretations of scripture. Throughout the querelle, scripture has often been used as evidence to assert the inferiority of women or their

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subordination to men – in particular, Genesis 3:16, which states that the husband shall rule over the wife. In response to these claims, early feminist authors have provided novel interpretations of scripture. Two sections of Genesis in particular have been used to support substantial feminist arguments: the Creation and the Fall. While the Creation is typically used to further demonstrate the equality of the sexes,24 the Fall is more often used to describe and explain the unjust subordination of women. The inequality resulting from the Fall is thus contrasted with the original equality guiding the Creation. One might be under the impression that traditional narratives of the Creation are less useful in supporting misogynist claims than traditional narratives of the Fall – as Gen 1:27, for instance, states that “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” The creation of men and women is generally presented in a positive way, and, unlike in the case of the Fall, standard narratives of the Creation do not explicitly refer to the subordination of women. Yet misogynist readings of the Creation have still been put forward in the querelle. There were two particularly popular ways of interpreting the Creation in a sexist way: first, by arguing that women are inferior to men because they have been created second – or even that they are the result of a second-hand creation. One of Paul’s claims illustrates well this first misogynist interpretation: I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. (1 Tim. 2:12–14; emphasis mine) This claim about the order of creation, supported by Paul’s authority, has been used by several misogynist writers in the querelle. This is, however, a claim that most French feminist authors chose not to directly address. François Poulain de la Barre is an exception: he notes that the story of the Creation does not mention inequality or dependence, and that there is something absurd in holding the order of creation against Eve: It is true that Adam was created first; but if this is an advantage it does not pertain to him alone, and it is counterbalanced by the honor God bestowed upon Eve in creating her in an earthy paradise, the time and place being purely external factors which neither confer on things nor suppose in them any particular excellence; otherwise the beasts would have been more noble than Adam, their creation having preceded his; the elders would be more excellent than their juniors, the fathers and mothers more excellent than their children, in a word, all those who are older than others. (Poulain de la Barre 2002: 271) Poulain emphasizes the absurdity of this argument by extending it to other creatures: if what is created first is better than what is created last, then the beasts would be more noble than Adam; parents would be better than their children; etc. Buffet goes even further in that direction by arguing that the order of creation, far from making women inferior to men, shows their value: […] the perfection of the Universe depended on the creation of woman, which was the last of [God’s] works […] and without which the world would not be as beautiful and enjoyable. (Buffet 1668: 201; my translation) One could even infer from this passage that Buffet, despite arguing for the equality of men and women in general, takes a special interest in emphasizing the natural superiority of women. 342

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Indeed, another common misogynist reading of the Creation consisted in arguing that women are inferior to men since they have been created from a second-hand material: Adam’s rib. Without openly engaging with this line of argument, Buffet claims the exact opposite. Women, she argues, have been created from a more noble material than men: a human rib instead of dirt. Since Adam’s rib is the strongest part of his body, this indicates that the body of women is made from the most excellent materials (1668: 200–01).25 Other authors, like Gournay and Suchon, do not directly engage with claims about the order of creation: instead, they provide a different narrative of the story. The Creation, they argue, confirms the natural similarity and equality of men and women: Further, the human animal, taken rightly, is neither man nor woman, the sexes having been made double, not so as to constitute a difference in species, but for the sake of propagation alone. The unique form and distinction of that animal consists only in its rational soul. And if it is permitted to laugh in the course of our journey, the jest would not be out of season that teaches us that there is nothing more like a [male] cat on a windowsill than a female cat. Man and woman are so thoroughly one that if man is more than woman, woman is more than man. Man was created man and female – so says scripture, not reckoning the two except as one; and Jesus Christ is called Son of Man, although he is that only of woman –the whole and consummate perfection of the proof of this unity of the two sexes. (Gournay 2002: 86–87) 26 For Gournay, the two sexes should be understood as the result of one and the same creation; that of the human species, distinguished by its rational soul. As shown by the analogy with male and female cats, she regards sexual difference as superficial.27 The narrative of the Creation is also important in that it confirms, for feminist authors, not only that men and women are similar, but also that they have both been made in the image of God and are of equal worth. Buffet thus emphasizes that women have just as many similarities with God as men do (Buffet 1668: 199–200). Gournay also insists on this point, stressing that those who are eager to associate God with a manly figure are mistaken: It is not amiss to recall on this point that certain ancient hair-splitters carried their arrogance to the inane extreme of arguing against the image of God in the female sex, as opposed to man; on this basis, according to their reckoning, they had to make the beard characteristic of that image. It was consequently necessary, moreover, to refuse to women the image of man, since they could not resemble him without resembling the other whose image he bore. God himself has distributed the gifts of prophecy impartially to women along with men and has also established them as judges, instructors, and leaders of his faithful people in peace and war, in the persons of Huldah and Deborah. (Gournay 2002: 87) 28 The story of the Creation, even in its most conventional narrative, thus offers possibilities to argue for the equality of men and women on the basis of the egalitarian creation of human beings as a species, within which sex is not given a hierarchical function. While the Creation can easily provide grounds to argue in favor of the natural equality of men and women, standard readings of the Fall generally suggest that the subordination of women is justified in light of Eve’s responsibility for the original sin. While most feminist writers of the querelle likely disagreed with this stance, they had to find creative ways to respond to, or to reinterpret, this narrative. As I will now show, feminist writers typically identify the Fall as the original cause of the subordination of women in society. As a result, critical feminist narratives of the Fall 343

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were put forward as an explanatory tool in order to further emphasize the arbitrariness and illegitimacy of that subordination. These alternative narratives of the Fall, by contrasting the prelapsarian state of sexual equality with the postlapsarian state of inequality, provide an explanation for the origin of the subordination of women in the manner of what could be called, following Miller, a social construct (Miller 2008: 9). But they also make it possible to imagine a different state of affairs in which this inequality could be overcome. The Fall, because it provides an explanation for the origin of the subordination of women, at the same time makes it possible to envision the emancipation of women by emphasizing that their subordination is neither natural nor ineluctable. New narratives of the Fall, in conjunction with narratives of the Creation emphasizing the natural equality of men and women, have thus allowed early modern feminists to further substantiate their proposals for the improvement of the status of women. There are multiple ways of making sense of the Fall in such a feminist perspective. Furthermore, the original sin had generated a number of misogynist arguments and was all the more important for feminist writers to address.29 Various strategies have thus been put forward to try to explain and provide a feminist interpretation of Eve’s role in the Fall. These positive readings of the Fall attempt to narrate the story of the Fall without casting a blame on Eve. Typically, they acknowledge Eve’s role in the Fall, but for purposes other than blaming her.30 More importantly, Adam’s responsibility is also stressed. Both Gournay and Suchon make sure to emphasize, in their narratives, that Eve is not the only one to blame for the Fall. Suchon in particular frequently refers to the Fall as “Adam’s sin”31 and provides an interesting explanation as to why we might want to reconsider blaming it on Eve. While traditional narratives of the Fall suggest, more often than not, that Eve is the only one to blame for the original sin, Suchon raises two main objections to this reading. She first argues, following Saint Thomas, that if only Eve had sinned, the original sin would not have been passed on to the whole human species: for […] the original sin is transmitted through the active principle [of generation], which is responsible for transmission in all subjects that have been produced through normal generation. (Suchon 1693, short treatise: 9; my translation) Suchon refers here to Thomas’ Summa Theologiae, I, II, q. 81, a. 5. This is an accurate summary of his views: according to Thomas, the original sin is inherited from the father. This is because the original sin is transmitted by the “first parent insofar as he is the mover in the begetting of his children,” by which he means the father, who provides the active principle of generation. In following Thomas, Suchon endorses, like him, an Aristotelian conception of generation, which identifies the active principle with the male: for Aristotle, the male is the efficient and formal cause of generation. But Suchon then turns this conception of generation against men by further arguing that Adam, in blaming Eve, is really making excuses and avoiding taking responsibility for his own actions – as nobody forced him to eat the apple.32 Even authors who do not explicitly blame Adam for the Fall often insist, in their narratives, on the arbitrariness of the subordination of women. While Gournay does not openly question standard narratives of the Fall with respect to the original sin, she emphasizes that the subordination of women introduced with the Fall does not confirm in any way the superiority of men: And however true it may be, as some maintain, that such submission was imposed on woman in punishment for the sin of eating the apple, that still hardly constitutes a decisive pronouncement in favor of the supposed superior worth of man. (Gournay 2002: 95)

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For Gournay, the fundamental equality introduced by the Creation has been unfairly compromised in the aftermath of the Fall: since women have been made in the image of God just as much as men, and are, as such, worthy of his blessing, it is wrong to deny them the advantages and privileges of men on the basis of the narrative of the Fall. Indeed, while men have certainly felt that the narrative of the Fall grants them authority over women – emphasizing, again, that women are more closely associated with Eve than men with Adam – early modern feminists point out that this subordination is at best poorly understood, and at worst illegitimate. Poulain de la Barre questions the legitimacy of the biblical claim itself: [women] become dependent only by accident and by an alleged law. I say an alleged law, because it is not a real law. The passage, “thy husband shall rule over thee,” etc., was not conceived at all in the usual form of divine laws, which are imperatives and accompanied by threats against those who do not obey them. (Poulain de la Barre 2002: 274) 33 Interestingly enough, Suchon explicitly rejects Poulain’s strategy: While an Author of this day [the author of the Equality of the Sexes] has pretensions to softening the malediction imposed by God upon Eve; […] and that, to support his point, he is helping himself with a Hebraic version that seems to soften it; it is clear that most scholars, following Saint Jerome’s version, confirm explicitly and without ambiguity this submission and dependence. This submission and dependence is so well explained that it cannot lead to a contrary interpretation, even if we are favorable to vindications of women: we thus must note that women are condemned to two types of sorrows. The first one is a bodily sorrow, constituted by the pain and infirmities endured by those who engage in marriage; and the second one is a spiritual sorrow, which consist in dependence […] (Suchon 1693 part III: 91; my translation) In this passage, Suchon is referring to the above-cited passage of Poulain’s On the Excellence of Men in 274 sq. As shown in the emphasized part of the passage, for Suchon, the subordination of a wife to her husband cannot be questioned as such.34 Instead, she questions the way this injunction has been interpreted and applied. It is no coincidence that Suchon’s remarks on the Fall take place within the portion of her Treatise dedicated to the topic of authority. She argues that despite the subordination introduced by the Fall, women still possess a capacity for authority, and that they should be allowed to exercise that capacity. While she is willing to grant that Eve is, in some way, subordinated to Adam because of the Fall, she refuses to see the effective or actual subordination of women as justified: This is not to say that if we consider God’s governance from the beginning of time, we will discover it has always been more favorable to women than men claim. However, part of the power men exert over women is usurped more often than it is legitimate, since custom has more force than justice in the way in which we are treated. For God formed man and woman in His image and Likeness; He gave them power and dominion conjointly over the animals of the earth, the fish of the sea, and over all that is under the heavens. He made them both masters in equal measure, and His commandment to populate the earth and subjugate it was for Eve as well as for Adam, to whom the Lord gave her as a companion and an associate, not a servant or slave. (Suchon 2010: 199–200)

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Suchon insists that Adam and Eve should nevertheless be seen as equals. The subordination resulting from the Fall should not compromise Eve’s status as Adam’s companion, as they both share an equal capacity for authority. Their shared power over nonhuman animals is further evidence that they both share that capacity. Despite the relatively unclear (and possibly unfair) form of subordination that Eve still owes to Adam according to the standard narrative of the Fall, Suchon argues that this relationship of subordination has gone horribly wrong as men make poor use of their authority over women.35 Through their unusual interpretations of the Fall, early modern feminist authors thus manage to explain the origins of sexual inequality and to challenge its necessity and its political implications. Whether it is by questioning the legitimacy of scripture on the matter, like Poulain de la Barre or Hippel, or by questioning the interpretation and application of this commandment, like Gournay, Suchon, and Astell, sexism is understood as an unnatural phenomenon that runs against the very idea of equality set by the Creation. As such, it needs to be questioned and addressed. *** Religious references play a prominent role in early modern feminist arguments. I have emphasized that role by investigating two significant forms of appropriation of religious sources. First, the appropriation of canonical religious authorities to serve feminist purposes. The works of Saint Thomas, Saint Paul, Saint Jerome, Saint Bernard, and many more, can easily be read as misogynistic. Yet Gournay, Suchon, and other feminist writers were eager to use the authority of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church to support their own arguments about the equality of men and women. They do so in a way that is both critical and insightful: without distorting the sense of the original passages as much as they have sometimes been accused of, they carefully select the portion of the argument that fits their own purposes and are thus able to claim that their argument is supported by religious authorities. Second, early modern feminist arguments have also been supported by innovative interpretations of scripture, in particular of the stories of the Creation and of the Fall. While narratives of the Creation can more easily support and accommodate various claims on the equality of men and women, feminist narratives of the Fall are used to emphasize the arbitrariness of the subordination of women to men. Whether it is by questioning who is really responsible for the original sin, by questioning the relevance of scripture on the matter, or by questioning the harmful implications of the subordination of women resulting from the Fall, various feminist strategies have been put forward to criticize the subordination of women to men and to emphasize that this subordination, far from being necessary or natural, is illegitimate.

Notes 1 Suchon 2010: 119. I am citing English translations when available unless indicated otherwise. 2 While the term “feminism” was only coined in the nineteenth century by Charles Fourier, there is little doubt that the concept of feminism was already in place in the early modern era. In this paper, I will use “feminism” to capture a broad range of theoretical reflections on the equality and differences between the sexes, and of political measures aiming at the improvement of the situation of women. Joan Kelly endorses a similar perspective, emphasizing how contemporary feminism is indebted to its early modern roots: “Latter-day feminism, for all its additional richness, still incorporates the basic positions the feminists of the querelle were the first to take.” (Kelly 1982: 5) Kelly’s contribution also helpfully identifies common goals shared by feminists of the querelle. 3 Usually translated in English as “the woman question,” although “querelle” carries a more combative meaning, closer to that of a dispute. 4 See in particular her “Des fauces devotions” and “Advis à quelques gens d’église,” two essays in which she criticizes hypocritical practices among clergy members (in particular with respect to confession) who were nevertheless reluctant to support the ordination of women (Gournay 1997: 188).

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Critical Perspectives on Religion 5 The nature and political implications of Suchon’s neutralism are investigated in the articles of Desnain (2006), Shapiro (2017), and Walsh (2019). 6 Jacques Olivier was the pseudonym used by Alexis Trousset, a member of the Franciscan religious order (Maclean 2013: 153). 7 Maclean 2013 and Bollème & Andriès 2003 further discuss the audience of misogynist and feminist works during the querelle in France. Kelly investigates the social status and educational background of some protagonists of the querelle with a special focus on English authors (Kelly 1982: 7–8). 8 The foreword and dedication, when available, are particularly helpful in assessing the intended readership of early feminist works. 9 Kelly importantly emphasizes that throughout the querelle, only writers on the feminist side had a real interest in engaging with, and refuting, their opponents (Kelly 1982: 19). 10 Aristophile was the pseudonym under which Suchon published her first treatise, Traité de la morale et de la politique. 11 Bonnefont makes a similar criticism regarding Gournay’s “recurring citation of ancient authors” (1898: 327). 12 While it is true that several protagonists of the querelle were influenced by (e.g.) Agrippa’s arguments against the inferiority of women, it is obviously inaccurate to equate the various feminist arguments provided by women to his or to any other man’s. It is also worth noting that Gournay and Suchon themselves were aware of how their use of authorities could be negatively received by others. Gournay defends her translations against accusations of plagiarism in her Letter to Monseigneur de Gelas. And Suchon acknowledges and justifies her abundant use of sources in the Preface to the Treatise on Ethics and Politics: […] just as receiving the beneficence of kings and princes is not to be equated with begging, consulting masters of knowledge, using their doctrine, and following their insights to strengthen our own and to shed light on difficult questions do not reveal a barrenness of mind. (Suchon 2010: 79) 13 See also Suchon 2010: 85; 131; 215; … Gournay similarly reminds her readers of these three methods, further insisting on the importance of authorities: And if I judge well, either of the worthiness or of the capacity of women, I do not propose at present to prove it with reasons, since the opinionated might dispute them, nor with examples, since they are too common, but indeed only by the authority of God himself, of the Fathers […]. (Gournay 2002: 76) 14 François Poulain de la Barre, another proponent of the equality of the sexes, favors ratiocination over the other two means of argumentation. But as pointed out by Pellegrin, he still hints at the three means of argumentation in On the Excellence of Man (Poulain 2011: 16). 15 The lack of credibility ascribed to women as knowers in the early modern era is reminiscent of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice recently brought to light and investigated by Miranda Fricker. Fricker argues that epistemic injustice takes two distinct forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice seems particularly helpful to understand the lack of credibility faced, and criticized, by early modern women in this context: “Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word” (Fricker 2007: 1). In other words, the hearer is not giving the speaker (in this case, early modern women) the credibility they would have given them otherwise, were it not for the prejudice the hearer holds. The concept of epistemic injustice has been profitably used by May (2014) and Forbes (2019) to make sense of the lack of credibility faced by early modern women writers. I thank Karen Detlefsen for bringing this point to my attention. 16 As noted in Noiset’s introduction to Gournay’s Les Advis, the criticisms that early modern women (Gournay in this case) were receiving regarding their use of sources and references were also in part due to the somewhat antiquated style they were using, as they did not always have access to more recent models of education (e.g. the humanist formation) (2002: 8). 17 This significant omission of the condemnation part is flagged by Hillman and Quesnel. 18 It is worth noting that Suchon is not always that thorough: she frequently chooses not to include exact references, or only includes vague ones. 19 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. (1 Corinthians 7:3–4)

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Charlotte Sabourin 20 As pointed out by Dorlin, there is something inherently subversive in supporting heterodox thesis with orthodox references (Dorlin 2000: 42). 21 Bertolini goes further and argues that Suchon is a reformed Catholic putting forward her own spiritual conception of the Catholic Church, grounded in rational ideals (Bertolini 2000). This interpretation is consistent with Suchon’s willingness to encourage women to live a celibate life as neutralists without joining traditional clusters. 22 Agrippa takes issue with the same passage, but ends up dismissing it in a somewhat unsatisfying way by arguing that the sexual hierarchy in the church (which he finds necessary) should not translate into an absolute hierarchy between men and women, as “God has a preference for no one” (Agrippa 1996: 96). 23 Marguerite Buffet provides such a catalogue in her Nouvelles observations sur la langue française; où il est traitté des termes anciens et inusitez et du bel usage des mots nouveaux avec les Éloges des Illustres Sçavantes Anciennes et Modernes [untranslated: literally, “New Observations on the French Language: An Investigation of Old and Uncommon Terms, as well as of the Beautiful Use of New Words; with a Eulogy of Illustrious Learned Women”] 24 Or even, as we will see, the superiority of women over men. 25 This was a common line of argument. Suchon makes a very similar one in a short addition to her Treatise (“Petit traité de la faiblesse, de la légèreté et de l’inconstance qu’on attribue aux femmes mal à propos”) (1693: 1–3). Poulain also provides a similar argument (2002: 271). 26 Gournay reiterates this point in The Ladies’ Complaint (2002: 105). 27 Suchon makes the same point in her short Treatise (1693: 1–3). 28 Gournay often reduces misogynist arguments to an undue fascination for beard (see for instance The Ladies’ Complaint, 103) – a way to remind her readers of the lack of significant natural differences between man and woman. 29 Miller, in her extensive investigation of feminist and misogynist narratives of the Fall within the English tradition, makes a remark that strikes me as applying to the French context as well: in early modern works, women are typically more closely aligned with Eve than men with Adam. Women are, in that sense, overdetermined by belonging to the category of Eve the sinner, and denied an individual status (Miller 2008: 13 sq.). 30 Theodor von Hippel, a German feminist writer of the eighteenth century, uses an interpretive strategy that is unusual in the French and English traditions as he completely exonerates Eve. While he acknowledges that Eve is responsible for the Fall, he shifts the usual blame from her by suggesting that the Fall is in fact a good thing. The Fall, as Hippel understands it, is what caused the development of reason and the rise of civilization. According to his very liberal narrative, Eve was always more mature than Adam, who was originally placed under her supervision. Hippel associates the Fall with the awakening of human reason. Prior to that awakening, Adam and Eve were living more or less like animals, guided by instinct. The Fall is thus depicted in a positive manner, and the contribution of Eve is presented as useful rather than blameworthy (Hippel 2009: 150). 31 See, for instance, Suchon 2010: 74, 277. 32 She is following Saint Bernard on this point: in his second homily, Bernard blames Adam for not taking responsibility for his actions. Suchon does not, however, mention that Bernard blames Eve even more than Adam, calling her crazy and arrogant and contrasting her with the Virgin Mary. This is another good example of critical appropriation of canonical religious sources. 33 Hippel similarly questions the legitimacy of the same claim (Gen 3:16) by arguing that it was a later addition to scripture (Hippel 2009: 151). 34 I have argued elsewhere that this necessary submission of the wife to the husband leads Suchon to argue that women will ultimately be happier if they don’t marry, and if they instead choose to live in community with other women (cf. Sabourin 2017). 35 As an interesting contrast: Mary Astell shares, to some extent, a similar strategy, but is more eager to openly question the claim according to which all women, following Eve, owe obedience to men. In her Reflections upon Marriage, Astell warns her readers against turning an “is” into an “ought”: the fact that women are subordinated to men does not entail that they should be. Scripture foretells what would be, but need not determine what ought to be (Astell 1996: 19–20).

Bibliography Agrippa, H. C. (1996) Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Angenot, M. (1977) Les Champions des femmes: examen du discours sur la supériorité des femmes, 1400–1800, Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec.

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Critical Perspectives on Religion Astell, M. (1996) Political Writings, ed. P. Springborg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bertolini, S. (2000) “Gabrielle Suchon: une vie sans engagement,” Australian Journal of French Studies 37(3): 289–308. Bollème, G. (1971) La Bibliothèque bleue: littérature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, Paris: Julliard. and L. Andriès. (2003) La Bibliothèque bleue: La littérature de colportage, Paris: Laffont. Bonnefon, P. (1898) Montaigne et ses amis: La Boétie. – Charron – Mlle de Gournay, Paris: A. Bolin et cie. Buffet, M. (1668) Nouvelles observations sur la langue française; où il est traitté des termes anciens et inusitez et du bel usage des mots nouveaux avec les Éloges des Illustres Sçavantes Anciennes et Modernes, Paris: J. Cusson. Desnain, V. (2006) “Gabrielle Suchon’s Neutralists,” in J. R. Perlmutter (ed.), Relations and Relationships in Seventeenth Century French Literature, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, pp. 116–31. Dorlin, E. (2000) L’Évidence de l’égalité des sexes: une philosophie oubliée du XVIIe siècle, Paris: L’Harmattan. Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forbes, A. (2019) “Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice,” Hypatia 34(4): 777–801. Gournay, M. L. J. de (1997) Les Advis, ou, les presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay: 1641, ed. J. P. Beaulieu and H. Fournier, Amsterdam: Rodopi. (2002) Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works, trans. R. Hillman and C. Quesnel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gray, F. (2000) Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hippel, T. G. von. (2009) The Status of Women: Collected Writings, ed. T. F. Sellner, Bloomington: Xlibris. The Holy Bible, New International Version. Available at: https://www.biblegateway.com/. Kelly, J. (1982) “Early Feminist Theory and the ‘Querelle des Femmes’, 1400–1789,” Signs 8(1): 4–28. Kelso, R. (1956) Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Maclean, I. (1977) Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (2013) “La Querelle des femmes en France et en Angleterre de 1615 à 1632: conjoncture et structures,” Littératures classiques 81(2): 147–71. May, Vivian M. (2014) “‘Speaking into the Void’? Intersectionality Critiques and Epistemic Backlash,” Hypatia 29(1): 94–112. Miller, S. (2008) Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pellegrin, M.-F. (2013) “La ‘querelle des femmes’ est-elle une querelle? Philosophie et pseudo-linéarité dans l’histoire du féminisme,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 35(1): 69–79. Poulain de La Barre, F. (2002) Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, ed. M. M. Welch and V. E. Bosley, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Poulain de La Barre, F. (2011) De l’égalité des deux sexes. De l`éducation des dames ; De l’excellence des hommes, M.-F. Pellegrin (ed.), Paris: Vrin. Ronzeaud, P. (1975) “La femme au pouvoir ou le monde à l’envers,” XVIIe siècle 108: 9–33. Sabourin, C. (2017) “Plaider l’égalité pour mieux la dépasser: Gabrielle Suchon et l’élévation des femmes,” Philosophiques 44(2): 209–32. Shapiro, L. (2017) “Gabrielle Suchon’s ‘neutralist’: the Status of Women and the Invention of Autonomy,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 50–65. Stuurman, S. (2004) François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Suchon, G. (1693) Traité de la morale et de la politique, Lyon: B. Vignieu. (2010) A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of her Sex: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings, Trans. D. C. Stanton and R. M. Wilkin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walsh, J. (2019) “Gabrielle Suchon, Freedom, and the Neutral Life,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27(5): 685–712. Wilkin, R. (2019) “Feminism and Natural Right in François Poulain De La Barre and Gabrielle Suchon,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80(2): 227–48. Winn, C. H. (2002) Protestations et revendications féminines: textes oubliés et inédits sur l’éducation féminine, XVIe XVIIe siècle, Paris: Champion.

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26 BEAUTY, GENDER, AND POWER FROM MARINELLI TO WOLLSTONECRAFT Patrick Ball

26.1 Introduction In 1600, Lucrezia Marinelli wrote in her polemical The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men that “man needs to love beautiful things, and what more beautiful thing adorns the world than woman?” (Marinelli 2000: 63). Beauty, both that of performance and adornment, the natural and affected, is contested ground for Marinelli as it had been for many other writers, misogynist, and counter-misogynist. Aesthetics as a discursive realm has long structured and been structured by assumptions about gender, with the common association of women with beauty serving to inform notions of the place, function, and nature of beauty as well as those of women. Marinelli, concerned to counter Giuseppe Passi’s misogynist tract Dei donneschi difetti, released the previous year, makes extensive use of beauty as both a social and natural phenomenon in her defence—and exaltation—of women. In the process, she produces a theological aesthetics that defends a significant role for beauty and for women, understood as beauty’s exemplary objects, within the social and divine order. In this way, Marinelli’s work at the very opening of the seventeenth century exemplifies the concern of this chapter: to understand how thinking around beauty, gender, and political power interacted with one another over the course of the early modern period, and especially in the work of Frances Reynolds and Mary Wollstonecraft at its end. This interaction is present in the work of many of the writers—pro- and anti-woman—of the early modern period. Writers may lean on particular ideas of women’s place or character—those ideas themselves influenced by women’s social position—to justify or explain their aesthetic theories. They might use those aesthetic theories in the service of existing power or in the service of revolution. Or they might seek to change the position of women through a cunning use of existing ideas on beauty or aesthetic taste. This chapter will chart the particular manifestations of this interaction in the work of four pro-woman writers in the early modern period: Marinelli, François Poulain de la Barre, Frances Reynolds, and Mary Wollstonecraft. For each writer beauty, power, and gender interact in subtly different ways, with attendant differences in their aesthetic and political commitments. They are also separated by time, place, and language. But considering them in comparison with one another will, I hope, usefully elucidate the significance of each, and of a relationship between aesthetics, gender, and politics that persists to this day. And, as we shall see, it is Wollstonecraft herself that most helpfully clarifies the interaction I have sketched here. She comes down decisively on the primary significance of power; that is, Wollstonecraft argues that gender and aesthetic ideologies 350

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are both the products of existing oppressive social orders, and that hence only major on-theground political change can go about shifting them in favour of women—a conclusion with, I believe, continuing political relevance. To get to this point I will begin with brief discussions of the aesthetic theories of Marinelli and Poulain in the seventeenth century, to show two different ways that theories about beauty, taste, and adornment were used to argue for pro-woman views. I then turn to eighteenth-century Britain, and a debate about the place of women in both aesthetics and society in which both Reynolds and Wollstonecraft made interventions. A comparison of Reynolds to Wollstonecraft will then reveal the deeply politicised vision of beauty given to us by Wollstonecraft.

26.2  Beauty and Power in the Work of Lucrezia Marinelli and François Poulain de la Barre As I noted briefly at the outset, the three-sided interaction between beauty, social power, and gender can be clearly seen from the work of Lucrezia Marinelli. For her, the power of beauty is predicated on what seems to be a fact about its nature— “man needs to love beautiful things.” This power is explained earlier in the text with reference to the perceived power of women as objects over presumed heterosexual male subjects: “men are obliged and forced to love women,” she writes, and “women are not obliged to love them back, except merely from courtesy” (Marinelli 2000: 62). These two involuntary obligations on men—the need to love “beautiful things” and to love women—show how beauty and gender are intertwined for Marinelli. Beauty has another power too, one that is—for Marinelli—far more important than any kind of appetitive inducement. Beauty leads to knowledge of God. Again, it is the beauty of women in particular that is of most significance here: “women’s beauty leads to the knowledge of God the supernal intelligence, and shows the way to heaven” (Marinelli 2000: 63). She describes beauty as a “golden chain” upon whose links the soul progresses to heaven, beginning with “corporeal beauty” but then quickly ascending to the second link that “gazes with the internal eye at the soul that, adorned with celestial excellence, gives form to the beautiful body” (Marinelli 2000: 66). From there—the beauty of the soul that shines through the body— the soul then progresses further, to contemplate “the angelic spirits” and God himself (Marinelli 2000: 66). Reflecting on the beauty of women, then—again from the perspective of a presumed heterosexual male subject—leads an adequately contemplative mind directly to knowledge of God. This theological picture has many consequences. Situating women within a divine system is, of course, itself a strong defence of their significance and virtue; so, too, is Marinelli’s insistence that a more beautiful body is an indicator and consequence of a more beautiful soul, which she lays out explicitly earlier: Now, if we wished to apply the common reasoning, we would say that women’s souls are equal to men’s. But the complete falseness of this opinion will become apparent to everyone whose mind is not totally committed to the opposite point of view if we consider the body, because the nobility of the soul can be judged from the excellence of the body— which is ornamented with the same character and beauty as the soul, “which such a body manifests in itself.” The greater nobility and worthiness of a woman’s body is shown by its delicacy, its complexion, and its temperate nature, as well as by its beauty, which is a grace of splendor proceeding from the soul as well as from the body. Beauty is without a doubt a ray of light from the soul that pervades the body in which it finds itself, as the wise Plotinus writes… (Marinelli 2000: 57) 351

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Through her theory of the significance and role of beauty, then, and of women’s relation to it, Marinelli claims for women a superior personal virtue to that of men. It is a sign, too, of greater favour from God (“a grace of splendor”) and of a divinely ordained social, epistemological, and theological role within the natural order of things. For Marinelli, this role ought to be taken seriously by men: merely by virtue of their beauty, women are important sources of both virtue and knowledge of the divine, and hence ought to be treated with dignity and respect by men. But the argument has political implications too, though Marinelli does not spell them out explicitly here. For if women are truly more virtuous than men then a society that dominates them and takes no account of their virtue can only be vicious. Similarly, a society that failed to adequately acknowledge women’s beauty would cut itself off from knowledge of God and the divine order. The political message is implicit but simple: if—as Marinelli believes she has demonstrated— everyone agrees that women are superior in beauty, then they must also agree that it is a perverse and unjust society that would ignore or undermine their moral and intellectual qualities, of which their beauty is a direct manifestation. Marinelli therefore makes her arguments about the political and moral value of women through an aesthetic and theological lens. To her, that women are more beautiful than men is a natural fact, and the relation between beauty and virtue is a natural fact as well. From these two claims about nature, as we have seen above, political claims about the place of women can be given; and a societal structure that would fail to exalt the beautiful can then be denounced as unnatural and thereby irreligious. For Marinelli, then, politics should properly be influenced by beauty; but beauty, including the practices of self-adornment and taste as well as its bare definition, is not influenced by politics. It is a natural and prior fact. Several decades later, François Poulain de la Barre did read beauty through the lens of existing gender politics. He argued that women’s adherence to and apparent obsession with the rituals of performative beauty was a result of their oppression—it was a sort of palliative, and an illicit avenue toward an informal power that was the only form not denied to them. He gives a speculative history to explain what he sees as the artificial inequality between the sexes, and as part of this he shows how women’s beauty practices grew out of a particular gender-political context: Once [women] noticed that external adornments made men treat them more gently and that their own condition thereby became more tolerable, they exploited everything that they believed would make them more amiable. For that purpose they used gold, silver, and precious stones as soon as they were in vogue. Since men had prevented them from displaying their intellectual gifts, they applied their energies exclusively to whatever could make them look more attractive. They succeeded admirably, and their clothes and beauty won them more esteem than all the books and knowledge in the world. This tradition became too well established to allow any possible change subsequently; the same practice has been passed on to us, and it now seems to be a tradition that is too old to criticize. (Poulain de la Barre 2013: 131) This shifts our understanding of beauty to a different ground: the beauty of women and their participation in its practice is no longer a natural given from which arguments of the kind Marinelli made can proceed, but a social fact in need of explanation. This in turn can lead to a reorientation of the political aspect of beauty: rather than arguing alongside a known, established order—for improvements within that order—beauty, its effects, and fellow-travellers, can be made to argue against the order. Where for Marinelli the fact of women’s beauty was a sign that a political order that oppresses them is perverse, for Poulain women’s beauty is a manifestation of their oppression. Hence, in Poulain, the relation between beauty and power has shifted direction: a shift that Wollstonecraft re-stages, as we will soon see. 352

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26.3  Taste, Femininity, and Power in the Eighteenth Century In Poulain and Marinelli, then, we have seen two different ways that beauty can be used in making political claims on behalf of women. It can be a sign of women’s inherently greater virtue or of their oppression, and in either case, a society that dominates women must be altered or overturned. We have also seen two ways that thinking about women can lead to particular conclusions in theorising about the role and importance of beauty: for Poulain it is a social practice, having grown from unjust origins, while for Marinelli beauty is a natural fact through which women, by the grace of God, are exalted. Both of these strands of thought—using beauty to make political arguments about women’s social place, and using women to make theoretical arguments about beauty—persisted into the eighteenth century. The third Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, used assumptions about women as overly sensuous and amorous beings in his delineation of a good, austere, harmonious aesthetic sense from a bad, “effeminate” one (Shaftesbury 2001: 1.340; 3.386); while Edmund Burke, in his Enquiry, used a man’s feelings about a beautiful woman as evidence against the idea that beauty derives from abstract principles (Burke 2015: 79). Here I wish to highlight the work of two prowoman writers on both these strands: Frances Reynolds and Mary Wollstonecraft. Reynolds, rather like Marinelli, used assumptions about women’s essential nature to develop a theory of beauty and taste, and from that derived an implicit social critique of a male-dominated society. Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, argued that views about what is beautiful and what constituted good taste were themselves the result of an unjust male-dominated society that had also constructed women into weak and trivial beings. In this, she is more similar to Poulain; but as we shall see, her work moves beyond his in its consideration of the politics of beauty.

26.4  Beauty and Gender in the Enquiry of Frances Reynolds Like Shaftesbury and Burke, Reynolds articulates an association between women and the proper standards of beauty and taste in her short Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty, of 1789. Unlike her male counterparts, however, she lends the association a positive valence that could, if taken seriously, lead to an improvement in the position of women. But, as we will see later, for Wollstonecraft the association is the problem, and no real political progress against male supremacy can be made while women and beauty remain inextricably tied together in the way they are for Reynolds. Reynolds makes the gender division the axle and origin of her entire aesthetic system: It is I imagine to the principles of the masculine and the feminine character, that we owe the perception of beauty or taste, in any object whatever, throughout all nature, and all art that imitates nature… (Reynolds 1789: 28) For Reynolds, therefore, all our judgements regarding the beautiful and sublime refer back, either directly or “symbolically,” to the aesthetic judgement of human beings as objects, with the “feminine character” as the “sweetest, most interesting image of beauty,” and the masculine “partak[ing]” of the sublime. “Thus it will be found,” she writes, “that, in every object that is universally pleasing, there exist principles that are analogous to those that constitute beauty in the human species” (Reynolds 1789: 28). And the “governing principle” of beauty in humans—and hence, by analogy, in everything—is “the moral sense” (Reynolds 1789: 22). Thus, for Reynolds, as for Marinelli, our apprehension of beauty in humans is an apprehension of the “moral virtue” of the object: “the body charms,” she writes, “because the soul is seen.” This ability to perceive virtue is 353

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a matter of cultivation: “the rustic” is charmed by the physical, but “to a man of taste the physical pleases only through the medium of the moral” (Reynolds 1789: 20). And in this schema it is only the “man” of taste that perceives “the real charms of beauty,” which is hence always an appreciation of inner virtue—or, in the case of non-human objects, a kind of anthropomorphism in which they are symbolically imbued with human-like mental qualities: Witness the charm of the infant innocence, of the snow-drop, of the soft elegance of the hyacinth, &c. and on the contrary, our disrelish of the gaudy tulip, the robust, unmeaning, masculine piony, hollyhock, &c. &c. (Reynolds 1789: 30–31) This mediation of the moral (virtue) by the physical (the appearance of the body) in aesthetic judgement is again explained by—and helps further justify—the gender binary; Reynolds yokes together the physical charms of the sexes with essentialised moral and mental qualities in considering their forms of beauty, which exist distinctly from each other. “The beauty of each sex,” she writes, “is seen only through the medium of the virtues belonging to each,” just as the beauty of particular stages of human life (infancy, youth, “manhood,” etc.) are seen only through the virtues particular to that stage (innocence, compassion, fortitude, etc.) (Reynolds 1789: 21–22). Where there is an incongruity between physical appearance—no matter how formally charming that appearance might be—and the correct or expected virtues of a particular sex or age, Reynolds claims, we are disgusted: “without congruity, there could be no virtue; without virtue, no beauty, no sentiment of taste.” The softness and mildness of the feminine expression would be displeasing in a man. The robust and determined expression of the rigid virtues, justice, fortitude, &c. would be displeasing in a woman. However perfect the form, if an incongruity that touches the well-being of humanity mingles with the idea, the form will not afford the pleasing perception of beauty, though the eye may be capable of feeling its regularity, &c. So far is it from pleasing, that it is the more disgusting from its semblance to virtue, because that that semblance is a contradiction to her laws. (Reynolds 1789: 22–23) As we’ve already seen, Reynolds also says that the feminine is the “sweetest, most interesting image of beauty”; with some more of her aesthetics in place we can now see that this constitutes a moral claim about women that brings her into a strange kind of alignment with Marinelli. Far from seeing the beauty of women as “subaltern” and as a threat to virtuous masculine taste, as Shaftesbury did (Shaftesbury 2001: 3.177), Reynolds forthrightly claims that the beauty of women is an expression of important inner virtues that are at least on a par with the masculine virtues. Indeed, later in the text she describes “woman” as “the most perfect existing object of taste in the creation,” taking the idea of feminine beauty as the prototype of all beauty familiar from Burke and linking it with an explicit claim about the concomitant moral excellence of women (Reynolds 1789: 43). This moral excellence is argued for even more strongly in Reynolds’ account of taste—that is to say, in her account of the appreciation of beauty. Here too Reynolds opposes the misogyny of Shaftesbury and stakes a claim for the significance and centrality of women to the aesthetic realm. As we’ve already seen, for Reynolds, taste must be cultivated, and the true appreciation of beauty requires an appreciation of the moral virtues of which beauty is an expression: Taste is intellectual pleasure, an approving sense of truth, of good, and beauty. The latter seems the visible or ostensible principle of the two former: and is that, in which the universal 354

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idea of taste is comprised. All are pleased with the sight of beauty; but all are by no means sensible, that the principles that make it pleasing, that constitute a form beautiful, are those, or to be more intelligible, relate to those, that constitute man’s highest excellence, his first interest, his chief good! (Reynolds 1789: 35) Somewhat vaguely, Reynolds identifies the “three co-existing principles of taste” that “run through all its perceptions” as virtue, honour, and ornament. Honour and ornament form the “public character” of taste, and virtue the “private and domestic.” Of these three, private virtue is exalted as the most important: indeed, Reynolds writes (again confusingly) that it is in virtue that, “though unperceived by the vulgar, to the eye of taste she [taste] appears in her highest ornament, highest honour” (Reynolds 1789: 39). As they are the “public characters” of taste, honour and ornament are prone to corruption by the social: by the enervating influences of wealth, or by the “false honour” afforded to prevailing modes and fashions. Reynolds is conscious of the risk posed to true taste and virtue by extreme wealth: In the progress of civilization, the polishing principle, which I call taste, is chiefly found in the highest sphere of life, highest for both internal and external advantages: wealth accelerates the last degree of cultivation, by giving efficacy to the principles of true honour; but it also accelerates its corruption, by giving efficacy to the principles of false honour, by which the true loses its distinction, becomes less and less apparent, nay by degrees less and less existent. Wealth becoming the object of honour, every principle of taste must be reversed. Hence avarice, and profusion, dissipation, luxurious banqueting, &c. supersede the love economy and domestic comfort, the sweet reciprocation of the natural affections, &c. hence the greatest evils of society, the sorrows of the virtuous poor, the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes; in a word, the general corruption of morals, and of course of true taste. (Reynolds 1789: 37–38) In such circumstances, true people of taste are disgusted by the ornament and honour incongruously afforded to unvirtuous things (Reynolds 1789: 42). Cultivating true taste therefore requires cultivating an understanding and appreciation of virtue, and this can only be achieved in the private and domestic sphere, where taste is insulated from the pernicious social effects that might unworthily co-opt it. And this private, domestic sphere—as it was for Shaftesbury, and more generally throughout the eighteenth century and beyond ( Jones 2009)—is associated by Reynolds with the feminine. Women hence appear for Reynolds not as threats to taste and virtue but as their arbiters and cultivators—as they did, through the theological lens, for Marinelli. The cultivation of the social moral affections is the cultivation of taste, and the domestic sphere is the true and almost only one in which it can appear in its highest dignity. It is peculiarly appropriated to feminine taste; and I may say, it is absolutely the only one in which it can appear in its true lustre. True taste, particularly the feminine, is retired, calm, modest; it is the private honour of the heart, and is, I imagine, incompatible with the love of fame. (Reynolds 1789: 43–44) Reynolds, then, can stand at the apex of the movement that Robert Jones describes taking place throughout the eighteenth century: one in which taste, and by association with it, virtue, is shifted from the public sphere to the private, with “private” here referring both to the domestic realm—the interior of the home—and to the emotional realm on the interior of a person. By both connotations 355

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taste and virtue also come to be more closely associated with women, confined as they were to the domestic realm and thought of as more sentimental and more sensuous ( Jones 2009).

26.5  Wollstonecraft’s Intervention Reynolds, therefore, argues forcefully for the pre-eminence of women as both subjects and objects of taste, and reiterates the significance and intimacy of the link between taste and virtue. Undoubtedly, then, and expectedly, Reynolds’ Enquiry is more pro-woman than either Burke’s one or the work of Shaftesbury. She puts an unquestionably positive spin on the linkage between women and beauty expounded by Burke. She carves out a role for women as important moral actors, participating in a long tradition of counter-misogynistic cultural arguments that seek to exonerate or promote women’s virtue. Like Marinelli before her, Reynolds produces a set of arguments using beauty and taste that, if taken seriously, ought to lead to an alteration or overturning of a social order that dominates women—the exemplary objects of beauty and subjects of taste, both of which are shown to be of great importance for virtue. And perhaps, indeed, a longer timeline could be drawn that would situate Reynolds’ moralaesthetic arguments within a centuries-old discursive contest that leads to the present day and that does seem to coincide with some improvements in some aspects of some women’s lives. But cultural histories that locate the impetus for major material change in fairly isolated intellectual arguments are tenuous at best. Wollstonecraft, writing only a few years after Reynolds, already sees that the change in women’s position that Reynolds articulates and defends is not going to undo—and in fact participates in—women’s oppression. It is to her intervention that we will turn now. Wollstonecraft sees the relation between beauty and power in much more complex and dynamic terms than Marinelli, Poulain, or Reynolds. Like Poulain, she understands that the dominance of performative beauty over the lives of women is a result of their exclusion from the realms of institutional power: they are “confined … in cages like the feathered race” with “nothing to do but to plume themselves and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch” (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 125). But while for Poulain women’s performance of beauty—their practice of self-­ adornment and concern for ‘looking beautiful’—is a palliative for a general lack of other kinds of self-efficacy, in Wollstonecraft’s works beauty is situated in a more complex dialectic with power. This dialectic is subjugatory of women, and beauty actively advances it. From this, Wollstonecraft is able to combine the view of Poulain—that an emphasis on beauty is a direct result of a lack of power—with a corollary of that of Marinelli—that beauty grants its wielder a kind of social power—and show that both conditions conspire to keep women in a state of spiritual, mental, moral, and physical enervation. Only some kind of liberatory political effort can break this exhausting cycle. This critique is formed alongside, within, and around Wollstonecraft’s critique of the aristocracy. For Wollstonecraft, both the domination of the lower orders by the ruling class and the domination of women by men are arbitrary and unjust seizures of power that depend on sentimental cover-ups—such as the practices of beauty and taste—to retain the gilt of legitimacy. She writes that the aristocracy has no incentive to self-improve, to work, and may have all the beautiful things they want from a position of slovenly, vicious otium: placed in a “torrid zone, with the meridian sun of pleasure darting directly upon them” they experience none of the wants and needs that Wollstonecraft sees as necessary for the development of solid virtues (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 124). Worse than the deformed state of the ruling class alone, however, is the effect that this deformation has on wider society. Wollstonecraft notes that the great men of the nobility all achieved their status by some inaugural injustice or deceit—chiefs “touching the most powerful springs of savage conduct, hope and fear”—rather than through any kind of natural right. Nevertheless, 356

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these despots must make a “shew of right,” and they must make ever greater shows of right as the progress of civilisation expands the intellectual opportunities and capacities of their subjects. They are “compelled to make covert corruption hold fast the power which was formerly snatched by open force” (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 83). The power of the aristocracy cannot be grounded in reason or the intellect. It is itself irrational and unjust: hereditary power “clash[es] with the mental superiority that naturally raises a man above his fellows” (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 80). The best way, then, to grant a legitimate sheen to the power of the aristocracy is to, as she puts it, make a great show of pomp and circumstance, luxury, extravagance, superstition, and “the pestiferous purple” (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 83). By gilding their power they make it temporarily tolerable, but they make themselves stupid. Worse yet, this power structure makes the contagion more virulent by creating perverse incentives for those lower down the hierarchy. The pathetic creatures of the ruling class warp the fabric of society around them such that the acquisition of true merit pales as a method for social advancement compared to appealing to their own cramped and shallow sentiments. Virtue, talent, and industry are neglected as the game of wealth and rank is played with pride, flattery, and adornment—an immoderate obsession with appealing to the sensuous: Have ye not heard that we cannot serve two masters? an immoderate desire to please contracts the faculties, and immerges, to borrow the idea of a great philosopher, the soul in matter, till it becomes unable to mount on the wing of contemplation. (Wollstonecraft 2009a: 22) For Wollstonecraft, this is a necessary consequence of the coincidence of that which is appealing to the senses—beauty—with power: in this case, the very real power of property and rank. But to Wollstonecraft, a similar vicious cycle occurs in the case of women. The vast majority of women, of course, did not enjoy the real power of wealth and rank of the aristocracy. But Wollstonecraft does believe that, through beauty, women—at least, women of the middle and upper classes—do become similarly trapped. In the case of women, however, it is not generated by plenitude but by a lack of rational and virtuous paths to power and self-efficacy. The rich have no incentive to expand their minds or virtues because they want for nothing and are surrounded by idle pleasures; women have no opportunity to do so because they are systematically denied any such opportunities by patriarchal institutions and traditions.1 The industry and necessity for and by which middle-class men are cultivated are closed away from almost all of their women counterparts (Wollstonecraft herself seeming to be a rule-proving exception). Middle- and upper-class women receive only “a disorderly kind of education” from which emerge “uncultivated understandings [that] make them entirely dependent on their senses for employment and amusement” (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 88, 94). This forced dependence on the senses narrows the horizons of women’s activity, and—because “the employment of the thoughts shapes the character both generally and individually”—the effect is that women are constructed as objects and subjects of taste and little else (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 148). That is, women are constructed both as beautiful bodies to be admired and adorned and as beings in thrall to their own senses and sentiments, who can participate in refined, pretty conversation on matters of taste. This significantly demonstrates a slippage between the division of subject and object wherein being a subject is itself objectified by the demand that opinions be appealing. Both sides are thereby weaponised against women’s characters. As Wollstonecraft observes, the two also participate in their own self-reinforcing cycle: being a beautiful object requires the cultivation of the senses and faculties of sensuous taste; this devotion to the senses, rather than to reason or truth, reduces one’s self-efficacy and makes the appeal to the senses of others yet more necessary. 357

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Wollstonecraft’s acerbic—and at times mournful—depiction of this condition takes up much of the prose of her Vindications and even of the Historical and Moral View, all of which are outstanding polemics. A couple of examples will suffice, though there are many from which to choose: Women are every where in this deplorable state; for, in order to preserve their innocence, as ignorance is courteously termed, truth is hidden from them, and they are made to assume an artificial character before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 112) Where is the dignity, the infallibility of sensibility, in the fair ladies, whom, if the voice of rumour is to be credited, the captive negroes curse in all the agony of bodily pain, for the unheard of tortures they invent? It is probable that some of them, after the sight of a flagellation, compose their ruffled spirits and exercise their tender feelings by the perusal of the last imported novel.—How true those tears are to nature, I leave you to determine. (Wollstonecraft 2009a: 45) As with the wealthy, this impoverishment of women’s intellectual and moral faculties is both symptom and cause of their single-minded focus on the performances of beauty and taste. For, again like the wealthy, the enervated state of refinement that is cultivated in women really does work to grant women access to a form of power that otherwise would—like all others—be closed off from them: “if women,” Wollstonecraft writes, “are not permitted to enjoy legitimate rights, they will render both men and themselves vicious, to obtain illicit privileges” (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 68). Here Wollstonecraft recalls Poulain: women, she argues, shut out from political or institutional power,2 adorn their bodies and refine their opinions to appeal to the base sensualism of men, who—themselves vitiated by the moral malaise generated by the pestiferous purples of aristocracy and patriarchy—find themselves taken in and setting up women as despots. As Claudia Johnson puts it, for Wollstonecraft, “women’s weaknesses render them imperious rather than docile … Men ought to resent in women the same power they resent in kings”: that is, an irrational and arbitrary power based on the senses rather than reason ( Johnson 1995: 33). So the “passions of men have thus placed women on thrones,” and while this continues to be the only possible avenue for women’s access to power and self-efficacy it will continue to be one frequently walked, and women will continue to cramp their intellects and spirits in the pursuit of these “illicit privileges” (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 68). The two conditions—enervating beauty and illicit, sensual power—reinforce one another for women as they do, in a different way, for the aristocracy. And of course, as well as being undesirable from the point of view of its vicious effects on the mind, soul, and body, the arbitrary power women gain through beauty is also exclusionary of the great many women who are unable for whatever reason to meet the arbitrary demands of men’s desires. To be a beautiful object or a refined subject is expensive and difficult; it excludes the poor, the old, those whose appearance deviates from a societal norm. As the dialectic turns between beauty and social power it leaves more and more women behind—the vast majority of them, in fact. Even those women who can meet the demands of male lust are excluded for most of their lives: “the usefulness of age, and the rational hopes of futurity, are all to be sacrificed to render women an object of desire for a short time” (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 164). This dialectic is therefore in a dynamic of “patriarchal equilibrium,” as described by the historian Judith Bennett: a historical dynamic distinguished by the plasticity of those institutions by which women are dominated by men. Such institutions, Bennett argues—and beauty, for Wollstonecraft, is one of them—can persevere through time while accommodating and adapting to 358

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apparent or superficial changes in the status and condition of women (Bennett 2006: 54–81). So despite—in fact because of—the despotic power of the imperious beauty, women as a category remain subjugated. As Naomi Garner notes, “the illusion of power through beauty that entices and entraps women is a manageable power that does not threaten male superiority” (Garner 2013: 90). Patriarchy adapts: the centring of women as aesthetic subjects and objects—as people not just capable of but important for understanding beauty—becomes another part of its mechanism. In this light Reynolds’ claim in favour of women’s virtue, depending on under-explained and essentialised gender traits, can be recast as a post-hoc rationalisation of the already-existing oppressive relations described by Wollstonecraft: an attempt to make the best of a bad situation. Even a justificatory account that exalts the beauty and taste of women preserves the association of women with beauty that, Wollstonecraft sees, is both cause and effect of their subjugation. An account centred on natural traits and on natural virtue attempts to spin and alter perceptions of beauty and of women while failing to take notice of the final, and for Wollstonecraft most basic, factor in the determination of those perceptions: power itself.

26.6 Conclusion What, then, of Wollstonecraft’s own proposed route out from the cycle? As we know, Reynolds believes that women have a natural role to fulfil as educators because they are exemplar subjects and objects of beauty, by virtue of their particular and essential characteristics as women. Wollstonecraft, by contrast, is clear that no such essentially and peculiarly aesthetic character exists in women; it is all the product of their construction by the contingencies of a patriarchal and aristocratic society—that is, a society characterised by the arbitrary and irrational exercise of power. Indeed, she goes so far as to say in the Rights of Woman that she “firmly wish[es] to see the distinction of sex confounded in society” (Wollstonecraft 2009b: 126). Hence for Wollstonecraft liberating women requires shifting the conditions in which they are constructed: lionisation of their virtues will always be insufficient while those virtues—if virtues they really are—are understood and formed within currently existing oppressive structures. This determination to shift the conditions that create attitudes is one of the basic principles of revolutionary politics.3 The contrast with Reynolds can help us to see in starker relief the revolutionary character of Wollstonecraft’s intervention in the interaction between beauty, gender, and power. Reynolds presents a pro-woman aesthetics that fails to address the underlying dominative power structures on which that aesthetics is based—in particular, the assumptions that women are essentially, naturally beautiful and domestic. Wollstonecraft excavates these supposedly natural qualities to find subjugation at their bases. She recognises that the way we think about beauty, the way we think about women, and how those two are intertwined, is always dependent on power relations. Without altering those relations beauty can never be liberatory: shifting attitudes toward beauty and gender, and thereby creating people free from the dependence they generate, necessitates shifting—or destroying—the power structures on which, like ivy, they grow.

Notes 1 Though I focus exclusively on her analysis of the depredations to which women are subjected through beauty, Wollstonecraft herself is highly sensitive to many other forms of subjection; see, for example, Sandrine Bergès’s discussion of her novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Women (2013: 90). 2 Lena Halldenius has given a useful discussion of the nature and possibility of republican representation in Wollstonecraft, and the ways by which women might come to political and institutional power. In particular, Halldenius notes that for Wollstonecraft women must participate directly in their own government; this is the only way that their interests might be represented (2016: 166–82).

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Patrick Ball 3 Alan Coffee reads the “revolution in female manners” as the creation of a society in which “women’s perspectives have helped shape the public culture so that the kind of pernicious ideas (such as that women are made rather to feel than reason) that impede their freedom cannot gain a foothold” (2016: 198). Attacking such pernicious ideas, I argue, requires the removal of those arbitrary powers that generate them.

References Bennett, J. M. (2006) History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bergès, S. (2013) The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1st edition, London, New York: Routledge. Burke, E. (2015) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. P. Guyer, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published 1757. Coffee, A. (2016) “Mary Wollstonecraft, Public Reason, and the Virtuous Republic,” in S. Bergès and A. Coffee (eds.), The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, Oxford University Press, pp. 183–201. Available at: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198766841. 001.0001/acprof-9780198766841 (Accessed: 7 December 2018). Garner, N. (2013) “‘Seeing Through a Glass Darkly’: Wollstonecraft and the Confinements of E ­ ighteenthCentury Femininity,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 11(3): 81–95. Halldenius, L. (2016) “Representation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Political Philosophy,” in S. Bergès and A. Coffee (eds.), The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, Oxford University Press, pp. 166–82. Available at: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198766841. 001.0001/acprof-9780198766841 (Accessed: 7 December 2018). Johnson, C. L. (1995) Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen, 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, R. (2009) Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marinelli, L. (2000) The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, trans. A. Dunhill, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published 1600. Poulain de la Barre, F. (2013) “A Physical and Moral Discourse Concerning the Equality of Both Sexes,” trans. D. M. Clarke, in D.M. Clarke, (ed.) The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of Seventeenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 119–200. Originally published 1673. Reynolds, F. (1789) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty. London: J. Smeeton. Shaftesbury, A. A. C., Earl of. (2001) Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols., ed. D. den Uyl, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Originally published 1711. Available at: http://oll.libertyfund.org/ titles/shaftesbury-characteristicks-of-men-manners-opinions-times-3-vols (Accessed: 26 July 2018). Wollstonecraft, M. (2009a) “A Vindication of the Rights of Men,” in J. Todd (ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), pp. 1–62. Originally published 1790. (2009b) “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in J. Todd (ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), pp. 63–283. Originally published 1792.

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27 THEORIES OF THE STATE Alan M. S. J. Coffee

27.1 Introduction The early modern period was pivotal in our contemporary understanding of the nature, role and limits of the state. As absolute monarchy and principles of heredity gave way to constitutional and representative forms of government, the discussions and political conflicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have bequeathed us a canon of familiar writers whose names fill almost all introductory texts to, or university courses on, the history of political philosophy – names such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau and Burke. As so often in the history of philosophy, no women are included in this list. And as just as often, this is both misleading and a detriment to the discipline. Women not only took an active – and often prominent – part in the debates through which the concept of the state comes down to us, but their ideas continue to resonate and remain applicable today as we grapple with the legacy of this period in our own relationship with the legitimacy, authority and relevance of the state. In one sense, of course, it is undeniable that women have made a lasting contribution to the theory of the state. The question of where women stand in relation to the state, and the demand for full and equal legal standing, strikes at the heart of the fundamental moral and political principles from which that concept is constructed – such as justice, liberty, equality, inclusion, citizenship, rights to name just a few. The history of early modern feminism is, for that reason, necessarily bound up with the development of the modern conception of the state. It is not only indirectly, through “the woman question”, that women have intervened in this subject, however. As we shall see, women also made significant contributions to the general question of the nature of the state, irrespective of the issue of female standing. Women have contributed to political philosophy from across the ideological spectrum. Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), for example, developed arguments for individual liberty of conscience and religion within a royalist framework that prioritises peace and stability over personal latitude for action (Cavendish 2003). Writing slightly later, Mary Astell (1666–1731) argued for women’s education based on their intellectual equality and offers a critique of the prevailing ideas of marriage as a form of bondage while remaining committed to High-Church Tory principles (Astell 1996). My intention in this chapter, however, is not to survey the breadth of women’s theoretical engagement but to examine how women’s perspectives can come subtly to alter scope and focus of some of the fundamental political concepts that we use. It is by grappling first with the foundational principles of the state that we can then come more clearly to see what is at stake in considering what women’s relationship with the state is, and what it should become. My approach will be to DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-33

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focus the bulk of this chapter on looking in detail at the work of one woman, Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791), who developed what I consider to be the most extensive and fully-developed political philosophy of any woman in the early modern period. While Macaulay wrote comparatively little directly about women’s particular political concerns across a long career, her work paved the way for later feminist philosophers, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797). Macaulay framed her political analysis within the republican political tradition, as did Wollstonecraft. The political questions they posed, and the set of principles that they employed, were, however, general and are accessible to those who do not share this particular theoretical outlook. I have chosen to restrict my scope for several reasons. First, though Macaulay is a relatively obscure figure today, she was a colossus of her time. She was an innovative thinker who can reasonably be described as the pre-eminent republican philosopher of her generation (Coffee 2017, 2019). Secondly, the republican tradition on which Macaulay draws furnishes us today with a range of core political concepts and values, such as equal citizenship, rational public discourse and representative government. Thirdly, in contrast to the standard picture of republicanism as a thoroughly masculine and patriarchal tradition that was hostile to feminist values, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were an especially rich period for women writing within a republican framework and drawing on its fundamental principles. Macaulay provides an excellent gateway into this literature, even if each philosopher deserves to be studied on her own terms. Amongst the others, in France, Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland (1754–1793) and important aspects of the philosophy of Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822) can all be usefully understood through a republican lens (Bergès 2022), while in the United States, women writing on both feminist and abolitionist themes, often framed their arguments in the republican terms popularised during the American Revolution, including Nancy Kingsbury Wollstonecraft (1791–1828) (Coffee 2023), Sarah Moore Grimké (1792 –1873), Frances Wright (1795 –1852) and Margaret Fuller (1810 –1850) (Falchi 2016; Vantin 2016; Mocci 2018). In Britain, alongside Macaulay, Wollstonecraft and Barbauld, Mary Hays (1759–1843) and Mary Shelley (1797–1851) also make extensive use of republican themes (Coffee forthcoming). As political philosophers, collectively and individually, these women have long been overlooked, misunderstood or discounted. Their work is, however, currently the subject of considerable recent scholarship as part of the wider movement to recover, reappraise and recognise women’s historical philosophical contributions and its potential continuing relevance. From one perspective, this may seem surprising to some since it goes against a longstanding – and not unwarranted – feminist suspicion of the republican tradition, viewing it as patriarchal and as being constructed around masculine norms and ideals. Nevertheless, what we find by listening to, and examining, what women have written in this tradition is that the tools of emancipation – freedom from arbitrary power, equality, citizenship, democratic voice – are available for women to both use and adapt to their needs and purposes. Indeed, the philosophers that I discuss in this chapter show us that the full recognition and inclusion of women on equal terms with men is a theoretical necessity, not simply for consistency or merely by extending its principles to embrace women as well as men, but because a failure to do so unleashes a corrosive causal effect that corrupts the virtue of society that is necessary for the freedom of men. Gender inequality, in other words, is incompatible with a free state. The systematic and entrenched social inequality between men and women is, perhaps, the central question in feminist political philosophy. “If all Men are born free”, Mary Astell famously asked in 1700, “how is it that all Women are born slaves?” (Astell 1996: 18). She followed this question up by wondering why it was that to be subject to the will of others was so abhorred in men and yet not only applauded in women but considered necessary. The same language of servitude was used by Mary Wollstonecraft at the end of the century, as was the same observation of not only double standards but a shaping of public consciousness in order to make that double standard appear palatable and inevitable. Inequality, then, is only part of the fundamental feminist question, another part 362

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being that the social and political world has been constructed in men’s interests. The approach that I take in what follows is to look at how Macaulay handles the basic questions of what is the nature of the state, and on what fundamental principles should it be built. Once we understand how she answers this, we can see how fragile the principles are and how easily and deceptively they can be corrupted and subverted, producing not only inequality but its accompanying justifying narrative. The structure of this chapter is as follows. First, in Section 27.2, I give some background to Macaulay and the context in which she wrote. I also establish Macaulay’s most basic premise that the state is, and must always remain, only a vehicle for the protection of the natural rights of the people it governs. In Section 27.3, I build on this foundation, focusing on Macaulay’s conception of freedom which entails and requires two further values, equality and civic virtue. A free society must, of necessity, be an equal society in which certain values and behaviours hold. Where the balance between these three ideals is broken, then the conditions necessary for freedom and equality unravel. Macaulay argues this in general terms, not referring to the condition in particular. In Section 27.4, however, I show how her work was developed by Wollstonecraft into an analysis of the social construction of systems of norms and practices that combine to keep women in a subordinate position. Finally, in Section 27.5, I turn briefly to another neglected woman philosopher, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) who developed Macaulayan themes and arguments, further probing the idea of equality as a necessary ideal.

27.2  Catharine Macaulay Catharine Macaulay produced by far the most developed, and the most influential, political philosophy of any woman in the early modern period. She was a prolific writer, most widely known as the author of an eight-volume History of England covering the period from the accession of James I to the installation of William and Mary. She also wrote a supplementary volume written as a series of letters to a friend that brought the work up to date, a philosophical Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, several significant political tracts, and a discourse on education. It is hard to overstate the extent of Macaulay’s celebrity as a public intellectual in the 1760s and 1770s. She was celebrated in art, satirised in plays, gossiped about in the press and her image was used to sell commercial memorabilia. Beyond her role as a public intellectual, Macaulay was regarded as being amongst the most able and exacting of critics by her major interlocutors, which included David Hume and Edmund Burke. Macaulay’s History was widely understood as a republican response to Hume’s own multi-volume History of England in which he defends principles that were favourable to royalists and Tories, and thereby a threat to the cause of liberty that she held preeminent. Macaulay also replied to Burke with her own Observations on two of his tracts written at significant political moments, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1770 and 1790).1 Even as Macaulay’s fame began to wane in England, she found a ready and enthusiastic audience amongst patriots and radicals in America and France who were attracted by her republican ideals and her justification of revolution as a legitimate means of securing liberty. She counted as friends, admirers or correspondents figures such as George Washington, John Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland and the Comte de Mirabeau (Hay 1994; Bergès 2016).2 Macaulay’s domestic popularity began to decline from 1768, with the publication of the fourth volume of the History which ends with a stirring endorsement of the execution of Charles I as an “eminent act of justice” in defence of liberty, something neither the public nor many readers were ready to accept (Macaulay 1783a: 4.418). The unpopularity of revolutionary and republican politics after her death in the years that followed the Reign of Terror and the wars with France perhaps sealed her fate as a philosopher whose ideas no longer found an audience. The gendered way in which the canons of history, politics and philosophy have been created meant that once she slipped from public view, though republican political ideals would 363

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once again be appreciated, it would be with her contemporaries, such as Thomas Paine, Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, that these would become associated. A central pillar of Macaulay’s theory is that “Government is the mere creature of human invention” (Macaulay 1783a: 4.415). Its purpose is “the protection of the people” and in particular, the securing of their natural rights. It follows that government is held on trust, accountable to the people and “may be changed or altered according to the dictates of experience and the better judgement of men” (Macaulay 1783a: 4.415–16). In this, Macaulay was an ideological purist, an Old Whig who held to the values that had motivated the Civil War a century earlier.3 She looked back to the early theorists in the Commonwealthman tradition, including James Harrington, John Milton, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, arguing that her contemporary aristocratic Whigs had lost sight of the spirit and guiding principles of their intellectual and political predecessors. A central and distinctive aspect of her analysis was her strong criticism of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its legacy. It was not its underlying rationale that concerned her.4 On the contrary, she regards the revolution as having correctly established the end of “hereditary indefeasible right” and that sovereign power must “flow from no other fountain than that of a contract with the people” in which “allegiance and protection were declared reciprocal terms” (Macaulay 1778: 4). The problem was that the plan of settlement “was neither properly digested nor maturely formed” (Macaulay 1778: 5). Rather than taking the form of a fully worked out transition of power to the people, there was a compromise between factions that allowed raw personal and partisan interests to take advantage of a deceived population, born of the “irrational prejudices which… detestable doctrines… had sown very deep in the hearts of the people” to bolster the power of the crown (Macaulay 1778: 4). The opportunity was not taken to cut off all the prerogatives of the monarchy, to devastating effect. This failure, she argued, was sufficient to undermine and circumvent the role of parliament, ultimately leaving power in the hands of the monarch.” At root, hereditary right was not the real issue but only a manifestation of the deeper problem which was vice, or lack of political and moral virtue. Unless there is a strong institutional design, built around the correct principles that support liberty and natural rights, unscrupulous and ambitious parties will inevitably emerge to sow discord and take advantage, invariably aided by the bigoted and easily led. Whereas in the past, this pattern revolved around the monarch and the politics of the court, the same dynamics of power and ambition are just as well suited to an ill-defended parliamentary system. In one sense, then, the failing of the Glorious Revolution, then, was that it did not go far enough, and was, in Barbara Schnorrenberg’s phrase, an opportunity missed (Schnorrenberg 1991). This failing was, however, both predictable and inevitable. Macaulay believed that governments have never, historically, been formed for the right reason (for the “full and impartial security of the rights of nature” (Macaulay 1770: 10)). They were instead “the produce of lawless power or accident, acted on by corrupt interest” (Macaulay 1770: 12). We can, therefore, never expect the transfer or redistribution of power to be conducted peacefully or on principled grounds (“in all the great struggles for liberty true reformation was never by the ruling party either effected or even intended” (Macaulay 1770: 12)). The flaws in the system left by the Revolution were, then, as expected, leaving “full opportunity for private interest to exclude public good” (Macaulay 1770: 12). History, Macaulay regrets, does not furnish us “with one exception to this rule; that when the succession in the government is changed, without a substantial provision for the security of liberty, its total destruction is accomplished, by the measure intended for its preservation” (Macaulay 1778: 5).

27.3  The State The purpose of the state, according to Macaulay, is to “secure the virtue, liberty, and happiness of society” (Macaulay 1769: 21). These three goals are, as we shall see, all connected. Liberty is 364

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the primary value. Virtue is constitutive of, and necessary for, liberty while happiness, or welfare, follows from it. This free, virtuous and happy condition can only be met in a state that is organised in the right way, which Macaulay defines as a “democratical system, rightly balanced” (Macaulay 1769: 21). By this she means a representative system wholly accountable to the people governed. The state, she argues, is designed for the benefit of the people rather than for any particular or factional interest groups, something “instituted for the protection of the people, for the end of securing not overthrowing the rights of nature” (Macaulay 1783a: 4. 415–16). These natural rights are crystallised in, and best protected by, the value of liberty that is the government’s chief purpose to establish. To achieve this, the laws and policies of the state must be virtuous. This entails that they are both rational and moral, grounded in the natural law that can be known by reason. The natural law is not only moral but it represents what is in human beings’ best interests, being the surest way to secure our collective happiness and well-being (Macaulay 1783b: vi).

27.3.1 Virtue It is not just the state that is supposed to embody the values of virtue and liberty, but individuals too. The chief individual goal is that of being free. Liberty, Macaulay tells us in the first paragraph of the History of England, “lies latent in the breast of every rational being, till it is nipped by the frost of prejudice or blasted by the influence of vice” (Macaulay 1783a: 1.vii). These caveats are significant. Liberty, for Macaulay, is not licence. It entails conforming one’s life to the dictates of both reason (as opposed to prejudice) and the moral law (as opposed to vice). Liberty, therefore, requires and follows from virtue. “Rational agency”, she argues, corresponds to “a rule of right” whereby “pleasurable sensation is sacrificed to the conviction of judgement, and to the dictates of a well informed understanding” (Macaulay 1783b: 129). This is a high standard, of course, but certain important features follow. First, there are two parts to liberty, which Macaulay often refers to interchangeably as “independence”, where this means that a person is independent of any form of arbitrary controlling power (Coffee 2017, 2019). One part is internal to the person and consists of a freedom or independence of mind whereby agents are willing and able to think for themselves, scrutinising their beliefs in the light of both reason and their knowledge and experience in order to arrive at the best judgement rather than following habit, inclination, selfish interests or received wisdom.5 The other is external to the person, represented by a civil form of liberty to act on one’s own account rather than having to rely on the permission of others. The two sides to liberty work together. Free persons must be able both to think for themselves and act on their decisions. The value of liberty to individuals, according to Macaulay, is twofold. People can do what best suits them personally, regarding their interests, needs and situation. More importantly, they can pursue and discover moral and empirical truth, which is said to be a good in itself. The pursuit of knowledge and wisdom is of paramount importance for both individuals and society which should be run on the most up-to-date knowledge and soundest principles available. Of course, individuals can, and frequently do, make mistakes about moral and empirical matters (“else why have we schools to train our youth in knowledge, and habits of virtue? Why are treatises written… to inform the understanding, in a manner as shall enable her to be a proper guide to the will?” (Macaulay 1783b: 194–95)). The pursuit of truth and knowledge, therefore, should be thought of as a collaborative and collective endeavour. For one thing, we rely on other people for our upbringing and education. More significantly, our whole social environment unavoidably contributes to the formation of our minds and character. If we are not careful to maintain the integrity of this environment, the consequences can be disastrous consequences (“every error thrown out in conversation, every sentiment which does not correspond with the true principles of virtue, is received by the mind, and like a drop of venomous poison” (Macaulay 1790a: 103)). 365

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It is an urgent matter, then, for a free society to develop a robust science of politics, morals and rational interests, just as has been done in the physical sciences. Sadly, however, while the natural sciences of her day were making significant progress, Macaulay regretted that this had not been matched in politics and morals (Macaulay 1790a: 169–70).

27.3.2 Equality Alongside civic virtue, necessary for a free state is equality. So closely tied are “political equality, and the laws of good government”, Macaulay argues, “that one never can exist to perfection without the other” (Macaulay 1769: 16). Government, she adds, is to be “a fair and equal representation of the whole people”, accountable to them all and run in their collective interests (Macaulay 1790b: 48). In part, the reason for this is grounded in natural law (“the natural equality of men” (Macaulay 1790a: 160) which gives rise to “equal rights in men”, (Macaulay 1783a: 4.409)).6 In part, however, the reason is more pragmatic, since inequality is said to undermine the civic virtue necessary for a free society. In the sense Macaulay uses it, equality is a demanding idea. Fundamentally, the duty and role of the state are to guarantee the equal freedom of the citizens (“governments are formed on principles which promise the equal distribution of power and liberty” (Macaulay 1783a: 5.19)). Liberty is linked to power since free individuals must have the power to direct their lives as independent agents. This means, first, that they must have equal standing under the law, equal protection, equal representation of interests, and an equal opportunity to access public debates by which law and policy are made. Independence also entails a high degree of material inequality. It is sometimes suggested that Macaulay was not concerned with financial equality. Bridget Hill, for example, refers to Macaulay’s remark that she was not “arguing against that inequality of property which must more or less take place in all societies” but only against “political distinctions” (Hill 1992: 176, referring to Macaulay 1790a: 167). This is, however, misleading since shortly afterwards, Macaulay condemns that “inequality of property, which is incompatible with a wise and just government” (Macaulay 1790a: 190). Nevertheless, what concerns Macaulay in this later passage is not the economic equality for its own sake, but the effects that material inequality has on liberty and virtue. The three values of liberty as independence, virtue and equality are conceptually and causally connected so that where any one of these is missing, this undermines the other two ultimately making the freedom of the state as a whole impossible. Any significant form of inequality, whether material or otherwise, that leaves some people dependent on others is incompatible with a free society. This is true of both poverty and excessive wealth. In the case of the latter, Macaulay gives the example of allowing corporations to grow too powerful: The addition of above thirty millions capital would give such power to the South-Sea company as might endanger the liberties of the nation; for by their extensive interest they would be enabled to influence most, if not all, the elections of the members, and consequently overrule the resolutions of the house of commons. (Macaulay 1783a: 5. 299) Inequality does not only directly subvert freedom by creating dependence and giving an opportunity to bypass the law, however. It also leads to the corruption of virtue by allowing people to cultivate unvirtuous attitudes: As envy and covetousness are two passions which act powerfully on the peace and harmony of the mind, the virtue of citizens will be in a greater security where the wholesome restraint

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of sumptuary laws, or taxes properly imposed banish those objects from society, which are adapted to inflame cupidity, and excite a vicious emulation. (Macaulay 1790a: 190–91)

27.3.3  The Corruption of Virtue If the state is to uphold and protect the liberty of its citizens, then, it must ensure that the conditions are right for the development and maintenance of their civic virtue. The collective loss of virtue is a constant threat to the nation. It is, Macaulay laments, An observation too well grounded on the experience of all times, that human nature, deprived of that education and that train of fortunate circumstances which give birth to virtue, and support its stability, and when tempted with equal opportunities to gratify inordinate inclinations is the same corrupt and inconsistent being, in all ages, in all countries, and throughout every period of revolving time. adding that “every page of the history of Great-Britain… exemplifies this melancholy truth” (­Macaulay 1778: 273). Her own account of the English history from the accession of James I bore this out. Macaulay identifies two kinds of problem: the quality of people’s thinking and poor institutional structure. The remedy is, first, to improve the education of the people who must be taught to think rationally based on immutable moral truths (there is “no cultivation which yields so promising a harvest as the cultivation of the understanding; and that a mind, irradiated by the clear light of wisdom, must be equal to every task which reason imposes on it” (Macaulay 1790a: 31)). Part of the solution is found in improving formal education. This is, however, not sufficient. We learn far more from the example of others around us than we do from abstract instruction, particularly in cultivating the depth of moral feeling that must accompany our intellectual grasp (Macaulay 1790a: 72; Coffee 2017: 851–52). Government has a significant role to play here. High standards should, for example, be set on the behaviour of its officials and magistrates who serve as examples to us all. Public policies should also be designed to create a broadly egalitarian society in which public displays of wealth are discouraged, and which foster social cohesion, such as by rehabilitating former criminals back into society (Macaulay 1790a: 176–209). The government can also stimulate suitable artistic, religious and cultural practices to improve the morals and habits of the population. Having trained people to think rationally and morally, the second part of the remedy is to motivate them to support and pursue the public good over their own private interest. It is one thing to understand the benefits of pursuing the common good (When the happiness of an individual is properly considered, his interest will be found so intimately connected with the interests of society of which he is a member, that he cannot tact in conformity to the one, without having a proper consideration for the other. (Macaulay 1790a: 169)) but it is another thing to live by it (“but reason will revolt against a service for which it finds no adequate return” (Macaulay 1790a: 169)). Good governance, then, is essential. Where the state is run on the principles of equal liberty and the happiness of all the people, reason is rewarded and so, “the common good becomes the common care” (Macaulay 1783a: 5.19). Nevertheless, it is not sufficient to rely on people’s becoming virtuous and public spirited in this way. There will always be corrupt individuals ready to exploit the trust of the people for selfish gain. With this in mind, institutional design becomes the vital constraint. Macaulay cites the flaws in the system that was put in place after 1688 that “left full opportunity for private interest to exclude public good, and for a faction” to appear to quash one

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malign influence in the machinations of court only to leave a less obvious but equally destructive one in the royal prerogative (Macaulay 1770: 34). In a letter to the exiled Corsican revolutionary leader, Pasquale Paoli, Macaulay gives an outline of a constitution that she believes answers to the stated goal of securing equal liberty, virtue and happiness by making “all interests unite in the welfare of the state” and by “depriving every individual, order, or class, of the power of hurting it” (Macaulay 1769: 34).7 She proposes a bicameral system divided between an advisory senate of experts and an executive chamber of elected representatives. There is a strict separation of powers, rotation of offices and a set of term limits placed on all official roles. These measures will, she argues, limit the potential for abuse and so direct the ambition and energies of the elite cabinet of senators towards identifying and pursuing what is in the public rather than their own private interest. A key part of Macaulay’s constitutional design focused on land reform. Her purpose, she tells us, is to ensure an equitable distribution of land and to prevent the “aristocratical accumulation of property” (Macaulay 1769: 27).8 It is notable, however, that she provides only for the division of land between male heirs, and bans women from bringing dowries into their marriages. This sits awkwardly with the analysis given above about equality, independence and the common good. To some extent, Macaulay attempts to mitigate this with provision to be made for the education of girls, and for widows and unmarried women. This is, however, clearly inadequate since it maintains the condition of female dependence which is not only harmful to the women themselves but, in her own analysis, liable to undermine the freedom and virtue of the rest of society.

27.4  Women and the State These remarks on women have proved puzzling for Macaulay scholars and troubling for feminists. The issue at stake, however, runs more deeply than her constitutional arrangements. Throughout her work, Macaulay never mentions the issue of citizenship for women or discusses the idea of equal legal or political rights. It is not until her final book, the Letters on Education, written shortly before she died, that she makes an explicit or sustained argument for women’s equality, though even then, she stops short of discussing the idea of citizenship for women. This omission stands in stark contrast to the boldness with which she advances radical and revolutionary ideas, such as on the justness of the regicide, the legitimacy of the American and French Revolutions, or the failings of contemporary English politics. Furthermore, she often couches her arguments in abstract, universal and gender-neutral terms, such as of natural rights or the whole human species, that would include women, and she frequently explicitly extends her provisions for equal liberty to include other maligned groups such as Catholics and people of colour.9 Women, of course, were not simply just another marginalised group. As Halldenius remarks, female citizenship at this time represented a contradiction in terms (Halldenius 2015: 3). It may, therefore, have been that the idea of political life was so infused with masculine norms and patriarchal attitudes that Macaulay simply was not able to make the necessary conceptual link to apply her generic arguments for equality and independence to women. It would, however, take a brave critic to suggest that Macaulay lacked intellectual imagination. In any case, such an argument is unnecessary since, as Susan Staves highlights, the relevant conceptual leaps between women and citizenship had already been made often enough since the late seventeenth century, in satire and comedy at least, if not necessarily in political philosophy itself (Staves 1989: 170). Indeed, Macaulay’s overall argument across the Letters shows that she is, precisely, aware of the power of patriarchy to obscure things from our conscious minds and to make women’s inequality appear wrongly to be part of the natural order of things (see, e.g., Book I, Letters XXI–XXIV, 123–38). A close attention to Macaulay’s across her career, however, from the writing of her Histories onwards,

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shows that she did engage with the question of women’s condition and subordination in a subtle and nuanced, but distinctive and significant way. I briefly outline below just two of Macaulay’s feminist insights: the comparison between monarchical and domestic power, and the political agency exercised by women throughout history.

27.4.1  Monarchy, Patriarchy and the Home As we have noted, Macaulay’s principal concern is not with monarchy itself but with arbitrary rule in whatever form it is found. Monarchy may have been the paradigm of bad government that preoccupied her political writings, but the corrupting effects of tyranny were entirely general (Coffee 2017). What we see in the Histories, as Wendy Gunther-Canada has shown in great detail, is how Macaulay closely ties state tyranny in government with domestic tyranny in the household as part of a broader attack on the arbitrary nature of patriarchy, on which both monarchy and family relations were grounded (Gunther-Canada forthcoming). Macaulay’s critique, Gunther-Canada argues, “exposed the courtiers who bowed to a divine right king as one and the same with the husbands and fathers lording their authority over wives and children in patriarchal families” (Gunther-Canada forthcoming: 11).10 Macaulay frequently exploits the fact that monarchy was historically and logically tied to patriarchy via its hereditary principle, although, in her Loose Remarks on Hobbes, she develops a more general attack on patriarchy directed at the social contract, still rooted in republican principles and the family (Macaulay 1769; Gunther-Canada 2006). The tying together of monarchy and patriarchy as instances of arbitrary power was an innovative move because it allows Macaulay to draw an explicit parallel between domination in the state and domination in the home, something that had eluded male philosophers of the period, whether pro-monarchical (such as Hobbes or Hume) or anti- (such as Harrington or Locke). Since patriarchy can be shown to be an arbitrary form of power, Macaulay’s observation was that irrespective of whether it is exercised by the state or in the home, patriarchal power has the same corrupting effect of the stock of civic virtue necessary for a free state. In effect, the power of a husband over his wife represents the same abuse of arbitrary power as the monarch over the people.11 In republican terms, this is an argument that originates with Macaulay.

27.4.2  Women as Political Agents Macaulay’s arguments in respect of women’s political role are not only theoretical. Several scholars have noted the contrast between her treatment of women throughout her Histories and other contemporary narratives, all naturally written by males, including Hume. As Philip Hicks put it, Macaulay frequently focuses on or draws attention to the actions and interventions of women whom others had “unjustly ridiculed, omitted, praised for the wrong reasons, or not praised highly enough” (Hicks 2002: 187–88). Given Macaulay’s pioneering role as the first prominent female historian, this was, again, an innovation. Hicks argues that Macaulay shows in her writing of history that “women were capable of any particular virtue or accomplishment”, foreshadowing what she was to say explicitly and at length in the Letters (Hicks 2002: 196). Hicks cites this passage from the History as an example: It is education and circumstances which alone form the man… [A] large measure of indulgence is to be given to the foibles, the infirmities, and even of every man or woman, who has not received the benefits which from a perfect form of education. (Macaulay 1783a: 8.62, 59)

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In so doing, Hicks concludes, Macaulay shows that women can and do act politically, thereby undercutting a core cultural assumption about gender (Hicks 2002: 198). Staves makes a similar point, focusing on one event in which a group of women petition parliament for protection (Staves 1989: 165–69). She contrasts the dismissive treatment of this event given by Hume with Macaulay’s vivid account that takes the women seriously and brings them to life. Although Staves’s overall arguments are different from Hicks’s, her conclusion is that Macaulay is addressing the social construction of gender which in the conditions of the day “can be more powerful than the rhetoric of rights” (Staves 1989: 180). Gunther-Canada takes the theme of Macaulay’s involvement of women in her account of history further, arguing that, “her studied observations on monarchical government and sexual politics include women qua women in the life of the commonwealth”, giving the women a centre stage as instigators of events, animating them as independent agents and demonstrating their political effectiveness even though they were legally and conventionally subject to men (Gunther-Canada forthcoming: 29). “With each volume of the History”, Gunther-Canada goes on, “her consideration of women’s condition occupied a larger portion of the pages, underscoring how patriarchy was encoded in the social contract, and elements of monarchical rule reflected in the marriage contract” (Gunther-Canada forthcoming: 35). In spite of all this, it remains the case that Macaulay never overtly made a demand for women’s full and equal citizenship. This much said, in the Letters she does develop an unambiguous argument for women as independent agents based on their moral and mental equality, laying the philosophical foundations for Mary Wollstonecraft’s subsequent direct plea for citizenship and political representation for women, which I discuss below. Taking nothing away from Wollstonecraft’s own originality and significance as both a feminist and philosopher – I regard her contribution to republican theory to be of immense contemporary value – Macaulay should be acknowledged as the giant upon whose shoulders Wollstonecraft stood.12 Macaulay’s position is based on two key premises. First, virtue is grounded on immutable principles (Letter XXI). It is therefore accessible to, and useful for, all rational agents. Since, “the doctrine of innate ideas and innate affections, are in a great measure exploded”, it follows that men and women have the same underlying rational, moral, and spiritual faculties” (Macaulay 1790a: 127). There can, therefore, be no characteristic differences between the sexes with respect to these features (Letter XXII). “There is”, Macaulay deduces, “but one rule of right for the conduct of all rational beings; consequently… true virtue in one sex must be equally so in the other” (Macaulay 1790a: 125). The attempt to set up distinct and complementary gendered differences will inevitably lead to one sex dominating the other. (Interestingly, in her rebuttal to Rousseau on this issue, Macaulay expresses it in terms of men exercising their “prerogative” over women which leads to “confusion and chaos in the system of human affairs” echoing her argument against monarchy (Macaulay 1790a: 129)). Secondly, false ideas can easily become entrenched in the public consciousness. Under conditions of social inequality, these ideas will be those that are to the advantage of the dominant group. In the end, “every part of morals becomes fluctuation; and customs, manners, sentiments change according to the notions of those in power” (1790a: 96). She concludes that It is from such causes that the notion of a sexual difference in the human character has, with a very few exceptions universally prevailed from the earliest times, and the pride of one sex, and the ignorance and vanity of the other, have helped to support an opinion which a close observation of Nature, and a more accurate way of reasoning, would disprove. (Macaulay 1790a, 127)

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27.4.3  Education and Social Reform This sets up a problem that Macaulay cannot easily resolve. Given the corrupt state of the nation, with false and pernicious views not only of the sexes but, more generally concerning views inimical to liberty and equality, what can be done in response? The dominant, after all, have their ideas lodged in the public consciousness, skewing public debate in their favour. They will not easily let that go. Macaulay remains optimistic about the power of natural reason to overcome error and vice. With a system of national education that equips and motivates individuals to critically reflect on their beliefs, she is confident that immutable principles will prevail and prejudices will be overcome, paving the way for a more virtuous society.13 This seems unrealistic. At this point that Wollstonecraft takes the argument further (Coffee 2013, 2014). She explicitly builds on Macaulay’s argument that virtue admits of no difference but is less sanguine about the possibility of reforming society on rational principles from the current conflicted starting point. “In every age” Wollstonecraft observes, “there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it” such that whenever people try to challenge it, the “truth is lost in a mist of words… and knowledge rendered a sounding nothing, by the specious prejudices that assume its name” (Wollstonecraft 2014: 47, 38). Under these circumstances, there is little that education can do. Children educated on rational principles, for example, would be turned against their parents who would still be governed by their former prejudices, dividing families and society (Wollstonecraft 2014: 187). Her refrain is that “till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education” (Wollstonecraft 2014: 47, 187). For Wollstonecraft, then, it is not education that is prior but social reform. It is not the rational principles that come first but the cultural medium through which these are inevitably and necessarily filtered. If we are to reason clearly, then the social conditions must be suitable. There must not be any dominating power group that can influence the social construction of ideas to their own advantage. In other words, it requires an egalitarian society in which all parties can contribute to the creation of the concepts, values, beliefs and norms through which they will themselves be viewed by others. This is the “revolution in female manners”, which Wollstonecraft calls for at the end of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a collaborative venture between men and women to redefine the social, political and economic relations between the sexes (Wollstonecraft 2014: 224). Only against this background can the equal citizenship and full legal and political rights for women that Wollstonecraft champions operate.

27.5  Anna Laetitia Barbauld Macaulay and Wollstonecraft both died in the 1790s. At the same time, another writer who moved in the same radical and dissenting circles was becoming increasingly politically vocal. Although better known as a poet both then and now, Anna Laetitia Barbauld was an astute political thinker who probed the logic of republican theory with great clarity. She worked with the same underlying structure that we have discussed – based around independence, equality and virtue – and she would bring a similar radical critique of arbitrary power, political corruption and social inequality into the nineteenth century. Like Macaulay, Barbauld was a prominent public intellectual who was also notable for being an outspoken woman intervening on controversial political matters. Barbauld had also engaged critically with Burke, in poetry at least, if not in a tract, although she had intended to answer him in that way. Sadly, like Macaulay, Barbauld would be subsequently largely forgotten for her political contributions. Even today, while there are some excellent studies of her overall intellectual thought (e.g. McCarthy and Murphy 2014; Clery 2017) I am not aware of any sustained treatment of Barbauld as a political theorist in her own right.

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One reason for this neglect may have been that, again like Macaulay, Barbauld rarely wrote about the condition of women and did not directly address the matter of female citizenship or rights. Indeed, on the few occasions when she does mention aspects of women’s social standing, she has not been favourably interpreted.14 This has meant that Barbauld has not attracted the attention of feminists, who over the last half century have pioneered the reappraisal of early modern women philosophers and political theorists. Until fairly recently, Barbauld was often referred to as a conservative, in contrast to both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft (e.g. McDermid 1989: 320).15 In part, this may have been because of her literary affinities with the establishment-leaning Bluestockings, as well as because of her perceived views on the social role of women. Nevertheless, this interpretation belies Barbauld’s association with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson and her position on religious freedom, equal citizenship, the abolition of slavery, the French Revolution, imperial expansion and the wars with France. As with Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, Barbauld understands the state as being representative of, and accountable to, its citizens, rooted in “the natural equality of men” (Barbauld 2002: 281). Government should be based on “universal jurisprudence” rather than being “adapted to local prejudices” (Barbauld 2002: 305). Freedom as independence is the central value but, she says in 1793 with the Terror raging in France, it cannot be imposed at “the point of a bayonet”. Far more strongly than Macaulay, Barbauld emphasises the need for political reform at a speed that the people can internalise and embrace. “Endeavouring to overthrow any system before it is given up by the majority, is faction”, she argues, while “the endeavouring to keep it after it is given up by them, is tyranny” (Barbauld 2002: 305). Both proceed from the same cause, she continues, which is the lack of a minority of citizens to conform their actions to what she describes as the “general will” based on the common interests of all (Barbauld 2002: 316).

27.5.1 Equality Equality, for Barbauld, is both formal and material. Formally, equality reflects our common dignity – everyone has the “right to bear the brow erect, to talk of rights” (Barbauld 2002: 274) – as well as our equal standing before the law (Barbauld 2002: 266). Even more so than Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, however, Barbauld is also committed to a high degree of material equality between citizens. The accumulation of wealth, she argues “generates power, and here begins the mischief, for power embanks and confines the riches which otherwise would disperse and flow back in various channels to the community at large” (Barbauld 2002: 347). Power allows the rich to pervert the law to suppress the poor, and to reinforce this with the propagation of justifying myths (“all the salutary prejudices”). The cumulative effect of large-scale material inequality is the erosion of civic virtue. Here, Barbauld again goes further than Macaulay to identify what she sees as natural laws of society which are akin to the laws of nature. These are levelling principles which limit the extent and effect of inequality. These include the “secret combination of the poor against the rich”, whereby the rich are routinely fleeced by the poor on the grounds that they can afford it (Barbauld 2002: 351). While Barbauld justifies this behaviour both practically and normatively (being “founded on the interest of the many, and the moral sense of all” (Barbauld 2002: 352)), the effect is disastrous for public virtue, implicating both classes alike and undermining their respective commitment to the common good which is necessary for freedom. In order to rectify the results of material inequality, we must equalise material conditions. “Let every man know what it is to have property”, Barbauld reasons, “and you will soon awaken in him a sense of honesty. Make him a citizen, and he will love the constitution” (Barbauld 2002: 355). We should also ensure that everyone has access to an adequate education and we should minimise the distinctions and hierarchy of class and rank. She also emphasises the importance of rich and poor mixing socially with each other. So, where religious societies for the reformation of the manners of the 372

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poor aimed at spiritual and moral improvement, Barbauld sees the practical benefits of bringing people together socially. With all republican theories, the maintenance of collective civic virtue is of paramount importance. Barbauld identifies the sins of the government with those of the individual. Since the nation is comprised of individuals, so the faults of the nation are rooted in the same vices – “pride, selfishness and thirst for gain” – that afflict private persons (Barbauld 2002: 301). This generates a need for government to constrain these behaviours. Significantly, Barbauld understands this as having implications both internally and externally (Barbauld 2002: 302). Internally, there must be just laws that uphold the common good, democratically and inclusively determined (requiring that “some well contrived and orderly method be established for ascertaining” the public will (Barbauld 2002: 303)). Justice, however, extends equally to our relations with other states and other peoples. The golden rule, she argues, applies as much in the Antipodes, or on the coast of Guinea, as in our native fields” (Barbauld 2002: 310), adding that there are “some darker-coloured children of the same [human] family, over whom we assume a hard and unjust control”, referring to the West Indies and the slave trade (Barbauld 2002: 308). The same principles of the mutual corruption of virtue in dominator and dominated alike arising from conditions of inequality and dependence can be seen to have implications not only nationally but internationally. Sadly, space does not permit me to discuss Barbauld’s arguments here, but Jessie Reeder perceptively reads Barbauld’s final poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, as providing an example in the context of British commercial interests in Latin America (2014, see also Clery 2017). Britain was unavoidably conflicted in supporting political independence for South American countries while simultaneously subjecting them to new forms of economic dependence. The resulting inequality and the erosion of liberty and virtue that accompany it, would lead inexorably to the destruction of the British Empire.

27.5.2  Concluding Remarks In advancing her theory the state, Macaulay appears to have felt no need to engage directly or specifically with “the woman question”. Instead, she engaged with the foundational principles of political philosophy as she found them, probing their logic consistently and relentlessly. In so doing, she brought her own agency as a woman to bear on matters that had, until her time, been largely and formally foreclosed to her sex, showing through her work that women’s agency had for all that been present in the political history of the nation. In bringing an outside, woman’s perspective she, we can surmise, was also able to make connections that her male predecessors and peers had not, such as to show the structural equivalence between the arbitrary power wielded by the monarch over the people, and by men over women. This, applying the widely-used principles of her time, gave rise to a social inequality between the sexes that necessarily weakened the population’s commitment to the common good, and the people’s ability to deliberate together constructively, thereby undermining the freedom of the nation itself. Though written out of the standard accounts of the history of political thought, Macaulay’s work provided the foundations for the more inclusive and radical forms of republicanism that would follow in the nineteenth century, and to the egalitarian understanding of political principles to which we are now heirs. Building on Macaulay, Wollstonecraft engaged with feminist concerns head on. She brought a more sensitive awareness of the effect of the social background to restrict and shape the way populations think and so to stifle debate. Women could not possibly win the battle of ideas over rights by appealing to reasoned argument in a society in which people’s minds had been foreclosed. The solution can only come through a combination of education and widespread social reform, brought about by men and women working collaboratively. Barbauld also builds on Macaulay’s work, and also avoids discussing women directly. Nevertheless, her analysis of inequality as giving rise to inter-group conflict as well as a natural, and justified, breakdown in civic virtue applies 373

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the same logic that we find in both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, and where Macaulay extended the harmful effects of patriarchy internally to the state by applying her critique of monarchy to marriage, Barbauld looks externally, showing us the folly of colonial exploitation. Though Barbauld’s political philosophy remains hardly studied, the recent attention that Macaulay and Wollstonecraft are now receiving is encouraging both for the recovery of women’s long history of theorising the state and for the health of the discipline of political philosophy that benefits greatly from a diversity and plurality of voices. Together, these three women philosophers have produced a rich, innovative and compelling theory of the state. Their work builds on the once radical ideas that now shape our contemporary political debate – the state’s accountability to its people, and that the benefits of citizenship are to be shared by all those subject to its power – but presses continually at the ideals of equality, inclusivity and representation that are implicit.

Notes 1 Burke wrote to a friend in 1770 that, “Mrs Macaulay’s performance was what I expected; there are, however, none of that [radical] set who can do better”, describing her as the “greatest champion among them” and adding that “I have been afraid to answer her” (1844: 230). 2 Roland aspired to “be the Macaulay of my country” (Bergès 2016: 108). 3 In its political sense, the term Whig arose in factional struggle over the succession to the English crown in the late seventeenth century. The Whigs were the successors to the Civil War faction that had supported parliament in opposing both the monarchy and Catholic rule. In various forms, Whigs had been the dominant force in British politics in the first half of the eighteenth century. By Macaulay’s time, after almost a century of politics and power, the Whigs had come to represent a much more diverse coalition of principles and interests. Macaulay represented an idealistic wing that held firmly to the principles advocated by Harrington and others in opposing all forms of absolute and unaccountable power, including in particular strict controls on monarchical influence over parliament. Labels at this time, however, can be confusing, with the more conservative and royalist Edmund Burke also claiming the mantel of “old” Whig in opposition to the radical politics of Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine and others (Burke 1791). 4 The Glorious Revolution refers to the establishment the process by which James II of England was replaced by his daughter, Mary II, and William of Orange. Though the Revolution, as Macaulay called it (“Glorious” was not yet the standard reference), was widely celebrated in her time, the settlement had in fact been a compromise between Royalists and Parliamentarians that suited no one, other than to stave off political chaos. While Macaulay acknowledged that the Revolution had secured some important objectives, such as the establishment of a Protestant monarchy, the passing of the Bill of Rights, and expanding the role of Parliament, she regretted that there was much that was not done, including crucially the decision not to dispense with the Royal Prerogative by which the monarch could bypass parliamentary supervision and control. Macaulay believed that, ultimately, this left the levers of power as they were with many of the reforms being little more than window dressing (Macaulay 1778; see also Schnorrenberg 1991). 5 In a sense, arbitrary control is always “external”. Macaulay considers the rational mind to be a person’s true self, with passions and emotions being external barriers to rational thought, and so free action, in just the same way as impediments and frustrating objects that lie outside of the body. If we base our decisions on false opinions, for example, these will have their origin in the thought of other people, including from the wider culture, and so represent a form of external control. However, Macaulay does distinguish between internal independence of mind and external independence under law. Here, her approach resembles Kant’s in the Metaphysics of Morals who distinguishes between external and internal lawgiving (which results from the agent setting ends for themselves as an internal act of the mind) (2003: 6:239, 31). 6 See also vol. 3, 78 where Macaulay refers to “the equal rights of men”. Karen Green identifies this as the first occurrence the phrase the ‘equal rights of men’ in English, pre-dating the familiar uses by Paine and others at the end of the seventeenth century (2016). Macaulay also uses the “natural equality of men” to apply to people of all races, including not only their moral equality but also that of their aesthetic and mental qualities (1790a: 160). 7 Pasquale Paoli was the leader of the Corsican Republic which had declared its independence from the colonial rule of Genoa in 1755. The island was run on republican lines until it was annexed by France in 1769. The cause of Corsican freedom was celebrated by republicans across Europe including those in

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Theories of the State Macaulay’s circle. In 1767, she included a sketch of a proposed constitution for the liberated state as an appendix to her Loose Remarks on Hobbes. Macaulay was not the only philosopher to make such a suggestion, following Rousseau’s Project for a Constitution for Corsica (1765). Macaulay’s sketch was written as a letter to Paoli who was said to have been impressed by its contents. Although Paoli sought refuge in London when exiled by the French forces, he and Macaulay were unlikely to have met, such were the intricacies of the political situation. 8 Interestingly, Hume specifically rejects the rotation of offices and reform of the agrarian along these lines in his critique of Harrington’s Oceana, which closely resembles Macaulay’s own measures (Hume 1987: 515). On Macaulay’s intellectual differences with Hume, see also Green 2011. 9 On Catholics, Macaulay writes that The Irish committee, who were all of them Papists, shewed, that they looked on that privilege to be the common right of men of all persuasions, and that they took a brotherly concern in the interest of that conquered country. (1783a: vol. 3, 61) On racial equality see 1790a: 160 (note 3 above). 10 This was a point that Wollstonecraft was to expand upon in her own analysis, noting that a dominated woman may in turn, “tyrannise over her servants; for slavish fear and tyranny are found together” (1787: 63). 11 Unlike on some forms of liberal theory, there is no necessary strong distinction between the public and private spheres in republicanism (Coffee forthcoming). This is because the exercise of power in every sphere of life is subject to the test of whether or not it can be justified according to the common good. Domination in the home is not only abusive to the victims but is corrupting of virtue that can spread and so destabilise the freedom of the political community as a whole. 12 While there are differences between Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, at a suitable level of abstraction, Wollstonecraft shares the basic theoretical commitments and conception of the state that I have outlined in this chapter (Coffee 2019). 13 Again, it is interesting to note that while Macaulay first stipulates that boys and girls should be educated together in this manner, she later speaks of the education of the citizen (1790a: 32, 123). Given that she is emphatic that “the two sexes are so reciprocally dependant on one another that, till both are reformed, there is no expecting excellence in either”, this may hint that she was moving towards making an express case for women’s citizenship (1790a: 135). 14 On Barbauld’s feminism, see McCarthy 2001 and Bradshaw 2005 for excellent treatments. 15 In fairness to McDermid, she was writing to correct earlier dismissive misconceptions of nineteenthcentury women’s writing. The republican conception that I attribute to Barbauld had not yet returned to academic prominence in the 1980s.

References (1783) “Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Macaulay Graham,” The European Magazine 4: 330–34. Astell, M. (1996) “Reflections on Marriage,” in P. Springborg (ed.), Astell: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–80. Barbauld, A. L. (2002) Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. W. McCarthy and E. Kraft, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Bergès, S. (2016) “A Republican Housewife: Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland on Women’s Political Role,” Hypatia 31(1): 107–22. (2019) “Revolution and Republicanism: Women Political Philosophers of Late Eighteenth-Century France and Why They Matter,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 3(4): 351–70. and A. Coffee. (eds.) (2016) The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2022) Liberty in their Names, London: Bloomsbury. Bradshaw, P. (2005) “The Limits of Barbauld’s Feminism: Re-reading ‘The Rights of Woman’,” European Romantic Review 16(1): 23–37. Burke, E. (1791) An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, London. (1844) Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke between the Year 1744 and the Period of his Decease in 1797, ed. C. William, E. Fitzwilliam and Lieutenant-General Sir R. Bourke, 4 Vols., Vol. 1, London: Francis and John Rivington.

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Alan M. S. J. Coffee Cavendish, M. (2003) “Orations of Divers Sorts,” in S. James (ed.), Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 111–292. Clery, E. (2017) Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coffee, A. (2013) “Mary Wollstonecraft, Freedom and the Enduring Power of Social Domination,” European Journal of Political Theory 12(2): 116–35. (2014) “Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing of Life,” Hypatia 29(4): 908–24. (2017) “Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Conception of Social and Political Liberty,” Political Studies 65(4): 844–59. (2019) “Catharine Macaulay,” in S. Bergès, E. H. Botting and A. Coffee (eds.), The Wollstonecraftian Mind, London: Routledge. (2023) “Nancy Kingsbury Wollstonecraft and the Logic of Independence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 61(2): 257–82. (forthcoming) “Frankenstein and Slave Narrative: Race, Revulsion and Radical Revolution,” in M. Paradiso-Michau (ed.), Creolizing Frankenstein, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. (2022) “Mary Wollstonecraft and Relational Autonomy”, in The Routledge Handbook of Autonomy, Ben Colburn (ed.), Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 65–74. Falchi, F. (2016a) “Frances Wright: Liberty as Founding Principle of Republican America,” in A. Catanzaro, F. Falchi and S. Lagi (eds.), Monisms and Pluralisms in the History of Political Thought, Novi Ligure: Edizioni Epoké, pp. 69–84. (2016b) “Nashoba: Turning an Ideal Into a Concrete Reality,” in A. Catanzaro, F. Falchi and S. Lagi (eds.), Monisms and Pluralisms in the History of Political Thought, Novi Ligure: Edizioni Epoké, pp. 95–110. Green, K. (2011) “Will the Real Enlightenment Historian Please Stand up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume,” in C. Taylor and S. Buckle (eds.), Hume and the Enlightenment, London: Pickering & Chatto, pp. 39–52. (2016) “Reassessing the Impact of the ‘Republican Virago,” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 19(1): 29–48. Gunther-Canada, W. (2006) “Catharine Macaulay on the Paradox of Paternal Authority in Hobbesian Politics,” Hypatia 21(2): 150–73. (forthcoming) A Friend of Liberty: Catharine Macaulay and the Enlightened Republic, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halldenius, L. (2015) Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism: Independence, Rights and the Experience of Unfreedom, London: Pickering and Chatto. Hay, C. (1994) “Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution,” The Historian 56(2): 301–16. Hicks, P. (2002) “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain,” Journal of British Studies 41(2): 170–98. Hill, B. (1992) The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Oxford: Clarendon. Hume, D. (1987) “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” in E. F. Miller (ed.), Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 2 Vols., Vol. 1, London: A. Millar, pp. 512–29. Kant, I. (2003) The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. M. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macaulay, C. (1769) Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr Hobbes’ Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society with a Short Sketch of a Democratical form of Government in a Letter to Signor Paoli by Catharine Macaulay. The Second Edition with Two Letters one from an American Gentleman to the Author which Contains Some Comments on her Sketch of the Democratical form of Government and the Author’s Answer, London: W. Johnson, T. Davies, E. and C. Dilly, J. Almon, Robinson and Roberts, T. Cadell. (1770) Observations on a Pamphlet entitled “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents”, 4th edition, London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly. (1775) Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs, London: Dilly. (1778) History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend, Bath: R. Cruttwell. (1783a) The History of England from the Accession of James I. to that of the Brunswick Line, 8 Vols., London: J. Nourse, J. Dodsley and W. Johnston, (Vols. 5–8 are entitled The History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Revolution, London: C Dilly.) (1783b) A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, London: A. Hamilton. (1790a) Letters on Education. With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects, London: C. Dilly.

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Theories of the State (1790b) Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France, in a Letter for the Right Hon. The Earl of Stanhope, London: C. Dilly. McCarthy, W. (2001) “Why Anna Letitia Barbauld Refused to Head a Women’s College: New Facts, New Story,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23(3): 349–37 and O. Murphy. (2014) Anna Laetitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, London: Rowman and Littlefield. McDermid, J. (1989) “Conservative Feminism and Female Education in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Education 18(4): 309–22. Mocci, S. (2018) “Republicanism and Feminism: A Plausible Alliance. The Case of Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” Acta Politologica 10(2): 47–68. Reeder, J. (2014) “A World without “Dependant Kings”: “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” and the Forms of Informal Empire,” Studies in Romanticism 53(4): 561–90. Schnorrenberg, B. (1991) “An Opportunity Missed: Catharine Macaulay on the Revolution of 1688,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20: 231–40. Staves, S. (1989) “’The Liberty of a She-Subject of England’: Rights Rhetoric and the Female Thucydides,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1(2): 161–83. Vantin, S. (2016) “I «Segreti di Blackstone» Rivelati. Abolizionismo, Riforma Dell’educazione e Suffragio Femminile in Sarah Moore Grimké,” Percorsi Storici 4: 1–17. Wollstonecraft, M. (1787) Thoughts on the Education of Daughters with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life, London: Joseph Johnson. (1794) An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has Produced in Europe, London: Joseph Johnson. (2014) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. E. H. Botting, New Haven, CT: Yale.

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PART III

Figures

28 ITALIAN WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY From a Critique of the Aristotelian Gender Paradigm to an Affirmation of the Excellence of Women Sandra Plastina 28.1 Introduction A lively debate about women and their role in society flared up in Italy in the course of the sixteenth century, spawning a remarkable amount of literary criticism, as a vast array of works were published by both men and women, especially in the Veneto region. On the whole, discussions about the role of women run along rather conventional lines, characterised by a repetition of themes, tropes, metaphors and motivations in which references to opinions expressed in the past by the most authoritative philosophers, and a recourse to sources validated by tradition, are featured in virtually all instances. Yet, upon a more attentive reading, these literary constructions, often predictable in their structure, show how new concepts that focused on gender issues in greater depth were ushered in through unexpected channels, revealing a greater degree of sensitivity towards women and their role in society. Some treatises even rejected old stereotypes and conventional models of female behaviour. An attempt at revising and confuting Aristotelian gender norms thus began to emerge, and a significant number of women engaged themselves in refuting scholastic philosophical arguments about female inferiority. Aristotelian texts, once they are carefully analysed and critically interpreted, show evident chinks and contradictions, casting doubts on their author’s authoritativeness and undermining the arguments of his supporters, quick to mistake Aristotle’s philosophy with natural law. In the following pages, we will focus our attention chiefly on treatises written between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Taking as their starting point the Aristotelian assumption that women are by their nature weaker and colder than men, and that therefore their nature must be considered an innate impairment, these treatises aimed at overturning the anatomical and physiological prejudices which, for centuries, were invoked to endorse the notion that women are inferior. We will introduce a series of works written by women which, while firmly affirming that women are intellectually capable and have an aptitude for philosophical study, criticise harshly the misogynistic assumptions that lie at the foundation of Aristotle’s gender concepts, putting forward an original, innovative vision of the relationship between the sexes, and between nature, history and culture.

28.2  Two Treatises in Praise of Women A significant body of literary criticism had gained traction from the fifteenth century onwards, consisting of works published by both men and women, chiefly at the Este court in Ferrara. DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-35

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The Aristotelian understanding of gender identity, dominant in the scholastic culture of this period, proposed a sharp dichotomy between the social roles of the two sexes and the sets of virtues thought appropriate to them. Aristotle regarded these differences as essential, in that they derived from supposed biological differences between the sexes. In the late fifteenth century, the process of gender redefinition took place more energetically and self-consciously in Eleanor of Aragon’s Ferrara, where court intellectuals had before them a woman who was a living confutation of Aristotelian gender norms. We see this Ferrarese project of gender revisionism most impressively at work in Bartolomeo Goggio’s De laudibus mulierum, notable as the first Italian querelle text to engage with the task of refuting scholastic philosophical and theological arguments for female inferiority, rather than limiting itself to assembling examples from classical history of women who had ‘exceeded their sex.’ The end of the sixteenth century brought about major cultural changes, rendering this transformation in gender attitudes increasingly urgent for the scientific community. Owing to new discoveries and theories, Aristotelian natural philosophy was beginning to show its limitations. In this period, women writers like Moderata Fonte (1555–1592), Maddalena Campiglia (1553–1595), Camilla Erculiani (sixteenth century), Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1617) and Lucrezia Marinelli (1517–1653), introduced natural philosophy arguments in their writings, taking stances that were unprecedented. These women philosophers, through their works, placed themselves on an equal footing with their male contemporaries, opposing their theories with vigour and conviction and denouncing their clear contradictions. The writings of these women philosophers show they were conscious of the difficulty they faced in making their voices heard, as well as the conviction they had in their ideas and their determination in introducing these ideas in contemporary scientific discourse. Upon further scrutiny, it was Aristotle himself who provided arguments which could be used to refute his own theories, and not simply with regards to the presumption that habit is second nature, or that everything we learn we learn through experience (Plastina 2011). Galeazzo Flavio Capra, the secretary of Francesco II Sforza, celebrated feminine moral virtues in his treatise in praise of women, recognising such virtues as superior to those of men, precisely because of women’s cold nature, which fosters prudence and the curbing of those unrestrained reactions that are typical of men, who are led to extremes of passion and anger by their warmer nature. The softness that is characteristic of women, according to the renewed appreciation advocated by the pro-women faction, is transformed from a defect into a virtue, becoming the sign of a higher intellect. We won’t of course omit to mention the softness and tenderness of the flesh, a manifest sign (as philosophisers put it) of subtlety of mind […] those who are softer and more tender of flesh are endowed with greater ingenuity, hence women have a mind that makes it easier for them to learn what they wish. (Capra 2001: 94) Softness of flesh implies therefore greater intelligence, as is written in De partibus animalium (II 16, 660a, 11 ff.), where Aristotle argues that human flesh is the softest there is, and this because mankind’s sense of touch has superior perceptive qualities to those of any other animal. Likewise, in De anima (II 9, 421a, 20–22), Aristotle, while on the one hand stating that human senses are less sharp than those of many animals, on the other emphasises the acuteness of our sense of touch, which far excels the other senses and endows mankind with more intelligence than any other living being. The theme of the flesh’s softness and the related subtlety of mind had already been treated in a surprising text entitled De laudibus mulierum (In praise of women), written in about 1487 by

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Bartolomeo Goggio (or Gogio), a learned notary working at the Ferrara court. It was the first fully fledged attempt in Italy to question Aristotle’s assumptions, and to openly argue for the superiority of women. While the title is in Latin, the work was written in the Italian vernacular, and bears witness to the circulation of new ideas within the Ferrara court, where the pre-eminent public role assumed by Eleanor of Aragon, alongside her husband Ercole d’Este, doubtlessly encouraged the debate on the virtue and erudition of women. Goggio, who dedicated his work to the Duchess Eleanor, turned the assumption of female inferiority on its head, because Strength has little recourse against intelligence; the latter is more perspicacious in women than in men and this is a natural thing, since ‘moles carne aptos ingenio,’ according to [Aristotle], and Quintilian, in the first institutionis oratorie also said ‘The softer and more tender the flesh is, the more powerful the ingenuity’. (Goggio: 11v–12)

28.3  The Third Book of Il Cortegiano The attempt to overturn the assumptions of misogynistic anthropology made by these treatises met, as was to be expected, with stiff opposition. For example, the sententious comment by Bassiano Landi, a doctor and thinker from Padua’s Studio, about Aristotle’s passage in De Anima (II, 9) on the sharpness of the sense of touch, was designed to clarify any possible misunderstanding, putting women back in their corner of want and negativity. As for the softness of the flesh, while it is certainly true that those who are endowed with it have a brighter intellect, because from a warm temperature and form derives a more active spirit, from which the workings of the senses depend, Landi does specify that this has nevertheless nothing to do with women, who don’t share the positive trait of mollities (softness) but the negative one of laxitas, looseness of the flesh (Landi 1569: 29). In the sixteenth century, despite the outspoken hostility of many critics, traditional confutations of Aristotle, who is conversely also put forward as a bolster (a cold nature is suited to intelligence, shyness stems from sensibility, credulity from kindness), became a commonplace feature of European philogynous literature, especially starting from the third book of Il Cortegiano, in which Magnifico Iuliano strives to refute Gasparo Pallavicino’s misogynistic reasoning using arguments gleaned from Aristotle. Pallavicino’s argument rests on the claim that warmth, as an active and productive state, is much nobler and more accomplished than coldness, which instead has no place in the workings of nature. Hence Iuliano, by recognising warmth as a natural quality in men – while frigidity is a natural quality in women – seems at first glance to attest to man’s greater perfection. Women’s cold nature implies weakness, ‘cowardliness’ and shyness, as stated in the seventeenth chapter of Il Cortegiano. In other words, coldness is synonymous with imperfection, and it fosters further imperfection. However, Iuliano doesn’t limit himself to these statements, but continues with his reasoning by offering a counter-argument – based as was customary on a concession followed by a confutation – according to which, if it is true that warmth is in absolute terms more perfect than coldness, it is also true that in mixed matters perfection results from the mediation of opposites, as opposites are ‘tempered’ against one another, and women are closer to this state than men. Further proof of women’s greater degree of perfection is the fact they tend to live longer than men. Also, timidity in women is connected to their greater sensitivity and sharper intuition. Finally, both women and men are capable of noble gestures and thoughts. Here, the writing underscores and emphasises a philogynous dimension: women are by no means less perfect than men in physical terms, quite the reverse actually, and timidity is either a minimal defect or no defect at all, since it derives from a degree of sensitivity and intuition higher than that of men (Castiglione 2015: 281).

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Clearly, Iuliano reinterprets the assumptions typical of the misogynistic tradition, especially those of Aristotle, and highlights the effects and contributory factors that are conducive to a positive reassessment of women, using a technique popular in the debate between misogynistic thinkers and their opponents. In other words, Iuliano paints a picture of women based on the theoretical acknowledgement of the fact that they are as perfect as men, if not more so: women are positively endowed with physical balance, with the ability of reconciling opposites and a degree of sensitivity greater than that of men. Besides, the ability to reconcile opposites is, for the author of Il Cortegiano, a clear sign of women’s innate aptitude for social mediation, something they were recognised for in Renaissance courts and society. Both Capra and Castiglione rekindle the diatribe between misogynistic and philogynistic thinkers: they reconsider female coldness in a positive light because the nature of women is closer than that of men to the perfection of natural balance, the ideal equilibrium between elements and humours. “Although, owing to their weak feebleness, women are less spirited, for the same reason they are more cautious” (Castiglione 2015: 276). I also say that women’s nature is colder than that of men, who are far from the ideal balance because of their warmth, and that [women’s nature] is well-tempered, or at least closer to an ideal balance than that of men (…) And while women’s timidity may be proof of some imperfection, it originates however from a laudable cause, namely subtlety and readiness of mind. (Castiglione 2015: 281–82) In these treatises, the defence of feminine nature typically proceeds along the following steps: initially, it is recognised that women are possessed with a physical beauty and softness whose direct consequence is a praiseworthy aptitude to piety and love; then it is admitted that the cold, composed nature typical of women makes them quieter and more restrained; and in conclusion, it is stated that these traits, though apparently they are shortcomings and defects, are in fact virtues, because they make women more balanced, less prone to behavioural excesses like anger, hostility and volatility, ultimately more reasonable and ‘humane.’ However, many of these arguments eventually risk going down an insidious road when identifying the advantages and disadvantages women enjoy because of their physical constitution (Plastina 2017).

28.4  Women Speak Up: Moderata Fonte, Maria Gondola and Camilla Erculiani The idea that what the misogynistic tradition regards as defects are actually assets, because they make women humane and good-natured, is fully embraced by Modesta dal Pozzo (1555–1592), who wrote under the pseudonym of Moderata Fonte, author of the dialogue Il merito delle donne, ave chiaramente si scuopre quanto siano elle degne e più perfette degli uomini (The worth of women, wherein their nobility and superiority to men is revealed), written in about 1592 and published posthumously in Venice in 1600 by Domenico Imberti, in the wake of the debate triggered by the publication of Giuseppe Passi’s misogynistic work I donneschi difetti (The Defects of Women, 1595). Fonte is the first woman who, at the end of the sixteenth century, spoke up in the lively debate on the ‘nature’ and virtues of women: This reasoning makes sense to me (...) that we are of such a nature in which Fierceness doesn’t prevail, as it has little room for rage and Blood, hence we are more humane and good-natured and less inclined to Pursue our desires than men, who are instead possessed of a Hot, dry nature, and are dominated by rage, being all Flame and fire, and are all the more inclined to err and also unable To curb their disorderly appetites. (Fonte 1988: 46)

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Fonte referenced Ortensio Lando’s Paradox XXV, “Che la donna è di maggior eccellenza che l’uomo” (Lando 2000: 277) (That women are more excellent than men), and constructed the entire dialogue in Il merito delle donne as an exchange of opinions within a group of female characters. Fonte’s writing method doesn’t merely consist of a thick web of paradoxical arguments, but it also adopts a smart rhetorical strategy, using paradox as a tool for understanding, in addition to witticisms, anecdotes, fables and fiction. In the second half of the dialogue, the textual strategy is enriched by comparisons with the world of nature and with erudite subjects whose study is traditionally denied to women – philosophy, medicine, geology and astrology – and which contribute to broadening women’s cultural outlook and, together with poetry, oratory, painting and music, eventually confine men to an increasingly marginal role, both in society and humankind. Fonte’s was the first instance in Italy of a woman taking part in the literary debate about the position of women in society, and speaking out about their role in the public and private spheres. Within the Merito delle donne, female emancipation is inextricably linked with education and the acquisition of cultural tools that can liberate women from the tyranny of men. During a series of meetings occurring over two days, seven women discuss male flaws and the lack of recognition for the merits of women. In the course of the first day, once men’s faults have been examined, the most common misogynistic prejudices are refuted; in the second day, a more complex debate focuses on issues and aspects of contemporary learning. The characters dwell in particular on a series of scientific curiosities that have caught their attention, by no means doing so to pander to a taste for the eccentric and the bizarre. Indeed, if we consider the heavy restrictions on the education of women, who were deemed unsuited to studying jurisprudence, oratory and the natural sciences, we can better understand Fonte’s contribution, which combines learning and enjoyment, hovering between amusement and curiosity. In the second day in fact, the dialogue features a sort of small encyclopaedia of the natural world or, as we shall see, a perfect example of a Renaissance ‘forest.’ Men are absent from the scene of the dialogue, something which is emphasised at the beginning: “without any fear of being noted or hindered by men, they debated the issues that most pleased them” (Fonte 1988: 14); Fonte underlined the open dialogue format, in which different opinions could be expressed freely. When women examine the faults of men, they do so in paradoxical fashion, turning misogyny on its head and giving men a taste of their own medicine. Fonte’s entire treatise hinges on a paradox that goes to the heart of the contemporary debate on the nature of civil society. A society in which the rule of law prevails over individual inclinations, one in which all citizens can voice their opinions in public, and make themselves heard. Venice, the city of women writers which we will deal with in this chapter, is an example of such a society. At least potentially, and upon a superficial examination, it displays the features of an interesting microcosm, “a city as free as the sea, without laws, which provides laws to others” (Fonte 1988: 13–14). A further in-depth analysis of the issue of gender relations begins with a simple question: why are men convinced they are superior to women? “They have attributed to themselves this predominance (...) that we should be subject to them”; “envious of our merits, they try to destroy us” (Fonte 1988: 13–14). Men’s specific brand of arrogance has transformed this presumption into unjustified tyranny and, what is most important, men’s tyranny over women is assured by their control over economic authority and the systematic exclusion of women from any right whatsoever to ownership and independence. This odious tyranny begins from childhood. No consideration is given to the education of girls, while their brothers are guaranteed an adequate one. The ignorance in which women are kept about subjects like medicine, the law and oratory, which is debated on the second day, has condemned women to being dependent on men. The exploration of these fields of knowledge is the first step towards liberation undertaken by the dialogue’s seven protagonists and their readers, inside Fonte’s forest. A forest teeming with the rich exuberance of nature, alive with communitarian links, which conserves and amplifies the holistic, 385

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dynamic view of the world put forward by Fonte with her highly original, innovative effort. She captures the evolution, the metamorphosis of a natural world that doesn’t need fixity and abstraction in order to be perceived by the scientific eye. The dialogue’s seven characters, all friends, are by no means disturbed by the variety of natural phenomena that exist. They can almost glimpse a correspondence between these and the minds of women, which are especially adept at handling complexity and at working in the same way in which nature functions. The language the friends use to talk about natural phenomena is drawn from a specific, detailed observation of an ‘anti-heroic’ reality, a contingent, everyday reality in which the traditional association to the female domain of tasks such as preparing food, looking after the home and taking care of their loved ones’ health, promotes a better understanding of the natural world itself. Yet, the homely heart-to-hearts among lady friends (men were of course excluded) that Fonte features in her literary dialogue are wholly dissimilar from those described by Castiglione in Il Cortegiano: the instrumental use of culture, for centuries the practice of men, “who never tell the truth unless by mistake,” is indeed exposed by Fonte, who expresses the conviction that male supremacy is the direct consequence of the control over language, through the latter’s appropriation, that is exercised by men (Fonte 1988: 41). Books written by men, even when they seem to be singing the praises of women and to express admiration for the female sex, actually conceal very different intentions. By granting recognition, they simply reaffirm the superiority of the male sex (Daenens 1983: 11–50). A positive reassessment of women, on the basis of the positive influence exercised by their nature, is also found in an oration recited by Vincenzo Maggi in 1545 for Anna of Este, Mulierum praeconium (In praise of women), as well as in De mulierum praestantia (The excellence of women), whose Italian vernacular edition was entitled Un brieve trattato dell’eccellentia delle donne (A brief treatise on the excellence of women). Mulierum praeconium starts with traditional Aristotelian and Galenic thinking, according to which the difference between the male and female sexes lies in the different nature of their bodies, respectively warm and cold. However, it overturns the traditional diagnosis, which identified women’s cold, humid nature as the physiological cause of their inferiority. Eventually, Maggi does succeed in demonstrating how the advantage women enjoy in having a nature that is ‘phlegmatic’ and little inclined to desires, predisposes them to a more virtuous behaviour. The analysis set forth in the oration, though filled with the commonplace beliefs typical of treatise writing in those times, offers a few remarkable insights into the naturalistic approach to the psychology of passions and of their excesses, whether vexation or melancholia. The appendix to Un brieve trattato contains another text, an anonymous one, whose frontispiece bears the words “An exhortation to men, that they may not let themselves be surpassed by women” (Maggi 1545: 32). It is a brief essay, complementary to Maggi’s oration in its adoption of an antithetical perspective, spurring men into recovering their ancient dignity and former supremacy in the face of the virtuous accomplishments of women and their intellectual and public advancement. The authorship of the anonymous text, which is not devoid of ambiguous connotations and adopts an oblique argumentative strategy similar to that commonly found in sixteenth-century paradoxical literature, was attributed convincingly to Ortensio Lando. Praise for women, a theme frequently found in Lando, is combined in Paradox XXV with a discussion of the tenderness of the flesh, a sign of greater ingenuity, entitled “Che la donna e di maggior eccellenza che l’uomo” (That women are more accomplished than men), in which Lando explicitly refers to Aristotle: Whoever doesn’t believe that women are more accomplished than men should step away from such a foolish notion, and move closer to the learned Aristotle, who held that [women] are more ingenious than men, when he said that those whose flesh is softer are endowed with greater ingenuity (no one entertains any doubt that the flesh of women is softer and more tender). (Lando 2000: 277) 386

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Although Lando’s argument is clearly paradoxical – having Aristotle state the opposite of what he actually argued in his works with regards to female ingenuity – it is instrumental in making women’s natural aptitude for philosophy and their inclination to welcome ‘forms’ the central themes in the debate about the kind of education that should be reserved for women. In a famous passage of L’instrumento della filosofia (The instrument of philosophy, 1560), a work aimed at popularising philosophy by Siena philosopher Alessandro Piccolomini, the author provides a compendium of his beliefs on the subject. The rendering of philosophical treatises in the vernacular means that Italian women, who only know the language they were taught by their wet nurses, are able to draw from philosophical writings, as men also do, those teachings that are useful to improve their nature, and may aspire to the kind of perfection brought about by sciences, academic subjects and philosophy, “the true mother of our happiness in life” (Piccolomini 1560: 4). An interesting example of the popularisation of Aristotle’s philosophy is contained in Discorsi sopra le Metheore di Aristotele (A discourse on Aristotle’s ‘Meteorology’) by Ragusa philosopher Nikola Vitov Gučetić (also known as Nicolò Vito di Gozze, 1549–1610). He establishes a connection between women’s writings and the role of women and science in contemporary culture, transforming traditional teachings into a conversation which also includes women of erudition, as attested by the work’s preface, written by di Gozze’s wife and destined to a female readership. The dedication letter that Maria Gondola (or Mara Gundulić) addresses to her friend Fiore (or Flora) Zuzori, vigorously argues that women too are able to tackle philosophical and scientific issues. In one of the preface’s most significant passages, Gondola daringly upends the Aristotelian paradigm and attributes to the female sex a greater and better aptitude than that of men for the exercise of intellectual abilities, Because the nature of women is softer, as is obvious to anyone’s senses, since women are of humid temperament; as Aristotle said, those whose flesh is soft are of more capable mind, since the soul operates through the workings of the body. (Gondola 1584: 4) Inspired by Plutarch, Pythagoras and Plato, Gondola talks about the exceptional virtues of renowned women from antiquity, and then mentions some contemporary examples which show “how more adept women are at learning, and how sharper and more open to academic study their intellect is than that of men” (Gondola 1584: 13). Since we women are of the same species as men, we are exposed to the same effects that men too are subject to, but because the different aptitude we have for warring and learning stems from a difference in constitution — we have a temperate disposition, and men’s disposition can instead be termed as intemperate — our constitution will be better suited to all endeavours than one characterised by intemperance. (Gondola 1584: 13) The ‘matter’ women are made of therefore makes them ‘perfect’ and more suited to dealing with scientific and philosophical themes, more so than men, who were long held to be ‘naturally’ predisposed to learning because of their warm, dry nature. It is clear that the female sex is endowed with a mind that is more suited to welcome intelligible forms: The soul operates through the workings of the body, whose nature, when soft, in other words humid and warm, or humid and cold, is better suited to receiving, than when it is dry and warm, or dry and cold, as that of men; from this aptitude we can then conclude that women are more accomplished than men, a truth that is attested by several examples of women from antiquity. (Gondola 1584: 6) 387

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This presumption is fully shared by Camilla Gregetta Erculiani, a pharmacist from Padua and the author of Lettere di philosophia naturale (Letters in natural philosophy), published in Krakow in 1584. Her strong interest in philosophy induced her to tackle interesting issues in natural philosophy (Plastina 2014). Above all, she was keen on ‘sciences and virtues both’ and thought that knowledge of nature alone was of any value, everything else being ‘vain and worthless’; especially since, if doubters Were to consider, with judgement wise and free from any affection, the Transformation of times and states, and of men, and of which matter They are made of, they will discover that women are not devoid of that foresight and those Virtues that men enjoy. (Erculiani 1584: 3v)

It would then be desirable for men to change their opinions (and some women too should do so: “but for all this I don’t wish to stop endeavouring to recover in part the honour of mindless women, and I will perhaps give cause to their intellect to awaken” (Erculiani 1584: 3r)) about the physical nature of women, which they regard as unsuitable to the exercise of intellectual activity, since women are endowed with foresight and virtue exactly because of their nature and of their humid temperament (Erculiani 2016).

28.5  Lucrezia Marinelli and the Excellence of Women Unlike Camilla Gregetta and Maria Gondola, whose writings in the Italian vernacular were couched within the tenets of Aristotelian philosophy, Lucrezia Marinelli (or Marinella) produced a strong refutation of Aristotle in La nobiltà ed eccellenza delle donne e i Difetti e Vizi degli uomini (The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men), published in 1600. The renowned Venetian scholar, daughter of Giovanni, a doctor, overturned the assumptions of misogynistic anthropology and attributed to women a nature that was entirely different from the nature that had been attributed to them on the basis of a scholarly tradition derived from an orthodox reading of Aristotle. For example, the reproductive role of women, far from being the demeaning function of providing pure matter, subordinated to a form dictated by men, was reassessed positively for its independence. Women alone are the genesis of life, not simply in physical but also in spiritual terms. Women are the fire that generates and purifies. Besides, the meaning of the word ‘mulier’ (woman) is rooted in the sense of ‘soft,’ ‘delicate,’ ‘good-natured’ and ‘benign.’ Women’s psychological and personality features are seen to derive from their physical qualities, and women are further endowed with qualities well-suited to the preservation of life, such as gentleness and benevolence. Hence a balanced body, as is that of women, is highly suited to the moderate workings of the soul, unlike a warm nature, as we will demonstrate below. That women are of such nature is shown by their soft, tender flesh, by their white colouring mixed with vermilion, and in the end their whole body is a host of gentleness and virtue. But if, with these wonderful features of which [women] are by nature endowed, they applied themselves to the sciences and the art of war, as men do the whole day long, it would cause men to arch their eyebrows in amazement and awe. (...) but if [women] do not apply themselves thus, it happens [that they are considered inferior]; because women do not apply themselves thus, since they are prevented by men and their obstinate ignorance, who are convinced that women aren’t able to learn the same things that men learn. (Marinelli 1600: 11)

Marinelli suggests that the rhetorical device of antiphrasis – labelling something as negative in order to hint that it is positive, and vice versa – may be applied to the work of philosophers and 388

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poets. Her advice is to turn their writings to the advantage of women, interpreting as antiphrasis any instance in which they belittle women, irrespective of the authors’ intentions. Marinelli clearly spells out her agenda from the title of her work itself (The nobility and excellence of women) and her introduction: In the first [part] we demonstrate the nobility of women with strong arguments and countless examples, and we not only destroy the opinions of Boccaccio, Bernardo and Torquato Tasso, Sperone, Monsignor Di Namur and Passi, but of the great Aristotle too. In the second part, we confirm, with true reasoning and various examples drawn from countless ancient and modern historical treatises, that the defects of men greatly exceed those of women. (Marinelli 1600: 11) The main goal of La nobiltà ed eccellenza delle donne was, as its author indicated, to demonstrate the superiority of women: “With my discourse I want (...) this truth to be crystal clear to everyone, namely that the female sex is more noble and more accomplished than the male sex” (Marinelli 1600: 2). The polemic vigour which is the backbone for the rigorous arguments put forward by Marinelli in her treatise feeds on a critique of the concept of authority, by attacking the notions on the basis of which men claim to be superior to women. Marinelli develops her feminist argument by analysing the contradictions inherent in any discourse that is deemed to be absolute and universal, while instead it is built on premises that are historically and culturally conditioned. Unlike Moderata Fonte’s persuasive, poetic prose, Marinelli’s style is decidedly more abstract and intellectual in tone. She begins her treatise by drawing the readers’ attention to the rhetorical dimension present in the work of many authors who “with their quick wits try in any way possible to make the world believe that the truth is false (...) and, using specious reasoning, often reach the goal they so desire” (Marinelli 1600: 1). Marinelli’s text is a rigorous exercise in interpretation. After openly declaring that her purpose is to destroy the credibility of Boccaccio, Tasso, Speroni, Passi and above all Aristotle, she prompts readers to tackle the issue of intentionality. Marinelli’s opening salvo is directed at Aristotle, on whose authority all the other thinkers based their belief in the inferiority of women. She delves into Aristotle’s works: the Historia animalium, in which women are labelled as failed males, the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle states that the moral nature of women is less developed than that of men, and provides the reasons for women’s submission to the male sex, which is determined by nature. Aristotelian texts, once carefully analysed and critically interpreted by Marinelli, show evident chinks and contradictions, casting doubts on their author’s authoritativeness and undermining the arguments of his supporters, ready to mistake Aristotle’s philosophy with natural law. This begs the question of why Aristotle employed such inconsistent arguments on an issue so crucial to human life, like the relationship between the sexes. Marinelli’s answer is one and only one: because he was conditioned and biased, since he admired his own sex too fervently (Marinelli 1600: 28). A partisan, acritical admiration for the male sex led in fact Aristotle into evident contradictions, as he propounded his arguments in clear contrast not just with prevailing opinion but also with practical experience. Besides, Aristotle’s followers went to great lengths to follow in his wake, parroting his ideas, like fake chimeras, over the centuries. There are no other explanations for the stubborn duplicity and arrogance of men, whom Marinelli addresses in vigorous fashion: What do you think, my brothers, when you refuse to discover the good work of the womanly sex, so worthy and accomplished? And what is worse, you keep finding new fabrications to vituperate it,

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The strategy of attributing hostility towards women to personal resentment and incapacity had been previously adopted by Christine de Pizan. In the Cité des dames (The book of the city of ladies), she learned from one of the ladies, Reason personified, that defamation and slander against women are by no means universal truths, being instead personal, subjective attacks made by men who are fuelled by envy and resentment. Lady Reason induced de Pizan to consider “how the greatest philosophers you may hear [speaking] against your own sex have failed to distinguish truth from falsehood, and merely contradict and criticise one another.” As a result, she was no longer convinced that everything that philosophers say is trustworthy, and that they cannot err (de Pizan 2003: 49). Marinelli’s decision to use Aristotelian arguments against Aristotle himself in supporting her own statements justifies the accusations of duplicity and inconsistency that the author of Nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne levelled against the Greek philosopher. In the third chapter, Marinelli indirectly confuted Giuseppe Passi’s discourse XVIII, entitled Donna bella quanto sospetta: bellezza in lei quanto periculosa, fragile, caduca, e che sol sia cagione d’altri mali (Beautiful women are suspect: their beauty is dangerous, fragile and perishable, and only leads to more harm), while also directly confuting the argument of Aristotle, who not only denied the obvious, but clearly “went against reason and also his own opinion, namely that nature, always or in most cases, makes perfect things, [when he] deemed women to be imperfect in comparison to men” (Marinelli 1600: 12v). Marinelli readies her weapons against Aristotle’s evident misogyny, drawing extensive ammunition in order to make them more effective from the vast repertory of elements inspired by Aristotle: hence Nature, aware of how accomplished the female sex is, generates more women than men, as it is always or most always induced to generate what is best or more accomplished in all things (...) indeed I would say that, since Nature generates fewer men than women, men are less noble than women, as Nature doesn’t wish to generate a large, more numerous quantity of them. And this is enough [to highlight] the unique nature of the female sex. (Marinelli, 1600: 12v) From here on, the target of Marinelli’s polemic barbs is evident: having won the battle against Passi, she wages war on her adversary par excellence, whom she describes ironically as “that good fellow Aristotle,” who stated that women must obey men and mustn’t endeavour to assume any roles or functions that aren’t linked to simple domestic activity. Faced with this statement, Marinelli doesn’t seem ready to take a step back, but rather defines it as “the foolish opinion, the crude and evil uttering of a Tyrant and a fearful man” (Marinelli, 1600: 11v). This direct reference to Aristotle’s thinking shows – as if there was any need for it – the huge influence that the Greek philosopher had garnered as a promoter of scientific misogyny. Marinelli adopts a highly specific strategy in order to confute Aristotle’s theories, trying to shed light on the motives which may have induced him to develop a reasoning so hostile and cruel with regards to women. Hers is a subtly argued operation, aimed at destabilising Aristotle’s philosophical template and replacing it with a simple doxa, a common belief born of the rancour of a man whose sole motivation is his desire to lord over women. Hence, being merely an opinion, it isn’t worthy of any scientific consideration. Indeed, how can the opinion of one man alone, though he is regarded as a major philosopher, be elevated to the status of universal truth? Defamation and slander against women 390

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are not based on objective information or on observations prompted by experience, but rather on personal attacks sparked by envy and resentment. Philosophers frequently failed to distinguish truth from falsehood, and made mistakes, without ever admitting them, as de Pizan shows. Marinelli’s exhortation to jettison an acritical obedience to the principle of authority and to deny the misogynistic assumptions of Aristotle’s philosophy is born from these considerations.

28.6  A Confutation of Aristotelian Gender Norms Marinelli rams her target head on, with an unflinching attack driven by a specific cultural design. The other element deployed by Marinelli to counter Aristotle’s misogyny is a refutation of what we may define as his socio-political theories: the inferior condition of women is chiefly fostered by the patriarchal structure of society, which forces half of humankind to be relegated in a limbo from which they cannot (and won’t be able to) claim any rights – other than the right of having a master, first in their father and later in their husband – and deprives women of the ability to speak out and to control their fate in any way. Marinelli adroitly circumvents the biological determinism that is extensively codified in De Generatione Animalium, and which could have been a sine qua non in order to theorise the inferiority of women and to highlight the impossibility of any attempt at meta-historical transformations. Instead, she shows her keen intelligence by choosing to lay siege to an edifice that could have been open to transformation, and which had actually been the subject of an extensive body of critical evaluation by the philosopher most appreciated by women, Plato, with the utopian dream of his Republic. Marinelli holds in very high esteem Plato, “that great and indeed most righteous man” (Marinelli, 1600: 11v), who affirmed that men and women are equal, and advocated an egalitarian education for both sexes. Unlike Aristotle, and despite being himself a man, Plato, according to Marinelli, Was not a believer in forceful, violent mastery, he wanted and urged women to exercise the art of war, of horse-riding and of fighting sports, and to advise men on the requirements of the Republic, as is written in the Laws in dialogue 7 (...) and in the Republic in the seventh dialogue. (Marinelli 1600: 11v –12r) Marinelli thus demonstrated she had read and reflected on both Platonic dialogues, and that she was advisedly able to pick suitable quotations from them. She made these dialogues the pillars in the defence of her argument for the need to try an unprecedented pedagogical experiment, namely to impart the same education to boys and girls, in order to demonstrate that, if women were given the same educational, social and cultural opportunities afforded to men, they would not only be able to reach the same level as men, but even greatly exceed it. Marinelli wrote: I wish that [men] were to conduct the following experiment: that they trained a boy and a girl of the same age, both with a good disposition and ability, in the letters and in the use of arms, so that they could see how much more quickly and ably the girl would learn compared to the boy. (Marinelli 1600: 32v) Relying on these arguments, Marinelli’s intent was to prove that the subordinate condition in which women were forced to live wasn’t the inevitable consequence of a ‘natural’ reality, but stemmed from specific historical and social conditions. Marinelli was extremely familiar with Aristotle’s works, as shown by her statements refuting the truth of the views contained in Politics, Nicomachean Ethics and History of Animals, works in which the Greek philosopher analysed 391

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the family as a social institution and the relationships within it, and was led to conclude that the natural differences between men and women made the former, being rationally superior, inclined to leadership, while the latter, being entirely devoid of logos, are inclined to obedience. Man is the master within his domestic sphere, and his wife, children and slaves are submitted to him (the first book of Politics is illuminating in this respect). He is also the one absolute protagonist of the political sphere, since he alone has the ‘natural’ requisites that make him a citizen and entitle him to participate in public ceremonies, exercise the right to vote and speak in public assemblies. In the book’s second and third Chapters, Marinelli discusses Aristotle’s four causes, underlining that the souls of both women and men originate from God, hence from the same efficient cause, and therefore they necessarily belong to the same species. Gender difference doesn’t in fact imply a difference in species. Marinelli also emphasises Platonic and Neoplatonic themes, especially with regards to the link between beauty and virtue. But her most arduous task is revising history, when it is written about in tendentious fashion, and bringing to light ‘the egregious actions’ which men, envious of women’s good work, ‘neglected to mention’ (Marinelli 1600: 34). In the same manner in which, in the twenty-first century, scholars are striving to revise the canon and incorporate within it female authors who were once excluded from it, Marinelli endeavours to amend the history books, putting neglected women back in their rightful place: “Now I would like to give some examples, and I shall do so briefly, as I refrained from the effort of wanting to read all the history [books], since [male] writers are envious of the good deeds of women” (Marinelli 1600: 12) and have indeed systematically overlooked and excluded them, failing to recount the accomplishments of women, leaving women without voice and condemning them to oblivion. The argumentative strategy deployed by Marinelli is therefore linked to a psychological type of analysis into the rancour and aggressive feelings of Aristotle. His thinking is marked by envy and hatred, and by a strong resentment towards women. It is no coincidence that Aristotle himself explained, in the Rhetoric, that feelings come before will and reason. Envious people, according to St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa II: 2), turn reality on its head and see what is good for others an injury for themselves, and this failure to ‘see clearly’ translates into a skewing of judgement. Envious people feel threatened by the accomplishments of others, which they see as a menace, something that can undermine their superiority. Envy therefore stems from an indiscriminate desire to excel coupled with unrestrained self-love. Aristotle is envious and, spurred by boundless self-esteem, he relies on an insidious, impalpable yet effective weapon, defamation, through which he discredits women and belittles their qualities. With great lucidity, Marinelli identifies the negative effect of envy, in social terms, as a loss of balance and of reciprocal recognition in the relationship between men and women, the essential prerequisites for promoting justice in civic and political society. Marinelli addresses both men and women in various passages of her treatise, and exhorts both sexes to adopt new attitudes and follow the behaviour that derives from them. She hopes in fact that women, by dismissing any natural inclination towards inferiority and weakness, may become aware of their potential and, attracted by strong, positive role models, they may be able to reject the role imposed on them. “From all of these things may [women] be convinced, and the stubborn tyrants of women be vanquished, who tread on their dignity more insolently with each passing day” (Marinelli 1600: 46). Marinelli’s treatise therefore puts forward an alternative for the women of her times, which she express thus: “But if, as I hope, women will awaken from the lengthy slumber which oppresses them, these ungrateful, arrogant [men] will become meek and humble” (Marinelli 1600: 46). This is the treatise’s most political statement, as Marinelli directly and indirectly urges women to act, escaping from a position of subservience, unafraid of coming forward and expressing their ideas. Marinelli’s narrative strategy and her drawing on ancient and contemporary sources seem to go beyond a negotiating tactic, which is nevertheless present, and are better described using the words of Lucy Irigaray, when she encourages women to knowingly 392

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assume the ‘mimetic’ role which has been tailored to them by history. Irigaray holds that playing with mimesis enables women to re-establish their role through dialectics, and it means making visible what was designed to remain hidden: the presence of a feminine element through language (Irigaray 1985: 72). Marinelli’s strongest desire is to reincorporate women in history, making her readers aware of the existence of authoritative, highly talented women: “Some, who aren’t wellversed in history, believe that there have not existed nor do exist women who are learned, and expert in the sciences and arts, and they regard this as impossible” (Marinelli 1600: 37). Aristotle’s contradictions are emphasised by a second level of inconsistency, which relates more directly to the issue of natural law in its entirety, the subject of a philosophical debate taking place in Marinelli’s times. Debates about natural law frequently followed the thinking developed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (V 10, 113, 4b 30), where the law was defined as a rule which accepts variations. Aristotle used the following example: the majority of human beings naturally prefer to use the right hand, though some are left-handed. Strictly speaking, those who prefer to use their left hand don’t violate any law, they simply fail to abide by a rule. Refusing to abide by the natural law that stipulates that women are inferior instead transforms the latter into monsters: a woman who rejects her condition of subordination isn’t simply a human being who adopts a different behaviour but is regarded as lawless and acting against nature. The second line of Marinelli’s argument is a rebuttal of the extreme rigidity of the concept of natural law. She uses the simple observation that in the past, at various times and in a variety of contexts, women displayed great moral qualities, and were appreciated for their virtues; the list of ‘excellent’ examples is long and distinguished, from mythical queens like Semiramis and Dido to Roman matrons renowned for their bravery (Marinelli 1601: 70). In this instance too, variations in cultural practices form the basis for an attack against the notion of an absolute, rigid gender system characterising human nature. Marinelli, like other proto-feminists of her times, cites Herodotus, Plato and other authors as evidence of the fact that women have been treated in a variety of ways in different societies. Therefore, there is no natural law specifically applicable to women, there are only different customs and traditions that are attributable to different historical contexts and situations (Marinelli 1601: 63). A deliberately critical study of history teaches scholars not to confuse natural laws with societal rules and practices. There is also another sense in which the concept of nature, to which Aristotle and his Renaissance readers are referring, is associated not so much to social but to biological life, to Nature as physis, as natural development and growth. In this instance too Marinelli argues against the notion of a law. She refers to the commonly held belief that the nature of women is cold and humid, while men’s is warm and dry. Even admitting that this is truly the case, there are several exceptions: Because there are many regions, not so much cities or towns, where women are of a warmer nature than men from another region, such as for example the women of Spain and Africa, who are warmer than the men living in the frigid North. (Marinelli 1601: 119) What is evident is that, even when natural law seems to derive from biological characteristics, it nevertheless establishes rules, and not laws. In the case of the physical nature of male and female individuals, Marinelli seems to say that it isn’t a case of absolute differences, but of the relative ways in which some features are distributed, and which must be instead regarded as human potentialities. The same reasoning holds for the fact that men are deemed to have greater physical strength than women: greater strength surely doesn’t mean greater knowledge and learning. To better clarify Marinelli’s position, we may refer to what she writes about the fact that women do not lack physical and psychological strength, and that their seemingly limited prowess with arms isn’t rooted in biology but in culture, since women haven’t been accustomed to train with weapons 393

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owing to the education they receive. Indeed, if women were to “exercise in military science and art, as men do all day long, they would cause [men] to arch their eyebrows, in amazement and admiration!” (Marinelli 1600: 31). Marinelli, in a chapter of her work, ‘Donne nell’arte militare e nel guerreggiare’ (Women in the military art and war), ushers in a whole new consideration of the martial aptitude of men and women, cleverly shifting attention from physical strength to mental suppleness and moral virtues. She writes that “To lead armies, there is a need for great prudence, spiritedness, mental stability and open-mindedness, all virtues which pugnacious women are endowed with,” were they to engage in the art of war (Marinelli 1601: 76–77). One of Marinelli’s greatest merits is that she focuses the attention on what we may call the effects of ideology: where does the real power of men over women stem from? The arguments that rely on natural law as a tool against women continue to prevail in the collective conscience because men have power over any evidence to the contrary, evidence that women would be able to demonstrate if they were in a position to study and cultivate their knowledge: “hence men, fearful of losing their sovereignty and to become servants to women, very often forbid the latter to learn to read and write” (Marinelli 1600: 32). The education of women continues to be the real crux of the question, and those who support the cause of women will often return to it: access to knowledge is what would enable women to rewrite history, which has relegated them to a subordinate role. By questioning the assumptions in which discrimination against women is rooted, Marinelli carries out an in-depth analysis of the difference between ratio and factum: she cites Aristotle with regards to the biological differences between males and females, and compares this epistemological construct with astronomical fact. It may be reasonably concluded that so-called ‘facts of nature,’ far from being indisputable, are actually the fruit of opinions that men often defend stubbornly, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. As human facts, they are therefore liable to undergo constant transformations and new reformulations: It may be a light-hearted matter, that [Aristotle] was mistaken about the nature and the essence of women, perhaps it is too heavy a burden on his shoulders, as he didn’t wisely consider the nobility and accomplishments of women; as we can see, many have believed that the Earth and the Heavens are still, others that countless worlds exist, and others that there is only one (...) and each defends his own opinions, with much argument and stubbornness, and these are the answers to be given to those who vituperate the female sex. (Marinelli 1600: 109–10)

28.7 Conclusion By shifting their arguments’ focus from the dimension of biological features to that of cultural elaboration, the women philosophers we have referred to, albeit with different prose styles, all agree in arguing against the gender prejudice contained in Aristotle’s texts. Each from their own standpoint, they contend with the most popular arguments in the traditional debate on women’s virtues and shortcomings, refuting and overturning the arguments’ theoretical underpinnings. These women philosophers make clever use of paradoxes, upending the prejudice of women’s ‘natural’ inadequacy and arguing, for example, that the features women are endowed with make them more suited than men to dealing with philosophical and scientific issues, as argued by Erculiani and Fonte. Marinelli, in The nobility and excellence of women, draws attention to the contradictions inherent in any argument that claims to be absolute and universal when, on the contrary, it is built on historical and cultural assumptions, and celebrates in her dialogue not the equality but the superiority of women. If women are brave, smart, learned and prudent it isn’t because they are similar to men, but because they are women. 394

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References Aristotle, (1984) Opere, ed. M. Vegetti and D. Lanza, Roma-Bari: Laterza. Capella (Capra), G. F. (2001) Dell’eccellenza E Dignità Della Donna, ed. M. L. Doglio, Roma: Bulzoni; 1st edition (1525) Roma: Francesco Minizio Calvo. Castiglione, B. (2015) Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. A. Quondam and N. Longo, Milano: Garzanti. Daenens, F. (1983) “Superiore Perché Inferiore: Il Paradosso Della Superiorità Della Donna in Alcuni Trattati del Cinquecento,” in V. Gentili (ed.), Trasgressione Tragica e Norma Domestica. Esemplari di Tipologie Femminili dalla Letteratura Europea del Cinquecento, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, pp. 11–50. de Pizan, C. (2003) La Citta delle Dame, ed. P. Caraffi and E. J. Richards, Roma: Carocci, orignally published 1405. Erculiani Gregetta, C. (1584) Lettere di Philosophia Naturale, di Camilla Herculiana, Speciala Alle tre Stelle in Padoua, Indirizzate Alla Serenissima Regina di Polonia: Nella Quale si Tratta la Natural Causa Delli Diluvij, il Natural Temperamento dell’huomo, et la Natural Formatione Dell’arco Celeste, Cracovia: Stamperia di Lazaro. (2016) “Lettere di Philosophia Naturale,” in E. Carinci and S. Plastina (eds.), Corrispondenze Scientifiche tra Cinquecento e Seicento, Lugano: Agorà. Fonte, M. (1988) Il Merito Delle Donne, ed. A. Chemello, Mirano-Venezia: Eidos, Originally published 1600. Goggio (Gogio), B. Ad Divam Eleonoram de Aragona Inclitam Ducissam Ferrarie de Laudibus Milierum Bartholomei Gogii, British Library, Additional Ms. 17, 415. Gondola, M. (1584) “Alla non men bella, che virtuosa, e gentile donna Fiore Zuzori in Ragugia”, in N. V. Di Gozze, Discorsi Sopra le Metheore D’Aristotele, Ridotti in Dialogo, Venetia: Ziletti, 1584 Irigaray, L. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Landi, B. (1569) In Tres Aristotelis Libros de Anima, Venetiis: Apud Scottum. Lando, O. (2000) Paradossi. Cioè Sentenze Fuori del Comun Parere, ed. A. Corsaro, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Maggi, V. (n.d.) Mulierum Praeconium, Est.lat. 174 alpha 0.6.15. (1545) Un Brieve Trattato Dell’eccellentia Delle Donne, Brescia: D. Turlini. Marinelli, L. (1600) La Nobilta et Eccellenza delle Donne co’ Difetti et Mancamenti de gli Uomini, Venezia: G.B. Ciotti. (1601), La Nobiltà et Eccellenza delle Donne (correct and increased edition), Venezia: G.B. Ciotti. Passi, G. (1595) I Donneschi Difetti, Venezia: Lacobo Antonio Somascho. Piccolomini, A. (1560) L’instrumento della Filosofia, Venetia: Francesco Lorenzini Da Turino. Plastina, S. (2011) Filosofe della Modernità. Il Pensiero delle Donne dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo, Roma: Carocci. (2014) “‘Considerar la Mutatione dei Tempi e Delli Stati e Degli Uomini’: Le Lettere di Philosophia Naturale di Camilla Erculiani,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 20(1): 145–56. (2017) Mollezza Della Carne e Sottigliezza Dell’ingegno. La Natura della Donna Nel Rinascimento Europero, Roma: Carocci.

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29 TERESA DE ÁVILA ON SELF-KNOWLEDGE Jorge Secada

There is now considerable philosophical interest in the writings of Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada (1515–1582), better known as Teresa de Ávila, by reference to her birthplace, or as Santa Teresa de Jesús, using the name she adopted as a nun and recognizing her elevation into sainthood. She has been seen as anticipating Descartes and a “modern” conception of subjectivity, and as an important feminine voice in Renaissance and early modern thought.1 We will not engage directly with such historical work. But we will start mentioning a question sometimes asked of Augustine of Hippo, her fellow Doctor of the Catholic Church: is she really a philosopher? We will not address it directly, nor any of the many issues it raises, though an answer to it, skirting those issues, could be found here implicitly. Instead, we focus on what Teresa has to say about self-knowledge (conocimiento propio), a theme at the center of philosophy since its earliest history and present throughout her writings.2 Unapologetically, we do not force her into some contemporary inquiry, “as if the only way of bringing the dead to life is to patch them up, by a kind of cosmetic surgery, as fit participants in some modern debate” (Ayers 1970: 38). On the contrary, we hope to learn from her as we might from strangers coming from some distant land. To pursue our inquiry, we will invite two interlocutors: Plato, particularly in Phaedrus, and Descartes, particularly in Meditations on First Philosophy.3 The pertinence of this choice will, I hope, emerge as we progress, though in this four-sided conversation, no historical connections are presupposed.

29.1  Self-knowledge (I) Let us start with the striking image with which Teresa opens her masterpiece, Inner Castle: Consider our soul as a castle all of a diamond or very clear crystal, where there are many rooms […]. I find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity. Truly, our intellects, sharp as they may be, can hardly comprehend it, just as they cannot think (considerar a) God, for he himself says he made us to his image and likeness […]. Although there is between it and God the difference between creator and creature, it suffices that [he] said that it is made to his image, for us hardly to be able to understand the great dignity and beauty of the soul. (Castillo: I, 1, 1; BAC: 472)

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Teresa introduces several themes: the radical difficulty of self-knowledge which she compares to knowledge of God; the suggested relation between both; and the related insistence on the beauty and value of the soul. Shortly after, Teresa asks, “how can we come into [the castle]?” (Castillo: I, 1, 5; BAC: 473). In between, she makes clear we seek “understanding ourselves,” which amounts to answering the question “who are we?” (“entendamos a nosotros mismos… sepamos quién somos”). To underscore the importance of this enterprise she offers a comparison: it is greater ignorance to not understand ourselves and know who we are, than to not know where we were born or who our parents were. And she lays out what this self-knowledge, this answering the question ‘who am I?’ involves: “what goods might there be in this soul or who is within… or its great value.” Answering these questions, she states, goes hand in hand with caring for “its beauty.” Finally, in reply to the question at the start of this paragraph she writes that “the door to come into this castle is prayer” (Castillo: I, 1, 7; BAC: 474). So now we add another theme: the key to self-knowledge is conversation with God. How are we to understand self-knowledge here? Consider an example. A young soldier is recently married, and his wife is expecting a child. He is sent overseas, where he throws himself over a grenade, dying as a result. When learning of this, his wife comments, “he was a soldier; that’s the life he chose.” “I am a soldier” is an expression of self-knowledge in the sense in which it interests us here, and it plays a central role in a normative account of the case we are considering. If we ask why he did that, a compressed answer is provided by “because he was a soldier.” We are interested in exploring the relationship the soldier had to the fact expressed in the statement “I am a soldier” as it may figure in such deliberative reconstruction. Imagine stopping time as the soldier is about to land on the grenade and engaging him. There are several different answers that could take the place of the one we are considering without altering anything but the answer given: “to protect my comrades” is one of them. Notice also that though protecting his comrades follows from his being a soldier, being a soldier does not follow from protecting others in the room. Similarly, if asked about many of the things she did, Teresa could have answered either by pointing out she was a nun, or by saying, as indeed she did, that she was a creature of a loving God, his daughter, friend and bride (Vida: 25; 17).4 Though being a nun is one of them, there are many other ways of loving God. Protecting others, like loving God, is enacted by several different identities. We will come back to this. “I am a soldier” provides a reason to do something that is undoubtedly undesired and radically selfless, while also clearly self-centered and even in some sense desired. Neither he nor his wife nor his fellow soldiers wanted this to happen; but it is what, given the circumstances, needed to happen for him to live up to who he was. Though providing a reason, we should not suppose any deliberation, implicit or explicit, here. What he does is constitutive of who he is; this action flows directly from his identity. What, then, is the soldier´s relation to this fact about himself as it may figure in such normative reconstruction? What we are looking into must be cast, obviously, in the first person. And, to use contemporary terminology, it must be known to the soldier not as a fact about him as an object, as if observing himself, but as a subject. That is, he must “appreciate [his] own agency and responsibility” (Gertler 2011: 215).5 But is this the right way to put it? Let us look into it more carefully. Consider a situation where our soldier suffers from radical amnesia regarding who he is.6 Suppose he then learns that he suffered from a constant itch on his forehead, but he doesn’t feel any itch. He may conclude he has changed and be relieved. Now suppose he learns he is a soldier. Will this provide him with a disposition to throw himself over a grenade? I suggest not: if all he has acquired is the sincere belief he is a soldier, and he has no dispositions associated with being a

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soldier, the belief will not on its own suddenly provide him with them, with, that is, the identity of a soldier as we are taking it here. But this differs significantly from the case where he concludes he has changed since he no longer feels an itch: it may be a mistake for him to conclude he is no longer a soldier. Suppose, perhaps more naturally, that he does feel certain dispositions of a soldierly sort. Upon learning he is a soldier, he may start to make sense of them. Here we need to be somewhat clearer about our case. Is there no presence at all within him of who he is, or is he still disposed and able to be soldierly but now deprived of certain beliefs about himself? Our soldier has not changed bodies; he is not completely cut off from his past and who he is. Even so, there is a spectrum. He may notice some dispositions and abilities but does not know what to make of them. What he needs is to retrieve who he is, now that he knows he is a soldier. What would that involve? One natural, and I take it correct, answer is memory.7 Now suppose he remembers he went to training camp, or some such facts. What does this do apart from explaining to him, like it might to anybody, why he has a certain disposition or ability? On its own, nothing. What, then, is involved in retrieving himself so that his dispositions and actions flow from who he is, as was schematically captured in the case we sketched above? He wants to recover his identity, bring himself back to himself. That’s what memory must help him do. Plato’s use of memory might enlighten us here. Recall Socrates’s “tribute to memory” in the midst of his palinode (Phaedrus 2011: 250c).8 Memory transports him to the vision of the Forms. In Symposium, the reference to recollection at the start serves to bring the actual event remembered, in all its detail, to presence (Symposium 1997: 172b–74a). Memory uncovers and makes present in ways difficult to capture discursively; it brings the past back to the present. The phenomenology of memory bears this out. To analyze it as mere providing of information or even as observing oneself in the past is not warranted, for it leaves out without argument something of its phenomenology as if it were dispensable. In the case we are considering, the aim of recollection is to bring the soldier’s identity back to him. Teresa does not consider similar cases of self-retrieval, although of course, she is no stranger to the notion of memory as making present, as is seen in passages where she speaks of recalling as “putting […] in front [traer… delante]” or of the loss of memory as “blinding the eyes of those who have seen [los ojos de quien los ha visto se cieguen y los quita de su memoria]” (Vida: 15, 11, 4, and 10; BAC: 91).9 Remembering who he is or recovering his identity is for the soldier to be reacquainted with himself. More generally, the self-knowledge we are looking into is a form of self-acquaintance.

29.2 Acquaintance What is this acquaintance with oneself? As acquaintance is understood in the current philosophical literature, following Bertrand Russell, it is direct, unmediated awareness (Russell 1997: 46–59).10 Possessed by Cartesian impulses, contemporary philosophers, and Russell himself, link acquaintance with certainty and epistemic foundations. So indubitability regarding the existence of its object may be used as a criterion for an acquaintance (Duncan 2015).11 This is variously problematic for us. Indubitability is here applied to propositional attitudes: in our formulation, we moved from acquaintance with something to its existence. Russell, however, is enlightening here: “We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths” (Russell 1997: 46). In an earlier piece, he had explained that acquaintance involves “a direct cognitive relation to [its] object […]. When I speak of a cognitive relation here, I do not mean the sort of relation which constitutes judgment, but the sort which constitutes presentation” (Russell 1910–1911: 108). Acquaintance,

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then, appears to be non-propositional. However, the acquaintance to which Russell is pointing is simpler, and less of an achievement, than a belief solidly wedded to truth. But there is a sense of acquaintance which, perhaps, may have been in the back of Russell’s mind, and of which Teresa writes when referring to experiences within the deeper dwellings of the inner castle, or when trying to formulate what she felt and perceived when in the presence of God (Castillo: VI, 2, 3; BAC: 529).12 Teresa insists that she cannot put in words or formulate discursively what she is trying to convey. The experience of being unable to fully capture in words is familiar; sometimes language is at the service of evoking. Teresa, however, attends to experiences which are beyond language, where attempts to put in words would only obscure. Descartes also points in this direction regarding self-perception, when he explicitly instructs to look into oneself rather than ask for a discursive account, which would only “make matters more obscure” (AT VII-1: 8).13 Instead, he directs to one’s “close inner awareness” of one’s own mind (AT VII: 443). He also distinguishes between knowing God through “reasoning and the progression of discourse […] using the natural [and… somewhat obscure…] knowledge of one attribute of God, to [lead to] another attribute” from what he calls Intuitive knowledge [of God, which] is an illumination of the mind, by which it sees […] the things which [God] is pleased to show it by a direct impression […] on our understanding, […] by an immediate illumination of Divinity upon our mind. (AT V: 136–39) It is this intuition of God which appears at the end of the Third Meditation when the meditator moves to “the contemplation of God Himself ” which he describes as a “much less perfect” version of the beatific vision (AT VII: 52).14 Descartes also mentions that such direct nondiscursive intuitions are available through the senses, and he refers to a “certain knowledge which we touch with our mind with more confidence than we grant the testimony of our eyes” made manifest in the cogito (AT V: 137). We could also call on Plato here, and mention his insistence on showing rather than telling, or his use of allegory and myth, or even his discussion of writing in Phaedrus. In these cases what we have is not simple awareness feeding complex judgment and conceptualization but rather a cognitive experience that in some sense transcends language. There is, we might say, acquaintance as pre-propositional awareness, and there is also acquaintance as post-propositional knowledge. The latter’s claim to knowledge is not merely a matter of terminology, as my dog’s might be in ‘Yuyo knows Jorge but not Pedro’. In simple acquaintance, propositions grounded on it serve to bring to light features of its object which allow for intelligent interaction with it: language manifests understanding while mere acquaintance is brute. In the acquaintance the blessed have with God or the wise with the Forms, according to Teresa, Descartes, or Plato, words would only impoverish the object. In these cases, it is the object that now enriches the knower, who is passive with respect to it, while earlier she was active in conceptualizing and judging. While in the simpler awareness propositions add focus, in enlightened awareness they blind to the richness of the object, hiding it. But we are interested in self-acquaintance in this life. In the case we are considering, the cognitive achievement of the soldier’s reacquaintance with himself is the recovery of his normative identity, so he will act and live as he truly is. Now, he became a soldier through a complex process involving belief, desire and habit; intending and doing; predicting, succeeding and failing; shaping and being shaped; engaging in soliloquy and deliberation, and with others in conversation as teachers and friends, as mere informers, mirrors, or true companions. Throughout all this, he made himself into a soldier. Before he became amnesiac, he might not have remembered much of

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this process. What memory must do is not merely inform him about it in the sense of conveying information, but rather, as we might put it, inform him in the sense of re-forming him, of recovering what the process made of him. Further, this process did not end when, in whatever way we wish to fill this out, he became a soldier. “Being a soldier” points to an open-ended activity, a life. The point to stress now is that there is no narrative that fully captures it. The analogy with narrative, so dear to us moderns and post-moderns, is dangerous, as it helps hide the actual process, one which can be captured by innumerable narratives, some appropriate when and where others may be unhelpful and in fact harmful. The self-acquaintance we are considering involves a certain union, a being one with oneself, overcoming a distinction between subject and object. This is not a formal matter due to selfacquaintance. Both Descartes and Teresa write of divine contemplation ultimately consisting in union with God. Indeed, acquaintance admits of degrees, as the process unfolds. And in some cases, the process is interactive, both parts shaping the other. Indeed, Yuyo’s acquaintance with me had something my intelligent and linguistically aided acquaintance with my favorite pen never could have: it was mutual and mutually loving. There are, then, additional features distinguishing the acquaintance we have now brought to incipient sight from Russell’s simple pre-propositional one. Here we have a process where before we had a discreet occurrence. This process admits of degrees, could be open-ended, in some cases could be reciprocal, and in some lead to a kind of union. There is a further difference. Indubitability may have a place here, but doubt also does, guiding the process and moving it forward. This is so even for Descartes who, in spite of Cartesians, has his meditator say that “it would be easy for [God] to make [me] go wrong” in the cogito (AT VII: 36). Though we now have a better sense of our subject, we are still at the outskirts of Teresa’s self-knowledge. Acquaintance, as we are now starting to understand it, may be a complicated matter, but it can hardly merit comparison with the difficulty of comprehending God. After all, even my sweet Yuyo was able to attain it to some degree.

29.3  Self-knowledge (II) What is this possibly open-ended process of self-knowledge or self-acquaintance? Let us go back to Teresa’s Inner Castle: Returning to our beautiful and delightful castle, we must see how we could come into it. It appears I speak nonsense (algún disparate). For if this castle is the soul, it is clear there is no need to come in, for it is oneself (se es él mismo); as it would be absurd (desatino) to say to someone already inside a room to come into it. But you have to understand that there is much distance between being in and being in (va mucho de estar a estar), that there are many souls that […] have no interest in coming in nor do they know what’s inside so precious a place […]. (Castillo: I, 1, 5; BAC: 473–74) A crucial, emphasized phrase marks the difference between estar and estar (being in), two different ways of being within oneself. She suggests one is common, available to all. This is not that on which contemporary philosophers concentrate: the peculiarly privileged knowledge we may have of some of our own mental states (see Cassam 1994; Gertler 2011; Hatzimoysis 2011).15 Nor is it what they call self-awareness (Gertler 2011: 208–52).16 It would be unwarranted to claim that Teresa is referring to anything like a self. She speaks of “the soul [el ánima].” And by “oneself [él mismo]” she is referring to the human being of whom the soul is an integral part (Castillo: I, 1, 2; BAC: 472). Though not unconnected, it is also not what some call substantial self-knowledge (Cassam 2014).17 Her more common self-knowledge is closer rather to the self-knowledge we have 400

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been discussing, and similar discussions, differing from ours and each other in various ways, could have been offered using “I am a father” or “I am a Peruvian.” This is not, Teresa stresses, what we get by going into the castle. Yet she does write that its lack is worse than ignorance of parents or birthplace, thus comparing them. Moreover, by speaking of “distance” between them, she suggests a shared space. Though particularly difficult, it is not wholly separated from the more common one we have been examining. Perhaps we should bring to mind here the doubts we are left with at the end of Phaedrus, wondering whether the title’s character has actually profited from his day with Socrates and will now know “where he is going to” and so fulfill the hope embedded in the parting prayer and make himself “beautiful within” (Phaedrus 2011: 227a and 279b). Phaedrus is not led to a different sort of self-knowledge as much as to a better understanding of who he is. Why would one want to come into the castle? The answer Teresa offers is found in the image of a bright light shining from its center which will draw us in. This elaboration of the analogy is consistent with what we found at the start: the light is God who inhabits the innermost dwelling of the castle. Indeed, the ellipsis in our first citation from Teresa includes the following: “the soul of the just is… a paradise where… [God] finds his delights” (Castillo: I, 1, 1; BAC: 472). Shortly after, she speaks of “that shining sun which is in the center of the soul,” and explains “that it is always within it” though by covering the crystal with “a very black cloth” one will not allow it to shine through (Castillo: I, 2, 3; BAC: 476). It is no surprise, then, that prayer is the key to the castle, nor that going in and exploring it is one with knowing God. But what are we to make of all this? Once more, consider our soldier. The way we presented him left unspecified what motivated him to be a soldier. Context is central. He would not have thought of being a soldier in a world without soldiers. Perhaps he came from a family of soldiers, or he read military history and the deeds of soldiers attracted him. And he was physically or materially able to be a soldier. Had he lived in Teresa’s place and time, and been a woman, it would have been difficult to be one (not impossible, as some extraordinary, and to my mind admirable, cases of audacity and determination show). All this, nonetheless, does not quite lead us to where Teresa can make sense. We come closer, I propose, when we have our young person ask herself, “Is this a good life for me? Is this the right thing for me to do?” Our soldier was also a husband and a father, but in dying as he did he gave a definitive primacy to the first over the other two. What grounded this? Was it a choice he made consciously and reflectively? Earlier we mentioned Teresa’s answer to both questions, “who am I?” and “how should I live?”: “I am and should live as the child, friend and bride of God.” There is a formal asymmetry between this answer and the soldier’s answer. Teresa’s is all-encompassing. It does not define a life, nor determine more specific identities such as soldier or nun, but it does provide a normative structure and delimitation to any human life, while others we have mentioned, cook, soldier, mother, or husband, do not. Is there such an identity? In answering affirmatively, Descartes sided with Teresa, and so did Plato, in his own non-theistic way. But it is clear that an answer to such a question is at the core of what the soldier needs to know, a dimension of his self-knowledge we have yet to look into. Earlier we brought together identity and normativity. Issues arise here that far exceed the scope of our inquiry. Still, we do need to sketch the framework within which Teresa’s conception of self-knowledge arises. We mentioned the answer to the question “why?” in the face of our soldier’s act of radical self-denial. Suppose we were to ask further, “but why did he become a soldier?” Above we surveyed some of the answers to this question. Consider now the same line of questioning but addressed to a gangster engaged in some dismal gangster-like activity. What distinguishes one from the other, normatively? Up to that point, not much. Answers start to come apart when we ask further, “why are there soldiers (or gangsters)?” In accounting for these human identities, we may in one case find that it serves a purpose central to living, while the other might in fact jeopardize human 401

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life. Not all pertinent identities fit into one or the other class. Some will be generally deemed good or worthwhile, some permissible, while others will be considered deplorable or evil. Without denying that there may be room for transcultural assessments, all of this remains relative to cultural or social contexts.18 Here we may be tempted to ask, “but is it morally good?” Inspired by Teresa, however, we should resist temptation: she would not have recognized any such question, nor, if it were brought up, would she have acknowledged its pertinence. The question “who am I?” is never formulated in the abstract and universal manner in which it may arise for a post-Cartesian ethicist (see, for instance, Korsgaard 1996).19 It is always anchored fully in a particular life. This does not, to put it in contemporary terminology, make her an internalist regarding desires and reasons. But it does shift the focus from what we call moral obligation (whatever that may be) to a personal matter, fully rooted in an individual life.20 And though many or all may share some general answers to that question, they are insufficient to determine a life. One way to put this, adapting contemporary terminology, is this: Teresa’s question facing our soldier is whether there are any thick universal identities which permit, forbid, or commend being a soldier. One example of such an identity is being a creature of a loving God, as understood by Teresa. Thin identities, such as being a rational agent, are not what we are after here.21 Others may point to notions of human flourishing. But if we are talking about human life, not afterlife, then Teresa would resist that. She may have a point: can we really say that in doing what he did our soldier flourished? Before moving on, let us briefly survey our landscape. Identities motivate and provide normative frameworks. They are culturally anchored, though some could be universal and hold at any time of any human being anywhere. What access one might have to such universal identities, if indeed there are any, is not something we have examined in any detail, though it will be touched upon in what follows. Guided by Teresa, we have been focusing on self-knowledge as the knowledge one has of one’s own normative identities when they are fully taken on. Though it is the identity that motivates the agent, it is this knowledge which will figure within her deliberation when considering the question “what should I do in these circumstances?” Not all normatively required actions flow in the direct, non-deliberated manner of our soldier’s behavior. If successful deliberation issues in action, then the knowledge the agent must have of who she is will be the peculiar self-knowledge that concerns us and of which Teresa writes in the Inner Castle. Moved by the light shining within us, we go into the castle. Teresa understood prayer as a conversation with God, her lover. We can, within the present state of our inquiry, look at it as engagement with the good for us. It is then, naturally, the door to self-knowledge. We start our exploration tentatively moving into the first room, becoming familiar with it, and slowly proceeding into other rooms. Here we must note a limitation in the analogy, one of which Teresa was certainly aware. The image of the soul as a castle presents it as a completed building, something given to be discovered and examined. However, Teresa qualifies it in several ways. Though, referring to the stages of prayer and approximation to God, she writes of “seven dwellings,” she also states that “in each one of these there are many… with beautiful gardens and fountains and labyrinths” (Castillo: Epílogo, 22; BAC: 583).22 And she insists on the need to walk around the Castle, to go back and forth, to leave it in order to come back into it, to be at home in one dwelling before we move to deeper ones. We can speak here of a dialectical process: as we become increasingly acquainted with the good, it shapes us so that our self-acquaintance is as much a process of self-discovery as it is one of self-constitution, as Teresa perhaps intimates when mentioning the “great capacity (gran capacidad)” of the human soul. Teresa captures this process thus: You should not take [the Castle’s many] dwellings one after the other as in a row, but direct your eyes to the center […] where the king is found […]. [A]round this room there are many 402

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others […]. For the things of the soul must always be considered with fullness and breadth and greatness for it cannot be surpassed, since it is capable of much more than we can consider and this sun which is in this palace communicates with all its parts. This is very important for any soul […] let it walk through these dwellings, up and below and to the sides […]. Oh, if it is all in knowing oneself! This is so necessary… even for those who the Lord has in the same dwelling as he is […]. For humility always works like the bee in the hive the honey, and without it all is lost. Now, consider that the bee flies off to bring flowers; so, the soul in self-knowledge […] should sometimes fly to consider the greatness and majesty of God and there find its own insignificance better than in itself. (Castillo: I, 2, 8; BAC: 477) As the light within shines stronger, there will be increasing certainty that we are on the right path, accompanied by inevitable uncertainty as we move into unknown territory. Perhaps we can capture this dimension of the process by saying that doubts will increasingly focus on the how rather than on the if and why. Notions of satisfaction, plenitude and wholeness come into the picture here. As Descartes’s meditator puts it, “we experience… the greatest delight and satisfaction of which we are capable in this life” (AT VII: 52).23 This, rather than skeletal epistemic certainty, is the aim of self-knowledge. Yet radical self-deception is possible, even if the scenarios where complete error is plausible are exceptional. One extreme case of devastating delusion and ensuing self-recovery is presented in Duncan Jones’s film Moon; another, in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire. While it is monstrous self-delusion without the hope of redemption that is depicted in the last sequence of Francis Coppola’s The Godfather Part II. Humility and self-denial have roles to play here. The taking on of our identities, the uncovering of the good itself, can never be fully or exhaustively grasped and attained, and it demands the overcoming or submission of dispositions, urges and appetites, which do not originate from it. Consider here Teresa’s rhetorically powerful image, particularly humbling if addressed to Christian sixteenth-century men, comparing submission to God and the good to that of a bride to her groom (Camino (Valladolid): 7, 8; BAC: 270 and Camino (Valladolid): 34, 4; BAC: 382).24 There is no such thing as getting to know the whole of the inner castle, no way of knowing all the possible good lives open to us. Furthermore, knowing it is a transformative process: in knowing ourselves, we make ourselves, shaped by the good we pursue, the life we seek to live. Humility is at the core of the process; it requires cultivation and development; and it goes hand in hand with self-­ knowledge. We can get a better sense of this last point if we now turn to a theme we have ignored but which is at the very center of Teresa’s thinking: love.25

29.4  Love, Self-Interest, and Self-Denial One of the most striking changes that are effected by the Christianization of Plato is the bringing together in one person of Love and the Form of the Good. Contemplation of the Good is transformed into a personal loving relationship, thereby defusing the tension in Plato, manifested in the contrast between Phaedrus and Symposium, the display of love and the discourse on love, between self-interested appetitive worldly love and selfless true love directed at the Good. We should mention, even if only in passing, the distinction between dispositions to the good and appetitive urges.26 Both for Plato and for Teresa, in those who are closer to the center of their inner castle, the two are in harmony, while in those outside the castle, looking away from it, it is only the latter that rule. But for Teresa, submission to the good is itself wholly an act of personal, interactive, full and absolute love. For her, indeed, the pursuit of love encapsulates the normative dimension of human identity. This is not surprising. Teresa insists that love and not mere thinking is “the substance of perfect prayer,” and that prayer, if it is to express “true union with [God’s] will,” consists in living well, 403

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for its point is “to give birth to good works, always works [siempre obras, obras]” (Fundaciones: 5, 2; BAC: 688).27 Here, in Teresa’s most basic normative identity, we find one sense in which to take her repeated assertion that though not all are capable of engaging equally well in imaginative meditation or in understanding, “all souls are [capable] of loving” (Fundaciones: 5, 2; BAC: 688). But what is love? We might first say that it is an intense drive, perhaps even “a certain madness,” toward what is perceived as a good (Phaedrus 2011: 237c–38c and 244a–45b). Let us agree also that it is not a mere appetite or urge. The drive might be possessive, as in the case of a loved thing, like my fountain pen. However, even in this elemental case, love also involves sustained caring for the good of the loved. Let us consider our relation to others in self-knowledge. As we have seen, they shape our self-acquaintance. History and culture determine a spectrum of possible lives. Teresa does not make this a reflective focus of her attention, though she is openly motivated by her circumstances.28 She does pay considerable attention to her family and friends when reflecting on her childhood and youth. Later in life, her religious sisters, her confessors and friends, and many others both welcome and unwelcome, are a constant presence, some determining her own identity, for instance as a reformer. Teresa acknowledges these enabling and formative relations.29 Let us focus on the latter, beyond the usual analogies of mirrors, teachers and exemplars. In particular, let us take our cue from Teresa herself, when she mentions the most basic, ordinary self-knowledge by referring to family and country. And let us do so by looking at two phenomena, shame and pride. In particular, consider how shame and pride arise in us on account of what others do. I refer not to sharing in the shame or pride of another, as we might out of compassion or euphoria. Exclude also the shame or pride that attaches to us on account of what we have contributed to the deeds or misdeeds of others. I mean genuine and proper pride or shame arising wholly from what another does, as from the actions of one’s government or ancestors. We feel shame when we do not live up to who we are, and pride when we do, particularly if it displays excellence or requires special effort. The shame and pride we are considering, I propose, arise from a constitutive identity shared with those who shame us or make us proud. We would feel shame or pride for the actions of other human beings in the face of God or of extraterrestrials. Here, in the monstrous misdeeds of humanity, we find another source of humility, linking it to self-knowledge and its lack to self-ignorance. By debasing my identity as a soldier, I debase that of my fellow soldiers. And when I care for who I am, I care for others. My life is a life shared with others, and the lives of others are also mine. There are, of course, differences depending on the identities in question. But our point now is that the pursuit of my good is also pursuit of the good of others. Furthermore, there are identities which essentially involve a more personal and immediate loving relation to another. If I am a father, the good of my daughter will be one with my good to the point where I will throw myself over a grenade to protect her. And even if I am spared ever having to so live up to who I am, my self-acquaintance will involve at its center the presence of my daughter, so that it is from her in me that I will live as a father. This love, however, need not be mutual nor mutually cultivated. Consider then mutual personal love. Here we not only have lives fully and actually shared, but a personal and corresponded acquaintance, a constitutive presence to each other at the core of the life and identity of each one. This is, to my mind, the most promising avenue to explore if we seek some universal identity to ground normative structures. The drive toward unity with other humans, in the copiously varied forms it may take, is an essential part of who we are. It finds expression in Christianity, but it is not wedded to that faith and also shapes the ethical thought of, for instance, Plato, and it suggests the possibility of grounding both radical altruism and the keeping of simple promises in self-interested and fully determined individual identities. The matter, however, far exceeds the scope of this brief chapter seeking merely to introduce one aspect of the rich writings of Teresa de Ávila. 404

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As we pointed out, for Teresa the pursuit of love is the dominant normative principle. It gets its fullest satisfaction and most universal formulation in the love of God, the perfect mirror and exemplar, the gratuitous giver of wonderful and ideal gifts, the absolutely selfless and loyal lover who seeks only the good and beauty of the beloved. This is not the place to explore this aspect of her thinking in any detail, though it occupies the substance of her writings. We will, however, briefly compare her understanding of what is involved in the pursuit of the good, and so in self-knowledge, with that of Descartes, who was born 14 years after her death. In a letter of 1647, six years after the publication of the Meditations, Descartes wrote to his friend Chanut that he had “no doubt whatsoever (aucun doute) that we can truly love God through the sole power of our nature” (AT IV: 607–08). He then described the path to such love, which encapsulates that found in the Meditations. The successful result of this process fills one with “extreme joy [une joie… extreme]” and moves one to love God “so perfectly that [one] desires nothing at all except that his will should be done…. [One] no longer fears death, pain or disgrace” (AT IV: 609). Such a person would not wish to change anything, even when facing the greatest harm and “if per impossibile he could,” since she would know it is the will of God. The parallel with Teresa is striking: How fortunate the soul that has reached [this union with God], as she will live both this and the other life rested. For nothing that can happen on earth will afflict it […], not illness nor poverty nor deaths […]. For this soul sees well that he knows better what he does than she what she wants. (Castillo: V, 3, 3; BAC: 517) In further agreement with Teresa, earlier in the letter, Descartes argues that this is not a purely intellectual love, but is a true and “most delightful” passion, arising from the subjection of the body to the vision of the mind. Note Descartes’s intellectualism, by which I understand not that the vision of the good wholly subjects the person, will, understanding and body, to its rule, but that the “power of our nature” to which he refers is wholly that of intellectual perception. Descartes’s meditational route to God is entirely cognitive. It involves exercise and transformative practice, but it is all exclusively epistemic. It is, in this regard, far from Teresa’s Path to Perfection, concerned as she was with the discipline of appetites, with cultivating poverty, with love of others and the dangers of selfishness. Descartes’s meditations are episodic, though they yield results that are invasive of the whole life of the person; Teresa’s path is instead a continuous, living one, cultivated in all aspects of life and all dimensions of the person, and so more naturally transformative of the whole human being. Though we have now forgotten Descartes and substituted him for a Cartesian impostor, early reception of his work amongst Jesuits was precisely along these lines and not surprisingly critical of it to the point of dismissive sarcasm.30 Teresa helps us recover a neglected dimension of Descartes’s thought, while addressing some of its core failings, now restoring the wider appeal of the call to love and self-knowledge, away from Descartes’s extreme elitist intellectualism. It is, however, not in her relations to Descartes that we can find the greater philosophical riches in her writings, but, as I hope this chapter suggests, directly in the contributions they can make to a fuller conception of human life.31

Notes 1 See, for instance: Jean de Groot 1997; Gabriel Amengual Coll 2011; Jesús Sánchez-Caro 2011; Pedro Cerezo Galán 2012; Jorge Secada 2016 and 2019; Asunción Bernárde-Rodal 2017; Christia Mercer 2017; María del Mar Cortés Timoner 2017. On Teresa’s life, sources, and context, see: Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink 1996 and Daniel de Pablo Maroto 2009. Carlos Eire 2019 is a study of her autobiography and its reception.

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Jorge Secada 2 ‘[C]onocimiento propio’ appears 20 times in her writings, including her autobiography (3), the book on foundations (2), the two versions of Camino (3) and Castillo (12). See Juan Luis Astigarraga and Agustí Borrell 2000: I, 549. 3 I intentionally ignore authors within her tradition, like Augustine, of whom Teresa was particularly fond (Vida, 9, 7–8; BAC, 65). Teresa is cited, giving standard inner divisions, from the Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos (BAC) edition, consulting, when available, the facsimile reproductions of her manuscripts. All translations are mine. There is a not always trustworthy translation of many of her writings by Kavanaugh and Rodríguez; and a translation of Interior Castle by E. Allison Peers. 4 See, also: Camino (Escorial): 44, 2; BAC: 138 and 46, 2–3; Cuentas: 54; Fundaciones: 10, 11; BAC: 138, 346, 350, 616, 710. 5 Gertler adds “relative to [a belief he has learnt he has].” I would have “relative to his identity or to who she is.” The difference is significant. 6 This example is inspired by John Perry (1990 and 1994). 7 Recent studies of memory, not always relevant to what follows, are found in Ulric Neisser and Eugene Winograd (1988) and Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (1994). 8 References to the works of Plato use the Stephanus numbering. 9 See the entries for acordar, memoria, olvidar, and the rare recordar in Juan Luis Astigarraga and Agustí Borrell (2000). 10 See also: Ali Hasan and Richard Fumerton 2020. 11 In particular, for references connecting acquaintance with doubt, see Note 8 in Duncan 2015: 2536. 12 See also: Castillo: VI, 8, 6; BAC: 554 and Castillo: VII, 1, 8; BAC: 569. 13 See also AT: II, 597; AT: X, 523–24. The writings of Descartes are cited by reference to volume and page in the revised Charles Adam and Paul Tannery edition (AT). 14 In AT V: 133–39, Descartes prudently qualifies this. 15 A broader, historical account of the philosophy and epistemology of the self is Sorabji (2006). 16 Contrast with: Anscombe 1975 and (the latter half of ) Doyle 2018. 17 Green (2018) also has a lucid discussion of this kind of self-knowledge. 18 The Inca Garcilaso was able to evaluate radically differing pre-Columbian and Spanish ways of life from a perspective internal to both. It bears stressing that in such evaluation there are three terms, the two cultures and the evaluator with her identity, significantly in this case, encompassing both others. See Garcilaso 1985. Transcultural evaluations also have a place in other contexts. See Secada 2001: 684 and Secada 2009: 544–45. 19 Contrast Anscombe 1958 and (the earlier half of ) Doyle 2018. 20 This is apparent from, for instance, her own autobiography and the advice to her fellow nuns in Camino. 21 Compare Williams’ criticism of David Wiggins (Williams 1996: 213). See also the discussion of Williams in MacIntyre 2016: 150–65. From the perspective embodied in this essay, the unsurmountable problems facing the grounding of “moral” normativity arise from the emaciated identity of the modern subject. See Brewer 2009: 1–67. The simplistic treatment of authenticity in Cassam 2014: 216–19, is revealing, as is the somewhat more sophisticated one found in Ariso 2018. 22 The manuscript, difficult to make out here, has “laborintos” (labyrinths) inserted between the lines. The current form “laberintos” was also used at the time. BAC: 583, note c suggests that perhaps she meant to refer to the fruits of gardening labors, and relates it to the image of the watering of an orchard in her autobiography, but see the facsimile edition, vol. 2, 227, note 3. One way or the other, this term further supports my reading. 23 To capture the wholeness of the experience, both physical and spiritual, I use “delight and contentment”, where the French version has “contentement” (AT IX-1: 42) and the original Latin has “voluptatem.” See Castillo: V, 1, 9; BAC: 510. 24 See, also: Castillo: V, 4, 12; BAC: 523; Castillo: VI, 2, 1; BAC 528; and Castillo: VII, 1, 3; BAC: 567. 25 See the useful survey in Álvarez 2017: 73–78. 26 Note Teresa’s own distinction between true love and purely appetitive bodily love, for instance in Camino (Escorial): 7; 10, 2–4. See also: Camino (Valladolid): 4, 12–16; BAC: 257–59; Camino (Valladolid): 6, 6–9; BAC: 264–66. 27 See also: Castillo: V, 3, 11; BAC: 519 and Castillo: VII, 4, 6; BAC: 579. 28 As is apparent throughout her autobiography. 29 This is clear, again, in the autobiography. See also, for instance, Castillo: III, 2, 12; BAC: 493. 30 One example is Daniel (1691), later repeatedly published together with a brutal satire as in Daniel and Gervaise (1739). 31 I am grateful to Tal Brewer, Emma Secada, James Cargile, Roque Carrión, Mitch Green and John Marshall for comments on an earlier draft.

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Bibliography Álvarez, T. (2017) Diccionario de Santa Teresa: Doctrina e Historia, Burgos: Monte Carmelo. Amengual Coll, G. (2011) “La Experiencia en el Libro de la Vida. Una Lectura en Clave Filosófico-teológica,” in J. Sancho Fermín and R. Cuartas Londoño (eds.), El Libro de la Vida de Santa Teresa de Jesús. Actas del I Congreso Internacional Teresiano, Burgos: Monte Carmelo, pp. 367–95. Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958) “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33(124): 1–19. (1975) “The First Person,” in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 45–65. Ariso, J. M. (2018) “Pretender ser uno Mismo sin Saber Cómo es Realmente: El Problema del Imperativo de Autenticidad en Ortega y en Wittgenstein,” in J. Salas and J. M. Ariso (eds.), Ortega y Wittgenstein: Ensayos de Filosofía Práctica, Madrid: Tecnos, pp. 35–74. Astigarraga, J. L. and A. Borrell (2000) Concordancias de Los Escritos de Santa Teresa de Jesús, Rome: Editoriales O. C. D. Ayers, M. (1970) “Substance, Reality, and the Great, Dead Philosophers,” American Philosophical Quarterly 7(1): 38–49. Bernárdez-Rodal, A. (2017) “‘Basta ser Mujer para Caérseme las Alas’: Teresa de Jesús y el Feminismo,” in E. Borrego and J. Olmedo (eds.), Santa Teresa o la Llama Permanente, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, pp. 345–59. Borrego Gutiérrez, E. and J. Olmedo Ramos (2017) Santa Teresa o la Llama Permanente, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica. Cassam, Q. (1994) Self-Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2014) Self-Knowledge for Humans, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cerezo Galán, P. (2012) “La Experiencia de la Subjetividad en Santa Teresa,” in Claves y Figuras del Pensamiento Hispánico, Madrid: Escolar y Mayo, pp. 161–84. Cortés Timoner, M. M. (2017) “Teresa de Jesús y Los Espacios de Libertad Femenina,” in E. Borrego and J. Olmedo (eds.), Santa Teresa o la Llama Permanente, pp. 361–75. Daniel, G. (1691) Voiage du Monde de Descartes, Paris: Veuve de Simon Bernard. Daniel, G. and F. Gervaise (1739) Voyage du Monde de Descartes and Histoire de la Conjuration Faite a Stokholm contre Mr. Descartes, The Hague: Pierre Gosse. De Groot, J. (1997) “Teresa of Avila and the Meaning of Mystical Theology,” in K. White (ed.), Hispanic Philosophy in the Age of Discovery, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, pp. 145–59. De la Madre de Dios, E. and O. Steggink (1996) Tiempo y Vida de Santa Teresa, Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristiano. De Pablo Maroto, D. (2009) Lecturas y Maestros de Santa Teresa, Madrid: Editorial de Espiritualidad. Descartes, R. (1996) Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 Vols., ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Paris: Vrin. (2008) Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. M. Moriarty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doyle, J. A. (2018) No Morality, No Self: Anscombe’s Radical Skepticism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Duncan, M. (2015) “We Are Acquainted with Ourselves,” Philosophical Studies 172(9): 2531–49. Eire, C. (2019) The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Garcilaso de la Vega, I. (1985) Comentarios Reales de los Incas, 2 Vols., ed. A. Miró Quesada, Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho. Gertler, B. (2011) Self-Knowledge, New York: Routledge. Green, M. S. (2018) Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge, New York: Routledge. Hasan, A. and R. Fumerton (2020) “Knowledge by Acquaintance vs. Description,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/; consulted after the substantial revision of June 2019. Hatzimoysis, Anthony (ed.) (2011) Self-knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, C. (1996) The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, A. (2016) Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mercer, C. (2017) “Descartes’ Debt to Therese of Avila, or Why We Should Study Women in the History of Philosophy,” Philosophical Studies 174(10): 2539–55. Neisser, U. and R. Fivush (1994) The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. and E. Winograd (1988) Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perry, J. (1990) “Frege on Demonstratives,” in P. Yourgrau (ed.), Demonstratives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 50–70.

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Jorge Secada (1994) “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” in Q. Cassam (ed.), Self-Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 167–83. Plato. (1997) Complete Works, ed. J. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, Indianapolis: Hackett. (2011) Phaedrus, ed. H. Yunis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, B. (1910–1911) “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11: 108–28. (1997) The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sánchez Caro, J. (2011) “Intimidad y Búsqueda de sí Mismo en el Libro de la Vida,” in J. Sancho Fermín and R. Cuartas Londoño (eds.), El Libro de la Vida de Santa Teresa de Jesús. Actas del I Congreso Internacional Teresiano, Burgos: Monte Carmelo, pp. 345–65. Sancho Fermín, J. and R. Cuartas Londoño (2011) El Libro de la Vida de Santa Teresa de Jesús. Actas del I Congreso Internacional Teresiano, Burgos: Monte Carmelo. Secada, J. (2001) “Historiography,” in L. C. Becker and C. B. Becker (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd edition, 3 Vols., New York: Routledge, pp. 683–85. (2009) “Historiographical Paradigms in Contemporary Philosophy,” in C. Barros (ed.), Historia a Debate: III Congreso, 3 Vols., A Coruña: Historia a Debate, pp. 531–48. (2013) “God and Meditation in Descartes’s Meditations,” in K. Detlefsen (ed.), Descartes’ Meditations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 200–25. (2016) “Descartes, Meditation, and the Nature of Philosophy,” Presented at the Virginia Philosophical Association Annual Meeting, October 22; conference program available at https://sites.google.com/site/ virginiaphilosophy/77th-program (2019) “Santa Rosa de Lima y Descartes,” Allpanchis 46(83–84): 171–221. Sorabji, R. (2006) Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Teresa de Ávila. (1873) Vida, ed. V. D. L. Fuente, Madrid: Viuda é Hijo de D. E. Aguado. (1965) Camino de Perfección (Valladolid), ed. T. de la Cruz, Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana. (1980–1987) The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, 3 Vols., trans. K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodríguez, Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies. (2003) Fundaciones, ed. T. Álvarez, Burgos: Monte Carmelo. (2007) Interior Castle, trans. E. A. Peers, Mineola: Dover Publications. (2010) Camino de Perfección (Escorial), ed. T. Álavarez, Burgos: Monte Carmelo. (2011) Castillo Interior, ed. T. Álvarez, Burgos: Monte Carmelo. (2012) Obras Completas, ed. E. M. Dios and O. Steggink, Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. Williams, B. (1996) “History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection,” in C. Korsgaard (ed.), The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 210–18.

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30 (SELF-)PORTRAITS BETWEEN TWO GOWNS Marie de Gournay Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin Marie de Gournay is an exemplary case through which to address the current questioning of the modern philosophical canon and its protagonists. Her work allows us to reflect on what makes a philosopher in terms of substance and forms of discourse from both an early modern and a contemporary perspective. Gournay’s status in the intellectual world was a subject of discussion—for her and those around her—in her own time, and has been since. She was at the center of a reflection on the quality of female authorship among the writers of the time. At the same time, she herself continued to shape her own standing as an author and to impose it through different strategies of self-affirmation. Finally, her situation is also of interest to historians of philosophy today. In fact, Gournay’s case is exemplary. She serves as a case study in several articles on the inclusion of women in the philosophical corpus (see O’Neill 2006). Who was Gournay in the literary and philosophical landscape of her time? What label and what status can we attribute to her? These are questions shared by early modern intellectuals and present-day commentators alike and to which Gournay wanted to offer, if not impose, her own response throughout her writings. On several occasions, Gournay speaks of herself as “une personne à la robe” [“a person in a gown”]. But this garment has a double meaning. It is the clothing worn by women (as opposed to men), but it is also the clothing worn by clerks, magistrates, and scholars (as opposed to ordinary people). Thus, Gournay seems caught between two possible gowns, two very different sorts of finery: women’s dresses and scholars’ robes. The former would mark her as one of the dominated1 and the latter as one who dominates. Her work shows how she weaves her own garment from these two gowns, an outfit all her own, sewn to measure, but without discounting the possibility that it might one day become ready-to-wear.2

30.1  Strategies of Self-portraiture Gournay presents herself as a writer, scholar, and philosopher. In doing so, she sketches a very precise self-portrait that is bolstered by her great capacity for introspection. It is as much physical and intellectual as moral. It is fundamental in the sense that it is truly foundational. In a certain sense, there is no need to reconstruct, to imagine, to guess who Gournay was, as we must sometimes do with other early modern female philosophers. Indeed, she has the specificity of constructing her own portrait with assurance, so much so that self-reflection constitutes the guiding principle of her entire body of work.3 But it is not just a simple process of reflexivity. She aims to herself master and construct her place and her image in the world of letters. Her self-portrait is at once a way of

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-37

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asserting herself and of controlling her image. We can therefore speak of a strategy to cement her place in the literary field. It should first be noted that the physical aspect plays an important role in this self-portrait. Gournay herself requested that her portrait figures on the first page of her writings. She thus inscribes her face, her physical traits, among the elements that make up her image as a writer. This engraving at the front of her collected works is important for another reason related to the fact that she is a woman. Female beauty can be a condition for or an argument against the consideration of men,4 but it is always a criterion and a sign.5 This is especially true in the intellectual domain where different prejudices can be mobilized: a learned woman is ugly or beautiful in consequence of her knowledge (Shapiro 2013). But in the written descriptions of herself that accompany this engraving, Gournay portrays herself as neither beautiful nor ugly. This mediocrity allows her to escape the traditional criteria for recognizing learned women, which are presented as an alternative: the assignment of beauty or ugliness. We can thus interpret it as a desire to avoid this choice. She is mediocre, as are most men of letters, on whose physiognomy no one would think to comment. The engraved portrait is only the first striking element of a self-portrayal that continues throughout her work. The written self-portrait appears continuously in Gournay’s œuvre. Its importance becomes apparent in a singular way in the context of a cruel prank. Some pranksters (the Count of Moret, Racan, and Ysandre) approached Gournay pretending to speak on behalf of King James of England who had decided to create a dictionary of all the scholars in Europe and wanted Gournay to write her autobiography to be included in the project. She complied and thus found herself publicly humiliated. One could say that this episode reveals her vanity. But there is another way to interpret it. First of all, it signifies that Gournay sees herself as a learned woman because she is not surprised by this request. Next, the very fact that she was chosen as a victim of this prank shows that she actually does belong to this intellectual world. She is known for being, or at least wanting to be, an actress of the learned world. This hoax, which sought to question this position, unintendedly cements it in a certain sense. Finally, agreeing to write her autobiography at such a young age (the text was completed in 1616), is the sign of her self-awareness as an intellectual and a desire to control her public image as a writer. Moreover, this self-portrait did not go to waste and was integrated directly into her work. The precocity of this integration shows the stakes of this self-presentation to the public and her “colleagues.” When portraying herself, Gournay puts a lot of emphasis on her sickliness and weakness.6 These traits are linked both to the fact that she is a woman and to the fact that she is poor.7 This dual weakness allows us to consider her psychological portrait. This portrait seeks to combine two themes that are not immediately consistent with each other: Gournay presents herself as weak on the one hand and measured on the other. The theme of moderation, especially in its moral dimension, is a topic that comes from ancient Greece. Gournay acts with moderation and is thus at odds with her time.8 In particular, excess takes the form of courtliness, an artifice that leads to undeserved praise. But given her original position in the literary field (what she calls her weakness), she suffers more than any other from attacks and injustices. Thus, the most interesting psychological element in her self-portrait is this alliance between weakness and pugnacity. It appears, for example, in this oxymoronic expression in the form of a motto: she has to “armer sa quenouille” [“load her distaff”] (Bienvenue de Monseigneur le Duc d’Anjou, Gournay 2002: 175.): that is, to manage to fight in spite of the weakness associated with her femaleness. Her combativeness can be explained by the fact that she has an exceptional soul. This selfassessment appears notably in the treatise Antipathie des âmes basses et hautes [Antipathy of base and lofty souls]. Therein, Gournay develops an elitist way of thinking similar to erudite libertines. When one is fortunate enough to have a beautiful soul, it imposes behavior and lifestyle that is out of the ordinary: “quiconque se gouverne par la sottise de son voisin, estoit digne de naistre plus sot 410

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que luy: c’est pourquoy je m’en abstiendray si je puis” [“whoever allows himself to be guided by the foolishness of his neighbor is worthy of being born more foolish than he: this is why I abstain if I can”] (Des diminutifs françois, Gournay 2002: 1121). Wise people are both rare and misunderstood by common folk among whom they pass for “sauvages” [“savages”] (Antipathie des âmes basses et hautes, Gournay 2002: 775). Ordinary people (who Gournay likes to call “sots” [“idiots”] just as the libertines did) are in fact incapable of distinguishing between “supresme suffisance” [“the highest intelligence”] and “l‘extravagance” [“foolishness”] (Ibidem, Gournay 2002: 776). Thus, lofty souls are not admired by the common people (among whom Gournay ranks ordinary scholars, as would an erudite libertine or a Cartesian9): they “sont hors de juste congnoissance en public, parce qu’ils sont hors de la proportion des autres; ils n’ont ny nom, ny tiltre, ni tiltre de profession” [“are not properly appreciated by the public because they are out of proportion to others; they have neither name nor title, nor professional title”] (Bienvenue de Monseigneur le duc d’Anjou, Gournay 2002: 181–82.). Not capable of being judged by common people, lofty souls are obliged to judge themselves, independently of the usual standards that do not allow them to be measured. This elitism leads to a specific ethic that completely separates the wise from common values, including Christian ones. Thus, they are allowed to avenge themselves, something the most well-established Christian precepts formally forbid. Gournay’s ethical self-portrait emphasizes this singular destiny of the wise. Lofty souls are guided by “la Raison universelle” [“universal Reason”] (Si la vangeance est licite, Gournay 2002: 766), which renders them capable of judging all laws, human as well as divine. And even though Christ condemns vengeance, it is authorized for those who correctly judge offenses. In this case, the very principle of justice presupposes protecting oneself from the persecutions of base individuals and responding blow for blow. Reason is a principle of judgment in several senses: it makes it possible to categorize people, to interpret the laws but also to take justice into one’s own hands. A lofty soul thus has the right to judge everything and to act in consequence of the fact that the common people do not understand it, that its very portrait is not comprehensible to them. This freedom of judgment is absolute as it touches on theological questions. An example that stands out is the audacity of Gournay’s attack on the clergy, whom she accuses of a lack of rigor in their religious statements and practices. Comparing herself to Diotima, to whom Socrates deigned to listen, she warns the clergy to take her seriously. She clarifies that they are not in a position to guide the conscience of ladies who “venoient à se déniaiser” [“had enlightened themselves”] (Advis à quelques gens d’Eglise, Gournay 2002: 800.). But enlightenment is the prerogative of a strong mind (see Cavaillé 2013). With her reasonable and enlightened mind, Gournay links herself to prominent figures of wisdom such as Diotima. This greatness is also a weakness: the theme of the persecution of the wise is never far away. The wise must organize themselves to protect each other. In the early modern era, a literary career was built in codified stages, one of the most important of which was mentoring, a process for recognizing and protecting a protégé (of any sex) entering intellectual circles. This process worked perfectly for Gournay: she had a very illustrious adoptive father (Montaigne) and an equally renowned adoptive brother ( Justus Lipsius). As an enthusiastic reader of Montaigne, she wrote to him and a friendship developed between them. This friendship was not private but public as Montaigne paid homage to his “fille d’alliance” [“adoptive daughter”] in his Essais. Above all, he entrusted her with the task of publishing his work posthumously. The use of the term “mentoring” in this case was very protective, as Montaigne’s widow attests to her role as editor of the Essais in their final version. But this mentoring operation is crucial to the self-portrait.10 Indeed, the authenticity of this passage still raises questions, with some considering it was added by Gournay herself. Ultimately it does not matter if this passage is the work of Montaigne or of Gournay,11 it is part of the latter’s portrait. It is even a determining element, then as today. The protection of her adoptive father constitutes the conferral of a kind of intellectual honor, but it also translates to a clear and distinguished function in the world of letters: that of the 411

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editor of the Essais. Mentoring is thus not only symbolic but also gives Gournay a job, a professional activity in this world. With such a mission to accomplish, she could no longer be ignored. Moreover, she excelled at it, both as the scientific director of the project (the quality of her edition of the Essais was recognized in her time and long afterward) and as the work’s distributor (she handled the granting of privileges like no other, for Montaigne and for herself ). With Justus Lipsius, the process is interesting because it is more ambiguous. Who is the protector and who is the protégé in this relationship? Justus Lipsius writes to Gournay to praise her excellence. In doing so he seems to bring her international recognition in the republic of letters. But at the same time, he aims to reinforce his connection with Montaigne by being accepted as a member of his extended family in a way. Here, then, Gournay is as much a protector as a protégé. The ambivalence of this protective bond also extends to Montaigne himself. Gournay constitutes a part of his literary personality thanks to this link, but she also plays an important role in the constitution of the portrait of Montaigne for posterity through her work as an editor. She sees it as protecting the work of Montaigne, notably through a defense of his style against the new canon of Malherbe and his friends impoverishing the French language. Her integration into the world of letters is final when the protégé becomes the protector unambiguously. I am thinking, for example, of Conrart, a young aspirant to this world who planned to go see her because he was seeking the acceptance of already recognized scholars (see Shapira 2003). We might also recall her relationship with Schurman, who praised her. Gournay promised to cite her favorably in return.12 In this case, there is an exchange of good manners between learned women. To judge and be judged constitutes a normal interaction between scholars, provided the judgment is fair (see Traicté sur la poësie. Qui sert d’Advertissement au Lecteur, Gournay 2002: 240). Her ability to master the rituals of initiation to break into the world of letters came to light thanks to her work on language. The primary language for scholars was Latin. She learned it on her own and did not feel capable of expressing herself in it. Nevertheless, she did not hesitate to translate and publish numerous Latin texts. On the one hand, this shows how she conformed to the common scholarly culture (she considered it necessary to understand Latin to be a part of it). On the other, it serves as a reminder of her hard work and determination: [I hardly know good French, and even less the truth of Latin: but I hide in its shadow so that few people see me, my puny glow fearing the light.] Je ne sçay guere de bon François, encore moins sçay-je à la verité de Latin: mais je me cache soubs son ombrage, pour estre veue de peu de gens, mon chetif lustre craignant la lumiere. (Adieu, De l’ame du Roy de France et de Navarre Henry le Grand à la Royne. Avec, la defence des peres jesuistes, Gournay (2002): 199)13 Her glow is undoubtedly puny, but it is certainly there. What better proof of her quality of a woman of letters than to take an interest in words themselves: authorized, forbidden, old, new. Gournay’s work as a linguist is well-known. It made her famous at the time by establishing her as the leader of a faction, that of those who defended the vigor and inventiveness of language. Becoming established as an arbiter and judge of the French language confirms that the lofty mind can judge anything and should freely express itself in the public sphere without its social deficiency hiding its intellectual and ethical superiority.

30.2  Struggles of a Lofty Soul The construction of her self-portrait is thus public and, as such, it is social but also political. Gournay’s engagement in various controversies and polemics of the time shows that taking action means condemning and fighting. Writing is a social and political position as much as a literary one. 412

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It is a public act that situates its author in the field of opinion and debate. On multiple occasions, it is Gournay who provokes it. She willingly takes part in society as she introduces concerns and points of view addressed to it (questions of religion, gender, or language, for example). Her writing is also political because it always exudes a particular conception of the common good, whether at the level of the republic of letters or of the kingdom. And the common good for Gournay presupposes a world without false devotion, without hypocrisy, without malice, without ridicule, and, notably, without misogyny, all themes that she develops in her work. We know that in her defense of women, Gournay supports the scheme of gender equality, an original position for her time (most philogynists adopting that of women’s superiority). But isn’t this in contradiction to the elitism that distinguishes lofty souls from low ones? The fact that she is a woman contributes greatly to her weakness, as she points out in L’égalité des hommes et des femmes [The Equality of Men and Women] and Le grief des dames [The Ladies’ Complaint]. But her criticism is more precisely that her sex discredits her in the eyes of the public in general and of all kinds of scholars in particular. Hence, it is indeed a matter of recognizing her mind. Equality would guarantee that her mind be judged just like a man’s because there is “unité des deux sexes” [“unity of the sexes”] (De l’égalité des hommes et des femmes, Gournay 2002: 979). In today’s terms, such a statement would seem to indicate gender neutrality rather than similarity. Sex is a secondary difference linked only to procreation (Ibidem, Gournay 2002: 978).14 It therefore never constitutes a criterion for judging a body of work and establishing a hierarchy. This model of neutrality is, moreover, coherent with the skeptical process of isostheneia. It is easy to relativize the importance of gender because it does not define the being. The intelligent man and the intelligent woman are perfectly equal in balance of judgment. Equality should make it possible to distinguish between lofty and base souls independently of sex. Gournay’s republic of letters is not a female republic or a society of women. Thus, there is good reason to distinguish, to rank. And in that regard, Gournay argues for gender equality, but she is not an egalitarian. Her thought is elitist. She defends the idea of hierarchical differences (that is, differences that produce a legitimate hierarchy as opposed to the one produced by titles of nobility). Her criterion is neither gender nor rank. She proposes another criterion of excellence than those traditionally recognized in society: nobility of the soul. It is both an intellectual and a moral standard. It defines an aristocracy of thought and good morals outlining a perfect republic of letters in which each recognizes the other in proportion to their intellectual and moral value, regardless of their gender. The removal of gender bias should lead to a free competition of ideas and talent. Gournay repeatedly insists that she does not fear comparison with anyone.15 But in an unjust society, bad individuals can attack “sufisans” [“intelligent ones”] when they are weak. Si la vangeance est licite [If vengeance is licit], the treatise defending the right of lofty souls to avenge themselves against base ones, is fundamental. It shows the extent of the imbalance that exists between the just and the unjust to the point of making it a general social problem. It is intolerable that the former’s reputation can be abused by the latter. The right to vengeance therefore, despite theological interdictions, should be allowed to put an end to a real social scandal, the persecution of lofty and timid souls, especially when they belong to women. Si la vangeance est licite is at once a self-portrait and a public and political stance: society must grant its most excellent parts the means to act and restrain the wicked. If the excellent allow the bad to attack them, it seems to comply with the prohibition of vengeance, but it violates another of God’s commandments, namely that the human being be preserved in being. The argument opposes two theological imperatives by ranking them. Men are above all images of God, whose main aim is their preservation. In a society where the best live under threat from bad individuals, it is God’s will as the creator that is flouted. In a way, then, vengeance finds itself in the position of the defender of the conatus, in accordance with the divine plan (Si la vangeance est licite, Gournay 2002: 758). This 413

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reasoning shows Gournay’s rhetorical and dialectical skill: she uses theological theses in the service of a philosophical demonstration. Human beings are made to persevere in their being, especially if they are excellent. The distinction between the ordinary and the excellent has moral, political, and theological implications. As common minds are not able to grasp this distinction, it is up to the intelligent to take charge of their own description and defense. Their “intelligence” means that they avoid ordinary laws. For they are the only ones who know how close good and evil are, requiring a clear gaze to rightly distinguish them. Vengeance can be either just or unjust depending on who is practicing it. This justification of a passion so seemingly negative as vengeance explains Gournay’s anthropology. Even superior humans need not renounce their passions. They should guide them rationally. [But not only as a soul or an action raises itself does the Vulgar (people’s) ability to rightly discern them, if I have not already said it in this Chapter and elsewhere on occasion; but further, it is so much more distant to be able to be convinced by this knowledge of the price of the rules and actions of fine souls; that the most excellent Good is that which borders Evil without touching it: perfection in all things being that to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away without wronging it: above all to things of this kind, perceptive abilities, wherewithal and orderly conduct of a healthy and lofty Reason, and the exact measure required of human behavior and moral obligations. Such that the right action and the good judgment of fine souls when they reach the height of their excellence, escapes the examination and approval of the Common (folk), by their own nature and loftiness, and sometimes even by their close proximity to evil. How can the common people distinguish the connections, so key and so delicate, that are sometimes found between these two things?] Or non seulement à mesure qu’une ame ou qu’une action s’eslevent plus haut, la veue du Vulgaire s’afoiblit à les discerner justement, si je ne l’ay desjà dit dans ce Chapitre et ailleurs par occasion; mais davantage, il est tant plus esloigné, de pouvoir mordre à cette cognoissance du prix des jugemens et sentimens, des reiglemens et des actions des belles ames; que le plus excellent Bien est celuy qui s’avoisine du Mal sans y toucher: la perfection en toutes choses, estant ce, à quoy l’on ne peut rien adjouster ny diminuer, sans luy faire tort: sur tout aux choses de cette espèce, sentimens, ordres et reiglemens d’une saine et haute Raison, et mesure exacte requise aux mœurs et devoir humains. De façon que le bien-faire et le bien juger des belles ames, quand ils se portent au poinct de leur excellence, eschappent à la perquisition et approbation du Commun, par leur propres nature et hautesse, et quelquefois mesme encore par le proche voisinage du mal. Comment le vulgaire pourroit-il distinguer les joinctures si primes et si delicates qui se trouvent quelquefois entre ces deux choses? (Antipathie des âmes hautes et basses, Gournay 2002: 782) The difference between good and evil is slight. Ordinary people are not able to appreciate it. The lofty soul therefore develops its own morality, quite distinct from that of the fool. The way Gournay presents this is important: the superior soul knows that the greatest good is very close to evil; it alone can rightly distinguish them. Here Gournay’s ethics takes on almost Machiavellian touches since those who have superior aims that are superior and good for everyone do not have ordinary values and know how to use evil. This raises a delicate question: does Gournay’s exemplarity as a lofty soul exempt her from the particularities related to her sex and her gender? One statement catches our attention: [My work dares to boast that since that divine Book that I have just mentioned (the Essais), none has surpassed it in reasoning, for good or for ill. It will be good to see later what Work 414

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by a woman victorious over the mischief of the times and of men, will be capable of erasing mine.] Mon ouvrage s’ose vanter, que depuis ce divin Livre que je viens de nommer [les Essais], aucun ne s’est porté plus avant que lui dans le raisonnement, soit bien soit mal. Il sera bon de voir après, quel Labeur de femme vainqueur de la malice des temps et des hommes, sera capable d’effacer le mien. (Discours sur ce livre, Gournay 2002: 557) Gournay asserts herself as the modern equal of Montaigne as far reasoning goes. But she then seems to put herself in competition with only women with regard to the posterity of her work.16 If the works are to be judged making a distinction between the sexes, the initial idea of unity, and thus neutrality, is ousted. This is explained by what can be said to be a political observation: as long as there is a gender privilege, she is considered as a woman before she is considered as an author and must propose writing strategies to combat this bias. Stating loudly and publicly that she is a woman is less a revindication than a warning against the biased readings this might lead to. It does not seem to me that she is addressing a female public. She asks lofty souls to recognize her as one independently of her sex. This strategy for addressing her public can also change completely to produce the same effect, that is to warn against gender bias. For example, she asks her reader to respond to her as though she were a man (see Bauschatz 1991:355). Changing sex to erase all sexes.

30.3  Portraits in Philosophy Indeed, without this sexist bias, it is possible to identify the authors, both male and female, who are worthy of interest. Here again, Gournay shows a great capacity for reflection, making explicit the criteria for judging a work: [For a Work to merit being called a Book, it must bring to the Public its own new goods, born in the mind of the Author. What I call an Original Book is not one that is entirely original, because almost none are, but rather one that is so for the greater part of its length. After having considered whether my Work is Original, it is necessary to see whether it is of a good genre: & its genre is essentially the Discourse on reason. This Discourse on reason should be examined just on its own & then in comparison with other Writings of the same kind & of this Century: because the Ancients fly too high to bear comparison with us, among which Ancients I place the Essais.] Pour faire qu’une Œuvre mérite ce nom de Livre, il faut qu’elle apporte au Public des biens propres et nouveaux, nez en l’esprit de leur Autheur. J’appelle Livre Original, non pas celuy qui l’est entierement, pource qu’il ne s’en trouveroit presque point de cette marque, mais bien, celuy qui l’est pour la pluspart de son estenduë. Après avoir consideré si mon Ouvrage est Original, il faut voir s’il l’est en un bon genre: & son genre de gros en gros c’est le Discours de la raison. Ce Discours de la raison se doit examiner simplement par soy-mesme, & en suite par comparaison des autres Escrits de mesme espece, & du Siecle: à cause que les Anciens portent leur volée trop haut pour souffrir nos paralleles, entre lesquels Anciens, je loge les Essais. (Discours sur ce livre, Gournay 2002: 556–57) The order of these criteria is important: originality, first of all, but which is judged in relation to the work as a whole because no thought is entirely original. Next, genre, which alone decides the value of originality. And that is the key point: an original work is only of interest if it offers a “Discours de la raison” [“Discourse on reason”]: if, therefore, it belongs to the rational “genre.” The reader must examine this discourse in and of itself but also in comparison with other works. 415

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The comparative method then shows the extent to which competition is healthy when it is unbiased. Reasons are discussed publicly and collectively. “[La] bonne et vraye discipline” [“good and true discipline”] is in fact “[la] discipline de la Raison et des Mœurs” [“discipline of Reason and Behavior”] (De l’éducation des enfants de France, Gournay 2002: 582.). Only reason’s judgment should be evaluated in the public space. It is also consistent with “[le] Franc arbitre” [“Free Will”] granted by God. And Gournay defends a univocity that makes it possible to think that a rational human judgment corresponds to divine laws.17 This is a crucial point in her thought, which allows us to question the fideism that several commentators have attributed to her. God is rational, which means that his laws are as well, and human beings can therefore judge them. Such a thesis is incompatible with fideism in any form. Finally, reason is the prerogative of lofty souls; it guides their behavior and allows a happy mixture of reason and passion. This mix distinguishes the wise (who Gournay also calls “entendemens de fin or” [“minds of fine gold”]) from fools (Antipathie des âmes basses et hautes, Gournay 2002: 783.). Two kinds of lives corresponding to two kinds of souls now also designate two kinds of understanding: “les vies relevées par-dessus l’ordinaire, que les anciens nommoient Philosophiques, ont esté, sont et seront tousjours heurtées du vulgaire” [“lives elevated above the ordinary, which the ancients call Philosophical, have been, and will always be, injured by vulgarity”] (Adieu, De l’ame du Roy de France et de Navarre Henry le Grand à la Royne. Avec, la defence des peres jesuistes, Gournay 2002: 200.). Reason is the sole arbiter of lives and of works. It is the philosophical lives that are remarkable. So that she herself can be judged objectively, Gournay reflects on the correct way to read authors. She notably gives us a real way of reading her work that consists of three levels: first, one must decide whether in general she is right on the subject in question; next, one must examine the relevance of the “raisons particulières” [“specific reasoning”] on which the general thesis considered to be rational is based; finally, one must consider whether it is accompanied by “quelque jugement et bien-seance qui le puissent soûtenir” [“a certain judgement and propriety that can support it”] (Discours sur ce livre, Gournay 2002: 561.). A piece of writing thus mobilizes different levels of argumentation that concern the general theses, the specific demonstrations and the opinions and illustrations that accompany the first two purely rational levels. Everything in this method is reduced to rational examination. Gournay leads a philosophical life and writes as a philosopher. This self-representation has been the object of debate, in her time as in ours. And in this respect, it becomes apparent that Gournay constitutes a case study on the philosophical canon and its creation, re-creation, and transformation. We must distinguish what we perceive a philosopher to be from the perception of the early modern period. One could certainly consider Gournay to be a philosopher by today’s standards, but this does not mean that she was perceived as such at the time. I have already shown how she portrays herself as a philosopher in the sense that she lives the philosophical existence of intellectually and ethically superior beings. But if she considers herself a philosopher, what about other people? How do they see her? It turns out that Gournay was already a case study in her time. Her case, her status, and her function were debated in the republic of letters in the seventeenth century. Guez de Balzac, in particular, an important man of letters and eminent critic of literary habitus, wonders about her case. He uses her as an example in a debate on the feminization of names, and more specifically trade names in the literary field. This decision clearly shows that Gournay belongs to this field, even if she constitutes an element that is more difficult to qualify than others because of her femaleness. [For he who would rank Miss Gournay among modern Authors and call her a Poet and a Philosopher, it seems to me that he has not done something as inappropriate as one might imagine: nor did he who asked her when she had changed her sex was not so clever that we 416

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can’t find a response. It is a rule laid down by the Grammarian Theodosius, and alleged by an old Interpreter of Ovid, that nouns that do not signify some position or some profession are not (201) less feminine than masculine, like dux, tyrannus, philosophus. And on this principle of grammar Servius is in agreement with Theodosius, adding to the three previous examples auctor, senator, balneator, fullo, which he says are of the common type (...) That if the usage of a nascent language, or at the very least a not very cultivated one, is not yet well assured, and if we are not experienced in a new this, as our Grammar is and our rules for speech; in that case, in my opinion, we must take the ear’s advice and choose that which shocks it the least and has the softest pronunciation. For example, I would say instead that Miss Gournay is a Poet rather than a Poetesse, and a Philosopher rather than a Philosophesse.] Pour celui qui donne rang à mademoiselle de Gournay entre les Auteurs modernes, et l’appelle Poète et Philosophe, il me semble qu’il n’a pas commis une telle incongruité que l’on se l’imagine: ni celui qui lui a demandé depuis quand elle avait changé de sexe, n’a pas dit un si bon mot qu’on ne puisse lui répondre. C’est une règle posée par le Grammairien Théodoze, et alléguée par un vieil Interprète d’Ovide, que les noms qui ne signifient pas quelque dignité ou quelque profession, ne sont (201) pas moins féminins que masculins, comme dux, tyrannus, philosophus. Et de ce principe de grammaire Servius demeure d’accord avec Théodoze, ajoutant aux trois autres exemples précédents auctor, senator, balneator, fullo, qu’il dit être du genre commun (...) Que si l’usage d’une langue naissante, ou à tout le moins peu cultivée, n’est pas encore bien assuré, et si nous ne sommes pas assez confirmés dans une chose nouvelle, comme l’est notre Grammaire et nos règles de parler; en ce cas là, à mon avis, il faut prendre conseil de l’oreille, et choisir ce qui la choque le moins et qui est plus doux à la prononciation. Par exemple, je dirai plutôt que mademoiselle de Gournay est Poète que Poètesse, et Philosophe que Philosophesse. (Guez de Balzac, quoted in Fogel 2004: 200–1)18 Here, first of all, Gournay has her status as an early modern author confirmed. She is then immediately defined as both a poet and a philosopher. Balzac’s position is that the names in question should not be feminized because they are suitable for authors of both sexes. There is no reason to take one’s gender into account to be a philosopher. This profession is neutral, and it is for this reason that there is no need to feminize Gournay’s philosopher title. This conclusion from Guez de Balzac is all the more meaningful as he had railed several years previously against Gournay’s claim that she was a full-fledged participant in this world of letters. Through her work and her action, she became a poet and a philosopher. In this case, this refusal to feminize these terms shows that she has been fully accepted in this world: she is one of them. It seems, therefore, that contemporary historiography cannot obscure this crucial fact: even a famously misogynist19 intellectual like Balzac calls her a philosopher. There is no need to justify this status at length since she demands and obtains it in her lifetime, even from her detractors. We can thus note this profession and this recognition, even if they were later obscured in the historiography of philosophy, with Gournay not appearing in the philosophical pantheon until the end of the twentieth century. The important thing is that certain writers today have restored Gournay to this original status. They proceed with her as with other philosophers, seeking her precise philosophical influences. This approach is the clearest way today to include Gournay in the category of philosophers. Understanding a philosopher always involves measuring the influence of other philosophers. Two trends can be distinguished: one that emphasizes skeptical influence (see O’Neill 2006; Broad and Green 2009: 110–39) and one that shows the Aristotelian influence (see Deslauriers 2019). Our analysis identified some skeptical influences and so that is what must be developed here. The idea that Gournay inherited above all a Montaignian-type pyrrhonism is based on two 417

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key themes: a distrust of reason, considered inadequate; and a tendency to weigh up arguments in order to, it would seem, subsequently dismiss them and thus cancel them out. This pyrrhonian influence would moreover explain the choice of religious authority rather than philosophical demonstration that Gournay stakes out at the beginning of L’égalité (Egalité des hommes et des femmes, Gournay 2002: 967). But in reality, Gournay begins this work by drawing on philosophers and philosophy at length. She presents them using an ordinary and yet slightly ambiguous vocabulary: Socrates is “divine” (Ibidem, Gournay 2002: 967) women “[ont] enseigné cathédralement (…) toutes sortes de disciples” [“publicly taught (…) all kinds of disciples”]. The first women she cites as examples are philosophers: Hypatia, Themistoclea and Theano, Pythagoras’ wife, who “dictait comme lui la Philosophie” [“wrote Philosophy as he did”] (Idem, Gournay 2002: 968). And she never really leaves these philosophical arguments and references behind in what follows. The share of the text reserved for philosophy is quantitatively much larger than that dedicated to theology. We also note that the latter is essentially mobilized as a reservoir of examples of historical value. Indeed, one of its main arguments (female priesthood) combines pagan and Christian rites (Idem, Gournay 2002: 982). The Sibyls appear alongside Mary-Magdalene, Seneca alongside Ronsard, even in the part of the work that is supposed to be based on theological authority. More generally, however, the ethos of the author, as we have analyzed it, shows that the discourse of reason is the only one that can free us from prejudices and injustices. On the one hand, the skeptical theme of reason’s weakness and fickleness is not evident in Gournay’s work. On the other hand, the theological proofs are always understood within a rational line of argument and explained in a purely logical (and uninspired) way. For example, it has been shown that a wise person can break free from the usual divine commandments when they flout that which is dictated by reason (e.g., self-preservation). So indeed, it is possible to mobilize another more general theological theme to support this point of view: that of the human being created in God’s image. Thus, one can always rationally discuss theological theories. Moreover, the equality referred to in the pamphlet cannot be understood as an equivalence in the skeptical sense. Mobilizing the idea that women can be placed “[en] égale contrebalance des hommes” [“in equal balance with men”] (Idem, Gournay 2002: 973) is not intended to produce doubt and indecision. Restoring balance does not eliminate the reasons for or against, let alone suspend judgment. The isosthenic process does not have the skeptical sense of annihilating all opposing arguments. Equality is not the balance of reasons, which prevents decisions. It is a philosophical theory supported by many reasons and an ethical decision, a choice that rules out any possible épokhè. Gournay’s thought is thus philosophical precisely because it is not really either skeptical or fideist. Indifference is not an acceptable philosophical aim for Gournay. This distances her from ancient skepticism while perhaps bringing her closer to early modern libertinism. This, it seems to me, is where Gournay’s skeptical legacy lies, if we are looking for one. From this point of view, Gournay’s most likely philosophical influence is not Montaigne but a certain reading of Montaigne, that of Pierre Charron. In his De la sagesse (1601), he insists on the importance of moral philosophy in relation to the other branches of philosophy. He distinguishes radically between the common and the wise and develops an elitist morality.20 They have great “suffisance” (high intelligence) and common men distrust and despise them.21 In her moral thought, Gournay bases her analyses on the distinction between the wise and the foolish in a way that does not hide the fact that the former are the ones whose minds are strong enough to confront all questions, including theological ones. Their mental superiority should be protected against the judgment and the attacks of fools. This is an ethical and social necessity that constitutes her struggle in life and in her work. Her self-portrait sheds light on a society that is unequal based on unacceptable philosophical criteria. The criticism of society makes it possible to show the superiority of a lofty soul in line with ethically acceptable criteria.

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30.4 Conclusion Gournay explains that she cannot sew,22 an art traditionally and symbolically associated with women. She must thus invent another garment, which will be neither that traditionally worn women nor that of the learned. She tailors it in her own way, loading her distaff. Loaded, the distaff becomes another instrument altogether, one that weaves an entirely different article of clothing. Thanks to her writings and her actions in the public sphere, she produces a philosopher’s gown, which, in her mind, is undoubtedly unisex.

Notes 1 “Je suis bien fort depitée contre les jugemens de nostre temps en matiere d’escrits ; veu que cestuy-cy d’abondant est hors de mon gibier, que je suis foible outre cela d’entendement et de robe” [“I am very annoyed by the judgments of our time with respect to written work; seeing as this, moreover, is outside of my competence, as I am weak besides in understanding and in dress”], and also “j’auray peut-estre assez de courage, quoy qu’il en faille beaucoup, veu ma robe, et le goust qu’a de ses pareilles, et moy de luy, le siecle où nous vivons ; pour dire je ne sçay quoy, sur ton institution” [I will perhaps have enough courage, although it would require a great deal, considering my dress, and the opinion the world in which we live has of its ilk, and I of it; to say I know not what of your education], Bienvenue de Monseigneur le duc d’Anjou, Gournay 2002: 163 and 166 respectively. [All quotes from Gournay are taken from this edition]. 2 “Some of them will still laugh from their core or their lips at these counterargument, given my dress: but my God, MADAM, what I would dare say if I was assured that your Majesty would not hear me, that from the time that men were first given this prescribed role, of which they talk excessively in so many places, of laughing at women’s reactions, their heads were made like mine, and those of women as well like those of the men in question” [Quelqu’un d’eux encore rira du cœur ou des lévres de ces contre-touches, veu ma robe: mais mon Dieu, MADAME, que j’oserois bien dire si j’estois asseurée que vostre Majesté ne m’ouyst pas, que du temps qu’on donna premierement aux hommes ce roolle prescrit, duquel ils piaffent en maints lieux, de rire de la replique des femmes, leur teste estoit faicte comme la mienne, et celle des femmes aussi, comme celle des hommes dont il s’agit”], Adieu, De l’ame du Roy de France et de Navarre Henry le Grand à la Royne. Avec, la defence des peres jesuistes. (1610), Gournay (2002): 232. 3 In addition to specifically autobiographical texts such as the Peincture des mœurs, a poem about herself, or the Apologie pour celle qui escrit, most of Gournay’s texts include reflections on herself. We will therefore have to call on a wide variety of writings to make out the author’s self-portrait. 4 See for example the last paragraph (11.4) of Spinoza’s Traité politique [Political Treatise] where women’s beauty is the reason they should be excluded from citizenship (Spinoza 1925: III.360). 5 See the article on “Gournai” in Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique that explains that like all women, Gournay would have preferred to be beautiful rather than intelligent! (Bayle 1820: 585, note B). 6 “Sinon quelle teste bien faite ne detestera cette interdiction chatemine; qui sous ombre d’establir une saincteté de mœurs egorge les bons, sur tout s’ils sont feibles, c’est a dire double object de protection du Ciel; et cela pour édifier un triomphe aux méchans? Or qu’il ne soit vray, que le bannissement et la rejection de la vangeance, esgorge sur tout les bons et les foibles, voicy dequoy: bien qu’il soit veritable que toutes les Loix Civiles, qui se meslent, dit-on, de l’interdire aussi, doivent tendre, comme les Celestes, à proteger sur toutes choses, après les bons, les feibles et la feiblesse.” [“Otherwise what wellformed mind will not hate this prohibition; which, under the guise of establishing righteous behavior, oppresses the good, especially if they are weak, which is to say doubly protected by Heaven; and this to create a victory for the wicked? Now it is true that the banishment and rejection of vengeance tears apart the good and the weak especially, this is why: although it is true that all the Civil Laws, which, they say, are also involved in its prohibition, should aim, like the Heavenly ones, to protect above all, after the good, the weak and weakness.”] Si la vangeance est licite, Gournay (2002): 752. 7 This poverty is fundamental to understanding her personality as an intellectual since she explains that she has to renounce hosting a salon (which was not yet the expression at the time) and conducting scientific experiments requiring expensive equipment. See Apologie pour celle qui escrit, Gournay (2002): 1380.

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Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin 8 “Donnant des louanges mesurées, et retenues, en un siecle où chascun les donne, et consequemment, où chacun les requiert, sans mesure” [“Giving measured and restrained praise in a century when everyone gives it and, as a consequence, demands it without moderation”], Bienvenue de Monseigneur le duc d’Anjou, Gournay (2002): 172. 9 De l’éducation des enfants de France, p. 604. 10 An important part of the mentoring process is based on imitation; there are ambiguities when it concerns people of different sexes. See the analysis of Bauschatz (1991): 359. 11 Here I follow the somewhat provocative albeit convincing remarks of D. de Courcelles: dans la mesure où le texte [sur la fille d’alliance] a été durablement inclus dans les Essais et traditionnellement attribué à Montaigne par des générations de lecteurs de son temps et des temps suivants, dans la mesure également où Michel Simonin démontre de façon convaincante que cette édition de 1595 a été préparée minutieusement par Montaigne lui-même, il n’y a pas de raison de mettre en doute la vérité de ce texte, ce qui n’implique pas forcément son authenticité. Mais ici l’authenticité importe peu. Ce qui importe, c’est la vérité que le texte indique [Insofar as the text (about his adoptive daughter) has been permanently included in the Essais and traditionally attributed to Montaigne by generations of readers in his own time and thereafter, and insofar as Michel Simonin shows in convincing fashion that the 1595 edition was meticulously prepared by Montaigne himself, there is no reason to doubt the truth of this text, which does not necessarily imply authenticity. But authenticity is of little importance here. What is important is the truth that the text indicates]. (Courcelles 1995: 464, note 1) 12 On the importance and the organization of these mentoring processes between learned women in a group that starts with Gournay, see Pal (2012). 13 On this image of the shadow that recalls the first title of her collected works, L’Ombre de la Damoiselle de Gournay, see B. Zedler (1989): 296. 14 For further reflection on gender neutrality in Gournay, we can refer to LaBrada (2017). 15 For example: “Il sera bon de regarder après quel rang ce Traitté doit tenir en gros par comparaison, entre ceux qui regardent ce mesme but de l’honneur et de la deffence des Dames” [“It will be good to look at how this Treatise must rank on the whole in comparison with those that have this same purpose of the honor and defense of Women”], (Discours sur ce livre, Gournay (2002): 563). 16 Some interpretations of these two feminist treatises seem to follow the same lines. Lewis, for example, considers that they are addressed to a uniquely female readership (Lewis 1999). To this argument we might add that of Bauschautz: The use of the feminine ‘celle’ [toutesfois je sçay bien que celle de nous deux qui a tort en cela…] in this last quotation suggests one reason why Gournay now feels more equality with her reader than she did earlier: many of her current readers are women, and so do not intimidate her as Montaigne and other male humanist readers tended to do. (Bauschautz 1994: 195) 17 “L’on ne doit nullement douter, que ce grand Dieu, qui nous a departy la Raison pour pierre de touche, et pour Phare en ceste vie, n’ayt conformé ses Loix sur elle, ou elle sur ses Loix” [“We should not doubt that this great God who assigned us Reason as a touchstone and a Beacon in this life, has shaped his laws based on it, or vice versa”], Si la vangeance est licite, Gournay (2002): 752. 18 The passage is taken from a letter to M. Girard dated May 7, 1634. 19 He was among those who refused to admit women to the French Academy. 20 He distinguishes between weak minds, mediocre minds and superior minds (see Charron (1827): I, XLV, 334–35). 21 Charron (1827): I, XLV, 336. 22 “On dit que les femmes n’ont jamais le filet que pour recoudre leur linge; la reigle est pourtant faulce en moy, qui ne sçay coudre et qui n’aime guere à parler” [They say that women only have thread to resew their cloth; the rule does not apply to me: I do not know how to sew and do not at all like to talk”], Bienvenue de Monseigneur le duc d’Anjou, Gournay (2002): 183.

Bibliography Bauschatz C. (1991) “Imitation, Writing, and Self-Study in Marie de Gournay’s 1595 ‘Preface’ to Montaigne’s Essais,” in M-R. Logan and P. Rudnytsky (eds.), Contending Kingdoms, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 346–64.

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Marie de Gournay (1994) “Les Puissances de Vostre Empire. Changing Power Relations in Marie de Gournay’s Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne from 1594 to 1626,” in A. Larsen and C. Winn (eds.), Renaissance Women Writers, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 189–208. Bayle, P. (1820) “Gournai,” in Desoer (ed.), Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, Tome 2, Paris Desoer, pp. 585–87. Broad, J. and K. Green. (2009) A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe. 1400–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavaillé, J-P. (2013) Les Déniaisés, Paris: Classiques Garnier. Charron, P. (1827) De la Sagesse I, XLV, Paris: Rapilly. de Courcelles, D. (1995) “Le rire de Marie de Gournay, Fille D’alliance de Montaigne,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25(3): 263–475. de Gournay, M. (2002) Œuvres Complètes, ed. J. -C. Arnould, 2 Vols., Paris: Honoré Champion. Deslauriers, M. (2019) “Marie de Gournay and Aristotle on the Unity of the Sexes,” in M. P. Lascano and E. O’Neill (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Cham: Springer, pp. 281–99. Fogel, M. (2004) Marie de Gournay: Itinéraires D’une Femme Savante, Paris: Fayard. LaBrada, E. (2017) “Unsexing Subjects: Marie de Gournay’s Philosophy of Sex Eliminativism,” in C. Brodsky and E. LaBrada (eds.), Inventing Agency. Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject, London: Bloomsbury. Lewis, D. (1999) “Marie de Gournay and the Engendering of Equality,” Teaching Philosophy 22(1): 53–76. O’Neill, E. (2006) “Justifying the Inclusion of Women in Our Histories of Philosophy: The Case of Marie de Gournay,” in L. Alcoff and E. Kittay (eds.), Guide to Feminist Philosophy, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Pal, C. (2012) Republic of Women. Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shapira, N. (2003) Un Professionnel des Lettres au XVIIe Siècle. Valentin Conrart, une Histoire Sociale, Seyssel: Champ Vallon. Shapiro, L. (2013) “The Outward and Inward Beauty of Early Modern Women,” in M.-F. Pellegrin (ed.), Penser au Féminin au XVIIe Siècle, Revue Philosophique, 138(3): 327–346.Spinoza, B. (1925) Opera, ed. C. Gebhardt, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag. Zedler, B. (1989) “Marie le Jars de Gournay, “ in M. E. Waithe (ed.), A History of Women Philosophers, Vol. II, Medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment Women Philosophers, A. D. 500–1600, Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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31 MADELEINE DE SCUDÉRY Moral Philosophy in a Gendered Key John J. Conley, S.J.1

Known for her novels and literary salon, Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) explored philosophical issues in a series of dialogues published toward the end of her prolific life. Concerned with moral philosophy, the dialogues often focus on the virtues and vices proper to the era’s aristocratic society, with a particular emphasis on the salon controversies swirling around the exercise of love. Her philosophical work stresses questions of gender. Scudéry repeatedly argues that moral virtues commonly believed to be reserved to men alone are in fact practiced by women as well and that signal gendered differences operate in the way in which each sex exercises the same array of virtues. In a series of literary orations, Scudéry also underscores how historically prominent women exercised the political and military virtues common opinion had wrongly ascribed to men alone.

31.1  Philosophical Formation A member of the minor Norman nobility, Madeleine de Scudéry was born in Le Havre on November 15, 1607.2 Orphaned in 1613 by the death of both parents, Scudéry’s education was supervised in Rouen by her uncle, a learned priest with connections at the French court. The curriculum featured reading, spelling, writing, drawing, painting, music, and dancing. It also included practical instruction in medicine, agriculture, gardening, needlework, and home economics. Literary formation was paramount in her educational program. Notably, she managed to master Spanish and Italian by studying the numerous books written in each language present in her house library. In her adolescence, she avidly read epic serial novels which would become her favored literary genre in her career as an author. Scudéry also began her philosophical formation with her reading of Plutarch (in Jacques Amyot’s French version), who introduced her to Stoicism, and the study of Montaigne, whose epistemological skepticism would durably influence her. Scudéry moved from Normandy to Paris in 1637, joining her brother Georges, a successful playwright. Through Georges’s literary connections, Mademoiselle de Scudéry quickly entered the salons of Paris. She frequented the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, hosted her salon, the famous chambre bleue.3 Notable literary women in the Rambouillet circle included Madame de Motteville, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Lafayette, and Catherine Descartes.4 Prominent literary men in the salon included Antoine Godeau, Pierre Corneille, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Valentin Conrart, Jean Chapelain, and Gilles de Ménage.5 Several of the salon’s authors, notably Balzac, defended religious and moral libertinism, a position Scudéry would repeatedly condemn in her later writings. 422

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During this literary apprenticeship in the chambre bleue, Scudéry began her own publishing career. Her historical novel, Ibrahim or the Illustrious Basa, appeared in 1641 and Illustrious Women or Heroic Harangues, a series of fictitious orations placed in the mouths of famous women, in 1642. Tellingly, both books were published under the name of her brother Georges, but Parisian literary circles soon divined the actual author of the works. The appearance of Artamène or the Great Cyrus, a novel printed in ten volumes from 1648 until 1653, sealed Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s literary fame. Containing more than 2 million words, the mammoth novel attracted a broad public devoted to serial historical romances. Exotically set in ancient Assyria, the romance was actually a roman-à-clef sketching various members of the chambre bleue designated through pseudonyms. Scudéry herself makes an appearance as Sappho. Both the novels and the orations express a proto-feminist perspective. Often mocked as melodramatic, the novels contain numerous abductions of the heroine, showing one of the ways in which women are abused by men. They develop a sustained critique of the distortion of power in the relationship between the sexes. This abuse becomes acute in cases of coerced marriage and rape. Similarly, the novels provide a negative portrait of abuses of power in the political relationship between superior and subject. The practice of slavery is singled out as especially egregious.6 In her oratorical harangues, one of the more unusual literary genres developed by her, Scudéry creates diatribes uttered by powerful women in a moment of crisis. Prominent characters include Cleopatra and Sappho. Many of the speeches condemn the silencing of women by gender prejudice and summon women to communicate their ideas through oral and written discourse. Appealing to historical precedent, they also argue that women have the capacity and the right to exercise political authority. The Scudéry siblings established a new home in the Marais neighborhood of Paris in 1653. In this residence, Mademoiselle de Scudéry conducted her famous Saturday salon: the samedis, where a large literary coterie assembled to discuss disputed literary and philosophical questions, especially those concerning the nature and types of love.7 The works of Montaigne, Pierre Charron, and Marguerite de Navarre were often cited as participants debated the nature of true friendship.8 Notable literary salon members included Madame de Sablé, Madame de Lafayette, Valentin Conrart, Paul Pellisson, Jean-François Sarasin, Gilles de Ménage, Jean Chapelain, and Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré.9 Especially influential on Scudéry’s later philosophical thought was Méré’s concept of honnêteté, the moderating virtue of decency, fairness, and tolerance that was at the antipodes of the religious fanaticism that had roiled France during the recent Wars of Religion. A critic of appeals to authority, Méré argued that truth could only emerge tentatively as the product of respectful discussion by informed parties on a topic. The polite conversation of the salon was a privileged site for such debates. Salonnières debated the novel philosophical theories of Descartes; Scudéry opposed the mechanistic Cartesian theory of matter, especially as it was applied to animals.10 Scudéry continued her prolific career as an author. Published in ten volumes, Clélie or a Roman History (1654–1661) contained Scudéry’s famous Carte de Tendre, a map of love.11 The map of Arcadia depicts the different obstacles (symbolized as mountains, lakes, and deserts) human love must overcome in its efforts to become properly spiritual. Succor is found in the picturesque villages of Love-Letters and Little-Tokens. With the ebbing of the public’s taste for prolix historical novels, Scudéry published brief novellas: Célinte (1661), Mathilde d’Aguilar (1667), and Promenade at Versailles (1669). Célinte and Mathilde d’Aguilar are psychological tales that examine certain distinctively feminine traits, such as the tendency toward curiosity. In Promenade at Versailles (1669), the royalist Scudéry lauds Louis XIV as a veritable mirror of moral virtues. A prolific correspondent, Scudéry exchanged letters with the leaders of European intellectual society, such as Bossuet, Fénelon, and Leibniz.12 In her letters to Catherine Descartes, Scudéry agreed with the niece’s opposition to her uncle’s mechanistic philosophy of biology.13 423

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Later in life, Scudéry published a series of dialogues labeled as “conversations.” Her most philosophical works, these dialogues focused on the moral and esthetic issues commonly debated in the salons. The books included dialogues extracted from her novels, dialogues reworked from earlier writings, and dialogues recently written for the new anthologies. These dialogue collections included Conversations on Different Subjects (1680), New Conversations on Different Subjects (1684), Moral Conversations (1686), New Moral Conversations (1688), and Moral Dialogues (1692). The dialogues reflect the issues debated in the salon hosted by Scudéry. The conversations often treat themes in moral philosophy: virtues and vices, the psychology of passions, the interplay between free will and a personal temperament shaped by the humors. Several dialogues deal with esthetics issues, such as the mimetic nature of art, music, and literature. The genre of dialogue used by Scudéry raises some problems for the interpretation of her thought. The dialectical framework of Scudéry’s philosophy can obscure which philosophical position she in fact is defending. In these dialogues, numerous speakers support contradictory positions on the issue under discussion. In such “conversations,” each person’s theses usually exhibit certain strengths and weaknesses. As the debate progresses, positions are changed, amended, or discarded. Some dialogues end on an inconclusive note. The interlocuters in Of Anger, for example, cannot finally determine whether anger is always a vice. The disputants concur that anger is a moral defect in most situations, especially when the angry person deliberately prolongs it, but they cannot agree to eliminate the possibility that in some circumstances expressions of anger are appropriate responses to flagrant injustice. Not all dialogues exhibit such agnostic conclusions. In many works, the interlocutors obviously agree on a certain philosophical question or one of the theories defended by a particular speaker is clearly more convincing than the theories championed by her opponents. Even here, however, positions are often affirmed tenuously, open to later challenge and modification. The rhetorical irony used by Scudéry can render the determination of philosophical stance even more problematic. Another hermeneutical problem springs from the skepticism, influenced by Montaigne, Scudéry often expresses concerning claims to knowledge. Of Incertitude analyzes the psychological roots of the widespread phenomenon of error. Personal emotion and cultural tradition are the principal obstacles to the accurate exercise of reason in the quest for objective knowledge. Just when we want to employ our reason and to make a careful examination of things in themselves, we realize that we believe only with the greatest doubt most of those things we once thought we knew with the firmest certitude. In our conduct of life, we are carried away by some blind impulse or by some custom we lazily follow without knowing why. (Scudéry 1686: 1.373) Like Montaigne and Descartes, Scudéry stresses how social custom can easily lead the noetic agent into error. But she also stresses how the more interior pull of personal temperament can distort noetic judgment and prevent the agent from objective perception of the real. Neither philosophy nor science is exempt from this incertitude. Many of the obscure disputes in these two domains are nothing more than a babble of contradictory authorities, a point repeatedly emphasized by Montaigne. As a contemporary example, she cites the controversy over the Cartesian theory of the vortex (Scudéry 1692: 1.211). Rooted in philosophical vanity and the taste for novel, nebulous theories, such controversies permit of no solution. Her skepticism is not without exception. She argues that God’s existence can be proved through a cosmological argument and exempts theological claims, based on faith and revelation, from critical scrutiny (Scudéry 1686: 1.431–60). Her skeptical epistemology, nonetheless, suggests the tenuousness of some of her affirmations in moral philosophy. As Laura J. Burch argues, Scudéry manifests a larger ambiguity

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in her writings concerning the relationship between women and the very enterprise of philosophy, given the inconclusive nature of many philosophical arguments.14 Scudéry’s works earned her a wide international reading public. During her lifetime, her books were translated into English, Spanish, Italian, German, and Arabic. Prominent literary institutions acknowledged her intellectual preeminence. She received the Académie française’s first literary award for her essay On Glory in 167115 and was elected a member of the Academy of the Ricovrati in Padua in 1684. Louis XIV granted her a royal pension. Nonetheless, a powerful Parisian literary elite criticized her works as incoherent and unreadable. The philosophy contained in them was condemned as second-hand, inaccurate, and confused. Furetière, Boileau, and Molière dismissed Scudéry as an uncultured pedant whose rambling romances and murky dialogues made no consistent arguments.16 Nicolas Boileau’s criticism was especially influential in later critiques of the philosophy of Scudéry. His Satire X claims that the love celebrated by Scudéry violates moral laws. You can see this in Clélie, where the heroine receives her lovers under the delicate name of friend. At first, she only takes small, permissible liberties. But soon you are in deep waters on the river of Tendre and you can navigate at will. (Boileau-Despréaux 1966: 67) Boileau’s Dialogue on Heroes of the Novel is even more severe. It skewers Scudéry’s works “for their lack of seriousness, for their airs, for their vague and superficial dialogues, for their fawning portraits of quite mediocre people, even on occasion very ugly people, and for their interminable and verbose effusions on love” (Boileau-Despréaux 1966: 445). Even with the feminist rehabilitation of Scudéry in recent decades, 17 this negative image of Scudéry as the caricatural précieuse has endured until the present day.

31.2  Philosophy of Virtue The primary focus of Scudéry’s moral philosophy are the virtues and vices that constitute the agent’s moral personality. She emphasizes the moral habits proper to the aristocratic world of the court. The virtues often presuppose a certain social rank, political power, and economic wealth common to nobility and the high bourgeoisie. Privileged virtues include politeness, magnificence, magnanimity, and discretion. Censured vices include flattery, slander, and venality—the defects of ambitious people with means. The constellation of virtues and vices also reflects the values of the era’s salon culture. The traits of meritorious speech, oral and written, and the proper method to conduct a conversation repeatedly pass in review. The analysis of virtue repeatedly links the discussion of moral habits to the question of gender. In analyzing the virtues and vices, Scudéry often uses the common salon method of the distinguo. This procedure consists in analyzing a moral quality by classifying and comparing minute gradations of the quality in question. Like other salons of the period, Scudéry’s salon frequently devoted itself to debates over the different kinds of love. Many of her dialogues use the distinguo to differentiate various types of a particular virtue or vice, to explain the particular context in which such a moral habit operates, and to demonstrate how certain versions of a virtue can deteriorate into a vice and how certain versions of a vice can actually operate as a virtue. The dialogue Of Kindness is exemplary of this procedure. It describes multiple variations of the virtue of kindness, such as friendly, courtly, urbane, vivacious, habitual, respectful, and eloquent. While the eloquent and urbane strains of kindness operate most clearly at court and in the salon, respectful kindness has a universal scope. In certain contexts, this virtue can become a vice

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inasmuch as there is true and false kindness. The moral quality can deteriorate into sentimentality or prove too tolerant of an evil that needs to be confronted. Kindness, which is a pacific and pleasant virtue, one necessary for society and rightly revered, becomes a vice if it lacks certain limitations. This virtue differs from others. There is only one type of justice and only one sort of generosity and of wisdom; however, there are a hundred types of kindness. (Scudéry 1680: 1.320) While all human beings should cultivate the virtue of kindness, it is a central, requisite trait in the moral personality of a woman. “Kindness is the most essential quality for women. It reinforces the charm of their beauty and their mind. In fact, kindness is so necessary for them that they cannot be admirable without possessing it in an eminent degree” (Scudéry 1684: 1.233). The aristocratic background of Scudéry’s virtue theory appears clearly in her analysis of the virtues of politeness, magnanimity, glory, and discretion. The dialogue Of Politeness analyzes the most distinctive virtue of the salon: the carefully cultivated habit of acting in a properly polished manner. Linguistic concerns are prominent in this presentation of the virtue. True politeness consists in knowing how to live properly and always knowing how to speak properly….It is the avoidance of any rudeness or injury to anyone. It is not saying to others what you would not want them to say to you. It is wanting not to be the tyrant of conversation by always speaking without letting others speak. (Scudéry 1684: 1.127) Politeness concerns more than the mastery of correct social conventions in speech and movement; to be truly virtuous, it must spring from authentic charity toward one’s neighbor manifest by the agent’s self-restraint. Even in the hierarchical world of the salon and the court, it is the golden rule of reciprocity that constitutes the moral norm for the practice of the virtue. Her treatment of the virtue of magnanimity and its allied attribute, magnificence, illustrates the relationship between virtue and gender. In the dialogue Of Magnanimity and Of Magnificence, three characters dispute the relationship between the virtue and the two sexes. The protagonist Menandre insists that both men and women can possess the virtue and indeed have possessed it throughout history. But the antagonist Parthénie disagrees, claiming that the political power and psychology required for such a virtue indicates that it is reserved to men. Menandre defines the virtue as a species of rational self-esteem, lack of resentment, and exuberant generosity. True magnanimity, as I consider it, is a good opinion of oneself, founded on reason and on the solid merit of one who aspires to great things and disdains the petty….To be magnanimous, it is necessary that the person never be laid low by reversals of fortune and that the person rise above this unfortunate state. Otherwise, we would be dealing with pride. (Scudéry 1684: 2.70–71) Like other virtues, magnanimity can easily deteriorate into a parody of itself, thus becoming a vice. Without prudential limits, magnanimity can too easily tolerate evil or lead to financial irresponsibility. Too much self-confidence can lead one to defy the reversals of fortune, thus tumbling into pride. Allied to magnanimity is the virtue of magnificence. An ardent royalist, Scudéry (through the character Menandre) devotes long passages to detailed descriptions of the magnificent wealth and 426

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taste displayed in the recently completed palace of Versailles. Every silver plate, golden chalice, marble statue, ornate mirror, heirloom, and painting masterpiece seems to pass in review. But Louis XIV is not the embodiment of magnificence due to the price and quality of the palatial display. Wealth alone could indicate a driving avarice; taste alone could simply signal a refined desire for luxury. In Louis XIV magnificence is allied to magnanimity inasmuch as this material splendor is devoted to the good of the French public and to posterity, and not to the king’s personal glorification. The value of heroic magnificence is that it has a greater regard for the public and for posterity than it does for the magnificent person. This is what makes the king the most magnificent person ever. If he builds superb buildings and if he embellishes all the palaces of the previous kings, he is doing so to make a present to all his successors. If he builds a superb hospital, where the sick can find rest and succor, it is due to the liberality he offers all the brave, crippled soldiers who will be born in his kingdom. (Scudéry 1684: 2. 54–55) Magnificence is properly a virtue only when motivated by the heroic charity and social concern evinced by authentic magnanimity. Agreeing with the definition and regal illustration of the virtue, Parthénie claims that this particular virtue appears to exist only in men. For it to be acquired, it would seem to be necessary to exercise a substantial amount of political power and to demonstrate generous, public judgments on numerous occasions. I never heard anyone say that this woman or this lady was magnanimous…I do not know if I have magnanimity or not. I do not know if I could find it in my mind or in my heart. I think that it is more for men than for women. (Scudéry 1684: 2.63–64) Contesting this gender stereotype, Menandre argues that the reason many women seem to lack this virtue is because society has taught them to cultivate their physical appearance and a childish coquettishness rather than their moral character. Women who are only pretty women, young, beautiful, playful, witty — they scarcely have any part of magnanimity. To have this, one must be distinguished by one’s merit and by a virtuous merit in order to be capable of it. (Scudéry 1684: 2.65–66) The capacity to cultivate this virtue does not depend on biological difference; it depends solely on moral maturity. It is the social prejudice that encourages women to cultivate only their physical qualities and their social graces that explain the difficulty women experience in excelling in this virtue. Against this prejudicial view of women and virtue, Scudéry insists that many historical women have actually manifested magnanimity. “This great quality is capable of being found in some extraordinary women” (Scudéry 1684: 2.64–65). As examples, she cites Portia, the courageous wife of Brutus, and Nitocris, the queen of Babylon who helped defend the kingdom against the Persian invasion through ingenious fortifications and strategies. Scudéry’s historicist method of refutation builds on the longstanding Renaissance tradition of catalogs of illustrious women. Social prejudice might claim that women cannot exercise certain virtues but the historical record indicates that they have often done so, occasionally with distinction. 427

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The dialogue Of Glory constitutes another apologetic for the capacity of women to cultivate virtues social prejudice has consigned to men alone. The conversationalists agree that glory is the external outcropping of interior honor in a virtuous agent. But the interlocutors disagree as to whether both men and women can cultivate this particular virtue. Theanor argues that only men can achieve glory since glory is primarily tied to distinguished military service. I am convinced that glory belongs principally to military actions and that those who are brave in this have more of it than others do…We must admit that that those who win a battle merit a greater glory than those who only overcome their passions. (Scudéry 1684: 2.560–61) Since women cannot serve in the military, they have little hope of acquiring the glory that belongs to the courageous warrior. Clarice disagrees, arguing that women often show glory in the conduct of love rather than war. “I think that glory belongs to love as well as to war. There is even a certain resemblance found in the battles, the victories, and the triumphs found in both” (Scudéry 1684: 2.564–65). Scudéry provides a detailed description of the parallels between the two enterprises, including spies, disinformation campaigns, feints, allies, slaves, prisoners, secret messages, hidden rendezvous, declarations of war, and peace treaties. Romantic conquest is especially glorious when it is free from considerations of physical beauty or economic wealth and when it emerges from intellectual and moral affinity. Furthermore, Clarice contends that glory is found in many enterprises outside the narrow domain of military maneuver. Scientific, literary, and artistic achievements are venerable venues for the display of glory. Women exhibit glory through intellectual and moral distinction rather than physical attractiveness. “Ladies have glory when their mind exceeds their beauty and when they have so much moral merit that one can still love them when they have lost everything that made them physically beautiful” (Scudéry 1684: 2.563). Glory is especially present when moral freedom has been acquired through the conquest of one’s passions. Class analysis is also present in Scudéry’s examination of the virtues. Especially prized in court circles, the virtue of discretion is indispensable for the proper conduct of politics. The dialogue Of Discretion explains how the presence and exercise of this virtue vary according to one’s rank in a particular social hierarchy. Regarding our superiors, we do not exercise discretion; rather, we express respect. Regarding our inferiors, we do not exercise discretion; rather, we exercise goodness and indulgence, especially when we abstain from doing something pleasing to us but displeasing to them. (Scudéry 1686: 1.613) The discretion of the courtier is essential to good governance, but the virtue is rarely exercised, since it is cultivated primarily in a network of social peers. When one deals with a social superior or inferior, other virtues take precedence. The narrow social limits to the operation of discretion reflect the stratification of the era’s society. Like the virtues cataloged by Scudéry, vices analyzed in her writings often bear an aristocratic pedigree. The vices criticized by predilection are often those present at court, such as flattery, vanity, and envy. As the virtues can deteriorate into vice, the courtier’s vices often disguise themselves under the mask of virtue. The ambitious aristocrat can even turn the theological virtues of faith,

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hope, and charity into something immoral. The dialogue Of Hope describes how court personages turn the virtue of hope into destructive illusions fueled by pride. The entire life of the court is nothing but hope; that is where one always dies in hoping for something. In every court in which I’ve been, I’ve seen courtiers puffed up with vain hopes, which at the end turned into bitter disappointments. (Scudéry 1686: 1.36) In her critique of common courtier vices, Scudéry typically emphasizes the faults of a linguistic nature, such as lies, gossip, backbiting, and self-glorification. Scudéry’s description of the ambiguity of certain virtues and the uncertain exercise of virtue in a conflictual context does not lead her to moral skepticism or relativism. In many dialogues, she firmly condemns certain actions as morally intolerable. Of Lying, for example, condemns the recourse to deception to advance the state’s alleged interests. No greater social, moral end can justify the use of immoral means. “In order for an action to be heroic, it is not only necessary that the motive be just; it is necessary that its methods be noble and innocent” (Scudéry 1684: 2.443). The quality of the moral act, and not only the intention of the moral agent, must be scrutinized for an action to be considered heroic or even just virtuous. Scudéry is especially critical of cultural practices that oppress women. A repeated subject of concern is the practice of polygamy, well-known to a cultivated French public through the missionary and travel literature of the period. No appeal to custom, history, or social context can justify actions that permit men to enslave women. “Neither nature nor reason could have authorized this custom. It is only the tyranny of custom motivated by a disordered voluptuousness that has authorized this multiplicity of wives and the imprisonment of the Sultan’s consorts in the Seraglio” (Scudéry 1686: 1.271). Similarly, she condemns the practice of the foot-binding of infant girls in China as an immoral attack on the physical integrity of women. Neither custom nor cultural beliefs can justify practices that are simply abuses of power rooted in misogyny.

31.3  Gender, Oppression, Language Like her novels and her literary dialogues, the fictitious orations fashioned by Scudéry to be spoken by historic personages in Illustrious Women or Heroic Harangues attack the gender prejudice that has excluded women from the exercise of authority in the public forum, especially in the political and military domains. Many of the speakers in the anthology are prominent historical women well known to the readers of classical literature and history in her salon and correspondence circles. These women wield actual political authority but also strongly influence the prominent man to whom they are linked through their wise counsel and actions. Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra reminds Marc Antony that it is she who saved him, and not he who saved her, during their various crises. The mother of Darius II, king of Persia, Sisygambus was captured by Alexander the Great during the Persian defeat at the battle of Issus. Addressing Alexander, she recounts how her counsel helped him consolidate his empire when she functioned as his de facto mother during her captivity. A Jewish client-ruler from the Herodian dynasty, Berenice governed a territory within the Roman province of Palestine. Exhorting Titus Agrippa, the Roman emperor, she explains how her alliance with him during his military missions in Palestine led him to the imperial throne. The Roman empress Agrippina urges the Roman mob to oust her son Nero, whom she had earlier made the emperor of Rome. Authentic advocacy for the welfare of the Roman people trumps claims of obedience based solely on an imperial title. Moral authority supplants titular authority.

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Of special philosophical interest is the harangue delivered by the poet Sappho. As Karen Newman argues in her translation and critical edition of this text, the Harangue of Sappho starkly condemns the cultural repression of women, even criticizing the institution of marriage itself.18 Admonishing her companion Erinne, who claims that she and other women are not supposed to develop their intellectual skills, Sappho argues that women have been saddled with a false sense of shame. A distorted, gender-specific virtue of modesty has made women reluctant to pursue education and perfect their mental capacity. “You must overcome the doubt concerning yourself that is planted in your soul. This false modesty prevents you from using your mind to achieve all that it is capable of attempting” (Scudéry 1644: 423). It is social prejudice, and not something innate to female nature, that has suppressed the effort of women to cultivate their minds and express ideas. Not only has this bias silenced women in matters of the intellect; it has systematically induced shame in them by branding intellectual achievement as a gender-specific species of sin. Justifying this suppression of women’s intellectual activity is society’s division of labor between the two sexes. Women are to devote themselves to the pursuit of physical beauty and social graces; men are to devote themselves to the world of art and science. According to this perspective, the practice of the liberal arts by women constitutes an attack on the proper frontier between men and women in the domains of study and work. “People who claim that beauty is woman’s sphere and that the arts and letters and all the liberal and rarified sciences belong to men―and that we women are barred from them―are very far from either truth or justice” (Scudéry 1644: 424). Both history and experience contradict these rigid, biased sexual roles. Many men focus on the development of their physical attractiveness and social charm just as many women exhibit distinguished achievements in art, literature, and science. Denying women the right and space to cultivate their mental capacity is an assault on nature itself because it is obvious that women, like men, naturally possess these gifts. It is the refusal to permit women to develop their intellectual capacity, and not the public exercise of this gift, that constitutes a sinful act against nature and nature’s God. The gods have made nothing useless in all nature….Now, why should we women be the only ones expected to rebel against this natural order as if we were ungrateful to the gods? Why should our minds be kept in a perpetual state of uselessness?...No reason could possibly justify the belief that what is infinitely admirable in itself is supposedly wrong and criminal in ourselves. (Scudéry 1644: 432) The intellectual empowerment of women can only occur when the biased vision of gender differentiation, condemning aristocratic women to the private sphere of physical beauty and romance, is challenged and overturned. The act of writing is of special importance in this assault on gender bias and this empowerment of women to express their ideas. Unlike oral expression, which quickly disappears, or being the object of someone else’s written words, which makes the woman written about passive, authorship permits women to express their own arguments that will endure through time. It is better to grant immortality to others than to receive it from others. It is better to find glory within yourself than to borrow it from somewhere else….Poetry has many advantages….If you simply speak with good grace, you will be known well enough….You have only to condemn the vices of your time and society will not fail to laud you. (Scudéry 1644: 438)

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The preferred mode of writing for women carries a prophetic note, since it involves criticism of the era’s vices, including presumably the injustice of gender barriers that suffocate women’s intellectual lives.

31.4  Conclusion: Salon Philosophy The salon is not only the venue for Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s philosophical formation and for the diffusion of her philosophical work; in her writings, the salon emerges as the subject of philosophical reflection. Her ethical analysis of virtue and vice does not pivot around the broad moral habits common to generic human nature; it focuses on the positive and negative moral habits proper to salon aristocracy and the annex world of the court. Politeness, magnanimity, and political courage receive praise and clarification. Slander, flattery, and venality receive censure and dissection. Repeated attention is devoted to the proper form and ethical rules of courteous speech, the lifeblood of the salon. Scudéry’s salon philosophy is a class-based philosophy where the moral character proper to the aristocratic salonnière and courtier is sketched and analyzed. Her moral theory reflects a salon culture that privileges polite conduct, but her ethical analysis insists that polite external manners must reflect steelier internal virtues of the will. The very form of Scudéry’s philosophical writings reveals their origin in the salon. Although she cites Plato and Socrates in her work, the form of her philosophical argument is not found in the Platonic dialogue. It resides, rather, in the conventions and topics of salon conversations in which she has participated and which she has vigorously hosted.19 Rather than being informal chats, these cultured conversations focus on abstract topics, proceed by distinguishing different types and gradations of the abstract attribute, function as debates where differing viewpoints on the topic can politely contest each other, and often conclude in a diplomatic resolution. The salon’s arms of the distinguo and of courteous mutual correction are omnipresent in the analyses of virtue and vice. As Catherine Villanueva Gardner has argued,20 one of the reasons women authors have been excluded from the philosophical canon is a question of genre. Few women in the early modern period wrote in the form of a philosophical treatise. Since the philosophical treatise is the preferred genre of philosophical discourse for academics who write the history of philosophy and compose philosophical syllabi for the classroom, philosophical reflection in other genres is easily ignored. Scudéry’s privileged genres of communication are the novel, the literary dialogue, and what is most original to her, the fictitious oration. In fact, the canon of early modern philosophy has often found a place for non-treatise works of philosophical argument written by men. Voltaire’s Candide, Berkeley’s dialogues, Montaigne’s essays, and Pascal’s Pensées are prominent examples of the canonical exception to the predilection for the treatise. But women authors, like Scudéry, who use the novel and the literary dialogue as their primary genre of philosophical argument are easily marginalized in the history of philosophy because their form of philosophical reflection differs markedly from the form of the academic treatise. Scudéry’s salon philosophy is a gendered philosophy not simply because women are the characters who speak in her dialogues and orations. Her moral philosophy constitutes a protofeminist correction of gender bias in virtue theory. Virtues such as glory, which common opinion had reserved to men alone, are present in both sexes. But the omnipresent virtues are often exercised differently by men and women. Both a warrior and a homemaker can acquire glory, but the means of acquisition and manifestation of the virtue differ. The longstanding belief that women cannot exercise political or military authority is contradicted by the many contemporary and past examples of women who have excelled precisely in such exercises of authority. History trumps misogynist theory. In the very act of writing and publishing her dialogues

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and orations, Scudéry transforms salon philosophy along the lines she exhorts other women to explore. Often private and ephemeral, salon conversations become a public and durable philosophical argument in the corpus of Scudéry. Their repeated point is to challenge and show the irrationality of the restrictive border between male and female domains centuries of prejudice had constructed.

Notes 1 Translations from the original French texts into English are by the author of this article. 2 Sources for this biographical sketch of Scudéry include Nicole Aronson, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, trans. Stuart R. Aronson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978) and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, ou Le voyage au pays de Tendre (Paris: Fayard, 1986); John J. Conley, “Madeleine de Scudéry,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.); Chantal Morlet-Chantalat, Madeleine de Scudéry (Paris: Memini, 1997); and Alain Niderst, Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Pellisson et leur monde (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1976). 3 An Italian aristocrat, Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665) married Charles d’Angennes, marquis de Rambouillet, from a prominent French aristocratic family. She imported many customs of the Italian Renaissance salon into the sessions she conducted in her chambre bleue, the special room painted in blue and decorated with blue curtains, in the Hôtel de Rambouillet in Paris. She also conducted her salon in the Château de Rambouillet, an estate located southwest of Paris. For an analysis of the literary ambitions and practices of the chambre bleue, see Nicole Aronson, Madame de Rambouillet ou La magicienne de la chambre bleue (Paris: Fayard, 1988) and Barbara Krajewska, Les Salons Littéraires: de l’hôtel de Rambouillet…sans precaution (Waterloo: Éditions Jourdan, 2017). 4 A memorialist, Françoise Bertaut de Motteville (1621–1689) was a leading chronicler of the court of Anne of Austria, the queen-regent of France. A cousin of Louis XIV and a leader of the anti-royalist Fronde, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier (1627–1693) conducted a salon noted for its production of portraits moraux. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626–1696) was celebrated for the letters she addressed to her daughter, Madame de Grignan, a partisan of Descartes. The novelist Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette (1634–1693) achieved literary fame with La Princesse de Clèves (1678). The poet Catherine Descartes (1637–1706) was the niece of René Descartes. 5 Antoine Godeau (1605–1672), bishop of Grasse, was a poet and literary critic. The playwright Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) was noted for his tragic dramas, especially Le Cid (1637). The memorialist Valentin Conrart (1603–1675) was a co-founder of the Académie française. The literary critic Jean Chapelain (1595–1674) championed the value of the Aristotelian unities in composing and evaluating a literary work. The philologist Gilles de Ménage (1613–1692) wrote a landmark history of women philosophers: Historia mulierium philosopharum (1690). 6 See Madeleine de Scudéry, Almalhid, Ou l’esclave Reine (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1660). 7 For an analysis of the practices of Scudéry’s salon, especially its emphasis on polite conversation, see Denis Delpine, La Muse Galante: Poétique de la Conversation dans L’oeuvre de Madeleine de Scudéry (Paris: H. Champion, 1997) and Madeline de Scudéry: Une Femme de Lettres au XVIIe siècle: Actes du Colloque International de Paris, 28–30 Juin, 2001, ed. Denis Delpine and Anne-Élisabeth Spica (Arras: Artois presse université, 2002). Still valuable is Victor Cousin’s classic study of how the novels of Scudéry reflect the salon-and-court networks of the era: Victor Cousin, La Société Française au XVIIe siècle d’après “Le Grand Cyrus” de Mademoiselle de Scudéry, 2 vols. (Paris: Dider, 1858). 8 Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) presents a collection of tales centered on the problems of romantic love in Heptameron. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) rejects classical theories of multiple types of friendship (such as those found in Aristotle) in his essay “Of Friendship.” Citing Cicero, he insists that authentic friendship is a rare type of unitive love. In On Wisdom, Pierre Charron (1541–1603) claims that friendship legitimately admits of different kinds due to the varied social relationships conducted by the moral agent. 9 A partisan of the Jansenists, Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé (1595–1678) hosted a salon known for its production of maximes. An opponent of Louis XIV during the trial of the disgraced finance minister Nicola Fouquet, the historian Paul Pellisson (1623–1693) became a close friend of Scudéry. The poet Jean-François Sarasin (1614–1654) was known for his mock epics. The mathematician and essayist Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré (1607–1684) developed his concept of the virtue of intellectual honesty in his essays L’honnête homme and Discours de la vraie honnêteté.

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Madeleine de Scudéry 10 See Madeleine de Scudéry, “Histoire de deux caméléons,” Conversations Nouvelles sur Divers Sujets (Paris: C. Barbin, 1680), 2: 500–35. In her analysis of the structure and behavior of two pet chameleons, Scudéry rejects the Cartesian mechanistic account of animate beings and defends a vitalist account. 11 See Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie, Histoire Romaine, 5 Vols. (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1654–1660), 1, 401–30. 12 Bishop of Meaux, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704) was the leading preacher at the court of Louis XIV. In his Politics Drawn from Holy Scripture (1679), Bossuet presents a providentialist philosophy of history, centered on the divine right of kings. Archbishop of Cambrai, François de Salignac de la MotheFénelon (1651–1715) was a prominent writer and preacher who opposed royal absolutism. His Telemachus (1694) denounces abuses of power by monarchial authority. The political differences between Bossuet and Fénelon became theological in the 1690s during the Quietist controversy. Fénelon defended the Quietist spirituality of the soul’s passive abandonment to God, which Bossuet condemned because it allegedly destroyed free will and the ascetical struggle to cultivate the moral virtues. In his correspondence with Scudéry in the 1690s, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) praised her knowledge of human nature expressed in her dialogues. Leibnitz and Scudéry sided with Bossuet in the quarrel over Quietism. 13 For a discussion of the relationship between Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Catherine Descartes, see Erica Harth (1990) “Cartesian Women,” Yale French Studies, 1990(80): 146–64. 14 See Laura J. Burch (2013) “Madeleine de Scudéry: Peut-on parler de femme philosophe?” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, 203(31): 361–75. As Burch argues, the dialogue Of Incertitude presents both sides of the debate concerning the appropriateness of women engaging in philosophical reflection. On the one hand, both in antiquity and in contemporary society women have successfully studied philosophical works and developed their own philosophical arguments. On the other hand, the plight of contemporary women who become obsessed with narrow philosophical disputes, such as the debate over atomism, is a cautionary tale. 15 Scudery’s analysis of glory in her essay echoes the theories of the prize’s founder, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac. Like Balzac, Scudéry claims that glory is tied to the recognition and approval of others. In her later dialogue Of Glory, however, Scudéry argues that glory does not depend on public reputation; it is solely dependent on the presence of interior, even hidden, moral virtue in the agent. 16 Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules (1659), Furetière’s Le Roman bourgeois (1666), and Bolieau’s Satire X (1667) dismissed Scudéry as the paradigmatic précieuse, a salon woman who cites philosophical works and uses sophisticated, abstract phrases but who is clearly ignorant of the terms she mangles in her pretentious speech. 17 For contemporary rehabilitations and interpretations of Scudéry from a feminist perspective, see Joan De Jean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Anne E. Dugan (2016) “Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch,” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 44(87): 247–66; Karen Green, “The Amazons and Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Refashioning of Female Virtue,” in Expanding the Canon of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. P. Salzman (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 150–67; and Dorothy Anne Liot Baker, Precious Women: A Feminist Phenomenon in the Age of Louis XIV (New York City: Basic Books, 1974). 18 See Karen Newman, “Editor’s Introduction,” Madeleine de Scudéry, The Story of Sapho, trans. and ed. Karen Newman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1–24. 19 For a discussion of how the Conversations of Scudéry reflect the egalitarianism and “focused encounters” of debate in her salon, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in ­Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 41–75. 20 See Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004).

References Primary Sources de Scudéry, M. (1644) Les Femmes Illustres, ou Les Harangues Héroïques, 2 Vols., Paris: Quiney et de Sercy. (1654–1660) Clélie, Histoire Romaine, 5 Vols., Paris: Augustin Courbé. (1660) Almalhid, ou L’esclave Reine, Paris: Augustin Courbé. (1669) La Promenade de Versailles, Paris: C. Barbin. (1680) Conversations sur Divers Sujets, 2 Vols., Paris: C. Barbin.

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John J. Conley, S.J. (1684) Conversations Nouvelles sur Divers Sujets, 2 Vols., Paris: C. Barbin. (1686) La Morale du Monde, 2 Vols., Paris: T. Guillain. (1688) Nouvelles Conversations de Morale, 2 Vols., Paris: Mabre-Cramoisy. (1692) Entretiens de Morale, 2 Vols., Pars: J. Anisson. (1835) Lettres de Scudéry à M. Godeau, Évêque de Vence, ed. M. Monmerqué, Paris: A. Levavasseur. (1991) Les Femmes Illustres, 1641, ed. C. Maignien, Paris: Côté-femmes. (2003) The Story of Sapho, trans. and ed. K. Newman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (2004) Selected Letters, Orations, and Rhetorical Dialogues, trans. and ed. J. Donawerth and Julie Strongson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Many of the original French texts of Madeleine de Scudéry can be found in digital form in the Gallica: Bibliothèque Numérique section of the website for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. See http://gallica.bnf.fr/. Secondary Sources Aronson, N. (1978) Mademoiselle de Scudéry, trans. S. R. Aronson, Boston: Twayne Publishers. (1986) Mademoiselle de Scudéry, ou Le Voyage au Pays de Tendre, Paris: Fayard. (1988) Madame de Rambouillet ou La Magicienne de la Chambre Bleue, Paris: Fayard. Boileau-Despréaux, N. (1966) Oeuvres Complètes, ed. F. Escal, Paris: Gallimard. Burch, L. J. (2013) “Madeleine de Scudéry: Peut on Parler de Femme Philosophe?” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, 203(31): 361–75. Cousin, V. (1858) La Société Française au XVIIe Siècle D’après “Le Grand Cyrus” de Mademoiselle de Scudéry, 2 Vols., Paris: Didier. DeJean, J. (1991) Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France, New York: Columbia University Press. Delpine, D. (1997) La Muse Galante: Poétique de la Conversation dans L’oeuvre de Madeleine de Scudéry, Paris: H. Champion. and A. E Spica. (eds.) (2002) Madeleine de Scudéry: Une Femme de Lettres au XVIIe Siècle: Actes du Colloque International de Paris. 28–30 Juin 2001, Arras: Artois presse université. Dugan, A. E. (2016) “Les Femmes Illustres, of the Book as Triumphal Arch,” Papers on Seventeenth Century French Literature, 44(87): 247–66. Goldsmith, E. (1988) Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Green, K. (2010) “The Amazons and Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Refashioning of Female Virtue,” in P. Salzman (ed.), Expanding the Canon of Early Modern Women’s Writing, Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 150–67. Liot Backer, D. A. (1974) Precious Women: A Feminist Phenomenon in the Age of Louis XIV, New York City: Basic Books. Niderst, A. (1976) Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Pellisson et Leur Monde, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Villanueva Gardner, C. (2004) Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy, Boulder, CO: Westview.

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32 THE UNORTHODOX MARGARET CAVENDISH Tom Stoneham and Peter West

32.1 Introduction Margaret Lucas Cavendish (1623–1673) was a natural philosopher, poet, playwright, and novelist. Her work was well-known in literary circles (the diarist Samuel Pepys records that there was considerable commotion whenever she visited London) and she was well-connected amongst philosophers and scientists via her husband, William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle. In the late 1640s, when the Cavendishes were in exile on the continent,1 William organised meetings of the ‘Cavendish circle’ which, at various times, included Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, and Digby. Prior to her marriage to William, Cavendish was encouraged in her intellectual pursuits by William’s brother Charles and her own brother Sir John Lucas, who would go on to be an Original Fellow of the Royal Society (Whitaker 2002: 11–12). Later in her own life (in May 1667), Cavendish would be the first woman invited to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. A central theme consistent throughout Cavendish’s writings is the idea that all of nature, whether human, animal, mineral, or vegetable, possesses life, sense, reason, and knowledge. For that reason, she is often characterised as a ‘vitalist’ and, in light of recent developments in the philosophy of mind, sometimes hailed as an early panpsychist. Another theme that is consistent throughout her corpus is a commitment to materialism. Like Hobbes, the most prominent materialist in Britain in the seventeenth century, Cavendish believed that there are no immaterial (or spiritual) substances in nature. Where there is nature, she maintains, there is material substance – and material substance alone. As she puts it in her Philosophical Letters (1664: 187), “nature is material, or corporeal; and whatsoever is not composed of matter or body, belongs not to nature”. When it comes to nature, her commitment to materialism is thus unambiguous. While her commitment to vitalism and materialism is consistent throughout her work, some significant aspects of her account of nature developed with time. Most notably, in her early writings, such as Poems and Fancies (1653), Cavendish accepts a version of ‘atomism’; the notion that parts of nature could, in principle, be broken down into indivisible atoms, a view associated in the seventeenth century with Epicurus and Lucretius. She would later explicitly reject this view (in ‘A Condemning Treatise of Atomes’, in Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1655), extending that rejection to corpuscular theory in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666a) where she critiques the empirical atomism of her contemporaries. The Observations also includes Cavendish’s most prolonged critical discussion of the experimental method, as endorsed by the Royal Society, and her reflections on the potential benefits and drawbacks of the burgeoning fields of microscopy and telescopy. Her final publication, Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) is a re-working of the DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-39

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ideas she first explicated and defended in Philosophical Fancies (1653) and revised in the two editions of Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655, 1663). It is her most systematic and in-depth defence of her account of nature. Before outlining the structure of this chapter, it is worth noting two methodological commitments that shape our reading of Cavendish’s philosophy. First, we are working on the assumption that there is such a thing as Cavendish’s ‘settled’ or ‘mature’ position on various issues (for discussion, see Detlefsen 2006: 205; Peterman 2019: 472; and for a more tentative approach, see Detlefsen 2022). Her rejection of atomism is the most obvious and uncontroversial example of this. Moreover, we take it that, if one wishes to identify Cavendish’s settled opinion on a specific issue, one should refer to the Observations or the Grounds – especially the latter which, as we noted, went through significant revisions. Second, we take Cavendish at her word when she states that there is no significant difference between her philosophy and her fiction. Cavendish published her novella The Blazing World alongside the Observations and explains that in doing so she “joined them as two worlds at the end of their poles” (Cavendish 1666b: ‘To The Reader’). Cavendish believes that fiction and philosophy are both “actions of the rational parts of matter”. For that reason, we also work on the assumption that what is articulated as truth in her fiction, such as The Blazing World, is intended to be consistent with her philosophy. The structure of this chapter is as follows. In Section 32.1, we provide an outline of Cavendish’s metaphysics and introduce some competing interpretations of her account of how nature is ordered. In Section 32.2, we focus on the place of immaterial entities in Cavendish’s system of nature. First, we outline her metaphysical and epistemological claims about God and, second, the development of her account of finite immaterial spirits. Finally, in Section 32.3, we emphasise the religious unorthodoxy of Cavendish’s metaphysics and demonstrate that some of her views are inconsistent with some important tenets of Christian doctrine.

32.2  Cavendish’s Metaphysics While Cavendish did engage in social, political, and ethical debates (for discussion, see, e.g., James 2003 and Walters 2014), she reserved the word ‘philosophy’ for what we tend to call ‘metaphysics’: the project of giving an account of the fundamental character of everything that exists and how the less fundamental phenomena, the quotidian things we know about, care about and interact with, relate to that fundamental character. She pursued this project in seven books throughout her 15 years of publishing. Five of those books constitute an almost obsessive re-working and refining of her ideas: Poems and Fancies (1653a), Philosophical Fancies (1653b), Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), Philosophical and Physical Opinions 2nd edition (1663), and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). These five books follow the synthetic method of presenting philosophy, with its echoes of Euclid, which was very common in the early modern period: They begin by spelling out the fundamental first principles and then proceed to show what can be constructed from these. For Cavendish, the first principles are Matter and Motion 2 and, from these, she constructs the whole of Nature, the natural world. Cavendish’s other two books on natural philosophy, Philosophical Letters (1664) and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666a), constitute her direct engagements with other thinkers (particularly More and van Helmont in the former and Hooke and Boyle in the latter). Like Hobbes’ Epicurean materialism (for Hobbes’ influence on Cavendish, see O’Neill 2001: xiii; Hutton 1997), in Cavendish’s system there is a complete rejection of both Cartesian immaterial substances and the neo-Platonist animating world soul. But unlike the Epicureans (and Hobbes), Cavendish thinks that matter is self-moving. In fact, she thinks it is a consequence of a thorough-going materialism that all motion is self-motion. As such she rejects the near-universal opinion that motion can be transferred from one material body to another by contact (and thereby 436

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avoids the problem of needing an unmoved mover to initiate the sequence of transfers of motion by contact, which was a traditional argument for the divine). Her reason for this is clearest in her objection to Descartes (Cavendish 1664: l.xxx, 97–99): motion is either a mode or a substance; modes cannot transfer from one substance to another because they are essentially modes of a specific substance; but if motion is a substance, then when it transfers the moved bodies should ‘increase in their substance and quantity’ (Cavendish 1664: 98) in proportion to how much they are moved. Thus, if you transfer motion from the bat to the baseball, the ball should grow and the bat shrink, but that is not what we observe. Consequently, no motion is transferred; rather (Cavendish argues) the ball is occasioned to move itself by the motion of the bat (for further discussion of Cavendish’s theory of occasional causation, see James 1999: 231–39; Detlefsen 2006: 425–26 and 2007; Boyle 2018: 97–100). To be capable of self-motion, matter must be to some degree animate, because self-motion requires knowledge, and self-motion in response to the motion of another object requires perception of that object. However, there are two kinds of animate matter: the rational and the sensitive. The rational matter she identifies with the mind or ‘corporeal soul’ and it engages in pure thought. The sensitive matter is less ‘agile’ and its actions are more mundane. “Perception is a sort of knowledge” (Cavendish 1668: I.ix.8) and both rational and sensitive matter have perceptions, though the former has more complete or ‘united’ perceptions and also ‘conceptions’ (Cavendish 1668: II.vii.23). The perceptions of sensitive matter can either be occasioned by other objects or internally generated ‘by rote’, i.e., imaginings derived from previous perceptions. She neither accepts nor rejects an empiricist principle which would restrict the perceptions of rational matter in the same manner, though she does think that matter can only ‘figure’ or ‘pattern’ (Cavendish 2001: 15), i.e. represent, the material (see below).3 As well as these two kinds of animate matter, there also has to be inanimate matter which is not self-moving. This is not because she thinks there are particular parts of matter which are incapable of moving, but rather because different objects move more or less freely, and this is explained in part by their having more or less inanimate matter. Thus, the baseball will move away from the bat very quickly whereas the brick will move away from the bat slowly, if at all, because the brick has a greater proportion of inanimate matter. We have a lot more inanimate matter than a brick, but we also have a lot more sensitive matter, so we can self-move in response to things about us much more effectively. Different objects, or ‘particular parts’ (or sometimes ‘creatures’) as she calls them, have these kinds of matter in different proportions. The greater the amount of rational matter, the more complex the movements that particular part can perform and thus the more intelligent its behaviour. Humans have a much greater quantity of rational matter than the baseball, which is why we can duck out of the way of the oncoming bat and the baseball cannot. Every portion of matter must contain some of each kind of matter – this is known as the doctrine of ‘commixture’ or complete blending. This is neither molecular mixture, which implies separability, nor co-extension, which wouldn’t allow variation in internal motions (pace O’Neill 2001: xxiii). Without some rational matter, the particular part would not know how to move (all parts can move); without some sensitive matter its motions would not be responsive to other parts of matter (all parts can be moved); and without inanimate matter, all motions would be instantaneous and as easy as a change of thought (Cavendish 1666a: 25–26).4 Cavendish is fond of the analogy between the kinds (which she sometimes calls ‘degrees’ and ‘parts’, in contrast to ‘particular parts’ which are individual objects) of matter which form the natural world and the different roles required to build a house: the rational matter is the architect, the sensitive matter the labourer, and the inanimate matter the stones and bricks. She likes to describe the human mind as being composed entirely of rational matter, and our fictions and fancies like architect’s drawings never handed to the labourer to build. However, that does not make the mind 437

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a special substance, like a Cartesian soul, for the different kinds of matter are inseparable: any and every part of nature contains all three kinds of matter. Rather, when we talk about someone’s mind, we are talking about their rational matter, which is present in all their body parts to greater or lesser degrees. This inseparability means that the mind controls the motions of the whole person, not ‘like a spider in a Cobweb’ (Cavendish 1664: I.xxxv, 111) but by instructing the sensitive parts in how they should move the inanimate parts, both as an exercise of its free will and in response to the perceptions of other objects that the sensitive matter has. This metaphysics proves to be very powerful, allowing Cavendish to explain vast ranges of natural phenomena, such as biological reproduction, disease, freezing, burning, colours, metals, liquids, and the motion of the planets. A key feature of these explanations is Cavendish’s frequent appeals to properties of Nature as a whole, not just its infinite scope and variety; for she maintains that it contains regularities and irregularities which are held in ‘poise and balance’ (e.g., Cavendish 2001: 98 – also throughout the epistle ‘To the Reader’). This raises an important interpretive question about how the behaviours of particular parts of nature are related to these properties of nature as a whole. Cavendish owes us an explanation of why there is order rather than chaos in nature, given each particular part moves itself freely according to its knowledge and perception. This is particularly pressing because it was largely the inability of atomism, in her view, to provide an explanation of order which led her to reject it. Two answers to this interpretive question have emerged and have been developed by David Cunning and Deborah Boyle, respectively: 1. Nature (as a whole) forms a unity or plenum with infinite knowledge providing order across its infinite extent. Just as the rational parts of the particular parts of nature (i.e., individual objects) provide the instructions for how the sensitive parts should move, so does the rational part of infinite Nature provide instructions for how all the infinite variety of particular parts should move themselves. (Cunning 2006) The problem with this is that if nature has order because the parts of nature follow the directions of an infinite whole which they comprise, then there is not enough space for the observed irregularities in Nature or for the freewill of the rational parts of particular objects to move themselves as they choose. In fact, proponents of this view argue that Cavendish does not really accept irregularity or disorder in nature, regarding the appearance of irregularity as an effect of our limited or partial perspective (e.g., Cunning 2006: 171). Yet, that Cavendish says there have to be irregularities in nature is undeniable. In the Appendix to GNP, for instance, she explicitly considers whether a world with no irregularities is possible and concludes it is only if nature also includes a world entirely irregular, because ‘all Nature’s Actions [are] poised with Opposites, or Contraries’ (Cavendish 1668: Appendix II.ii).5 For Cavendish, one source of irregularity is ‘disobedience’, which is possible because particular parts have freewill. Freewill rests in the rational parts, the sensitive parts merely take instructions on how to move and fulfil those instructions (they may sometimes fulfil them badly or ineffectually, creating irregularities like the palsy in humans, but they do not thereby exercise freedom). So, if there is no disorder, there is no freewill. But if there is freewill, then order comes from the particular parts’ obedience, and it is the ground of that obedience which would explain the order. To give a societal analogy: in a society of free subjects, there is only order if the law is obeyed, and the law is obeyed either through love of the law-maker or fear of retribution. So order is explained by the free subjects’ feelings of love or fear: even an all-powerful, absolute monarch needs to be loved or feared by his subjects.6 As Cavendish puts it, “Nature’s Parts move themselves and are not moved by any Agent” (Cavendish 1668: VIII.i, 106). 438

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This motivates an alternative reading: 2. Nature (as a whole) forms a unity which is itself a sovereign law-maker, dictating how the particular parts ought to move. Each particular part then freely obeys (or disobeys) these laws. (Boyle 2018) Such a view is distinct from the conception of laws of nature which was emerging through the seventeenth century (which Cavendish was sceptical of ), whereby laws are generalizations describing immutable patterns in nature (see also Detlefsen 2018). In this reading of Cavendish, the laws of nature are essentially normative, they are prescriptions for the behaviours of the parts of nature. Which gives us two distinct sources of irregularity: particular parts may disobey the laws of Nature, and even when they obey, their sensitive parts may fail to achieve what they were directed to do, giving us the resources to explain the irregularities in Nature; from war to disease. However, it is worth also considering why Cavendish maintains that not only is there regularity and irregularity in Nature, but also there is ‘poise and balance’ between them. She writes: Although nature be infinite, yet all her actions seem to be poised or balanced by opposition; for example, as nature has dividing, so composing actions; also, as nature has regular, so irregular actions; as nature has dilating, so contracting actions. (Cavendish 1668: I: xiv) This poise and balance, which is also sometimes described as ‘not running into extremes’, is often used to explain phenomena in the Natural world. If there were not Density, as well as Rarity; and Levity, as well as Gravity; Nature would run into Extreams.’ (Cavendish 1668: XII.i) What would be wrong with the ‘extreme’ of everything being dense, or heavy or hot or fast or…? Cavendish’s answer is that: several sorts, kinds, and differences of particulars causes order, by reason it causes distinctions: for if all creatures were alike, it would cause a confusion. (Cavendish 1668: II.x) So not only would an absence of any regularity lead to disorder, but a lack of variety would lead to ‘confusion’. Order requires contrasts: different sorts or kinds having different roles. As is so often the case with Cavendish, she is here modelling features of nature on her views of a well-ordered society: there need to be different classes of people with distinct functions for society to display order rather than chaos. If all subjects were aristocrats, or all were peasants, there would be confusion. But while this variety may be brought about in society by a good and wise sovereign, in nature it is brought about by the infinite knowledge of Nature as a whole. Nature’s infinite knowledge includes recognising the need for variety and contrasting kinds of particular part, and the balance between regularity and irregularity.7 Given our aims in the rest of this chapter, it is worth noting at this point that Cavendish places the responsibility for ordering parts of nature with Nature itself, rather than God. As we will see, God is, for Cavendish, a creator and ‘author’ of nature, but it is Nature (rather than God) that acts to organise itself in certain ways. This raises significant questions about how immanent God is in Cavendish’s system – which we address in what follows. 439

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A final point worth noting is that Cavendish seems to think that the mix of obedience and disobedience is a contingent fact about the world we inhabit. As particular parts are constituted, they will be inconsistent in their obedience to the laws of Nature, but, as we saw above, there could be entirely regular (obedient) or irregular (disobedient) worlds (Cavendish 1668: Appendix, II.ii: 254), the former being ‘blessed’ and the latter ‘cursed’, echoing the language of heaven and hell.

32.3 Immaterials 32.3.1  God and Nature As we’ve seen, like Hobbes, Cavendish maintains that there are no immaterial substances in nature. Thus, in the Observations she writes: Nature is purely corporeal or material, and there is nothing that belongs to, or is a part of nature, which is not corporeal; so that natural and material, or corporeal, are one and the same. (Cavendish 2001: 137) For Cavendish, whatever can be said to exist in nature is material, or corporeal, to the extent that the very terms ‘natural’, ‘material’, and ‘corporeal’ are virtually interchangeable. This commitment to the view that all of nature is material raises some important questions about the status of God in Cavendish’s natural philosophy. Eileen O’Neill claims that Cavendish “is at pains to make the thoroughgoing materialism of her natural philosophy consistent with certain Christian doctrines” (O’Neill 2001: xxiii). Thus, Cavendish maintains that God is a “supernatural, infinite, and incomprehensible deity” (Cavendish 2001: 17) and describes him as an “incorporeal being, void of all parts and divisions” (Cavendish 2001: 40). Beyond that, however, Cavendish doesn’t seem especially concerned with striving for orthodoxy. As we will find, O’Neill’s remark only seems accurate insofar as Cavendish’s philosophy is consistent with certain doctrines, none of which are distinctively Christian.8 There are two specific issues relating to the role of God in Cavendish’s metaphysics we will focus on. First, her account of an immaterial God’s relationship with material nature. Second, what exactly she means when she says that God is ‘incomprehensible’. For Cavendish, God is supernatural; he is literally beyond or outside nature. Cavendish argues that this follows from his lacking corporeality. As she puts it in the Observations, “if incorporeal, he [God] must be supernatural; for there is nothing between body, and no body; corporeal and incorporeal; natural, and supernatural” (Cavendish 2001: 266) (for her contemporaries, this would have been potentially heretical, for it seems to leave no space for the orthodox account of the Incarnation, with Christ being fully divine and fully human). How, then, are we to understand God’s relationship with nature? Cavendish views God as the creator of nature. However, she does not construe him as an immanent deity, present throughout his creation. Instead, she sees the relation between God and nature as one of a master (and creator) and servant. Consider the following passages from the Observations: God the author of nature, and nature the servant of God, do order all things and actions of nature, the one by his immutable will, and all-powerful command; the other by executing this will and command: The one by an incomprehensible, divine and supernatural power; the other in a natural manner and way: for God’s will is obeyed by nature’s self-motion; which self-motion God can as easily give and impart to corporeal nature, as to an immaterial spirit. (Cavendish 2001: 209; see also 212)

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For Cavendish, God is not an immediate cause but rather an occasion for changes within nature; God issues commands which nature, God’s servant, then executes. As Detlefsen puts it: “God’s creative power is a form of emanation” (Detlefsen 2009: 431). This requires nature to have knowledge and perception, marking a significant difference with the traditional ‘watchmaker’ analogy of God’s relation to nature. The motions of the various parts of nature, as Cavendish sees it, are caused by the principle of self-motion which God has bestowed upon nature as a whole. As Cavendish puts it in the Observations, if God is responsible for nature’s motion, Then it must either be done by an all-powerful command, or by an immediate action of God: The latter which is not probable, to wit, that God should be immediate motion of all things himself; for God is an immovable and immutable essence. (Cavendish 2001: 209) In other words, we should not understand God as the cause of motion in nature; none of God’s actions cause parts of nature to move. In fact, nothing (efficiently) causes anything else to move, for all motion is self-motion. Instead, we ought to think of God’s command as that which occasions nature’s own self-motion. Since all action is the result of self-motion, anything that happens in nature is the result of nature itself – neither God nor any other immaterial, supernatural entity can act in nature. (It is worth noting that this seems to leave no metaphysical space for miracles, including those performed by Christ and reported in the New Testament.) Cavendish also claims that God is ‘incomprehensible’ to all creatures in nature, including humans. What Cavendish means by this is that we cannot conceive of God and his attributes (Cavendish 2001: 38). At various places in her writing, Cavendish reveals a commitment to the idea that anything that does not exist in nature cannot be conceived (e.g., Cavendish 1664: 262, 321; Cavendish 2001: 86). This is because, she argues, anything that is not a part of nature, and thus is not corporeal, cannot be patterned or figured, i.e., represented, by the mind (we say more about Cavendish’s notions of ‘patterning’ and ‘figuring’ below). There is something about material (or corporeal) things – something that is lacking from immaterial things – that makes them the kinds of things that can be patterned or figured by the mind. As she puts it in the Grounds, No Part of Nature can perceive [i.e., pattern or figure] an Immaterial, because it is impossible to have a perception of that, which is not to be perceived, as not being an Object fit and proper for Corporeal Perception. (Cavendish 1668: Appendix 1.3) In the case of God, this means that no finite creatures (including ourselves) can “possibly pattern or figure him; he being a supernatural, immaterial, and infinite being” (Cavendish 2001: 88). Thus, not only is God metaphysically (i.e., causally) distant from his creation, he is beyond the comprehension of things in nature (including ourselves) too. Cavendish’s view is that for something to be an object of knowledge, whether through perception or conception, it must be possible for the matter of the mind to pattern or figure that object. In turn, this requires that the object in question have its own pattern or figure. Cavendish’s view, however, is that only corporeal things have patterns or figures. God, who is incorporeal and supernatural, does not have a pattern or figure meaning that he is not the kind of thing that can be an object of knowledge. He is not, as Cavendish phrases it, “an Object fit and proper for Corporeal perception” (Cavendish 1668: 240). The claim that God is beyond knowledge would seem to apply equally to natural knowledge and knowledge by revelation, and explains her commitment

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to the view that, at most, we can conceive of the existence of God, but not his nature or attributes, as endorsed in the following passages: no part of nature can or does conceive the essence of God, or what is in himself; but it conceives only, that there is such a divine being which is supernatural; And therefore it cannot be said, that a natural being can comprehend God; for it is not the comprehending of the substance of God, or its patterning out, (since God having no body, is without all figure) that makes the knowledge of God. (Cavendish 2001: 17) it is impossible for man to make a figure, or picture of that which is not a part of nature; for pictures are as much a part of nature, as any other parts… Where the notions of God can be no otherwise but of His existence; to wit, that we know there is something above nature, who is the author, and God of nature. (Cavendish 2001: 88–89) For Cavendish, our knowledge of God is restricted to knowledge of his existence (see Detlefsen 2009: 423–43 for further discussion). It does not consist in knowledge of his nature, attributes, substance, or essence. In that sense, our knowledge of God is limited. This limited knowledge is ‘notional’; that is, it involves knowing the truth of a claim without being able to conceive – a term which Cavendish uses interchangeably with ‘imagine’ (see, e.g., Cavendish 2001: 86; Boyle 2015: 444; Adams 2016: 5; Chamberlain 2019: 306–07; West 2021) – the entity or entities that the claim is about.9 Our inadequate knowledge of God is thus a result of the fact that “our very thoughts and conceptions of Immaterial are Material” (Cavendish 1664: 187; see Detlefsen 2009: 434). One might reasonably ask how we can even conceive of the existence of God, if conception requires figuring the motions of that which is being conceived. Cavendish’s answer is that “knowledge of the existency of God… is innate, and inherent in nature and all her parts, as much as self-knowledge is” (Cavendish 2001: 17). Cavendish’s view is that, like an artist who leaves her signature in her art, God, the creator of nature and all its parts, leaves a ‘signature’ of himself in each and every part of nature (Boyle 2015: 108). That ‘signature’ takes the form of an innate knowledge of his existence. Part of what it is to know oneself, Cavendish claims, is to know of God’s existence. As she puts it in the Observations, each part of nature “has conceptions of the existence of God, to wit, that there is a God above nature, on which nature depends; and from immutable and eternal decree, it has its eternal being, as God’s eternal servant” (Cavendish 2001: 38; see also Cavendish 1664: 187). Again, it is unclear how much space this leaves for knowledge by revelation and interpretation of scripture, especially since the veracity of sources of revelation is established by the accompaniment of miracles (from the burning bush to Christ’s miracles). As we saw previously, there does not seem to be room for miracles in Cavendish’s account of the operations of nature. We return to these issues in Section 32.3.

32.3.2  Finite Immaterial Spirits While Cavendish’s account of God is orthodox to the extent that it deflects the charge of atheism and allows her to distinguish natural philosophy from divinity by their subject matters and epistemologies, her views on the existence of finite immaterial spirits are more overtly unorthodox. As Emma Wilkins explains, for many seventeenth century thinkers, “belief in spirits was an essential part of being a good Christian” and “spirit-doubters and spirit-deniers… were attacked as dangerous atheists who threatened both religion and society as a whole” (Wilkins 2016: 858). As we will see, by these lights (by the end of her life at least), Cavendish had departed quite radically from Christian 442

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orthodoxy. In what remains of this section, we outline the development of Cavendish’s account of finite immaterial spirits before returning to the question of her (un)orthodoxy in the next section. Cavendish’s commitment to the view that God is an immaterial substance existing outside of nature is consistent throughout her philosophical corpus. However, the status of finite immaterial spirits is more ambiguous. In her works from the early 1660s (Philosophical Letters and Philosophical and Physical Opinions), Cavendish seems open to the idea that while no part of nature could be immaterial, immaterial spirits could exist within nature in some sense. However, by the time of her final publications, the Observations and the Grounds, there is no space in Cavendish’s system for finite immaterial spirits at all; whether within or outside of nature. Cavendish’s views on finite spirits in the early 1660s were heavily influenced by the publication of a new edition of Henry More’s collected works in 1662 (Wilkins 2016: 864). More argues for the existence of finite immaterial spirits in nature and characterises a disbelief in spirits as a dangerous prelude to atheism (Wilkins 2016: 859). Thus, much of what Cavendish says about spirits in the Philosophical Letters comes in a chapter where she directly responds to More. There, she makes the following somewhat ambiguous statement: no Immaterial Spirit belongs to Nature, so as to be a part thereof; for Nature is Material, or Corporeal; and whatsoever is not composed of matter or body, belongs not to Nature; nevertheless, Immaterial Spirits may be in Nature, although not parts of Nature. (Cavendish 1664: 187) In line with her thorough-going materialism about nature, Cavendish is clear in stating that an immaterial spirit could not possibly be a part of nature. Yet, in the same sentence, she concedes that immaterial spirits could be in nature, even if they are not part of it. It isn’t clear what Cavendish means by ‘in Nature’ and how something’s being in nature differs from its being a part of nature (for discussion, see Duncan 2012). One place we might turn for some insight into this issue is Cavendish’s fantasy novella The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World. The Blazing World was published alongside the Observations in 1666 and plays out over the backdrop of a world that conforms to the metaphysics endorsed in her natural philosophy. The denizens of the Blazing World are Cavendishian materialists and we are informed that this is a world in which Cavendish’s metaphysical claims, such as the claim that the colours of objects are as material as ‘primary qualities’ like size and shape, are known to be true. In that sense, The Blazing World can be thought of as a thought experiment in Cavendishian metaphysics where we gain an insight into what things would be like if her natural philosophy were both accepted and true (see Thomas 2020: Chapter 6 for discussion). What is significant for our present purposes is that in The Blazing World Cavendish seems to allow for the existence of finite immaterial spirits. The protagonist of the story, known as The Empress, consults what appear to be finite immaterial spirits. We are informed that such spirits cannot possibly interact with the physical world unless they “put on a hand or arm, or else the whole body of Man”. In other words, finite immaterial spirits, since they are not themselves parts of nature, can only act on parts of nature, i.e. move, by adorning what Cavendish (rather hauntingly) calls ‘gauntlets of flesh’. Given the master-servant model of the relation between God and nature discussed in Section 32.1, we can assume that spirits move by giving orders to material objects, which may obey those orders freely. Thus, the presence of spirits does not introduce new possibilities of motion, but at best changes which self-motions some particular parts of matter perform.10 Returning to the status of immaterial spirits in the Philosophical Letters, perhaps this is what Cavendish means when she says that they are in nature but not part of it. In the Observations, which was published alongside the Blazing World, Cavendish’s account of finite immaterial spirits is more categorical. In this work, she is no longer responding immediately 443

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to the views of More, but rather to the experimental philosophy of Hooke and Boyle, and there is very little discussion of finite spirits. Similarly, in the Grounds, her position on immaterial spirits is clear: I cannot conceive how an Immaterial can be in Nature: for, first, An Immaterial cannot, in my opinion, be naturally created; nor can I conceive how an Immaterial can produce particular Immaterial Souls, Spirits, or the like. Wherefore, an immaterial, in my opinion, must be some uncreated Being; which can be no other than GOD alone. (Cavendish 1668: 239) While, as we saw previously, she remains committed to the existence of an immaterial spirit outside of nature – namely, God – she now explicitly denies the existence of finite, created immaterials. Such an immaterial spirit cannot be ‘naturally created’ since natural processes cannot create supernatural things, nor could it be created supernaturally by another immaterial being since supernatural things do not engage in reproduction/generation of themselves. Her reason for the latter claim is not obvious, but may be implied in her careful studies of material reproduction (see Cavendish 1668: Part 4). This means that for an immaterial spirit to exist would be for it to exist uncreated. But that would make every immaterial spirit a god; since only God can exist uncreated.11 Again, Cavendish’s view is that there is something about nature – and, in turn, materiality (or corporeality) – that rules out the possibility of immaterial spirits existing within it. It is not just that (as it happens) they don’t. It is that they couldn’t possibly. God could not possibly exist in nature because he is incorporeal and thus indivisible, while all parts of nature are divisible. Finite immaterial spirits similarly could not possibly exist in nature because, according to Cavendish, they could not possibly ‘be naturally created’ (Cavendish 1668: 239). By the time of the Observations and the Grounds, Cavendish seems to have decided that, unlike God, finite immaterial spirits could not possibly exist even outside of nature, since that would require them to exist uncreated. Thus, Cavendish’s mature view is that there are no finite immaterial spirits at all: there is nature, which is material, and God, who is immaterial (and supernatural).

32.4  Cavendish’s (Un)Orthodoxy The metaphysical status of God in Cavendish’s system – as a creator and ‘master’ who is situated beyond nature – raises important questions about the extent to which her views on God, and religion more generally, can truly be said to be orthodox. As we saw, O’Neill claims that Cavendish ‘is at pains’ to show that her materialism is consistent with Christian orthodoxy (O’Neill 2001: xxiii). Yet, the preceding discussion revealed that some of Cavendish’s views or their consequences were not orthodox – and certainly would not have been perceived as such by her contemporaries. In light of these views, at least one commentator has suggested that Cavendish is in fact best described as a ‘skeptical Deist’ (Mendelsohn 2014: 41). As Mendelsohn puts it, Cavendish simply “hedged her bets (much like Pascal) by proclaiming her allegiance to Anglican Orthodoxy”. This paints a rather different picture to the one offered by O’Neill. In this final section, we outline Cavendish’s explicit claims about the relationship between her philosophy and orthodox religion before demonstrating that Cavendish’s metaphysics is inconsistent with some important tenets of Christian orthodoxy. Debates about human knowledge of the divine – and the possibility of our knowing anything about the infinitude of God’s nature – were rife in the second half of the seventeenth century and continued to play out well into the eighteenth. ‘Divines’ (thinkers engaged in scriptural analysis) were involved in heated debates over whether claims about God’s nature should be understood metaphorically, analogically, or literally (for an outline of one such debate, between William 444

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King, Anthony Collins, Peter Browne, and George Berkeley, see Fasko and West 2021). However, prolonged discussions about the nature of God are conspicuously absent in Cavendish’s own philosophy. She is clear in stating that God is supernatural and thus absent from nature despite having created it, but beyond that, she reveals very little about how she construes God’s nature. To some extent, this is explained by her claim in the Observations that God is ‘incomprehensible’ (Cavendish 2001: 17). As we established in Section 32.2, Cavendish maintains that beyond the claim that God exists, we can know nothing about the divine. God and his attributes, Cavendish maintains, are inconceivable. She is keen, in other words, to encourage epistemic humility concerning the nature of God. In fact, Cavendish deliberately side-steps such theological debates by drawing a distinction between those issues that are the purview of natural philosophers (such as herself ) and those which should be left to theologians, divines, and members of the church. In doing so, she further emphasises the limits of her own knowledge of God while also leaving it to theologians to settle matters of scriptural interpretation. For example, in the Philosophical Letters, Cavendish raises the question of how the ‘Divine Soul’ (something she would later come to reject) and the body are related. To which she responds: All which I leave to the Church: for I should be loth to affirm any thing contrary to their Doctrine, or the Information of the holy Scripture, as grounding my belief onely upon the sacred Word of God, and its true Interpretation made by the Orthodox Church. (Cavendish 1664: 210) She adds to this: “I avoid, as much as ever I can, not to mix Divinity with Natural Philosophy” (Cavendish 1664: 210). The phrasing of this claim is a little jarring, but the message is clear: matters pertaining to the divine lie in a different domain of inquiry to the natural philosophy Cavendish herself engages in. Elsewhere in the Philosophical Letters she expands on this claim and draws a distinction between what we can know of God naturally and what is revealed. The former extends only to our knowledge, via ‘sense and reason’, of “the Existence of an Infinite, Eternal, Immortal, and Incomprehensible Deity” (Cavendish 1664: 318). In other words, the study of nature will only inform us of the existence of God (something which, Cavendish claims, is known innately by all parts of nature). Revelation alone, then, would seem to be the only way we can gain knowledge about the nature and worship of God. Yet, it remains unclear what revelation might involve given Cavendish’s commitment to the incomprehensibility of the deity. As we saw previously, Cavendish maintains that we cannot conceive of God’s nature or attributes. Consequently, there seems to be little space for anything to be revealed to us. Our knowledge of the divine thus seems to be limited to our innate knowledge of God’s existence. We know that God exists but know little else (if anything at all) about what that actually means (Detlefsen 2009: 433–34).12 In the Philosophical Letters, Cavendish does not tell us much about what the second kind of knowledge – knowledge via revelation – involves. However, she picks up on this distinction once again in the Observations. There, she explains that while the study of nature can inform us “that there is a being above nature, which is God the Author and Master of nature, whom all creatures know and adore” (Cavendish 2001: 217), the manner in which we ought to ‘adore God’ is beyond the scope of such inquiry. Our coming to know religious truths (rather than simply the truth of God’s existence), she explains: requires his particular grace, and divine instructions, in a supernatural manner or way, which none but the chosen creatures of God do know, at least believe; nor none but the sacred church ought to explain and interpret. (Cavendish 2001: 217) 445

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It is possible to read this comment ironically; the irony being that the ‘divines’ profess expertise in that which is, by its very nature, incomprehensible. But even a straight reading of this remark indicates that, once again, Cavendish is drawing a line between the kinds of truths we can arrive at via natural philosophy and those which can only be arrived at by ‘Divinity’. She is also explicitly situating herself outside the group of experts who are qualified to interpret the supernatural word of God presented to us in scripture. The distinction Cavendish draws between natural philosophy and divinity does not, in itself, constitute evidence of her having held deistic beliefs. Taking Cavendish at her word, this is meant to be a sign of epistemic humility, rather than an explicit unorthodox commitment. However, it is also likely that Cavendish’s treatment of religious issues, especially those concerning the role of God in her system of nature, would have been met with criticism by philosophical defenders of orthodox Christianity such as Henry More or George Berkeley. There is, in other words, a fine line between epistemic humility and what some of her contemporaries would have considered scepticism and atheism (Locke’s correspondence with Stillingfleet is a case in point). For instance, despite (as we’ve seen) having attested that matters of scriptural interpretation are best left to the divines, the Appendixes to the Grounds contain several attempts to show that Cavendish’s materialist system is consistent with the word of God. For instance, she discusses the implications of her metaphysics for the possibility of resurrection (Cavendish 1668: Appendix II, VI) and the question of “Whether there shall be a material heaven or hell” (Cavendish 1668: Appendix II, IX). It seems likely that Cavendish’s aim here is to demonstrate that a commitment to materialism need not come hand-in-hand with unorthodox beliefs. Both Spinoza and Hobbes, after all, had developed broadly materialist systems of nature – and were accused of harbouring atheist sentiments in light of it. Conservative, orthodox thinkers, like More or Berkeley, certainly felt that there was a connection between materialism and atheism. For instance, Berkeley writes (albeit, well after Cavendish’s lifetime): “Pantheism, Materialism, Fatalism, are nothing but Atheism a little disguised” (Berkeley 1998: §6). It is reasonable to assume, then, that Cavendish may have seen the need to put such concerns to bed by addressing them head-on and showing that a commitment to materialism need not undermine the teachings of the church. Yet, it is highly doubtful that this endeavour would have been successful. First off, a conservative reader would most likely find it suspect that Cavendish only saw fit to consider such issues in an Appendix to her work. Indeed, her having done so might well be read as evidence that the discussions therein are somewhat ad hoc considerations.13 What’s more, the discussions in those Appendixes do not show Cavendish conforming to orthodox beliefs. For example, concerning heaven and hell, she writes: They shall be Material, by reason all those Creatures that did rise, were Material; and being Material, could not be sensible either of Immaterial Blessings, or Punishments: neither could an Immaterial World, be fit or proper Residence for Material Bodies, were those Bodies of the Purest Substance. (Cavendish 1668: Appendix II, IX) Having thus stated that heaven and hell are both material worlds inhabited by material bodies, she then even raises the question – which she leaves unanswered – of “whether this Material Heaven and Hell, shall be like other Material Worlds”. No doubt these claims would have set off alarm bells in the minds of conservative readers for, while Cavendish is happy to grant God himself the status of an immaterial, she appears to have reduced heaven and hell (along with their rewards and punishments) to material worlds, possibly even of the very same nature as the one we currently inhabit. In other words, there is nothing particularly special about them and nothing, in the literal sense of the term, supernatural. Cavendish’s heaven would certainly fall short of communion with God or beatific vision. 446

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To return to the question of whether Cavendish could plausibly be described as a deist: on the balance of evidence, it is reasonable to (at the very least) conclude that she would have been perceived as one. There are clear signs that Cavendish did not wish to be accused of unorthodoxy. She is clear in stating that she does not see it as her place to engage in theological discussion or scriptural interpretation; hence, she says very little about the nature of God. Yet, what she does say about the place of God, as removed from nature and beyond the reach of our comprehension, along with the pieces of scriptural interpretation she does offer, such as her claims about the materiality of heaven and hell, place her well outside orthodox views.

32.5 Conclusion By paying particular attention to the role of God in Cavendish’s metaphysics and her commitment to the incomprehensibility of the divine, we have demonstrated that in the context of seventeenth century thought Cavendish ought to be regarded a religiously unorthodox figure. Although there are important differences between her own metaphysics and that of Hobbes, in light of her commitment to materialism she would no doubt have been perceived by many as sympathetic to the Hobbesian outlook on nature. This would not have been helped by the fact that in her own system, God is removed from nature and relegated to a creator and governor who cannot actually act within nature itself. Furthermore, her attempts to emphasise the consistency of her own materialist system with various points of scripture, lead to heterodoxy at best. There is no consensus, currently, as to whether Cavendish ought to be construed as a deist. We’ve seen that O’Neill (2001) opposes this reading, while (e.g.) Mendelsohn (2014) supports it. Our own view is that, regardless of her intentions, Cavendish develops a system of nature that simply cannot be rendered consistent with some of the central tenets of Anglican Christian orthodoxy. Cavendish is clear in stating that all action in nature is the result of the principle of self-motion that each part of nature possesses. Thus, there is no room for outside influence; while God created nature, he cannot exert any influence on that creation subsequently. There is no space for miracles or particular providence in Cavendish’s system. Similar problems arise when it comes to making space for the Incarnation. Christ incarnate is both fully divine and fully human, i.e., a particular part of material nature – but for Cavendish this is an outright inconsistency. The divine is supernatural (literally beyond nature), and she is clear in stating that the natural and supernatural are heterogenous and cannot interact with one another. Finally, it is hard to make sense of the possibility of divine revelation, given Cavendish’s claim that God’s nature and attributes are completely incomprehensible because they cannot be patterned or figured by any part of nature. Since all human knowledge requires patterning, it is unclear what kind of knowledge divine revelation could possibly provide us with. It is unwise to speculate too deeply on beliefs and opinions that aren’t committed to the written page; thus, the strength of Cavendish’s devotion to Christian orthodoxy will inevitably remain unclear. However, what is clear is that Cavendish’s philosophical commitments would undoubtedly have put her in danger of being read as an unorthodox, and possibly deistic, thinker. Alongside her status as a woman writer in a male-dominated landscape (as well as her status as a senior member of a well-regarded family) this perhaps explains why Cavendish’s writing elicited virtually no engagement during her own lifetime (Cunning 2022).

Notes 1 Before her marriage, Cavendish was a maid of honour to the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria. William was Captain-General of the Royalist army in the north of England and fled after losing the battle of Marston Moor in 1644.

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Tom Stoneham and Peter West 2 In 1653a she also has Life and Form, but these are dropped as unnecessary when she introduces the idea that some matter is animate (initially this was expressed as very thin matter being material spirits) and the related rejection of atomism. 3 Cavendish formulated these views almost four decades before Locke’s Essay but was familiar with Hobbes’ philosophy of mind and would have been aware of the Peripatetic principle: nothing in the mind not first in the sense (Hobbes 1994: 1.1). 4 While the necessity of rational matter is conceptual for Cavendish, since without motion there would be no change, which is the result of internal or external ‘figurative’ motions, the necessity of sensitive and inanimate matter is empirical: slow movement requires inanimate matter, which requires the sensitive to move it according to the dictates of the rational. Consequently, she speculates in the Appendix to the Grounds whether there could be a world of only rational matter (Cavendish 1668: 193). The idea that nothing acts as fast as the mind is in Lucretius (1992: Bk 3, line 180). 5 Given Cavendish is asking about possibilities here, she seems committed to denying the modal principle of recombination (e.g., Efird and Stoneham 2008). 6 “[F]or Fear, though it makes people obey, yet does it not last so long, nor is it so sure a means to keep them to their duties, as Love.” (Cavendish 1666b: 63) Here Cavendish explicitly rejects the Machiavellian view that fear is more effective than love for ruling a state. 7 The explanation of poise and balance in terms of nature not running in to extremes has an interesting consequence: it blocks a cosmological argument from the existence of both order and disorder to the Manichean heresy of two equipotent gods, one good, one evil. 8 As we shall see, Cavendish does not commit herself to more, and arguably less, than is contained in Herbert’s five Common Notions (1645), which were taken to be definitional of deism; see, e.g., Blount (1693). Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) can be read as an attempt to add some distinctively Christian doctrine to the equally minimal commitments of the Essay. Cavendish never addresses the parallel task. 9 Cavendish includes a chapter on ‘notions’ in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (Cavendish 1663: 89). There she explains that is an “Obscurity of perfect Figures […] made not by the Rational Animate motions from outward Objects or Senses, but […] out of their voluntary and intire Motions, without the help of the Sensitive Prints” (Cavendish 1663: 89). To have a notion, for Cavendish, is to think of something without picturing it. 10 Rather surprisingly, this has potential to give a coherent theory of demonic possession and witchcraft. We do not know whether recognising this in part motivated her later total rejection of finite immaterials. 11 There is some consistency with her views on spirits in her earlier writings here. In the Philosophical Letters, she accuses More of a kind of paganism since his view involves ‘immaterial substances’ existing ‘in Nature’ (Cavendish 1664: 145). Here, in the Grounds, Cavendish similarly implies that to be committed to the existence of finite immaterial spirits is to be committed to the existence of multiple deities within nature; which, again, sounds like a kind of paganism. 12 On a more critical note, one might question whether Cavendish’s commitment to the incomprehensibility of God is consistent with her claim that we innately know that God exists. Is it plausible to suggest that we know God exists but know nothing about him? Cavendish claims that all parts of nature “know there is something above nature, who is the author, and God of nature” (Cavendish 2001: 88–89) but doesn’t that provide us with some kind of insight into his nature (as an author and creator)? 13 What we know of Cavendish’s writing and publication process supports this claim. Cavendish wrote and submitted sections of her writing to her publishers piecemeal (Whitaker 2002: 176–78). As such, the structure of her texts tends to reflect the order in which they were written. It is therefore likely that the Appendixes to the Grounds were written after the rest of the text.

Bibliography Adams, M. (2016) “Visual Perception as Patterning: Cavendish Against Hobbes on Sensation,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 33(3): 193–214. Berkeley, G. (1998) “The Theory of Vision, or Visual Language, Shewing the Immediate Presence and Providence of a Deity, Vindicated and Explained,” in M. Ayers (ed.), Philosophical Works Including the Works on Vision, London: J. M. Dent, pp. 277–304. Blount, C. (1693) The Oracles of Reason. London: no publisher.Boyle, D. (2015) “Margaret Cavendish on Perception, Self-Knowledge, and Probable Opinion,” Philosophy Compass 10(7): 438–50.

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The Unorthodox Margaret Cavendish (2018) The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavendish, M. (1653a) Poems and Fancies, London: Martin & Allestrye. (1653b) Philosophical Fancies, London: Martin & Allestrye. (1663) Philosophical and Physical Opinions, London: William Wilson. (1664) Philosophical Letters, London: no publisher. (1666a) Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, London: A. Maxwell (1666b) The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World, London: A. Maxwell. (1668) Grounds of Natural Philosophy, London: A. Maxwell. (2001) Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. E. O’Neill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chamberlain, C. (2019) “Color in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish Against the Early Modern Mechanists.” Philosophical Review 128(3): 293–336. Cunning, D. (2006) “Cavendish on the Intelligibility and Prospect of Thinking Matter,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 23(2): 117–36. (2022) “Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, and the Plenum,” in L. Walters and B. Siegfried (eds.), Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Detlefsen, K. (2018) “Margaret Cavendish on Laws and Order,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 72–92. (2022) “Cavendish’s Philosophical Genres in Philosophical and Physical Opinions and the Question of Hierarchy,” in L. Walters and B. Siegfried (eds.), Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Efird, D. and T. Stoneham. (2008) “What Is the Principle of Recombination?,” Dialectica 62(4): 483–94. Fasko, M. and P. West. (2021) “Molyneux’s Question: The Irish Debates,” in G. Ferretti and B. Glenney (eds.), Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy, London: Routledge. Herbert of Cherbury (1645) De Veritate, Prout Distinguitur a Revelatione, a Verisimili, a Possibili, & a Falso, 4th edition, London: no publisher. Hobbes, T. (1994) Leviathan, with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. E. Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett. Originally published in 1651. Hutton, S. (1997) “In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy,” Women’s Writing 4(3): 421–32. James, S. (1999) “The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7(2): 219–44. (2003) “Introduction,” in S. James (ed.), Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. ix–xxx. Lucretius (1992) On the Nature of Things, Trans. W. Rouse and M. Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mendelsohn, S. (2014) “The God of Nature and the Nature of God,” in B. R. Siegfried and L. T. Sarasohn (eds.), God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish, London: Routledge. O’Neill, E. (2001) “Introduction,” in M. Cavendish & E. O’Neill (ed.), Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. x–xxxvi. Peterman, A. (2019) “Margaret Cavendish on Motion and Mereology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 57(3): 471–99. Shaheen, J. L. (2019) “Parts of Nature and Division in Margaret Cavendish’s Materialism,” Synthese 196: 3551–75. Walters, L. (2014) Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, P. (2021). “Margaret Cavendish on conceivability, possibility, and the case of colours,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30(3): 456–476. Whitaker, K. (2002) Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic, London: Vintage Wilkins, E. (2016) “‘Exploding’ Immaterial Substances: Margaret Cavendish’s Vitalist Materialist Critique of Spirits,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24(5): 858–77.

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33 ANNE CONWAY Christia Mercer and Olivia Branscum

This chapter is an introduction to the philosophy of Anne Conway (1631–1679) which we maintain is more radical, both metaphysically and politically, than has been recognized.1 Its metaphysical commitments are radical in that Conway’s solutions to core early modern problems place her well outside the seventeenth-century philosophical and theological mainstream. Her politics are radical in that she is committed to the ultimate equality of all created things. The history of philosophy is chock-full of philosophers insisting that the good of the created world follows from the goodness of God. Conway might be the only thinker, however, to hold that every single one of the infinity of creatures persists through a series of lives, over the course of which each creature will attain a virtual moral perfection and its accompanying delight. Whether the creature is currently a fleck of “vile” dust, horse, or human being, it will eventually approach perfection. Because the created world or “third substance” moves eternally toward perfection and because the betterment of one creature contributes to the betterment of all, each will become roughly equal in goodness to all others. Although “individual creatures” are “only finitely good …, they are potentially infinite, that is, always capable of further perfection without any end” (6.6 [vii]).2 Some creatures’ journeys toward the good will take longer than others, or be more circuitous. There will be lots of creaturely backsliding. But every single thing will ultimately become morally commensurate with all the others. Our chapter first describes the special challenges of studying Conway’s philosophy, and then gives an overview of that philosophy before turning to a more detailed account of each of the three substances. Because Conway’s remarkable views about the created world or third substance follow from her notions of the first and second substances, namely, God and Logos, we will treat each of these in turn before summarizing her account of the third substance or created world.

33.1  The Special Challenges and Historical Importance of Conway’s Philosophy Anne Conway’s philosophy is a systematic attempt to solve a wide range of philosophical and theological problems. The full title of her main work, published posthumously in 1790, reveals her broad interests and sources: Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy concerning God, Christ, and Creation, that is, concerning the Nature of Spirit and Matter, thanks to which all the Problems can be resolved which could not be resolved by Scholastic Philosophy nor by Modern Philosophy in general, whether Cartesian, Hobbesian, or Spinozian. A Short Posthumous Work translated from English into Latin, with annotations taken from the ancient philosophy of the Hebrews.

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The interpreter of Conway’s Principles faces several related challenges. First, at some point after Conway’s death in 1679, the original English manuscript was translated into Latin and then lost. We cannot be certain, therefore, how reliably the Latin text conveys Conway’s original meaning. Second, we know that a portion of her book was written on her deathbed and that the penciled handwriting of her original text was at times almost illegible (Hutton 2004, 5). Given the circumstances within which the Principles was composed, we might assume that the English text itself was not carefully edited by its author. Third, unlike the compositions of other prominent early modern women philosophers, whose works were discussed in their day, Conway’s single published work remained almost entirely unstudied until the 1930s when a few scholars began their textual analysis of her thought (Hutton 2004, 2). Fourth, many of Conway’s sources stand outside the standard account of early modern philosophy and therefore are not well known to historians of early modern philosophy. In addition to the philosophy of Henry More (for a thorough account of More’s philosophy, see Reid 2012), she became acquainted with early modern Platonism, Jewish Kabbalist texts, and some aspects of Islam, and was known for her erudition (Hutton 2004). The final challenge facing the interpreter of Conway’s thought is that the radical nature of some of her core commitments does not comport with longstanding assumptions about seventeenth-century philosophy. Her conversion to Quakerism exemplifies her courage: many of the first Quakers endorsed the equal rights of women, proposed the dissolution of class distinctions, and claimed the nobility of all God’s creatures. We take these multiple extraordinary features of Conway’s intellectual life as justification to rethink the standard approach to her philosophy. When historians have turned their attention to her Principles, they have tended to apply longstanding views about the early modern period to her thought. But we believe that many common assumptions about early modern philosophy and the highly simplified story about its development are wrong exactly because authors like Conway were left out of its construction. As we will show, Conway’s philosophy subverts important common assumptions about the period.

33.2  The Basics of Conway’s Philosophy Anne Conway’s Principles contains nine chapters. Chapters 1–5 treat God, Logos, and their relations both to one another and to “Creation.” These concise chapters display the core metaphysical doctrines and assumptions that underlie Conway’s philosophy. In Chapters 6–9, she presents her account of the created world, and advances insightful criticisms of important contemporary philosophers. The Principles offers an account of reality based on three distinct substances. The first is God, the second is Logos or Christ, and the third is the created world. That is, there are “three classes of Beings” (5.3 [ii]) which “are distinct in substance or essence” (6.4 [i]). God is one and does not have two, three, or more distinct substances in himself, and just as Christ [or Logos]3 is one simple Christ without further distinct substances in himself … in like manner, creature, or the whole of creation [is] … one substance or essence, even though it may include many individuals …that are modally but not substantially or essentially distinct from one another. (6.4 [ii]) Conway is clear that there are only three substances, and that there could not be more: “the three [substances] just mentioned exhaust all the specific differences in substance that our minds can possibly conceive” (6.4 [i]). Each substance has its own unique level of goodness and capacity for

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change. God’s perfection renders the divine substance “altogether immutable” (5.3 [i]), whereas the divine products differ in their “kinds of mutability” (5.3 [ii]). Logos “is the most excellent production made outwardly by God, and the … most perfect image of him” (author’s emphasis, 5.4 [ii]). Thus, Logos can change “only from good toward good,” whereas creation, although “good in its nature,” can move “toward good” as well as “from good into bad” (5.3 [ii]). In the end, however, the creatures that God fashions will reach a state of ever-increasing perfection and joy. In her words, “it is the nature of every creature to develop and progress toward ever greater perfection to infinity” (7.2 [vi]). Regardless of the drastic changes a creature undergoes over the course of its eternal life (e.g., from rock to horse to human being), it retains its identity through time. Conway relies on the terminology of essence, attribute, and mode to describe and distinguish among the three substances. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, these notions were much used and debated, and it is important to be clear upfront about Conway’s understanding of these terms. Essence: Throughout the Principles, Conway equates essence and substance. Like many philosophers before her, she understands an essence to be what makes an individual thing X the very thing that it is and without which X would cease to be. Although God has an essence distinct from Logos and creation, he provides each of them with their specific essences. When God produces Logos, he produces “a distinct, Essential substance” (1.7); when he produces the infinity of creatures of the third substance they “receive” their essence and “their activity” from “God’s substance and essence” (1.7). But in providing essence to Logos and the created world, God remains essentially distinct from them (1.3; for more details, see below). Attribute: In his best-selling philosophical lexicon of 1653, Johann Micraelius explains that a standard sense of attribute “is that by which the being” or essence of a thing is understood. (See Micraelius 1653, 169–70; also, Pasnau 2011, 145–47.) Each attribute of God (e.g., wisdom, goodness) is a means by which the essence of God might be comprehended. Conway agrees (see 3.1, 6.6 [i], 6.8 [iv], 7.2 [i]). Protestant thinkers like Micraelius also commonly distinguished, as Conway does, between “communicable” and “incommunicable” attributes. Mode: The notion of modus has a complicated history in early modern thought (see Mercer 1999 for a brief history of mode from Marsilio Ficino through Descartes to Leibniz). It was common to describe a mode as what expresses an essence and to claim that each mode is a different or “determinant” expression of the essence of which it is a mode. According to Conway’s well-known contemporary, G. W. Leibniz, the essence of the number 6 can be “expressed” as 2 × 3, 4 + 2, or through innumerable other “modes.” Each mode expresses the essence in a determinant way, and each “differs from the other” (Leibniz 1923, 518–19). Similarly, Conway maintains that a mode is a unique determination or expression of the substantial essence of which it is a mode (6.4 [ii]), whether the substance is God, Logos, or creation. Although each mode expresses the essence of its substance, no two modes are alike. As we will see, it follows from the “communicative and multiplicative” nature of God’s goodness (2.4) that every mode of third substance (i.e., every creature) must be different from every other. We now turn to a fuller account of Conway’s conception of the divinity, and its implications.

33.3  First Substance: God The Principles begins with the assertion that “God is Spirit, light and life, infinitely wise, good, just, mighty, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He is the Creator and maker of all things, both visible and invisible” (1.1). Chapters 1–3 interrogate these and other divine attributes and unpack their metaphysical and normative implications. For example, an examination of divine love, goodness, generosity, and charity in Chapter 2 leads Conway to draw important conclusions. 452

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God must be “a Creator” (2.5), she argues, because his “goodness, charity and generosity” must “perpetually overflow” or emanate so as to “produce creatures (2.4).” More specifically, “God’s goodness” entails that he is “communicative and multiplicative” (2.4). Like many of her contemporaries (e.g., Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Leibniz), Conway draws on Jewish kabbalist and Platonist sources in her account of God, the divine attributes, and God’s relation to the world (these are “the most ancient” philosophies to which she refers in her book’s title). But unlike her contemporaries, she is willing to follow the implications of the divine attributes to their logical conclusion, however unorthodox. Indeed, many of her more radical views, both metaphysical and normative, result from her willingness to do so. We turn now to four key assumptions that ground Conway’s conception of God and his relation to Logos and creation. The first two concern the relation between the divinity and its products. The second speak to the ontological and normative richness of the world, which she takes to follow from the divine nature. For Conway, the goodness of God imbues the created world with moral significance: God’s perfect nature guarantees that the world is as full of creatures as possible, each of which will move eternally toward perfection, and each of which is different from the others.

33.3.1  Divine Perfection Because God is (among other things) the most perfect, wise, unified, and powerful entity there is, he must create and, in creating, must share his perfections with everything he produces. In Conway’s words: “divine goodness and wisdom” constitute “an internal impulse” to create (3.3). Not only is it “an essential attribute of God” to be “a Creator,” it is also “an essential attribute of God” that his goodness be “communicative” (2.4–5). Because only God can possess the divine attributes perfectly, his products necessarily possess them imperfectly. The second substance or Logos has all the (communicable) divine attributes more perfectly than the created world, though less perfectly than God. Because God shares all his (communicable) divine perfections when he gives “essence to Creatures” (3.3), it follows that every one of the infinity of creatures will receive from God all the (communicable) divine attributes and its own unique kind of “living goodness” (7.2 [ii]).

33.3.2  Emanative Causation Questions arise: how does the unchangeable God share his perfect divine attributes with his products and in what way do the divine products differ from him and one another? A common assumption among ancient and early modern Platonists (and many Kabbalists) allows Conway to explain both the causal relations among the three distinct substances and the means by which the second and third substances acquire divine attributes while remaining distinct from God and from each other. Conway’s understanding of emanative causation assumes that, for a substance A that is more perfect than a substance B, A emanates its communicable attributes to B in such a way that B receives those attributes in a manner inferior to the way they exist in A. So, for example, God – who is perfectly good and unified – emanates goodness and unity to Logos and to creatures, who then possess those features in diminished ways.4 To cite a well-known Platonist example of a communicable attribute, when the philosopher-rulers of Plato’s Republic act according to the Good, their goodness is imperfect compared to that of the transcendent Good itself. Conway nowhere provides an exhaustive list of the divine communicable attributes, but she considers them to include at least “spirit, Light, and life, that [God] is good, Holy, just, wise, and so forth” (7.2 [iii]). Crucially, as we will see in §5, she also maintains that “none of these communicable attributes is such that it is not living, or life itself ” (7.2 [iii]). 453

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For theists (including many Christians, Kabbalists, and Muslims), one of the great benefits of emanative causation is that it allows God to be both transcendent from and immanent in creatures while producing a hierarchy of substances. In the Principles, the first substance or God produces (and is more perfect than) the second substance or Logos, which (along with God) produces and is more perfect than the third substance or creation. God has its attributes independently of Logos although its attributes are immanent in Logos; God and Logos have their attributes independently of the created world although the communicable divine attributes are immanent in the created world. For Conway, the conjunction of divine perfection and emanative causation has far-reaching implications. One of those is the claim that every creature possesses all the (communicable) divine attributes, a claim we call the “package deal.” We consider the package deal (a term coined by Branscum) a core commitment of the Principles. By maintaining that every product of God will have all the divine attributes, it thereby helps to ground Conway’s commitment to the perfectibility of all creatures and the transformational changes that perfectibility demands. Remember that each individual creature X is a determinant mode of the third substance, is different from every other, and will become increasingly perfect over the course of its series of lives while maintaining its identity through drastic changes (see §2). X might be a piece of “vile” dust now (8.4 [ii]), morph into a horse in a century, and then transition to become virtually angelic over the course of a millennium, but regardless of its changes, X remains a distinctive expression of the divine attributes, all of which it always possesses. The second two Platonist assumptions that underlie Conway’s philosophy pertain to God’s communicable attributes and what they entail about creaturely multiplicity and interconnectivity. Once the divine “attributes have been duly considered” (3.4), Conway insists that significant metaphysical and normative claims about the created world follow.

33.3.3  Creaturely Plenitude God’s attributes motivate what we call creaturely plenitude, the two-pronged view that there must be an infinity of creatures and that each creature must be unique. For Conway, it follows from divine attributes like goodness, generosity, and love that God will make as many diverse creatures as he can: “an infinite number of creatures were created, that is to say, an infinity of worlds or creatures were made by God” (3.4). The package deal guarantees that each creature contains all the divine communicable attributes; creaturely plenitude demands that each creature be a unique expression of them. The uniqueness of each expression manifests in the distinctive moral journey a creature undergoes throughout its lives. Conway holds, for instance, that although Peter and Paul could each lose their humanity and transform into beasts and back again, Peter cannot become Paul (or vice versa) since such a transformation would disrupt the perfect justice that rewards creatures appropriately for their own history of activity (6.2).

33.3.4  Sympathetic Harmony and Normative Enhancement Divine attributes like goodness, generosity, and love also require that every individual creature X bears a sympathetic harmony to all other creatures and that the relations among X and its peers are communicative and multiplicative. In emanating the divine (communicable) attributes to all creatures, God shares his attributes with every one of his products. And in sharing his attributes, God guarantees a mutual love among them from which it follows that each will love the others and respond to them accordingly. Conway’s understanding of the ancient conception of universal sympathy follows from the multiplicative nature of this mutual love (7.3 [ii]) (on the history of the notion of sympathy, see Schliesser 2015). She sees God’s goodness and unity as requiring a 454

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normatively significant interconnection among all creatures, what we call normative enhancement (see Mercer 2015, 2019a). When two creatures have a normative enhancement relation, an increase in the goodness of one will promote an increase in the goodness of another, although the relation is non-reciprocal (i.e., the increase in the second will not then promote an increase in the first). For Conway, every creature bears such a relation to every other, guaranteeing the perfectibility of all creatures. Conway may be unique among early modern philosophers in the metaphysical and normative implications she draws from God’s attributes: “God’s wisdom,” she writes, entails that “every single entity” has the capacity to proceed “along its natural course and order” so that all creatures are “instruments of the divine wisdom, goodness, and power that is at work in them and with them” (9. 6 [ii]). Because of the “fertility that he has placed in” all creatures, God guarantees that they will move “toward an ever-greater perfection” and eventually feel joy. The joy of each creature X is partly due to the challenges that it has overcome: “a creature delights in a greater joy, because it owns what it has as the fruit of its own labor” (9. 6 [ii]). But X’s delight is also due to the bond it feels between itself and all other creatures, the beauty of which it increasingly recognizes. To review the neat logic of Conway’s radical version of sympathetic harmony. God shares through emanation all the (communicable) divine attributes with every creature, including his love, generosity, and “living goodness” (7.2 [ii]). As a consequence, every creature X loves all the others and harbors generosity toward them (although X is not always conscious of the relation it bears to all others). Because divine attributes come as a package deal and because the divine attributes of X are proportional (e.g., X’s wisdom will be equal in perfection to its generosity and love), an increase in the goodness and wisdom of one creature will enhance that of all its creaturely peers. This section has made evident the radical leanings in Conway’s thought. She is willing to cast aside assumptions at the heart of orthodox Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and follow the implications of God’s attributes to unorthodox conclusions. Attributes like God’s goodness, love, and generosity entail that every one of the infinity of creatures will increasingly love all the others and in doing so contribute to its own goodness and to the goodness of the whole. Perfectibility is secured because God “works perpetually, and his work is to create or to give essence to Creatures, in accordance with that eternal Idea or wisdom that is in him” (3.7). We now turn to Conway’s account of God’s eternal idea or Logos.

33.4  Second Substance: Logos In Chapters 4–6 of the Principles, Conway analyzes the metaphysical chasm between God and creatures, highlighting the role that the second substance plays as the “eternal medium” between God, the “supreme and altogether immutable Being, and Creatures, the least and altogether mutable being” (6.5 [iii]). Although Conway is clear that the second substance has an essence and nature that is distinct from the first and the third substances (see §33.2), she defines its nature primarily in contradistinction to God and creatures. Unlike God, it is changeable; unlike creatures, it changes only toward the good. It must exist because there needs to be a “medium” between “these two extremes,” which “participates in both” (6.5 [iii]). We refer to second substance as “Logos” to distinguish it from the historical Christ, building on Mercer’s argument that the historical figure is not identical to the second substance and rather a mode of the third substance (see Mercer 2019a). Conway explicates the nature of second substance by demarcating its two aspects, using the Greek terms logos ousios and logos proforikos. In doing so she affiliates herself with Jewish kabbalist and Christian renderings of the term “logos.” It is helpful to recall the first sentence of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” ( John 1: 1–2). Drawing from the language of 455

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Paul’s New Testament letters, she describes logos ousios as “the perfect and substantial image of the word that is in God” (4.2), which is itself “united with him eternally and in perpetuity” (4.2) (see Colossians 1: 15–17 and Ephesians 3: 9). Logos ousios is the source of logos proforikos, which is “the word expressed or brought forth, the perfect and substantial image of the word” (4.2; our emphasis). Logos proforikos is God’s “vehicle and instrument just as the body is in relation to the soul” (4.2). The demand of Logos’s nature is that it must straddle the immutable and mutable, the invisible and visible; it must be with God and with the world. But how? Mercer has argued that ousios is analogous to a divinely ordained narrative or plan that maximally displays the attributes of God, while logos proforikos is that plan “made visible” (see Mercer 2019a). The former exists immutably and invisibly as an idea or “word” conceived by God. The latter is “the word expressed,” an “image” of the word, unfolding temporally in the created world. Logos ousios is the single right way to manifest the divine attributes; it is more like God for being immutable and invisible. Logos proforikos is more like creatures for being mutable and visible, though it can change only “from good to a greater measure of good” (5.3 [ii]). Although logos ousios and logos proforikos share the same essence, they express it in different ways. With impressive finesse, Conway’s Logos manages to bridge the divide between being out of time and in it. A puzzle arises concerning the relation between logos proforikos and the created world: the former only moves from good to good, while creatures themselves can move from good to bad or bad to worse. Conway’s solution to the puzzle tells us a good deal about the third substance. Conway is a realist about creaturely suffering. She herself endured frequent severe physical pain and, despite her enormous privilege, seemed concerned with the harsh nature of life in England and beyond. Rather than ignore the reality of creaturely suffering (as did many of her contemporaries), she builds it into a divinely ordered world, and brilliantly uses the Christian narrative about Jesus Christ’s suffering for support (see Mercer 2012; 2019a). Despite the fundamental goodness of every divine product, creatures turn away from goodness and generosity, lose themselves in sinful behavior, and cause harm. The pain they suffer is the means to moral cleansing. So, despite their suffering, “God’s Justice …gloriously shines forth… in all creatures,” and their “transmutation … from one species into another” (6.7 [i]). She explains: [Divine] justice appears in both the ascent and the descent of creatures, that is, both when they are changed into something better and when they are changed into something worse.... And the same justice conferred a law upon all creatures, and inscribed it into their very natures. And when any creature transgresses this law, it is punished accordingly; whereas there is a reward for those who observe it, namely, to grow better. (our emphasis; 6.7 [i]) Although every creature X will eventually become “angelic” (6.7 [iv–v]), each can fall away temporarily from the good. When it does so, divine justice demands that X be punished in a manner that will (sooner or later) set it on a path to improvement. The transmutation of X from one species to another is a fundamental part of that justice. People who live “pure and saintly” lives will be elevated in the next, while those who live “wickedly” will be punished by becoming more brutish (6.7 [iv]). Because the justice of God “extends over all his works,” it follows that “all degrees … of sin have corresponding punishments,” which “benefit creatures” (6.8 [iv]) so that all will move toward ever-increasing perfection. We have a resolution to our puzzle about the difference between logos proforikos’s mutability and that of creatures. Consistent with emanative causation and the package deal, every creature possesses divine attributes at some level of perfection. If a creature X falls below a certain level of goodness, it will be punished so that it might increase in goodness. Normative enhancement (see §33.3) guarantees that, as X increases in goodness, it will contribute to the goodness of others. 456

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Despite creaturely suffering, “it is the nature of any creature whatsoever” that it has the “means by which it progresses and grows towards a further perfection” (2.6; also see 7.2 [vi]).

33.5  Third Substance: Creation Conway’s descriptions of God and Logos have significant implications for the third substance, which contains the realm of everyday reality that is capable of change (for better and for worse) and thus is bound by the laws of time. Conway calls the third substance “creation,” which encompasses all natural phenomena such as “the Sun, Moon, and stars” as well as parts of the world both visible and invisible (1.5; 5.7 [ii]). Accordingly, we use “nature” and “creation” interchangeably in what follows. So, what can be deduced about creation from our grasp of God’s attributes and the features of Logos? Conway writes that after “due consideration of the divine attributes, … as if from a most edifying Treasure chest, the truth of all things can be made plain” (7.2 [i]). Since all the positive features of creation are diminished versions of the divine communicable attributes, it is helpful to revisit the list of attributes here. Conway summarizes her view: God is infinitely good and communicates his goodness to all his creatures …, so that there is no creature of his that does not receive something of his goodness, and this to the greatest extent possible; … God’s goodness is a living goodness and has within it life, knowledge, love, and power, all of which he communicates to his creatures…. The communicable [attributes] are that he is spirit, Light, and life, that he is good, Holy, just, wise, and so forth. But none of these communicable attributes is such that it is not living, or life itself. (our emphasis; 7.2 [ii–iii) Conway frequently describes the emanative process as one in which God shares his living goodness (see, e.g., 5.4, 6.6 [ix]), and she is keen to emphasize that all the divine attributes must be understood as “living” things. This implies that even apparently inert creatures (say, rocks and minerals) are animate. Where some philosophers of the period – such as Descartes and Hobbes – associate materiality and extension with inactivity, Conway avidly insists that there can be nothing inactive or “dead” in nature. She argues that because “dead matter” is inconsistent with the goodness of God, it is “an impossible thing” (7.2 [v]; for more on her rejection of dead matter and Cartesianism, see Mercer 2019b). All creatures have “a principle that is more active and one that is more passive,” which Conway relates respectively to spirit and body (6.11 [ii]). So, a creature X will have an active and passive principle or component. The former is always more active than the latter, though there can be vast differences among levels of activity across the spectrum of creatures. For example, the passive principle in an angel will be more active than the active principle in a lowly rock. Importantly, however, even the passive principle in each of the infinity of creatures possesses a level of activity. Because everything in nature is active, Conway’s philosophy is frequently considered a form of vitalism – here, the view that life and activity are ubiquitous throughout the third substance (see more in 5.3). But a question arises: how exactly does the activity of creatures differ from that of God? The answer in brief is that the activity of God is one of emanation, according to which God acts but never changes; the activity of creatures involves constant mutability and a form of extension. In order to distinguish clearly “Creature... from God” (7.2 [v]), Conway relies on “diversifying attributes,” namely, “impenetrability, figurability, and mobility [that] are not communicable attributes of God; they are merely ones whereby Creatures differ from him” (7.2 [v]). Consistent with the definition of “attribute” we offered in §33.2, the distinguishing attributes of 457

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third substance are a means by which the nature of creatures can be grasped (though not the only means). These attributes are necessarily universal among creatures since they mark the stark difference between third substance on the one hand and the first two substances on the other (7.2 [v]). We arrive at two core points about third substance, which we take to follow from Conway’s understanding of God and Logos and which we explore in this section. First, although she agrees with mechanical philosophers like Hobbes and Descartes that creatures are always material or corporeal in that they are extended, mutable, divisible, and (to a degree) impenetrable, she vehemently rejects their views about the inertness of matter, insisting that nothing entirely dead could emanate from God. Second, Conway agrees with those vitalists who claim that everything in nature is alive, but she goes beyond most in embracing what we call panpsychism, namely, the view that mental activity is everywhere in nature. There has been much scholarly attention devoted to Conway’s account of third substance. Many have debated whether it is a single substance or is rather composed of one kind of substance. Others have been keen to discuss her account of the mind–body relationship.5 In this section, however, we focus on Conway’s commitment to the close relation between the activity of all creatures and their corresponding mental capacities, which we take to be key to her account of nature. Before introducing Conway’s panpsychism, it will be helpful to look more closely at the structure of creation and its connection to universal perfectibility.

33.5.1  The Structure of Creation and Universal Perfectibility Recall that for Conway, there are three distinct substances, each of which possesses a unique essence. Creation is a single living “substance or entity” that is expressed in an infinite number of determinant modes (7.4 [x]; for more on the notion of mode, see §33.2). Each of those modes is a “living goodness” and in turn expresses all the divine communicable attributes. Since God’s communicable attributes are emanated to individual creatures as a package deal, Conway’s vitalism implies the ubiquity of sympathy, love, charity, and wisdom (for more on Conway’s vitalism, see Arlig forthcoming; Merchant 1979; McRobert 2000; Broad 2002; Hutton 2004; White 2008; Mercer 2012b; Borcherding 2019, 2021; Rusu 2021). We argued above that every individual creature is a mode of creation, but it is also true that Conway sometimes refers to individual creatures as “substances.” The man, Alexander, and the horse, Bucephalus, depend ontologically on the third substance and are substances only in a derivative sense. Conway is clear that “the whole of creation is always only one substance or entity” (7.4 [x]); nevertheless, individual creatures can be distinguished from each other as modes of the third substance, and they are substance-like only in the sense that they are active and responsible for their actions. This is necessary for Conway’s account of universal moral perfectibility. To accommodate perfectibility, Conway builds two unorthodox commitments into the structure of creation. First, boundaries among species (like humans and horses) are permeable. Conway considers more active and intelligent creatures to be relatively morally elevated compared to so-called lower beasts and other parts of nature. Second, she proposes that all creatures participate in a kind of regeneration or reincarnation, under which they turn into more morally elevated beings (and back again) in accordance with their moral comportment in a particular life cycle (see (6.7 [i]; for discussion, see Mercer 2019b and Grey 2020). Conway asserts that all of creation started out on a level playing field: each creature came into existence as “a certain species of human” (6.4 [iii]). Perfectibility requires that every part of creation will tend back toward its prelapsarian status and eventually approach infinite goodness. Indeed, creation is structured to guarantee this eventuality. Although creatures are held responsible for their own activity to comply with God’s perfect justice and wisdom, universal sympathy means that creatures also perceive (and benefit from) each other’s activity (for more on the enhancement relation among creatures, 458

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see §33.3.4). Even the suffering that creatures must undergo serves a moral purpose by purifying them, helping them to become more active and full of life (7.1 [iv]). Conway goes so far as to call punishment “medicinal” because it is impermanent and directed toward the ultimate improvement of the creature and indeed all of creation (6.10 [iii]). We are now in a position to address panpsychism. Since all created individuals possess the divine communicable attributes, Conway thinks that every mode of creation is fundamentally good, active, and alive. The package deal of the communicable attributes further indicates that every creature has the capacity for love, knowledge, and power. Accordingly, Conway can be described as a panpsychist. Although “panpsychism” is not a label that, to our knowledge, Conway herself used, we apply it to her views because doing so emphasizes her contributions to several wide-ranging debates in the history of philosophy. The designation also provides clarity on the meaning and implications of her vitalism.

33.5.2  Panpsychism in the Seventeenth-Century Context Panpsychism, the idea that mind (from the Greek psyche) is everywhere (from the Greek pan), is an ancient notion that has seen many revivals and revisions over the centuries (see Skrbina 2005 for a useful survey from the western perspective). The basic problem panpsychism purports to address – that is, where does mind come from in a world that is mostly un-minded? – is closely related to a central issue in seventeenth-century philosophy, namely the source of life and activity in a mechanistic universe. In fact, questions about the nature and scope of mind had a new urgency in the seventeenth century. According to the mechanistic worldview promoted by the likes of Descartes, Hobbes, and Gassendi, material reality is similar to a complicated machine. It can therefore be understood fully in terms of mathematical and physical descriptions, eliminating the need to ascribe inner activity to much of the world. While mechanistic approaches were scientifically fruitful (and avoided problems facing Aristotelian natural philosophy), some philosophers worried that doing away with principles of activity – for instance, Aristotelian forms – caused just as much harm as good. Perhaps mechanism was useful for some purposes, but it also created new, seemingly intractable problems and intensified old ones (like the problem of mind–body interaction) (see Mercer 1997, 2005; Pasnau 2004; Riskin 2016; Schmaltz 2019 for discussion). Philosophers such as Leibniz, Spinoza, and Cavendish turned to versions of panpsychism to mitigate the damage of hardline mechanism while respecting the advancements of seventeenth-century physics. We add Conway to this list (see Branscum 2022, especially Chapter 3, for a discussion of other proponents of panpsychism in the period). In what follows, we offer two arguments for reading Conway as a panpsychist. For now, we define panpsychism as the view that mental capacities are ubiquitous in, and fundamental to, nature (this definition is based on one offered by Seager 2019; see Branscum 2022, Chapters 2–4, for a fuller account of Conway’s panpsychism).

33.5.3  Two Arguments for Conway’s Panpsychism 33.5.3.1  Panpsychism and Emanation Conway’s notion of emanation means that all parts of the third substance will have mental capacities, since all of God’s communicable attributes are emanated to every creature. Again, the divine communicable attributes include life, knowledge, justice, wisdom, “and so forth” (7.2 [ii–iii]). Just as no part of creation can be fully dead (see §33.3.2), so too must every part of creation display actual non-zero levels of mentality, since the divine communicable attributes are emanated as a package deal. The mental activity of something like a rock will look very different from that 459

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of a horse or a human being: the latter will be more “active and effective” (7.1 [iv]) and so more spiritually and morally advanced. Still, relatively crass and bodily entities will have mental powers. Conway explicitly affirms that “every body … perceives, possesses sense and cognition, and love and desire… and by consequence has activity and motion per se” (7, introductory paragraph). We can conclude that emanation, combined with the package deal, implies panpsychism.

33.5.3.2  Panpsychism and Perfectibility A second source of support for Conway’s panpsychism stems from her commitment to creaturely perfectibility. In §33.5.1, we suggested that the movement toward perfectibility requires that all individuals, regardless of the stage in their moral development, must be able to act – in other words, they must be moral agents. Throughout the physical changes creatures will undergo as a reflection of their moral status across successive lives, Conway needs a way of assigning to every creature X the “actions” of X as it changes from a rock to a horse to become increasingly angelic. It seems obvious that X should not be held responsible for the full breadth of its comportment unless it possesses a kind of moral agency. There are lots of ways to construe robust moral agency, but many of them depend upon an agent’s having a degree of conscious awareness of their choices and actions. Similarly, in present-day debates in the philosophy of mind, panpsychism is frequently associated with the ubiquity of consciousness or phenomenal awareness (for two of the many examples, see Chalmers 2016; Seager 2019). The question of consciousness in Conway is complicated and deserves more sustained discussion than we can offer here. For present purposes, we draw a distinction between the ability to exercise the mental capacities Conway lists in Chapter 7.1 [i–iii] – perception, wisdom, cognition, and so on – and a higher-order awareness of one’s ability to exercise those capacities (or of being in the mental state of such exercise). At minimum, all modes of creation will develop conscious awareness as part of their ascent toward perfection. Conway’s system meets our criteria for panpsychism even without the strong claim that consciousness is universal: since the lowliest rock still possesses all of the divine communicable attributes and must be responsible for its activity, all creatures are to some extent mentally endowed. Moreover, all creatures feel love, perceive one another, desire goodness, and stand in sympathetic harmony with every other. These features of creation are essential to Conway’s account of universal perfectibility and support the contention that mental capacities are ubiquitous and fundamental in nature.

33.5.4  Panpsychism and Vitalism; or, Why “Panpsychism?” Whatever the account of consciousness in Conway’s system, her panpsychism is significant – and worth distinguishing from what commentators call her vitalism, even though the two views are closely related. First, a point about terminology. When commentators call Conway a “vitalist,” they emphasize the fact that she considers everything in nature to be living and seem to assume that all vitalists would agree (some prominent examples include Merchant 1979; McRobert 2000; Hutton 2004; White 2008; Borcherding 2019, 2021; Rusu 2021). In fact, though, the term “vitalism” has meant many things to many people. Sometimes it is used to denote views that make life ubiquitous in nature. Elsewhere, the term refers to theories that posit a fundamental difference between living and nonliving parts of the world and seek to explain the unique principles of life. The history of p­ hilosophy is full of so-called “vitalists” who take major parts of nature to be non-living, or at minimum never assert that all of nature is alive (see Driesch 1914; for recent studies, see ­Normandin and Wolfe 2013 and Wolfe 2019, 2020. See also Banchetti-Robino 2020, especially Chapter 1). But in Conway’s case, the point of discussing her vitalism is precisely to articulate and 460

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name the universality of life within her system. Nor does “vitalism” always involve mentality: something can be alive without possessing or using mental capacities (see, for instance, Reid 2018 on the Cambridge Platonists). So not all vitalists are panpsychists. We suggest, then, that “vitalism” alone is an insufficient label for understanding Conway. The category of panpsychism allows us to highlight the radical scope of Conway’s vitalism and showcase her distinctive contributions to the history of the philosophy of mind. Conway’s handling of the mind–body problem is a useful example. Scholars have often focused on Conway’s account of minds or what she calls “spirit” and body, including its power to resolve issues regarding the interaction and relation between the mental and the physical (sometimes called the mind–body problem). But a question remains about how best to describe creatures’ mentality and corporeality in the third substance. Interpreters have responded to the question by modifying her notion of vitalism with terms like “spiritual monism,” “materialism,” or “(im)materialism.”6 We think that the notion of “panpsychism” both captures something true about Conway’s system and makes her specific response to the mind–body problem easier to understand. Near the end of her text, Conway acknowledges that “every creature” is material, but stipulates that the “noblest attributes” of matter or body (9.6 [i]) are “spirit or life, and light, under which [Conway] comprehend[s] the capacity for all modes of sensing, perception, and cognition” (9.6 [ii]). This claim is vitalist in its assertion that matter is always alive, but it is also explicitly panpsychist. Problems like mind–body interaction, mental causation, and the emergence of mental capacities out of the non-mental dissolve, for Conway, because the third substance is always both materially extended and mentally active – that is, because what one might call Conway’s vital materialism is combined with panpsychism.

33.6 Conclusion Anne Conway offers a philosophical system that imbues every aspect of creation with life, perception, and activity. Her commitment to universal perfectibility motivates the basics of her metaphysics. Her understanding of divine perfection, emanative causation, creaturely plenitude, and universal sympathy ground the rest of her system. We have hoped to show that many of the more radical features of her account of nature follow directly from her views about God and Logos. The plausibility of her account of the third substance and the richness of its metaphysical and ethical dimensions depends significantly on her understanding of the first two substances. By studying Conway’s philosophy of nature with careful attention to her views about God and Logos, we attain a better picture of her commitment to the eventual equality of all creatures, along with her views about minds and bodies, her account of nature, and her place in seventeenth-century thought. It is common to call Conway a vitalist. We have argued that her vitalism implies panpsychism, and that her panpsychism is worth singling out for interpretive focus. Panpsychism not only places Conway in a conversation with major figures in the history of Platonism and Kabbalah; it also reveals the relevance of her philosophy to a centuries-old debate about the role of minds and mental activities in nature. Recognizing Conway as a panpsychist therefore clarifies the form of vitalism she promotes and highlights the wider importance of panpsychism in the seventeenth century. Conway’s philosophical personality is relentlessly unificationist and inclusive. She claims that her Principles will bring together ancient and modern philosophical traditions in such a way as to show the fundamental compatibility of all monotheistic religions. Her rendering of nature as a living whole with an infinity of modes, each of which is eventually morally commensurate to all the others, makes her philosophy metaphysically and ethically egalitarian. Ethically, her egalitarianism implies that every creature will be restored to a morally sophisticated state. Metaphysically, it entails that powers usually reserved for more sophisticated, morally capable beings – for example, 461

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capacities such as cognition and agency – are open to every kind of creature. Conway’s thought constitutes a significant contribution to seventeenth-century philosophy and requires that historians of early modern philosophy reconsider longstanding assumptions about the period.

Notes 1 This chapter is the result of collaboration between Mercer and Branscum, though Mercer is the main author of Sections 33.1–33.4 and Branscum the main author of five. Because our goal was to make Conway’s philosophy accessible to newer readers of her thought, we have focused on the system in its entirety and had to ignore important recent scholarship (e.g., creaturely composition, identity and individuation, the nature of time and space, and the question of monism). See footnotes 4 and 5 for work on monism, Head 2020 and Thomas 2017 on of time and space, and Thomas 2018 on individuation and creaturely composition. 2 We refer to the forthcoming translation of the Principles by Arlig, Adomaitis, Mercer, and Reid. Roman numerals indicate subsections that have been added to this edition for ease of navigation. See Conway (1982, 1996) for other recent translations. 3 Conway refers to the second substance more frequently as “Christ” than as “Logos,” though she does use the latter term. We have chosen to use “Logos” in order to distinguish clearly between the second substance and the historic Christ whom Mercer has argued is a mode of third substance (Mercer 2019a). See §33.4. 4 For more on the Platonist views in early modern philosophy discussed here, see Mercer 2001, especially 178–95; Ogren 2016; Gersh 2019. For recent discussions of Jewish Kabbalism, see Ogren 2016; Garb 2020. In the seventeenth century, there were a number of different ways of accounting for emanation. For a helpful survey, see Schliesser 2005. 5 For recent treatments of Conway’s monism about creation, see Grey 2017; Gordon-Roth 2018; Lascano forthcoming. Mercer 2019a; Pugliese 2019; Thomas 2020. Here we follow Conway’s text in talking about individual creatures, and do not engage with this question. See also footnotes 1 and 6. For recent discussions of the mind–body relationship, see Lascano 2013; Grey 2017; Borcherding 2019. 6 Some commentators have argued that Conway promotes a kind of immaterialism or spiritual monism, but recently others have suggested that Conway is more of a materialist – albeit one whose materialism looks almost nothing like that of Hobbes, for instance. For a classic articulation of Conway as a ‘spiritual monist,’ see Hutton 2004, throughout. Detlefsen 2019, Borcherding 2021, Rusu 2021 describe Conway as more of a materialist. See Grey 2017 and Lascano 2013 for further discussions of Conway’s antidualism and the role of matter or body in the third substance. Branscum 2022 proposes “panpsychistmaterialist monism” to characterize Conway’s non-reductive monistic account of the third substance.

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Anne Conway Detlefsen, K. (2019) “Cavendish and Conway on the Individual Human Mind,” in R. Copenhaver (ed.), Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages, London: Routledge. Driesch, H. (1914) The History and Theory of Vitalism, trans. C. K. Ogden, London: Macmillan. Garb, J. (2020) A History of Kabbalah from the Early Modern Period to the Present Day, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gersh, S. (ed.) (2019) Plotinus’ Legacy: The Transformation of Platonism from the Renaissance to the Modern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon-Roth, J. (2018) “What Kind of Monist Is Anne Finch Conway?” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4(3): 280–97. Grey, J. (2017) “Conway’s Ontological Objection to Cartesian Dualism,” Philosophers’ Imprint 17: 1–19. (2020) “Species and the Good in Anne Conway’s Metaethics,” in C. Marshall (ed.), Comparative Metaethics: Neglected Perspectives on the Foundations of Morality, New York: Routledge. Head, J. (2020) The Philosophy of Anne Conway: God, Creation and the Nature of Time, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Hutton, S. (2004) Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lascano, M. P. (2013) “Anne Conway: Bodies in the Spiritual World,” Philosophy Compass 8: 327–36. (forthcoming) The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway: Monism, Vitalism, and SelfMotion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leibniz, G. W. (1923) Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. McRobert, J. (2000) “Anne Conway’s Vitalism and her Critique of Descartes,” International Philosophical Quarterly 40(1): 21–35. Mercer, C. (1997) “Mechanizing Aristotle: Leibniz and Reformed Philosophy,” in M. A. Stewart (ed.), Oxford Studies in the History of Philosophy: Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1999) “Leibniz and Spinoza on Substance and Mode,” in D. Pereboom (ed.), The Rationalists, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. (2001) Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, New York: Cambridge University Press. (2005) “Leibniz and Sleigh on Substantial Unity,” in D. Rutherford and J. A. Cover (eds.), Leibniz: Nature and Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2008) “The Platonism at the Core of Leibniz’s Metaphysics: God and Knowledge,” in S. Hutton (ed.), Platonism and the Origins of Modernity: The Platonic Tradition and the Rise of Modern Philosophy, Farnham: Ashgate Press. (2012a) “Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy: G.W. Leibniz and Anne Conway,” in S. Ebbersmeyer (ed.), Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Pure Inquiry in Early Modern Philosophy in, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter. (2012b) “Platonism in Early Modern Natural Philosophy: The Case of Leibniz and Conway,” in J. W. and C. Horn (eds.), Neoplatonic Natural Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2015) “Seventeenth-Century Universal Sympathy: Stoicism, Platonism, Leibniz, and Conway,” in E. Schliesser (ed.), Sympathy: A History, New York: Oxford University Press. (2019a) “Anne Conway’s Metaphysics of Sympathy,” in E. O’Neill and M. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, New York: Springer International Publishing. (2019b) “Conway’s Response to Cartesianism,” in T. M. Schmaltz, S. Nadler and D. Antoine Mahut (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merchant, C. (1979) “The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz’s Concept of the Monad,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 17(3): 255–69. Micraelius, J. (1653) Lexicon Philosophicum Terminorum Philosophis Usitatorum, Düsseldorf: Stern-Verlag Janssen. Normandin, S. and C. T. Wolfe. (eds.) (2013) Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010, Dordrecht: Springer. Ogren, B. (2016) The Beginning of the World in Renaissance Jewish Thought: Ma’aseh Bereshit in Italian Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah, 1492–1535, Leiden: Brill. Pasnau, R. (2004) “Form, Substance, and Mechanism,” The Philosophical Review 113(1): 31–88. (2011) Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pugliese, N. (2019) “Monism and Individuation in Anne Conway as a Critique of Spinoza,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27(4): 771–85. Reid, J. (2012) The Metaphysics of Henry More. International Archives of the History of Ideas, Dordrecht: Springer. (2018) “The Cambridge Platonists: Material and Immaterial Substance,” in R. Copenhaver (ed.), Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages, New York: Routledge.

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Christia Mercer and Olivia Branscum Riskin, J. (2016) The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rusu, D. C. (2021) “Anne Conway’s Exceptional Vitalism: Material Spirits and Active Matter,” The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11(2): 528–46. Schliesser, E. (2005) “Newtonian Emanation, Spinozism, Measurement and the Baconian Origins of the Laws of Nature,” Foundations of Science 10(3): 1–19. (ed.) (2015) Sympathy: A History, New York: Oxford University Press. Schmaltz, T., S. Nadler and D. Antoine-Mahut. (eds.) (2019) The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seager, W. (2019) “Introduction: A Panpsychist Manifesto,” in W. Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, New York: Routledge. Skrbina, D. (2005) Panpsychism in the West, Cambridge: MIT Press. Thomas, E. (2017) “Time, Space, and Process in Anne Conway,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25(5): 990–1010. (2018) “Anne Conway on the Identity of Creatures Over Time,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2020) “Anne Conway as a Priority Monist: A Reply to Gordon-Roth,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6(3): 275–84. White, C. W. (2008) The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631–1679): Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism, Albany: State University of New York Press. Wolfe, C. T. (2019) La Philosophie de la Biologie Avant la Biologie: Une Histoire du Vitalisme, Paris: Classiques Garnier. (2020) “Vitalism in Early Modern Medical and Philosophical Thought,” in C. T. Wolfe and D. Jalobeanu (eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, New York: Springer.

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34 GABRIELLE SUCHON ON WOMEN’S FREEDOM Julie Walsh

Gabrielle Suchon (1632–1703) is one among a handful of women that we currently know of in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries writing philosophical treatises about women and for women. We do not know much about the details of Suchon’s life, beyond the fact that she entered a convent as a teenager, eventually found a way to escape the cloistered life 25 years later, and lived out the rest of her life reading, writing, and teaching.1 Suchon’s two treatises—Traité de la morale et de la politique (Treatise on Ethics and Politics, 1693; TMP) and Du célibat volontaire ou la vie sans engagement (On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen, 1,700; CV ) total more than 1,200 pages, a substantial body of work devoted to women’s social, political, moral, and metaphysical lives (Kirsop 2000). Both her books were reviewed in the popular Le Journal des Sçavans, featured alongside other bright lights of the period, including philosopher G.W. Leibniz, mathematician James Bernoulli, and playwright Claude Boyer. Du célibat volontaire also received a favorable critical note in Les Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, which enjoyed wide readership across Europe. Suchon’s aim in her works is to inspire women so that they might, as she puts it, “protect themselves against servile constraint, stupid ignorance, and base and degrading dependence” (TMP.I.Preface/SW 84). Suchon believes that all humans, as rational beings, are born with the God-given gift of metaphysical freedom. On her view, however, women are unjustly excluded from attaining the conditions necessary to exercise that freedom. For Suchon, to act freely is to act in a way that is free from domination, independent, and informed by knowledge. Because women’s personal relationships are often sources of domination, ignorance, and dependence, those relationships serve as obstacles for women’s free actions. Suchon’s original insight is that in order to claim the ability to act freely, an ability to which they are entitled given their inherent metaphysical freedom as rational creatures, women ought to choose a particular lifestyle, which Suchon calls “celibate” or “neutral,” in which personal and professional relationships are foresworn. In order to see the way that she arrives at the view that the absence of such relationships is required for free action, I follow Suchon’s treatment of two traditional questions about freedom— what is it and how is it exercised? As noted above, Suchon holds that freedom is a God-given natural right, which allows rational creatures to determine their own actions in light of reason and knowledge. It is exercised, she thinks, when such determination meets no impediment. Because impediments abound for women, Suchon imagines a new political reality that allows a space for women to avoid such impediment. An implication of this view, I shall argue, is that, by Suchon’s own lights, wives, mothers, and nuns are not and cannot be free. This makes Suchon’s view radical for both her own time and ours.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-41

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I begin in Section 34.1 with the Traité de la morale et de la politique, with a treatment of Suchon’s argument in favor of allowing women to develop their minds. This argument, I suggest, offers a metaphysical foundation for her claim that women are entitled to access the three necessary and sufficient conditions—knowledge, non-domination, and independence, which Suchon calls generosity—that she takes to be required in order to actually develop their rational minds, and thus have their actions informed by such development. I consider these three conditions in Section 34.2. I then look more closely at the obstacles she sees to women’s ability to secure each of these conditions and argue that by Suchon’s own lights, freedom is impossible for women. In Section 34.3 I explore what I take to be Suchon’s own solution to the problem of women’s inability to exercise freedom: the lesson of her second treatise, Du célibat volontaire, is a call for a feminist revolution of sorts, which would entail radical social, cultural, political, and moral change.

34.1  The Rights of a Rational Creature God does nothing in vain. Suchon uses the fact that divine action is end-directed to ground the point that restricting women’s ability to act in a way that is consistent with her rational nature is not only bad or unjust, but against God and nature. It is worth quoting the key passage where she articulates this claim in full. She writes: [1] God created nothing useless: that is an established truth. [2] He destined the least of His creatures for specific uses and appropriate ends. [3] And since usefulness cannot be denied to even the lowliest beings, [4] we can recognize its presence all the more in the loftier, more illustrious beings. [5] Sentient and material creatures are intended to serve rational and intelligent ones, [6] and these in turn tend toward objects that conform to their dignity and help them achieve perfection. [7] Indeed, in keeping with natural law, all intelligent creatures pursue their innate desire for goodness and truth. [8] Now these propositions should be accepted with no exceptions based on sex. [9] For the sex that is customarily denigrated as least capable has as much right to the pursuit of truth as men, [a] even though men have always boasted of their advantages and privileges in all things. Notwithstanding this deprivation, it is, in fact, easy to demonstrate that women possess the ability and qualities necessary to gain knowledge successfully. This truth can be proven in three ways: [b] first, on the basis of their rational and intelligent nature; second, [c] by the authority of God Himself; and third, [d] by the testimony of the great figures of antiquity. (TMP.II.128/SW 157, enumeration added) We can extract the lines of Suchon’s argument in the following way:

1 2 3 4 5

God created all beings for specific uses and appropriate ends. (Assumption) All beings have uses and appropriate ends. (From 1) We recognize the usefulness of “lowly” beings. (Instantiation of 2) We recognize the usefulness of “higher” beings. (Instantiation of 2) Creatures that are sentient and material are intended to serve creatures that are rational and intelligent. (Assumption) 6 Rational and intelligent creatures serve rational and intelligent ends; they pursue objects that conform to their dignity and aid in attaining perfection. (Assumption) 7 It is in line with natural law that rational and intelligent creatures seek to satisfy their innate desire for truth and goodness. (Assumption) 8 This natural law does not differ based on sex. (Assumption) 466

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9 Therefore, women possess the abilities and the qualities to pursue the true and the good. (From 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) A central challenge for Suchon is to defend premise 8: she needs to defend that women are rational and intelligent creatures. If she can defend this point, then she is entitled to two further conclusions that, in my view, are the two that matter most for her: 10 Therefore, women have as much right (natural and divine) to pursue the true and the good as men. 11 Therefore, women ought not be excluded from the means to such a pursuit. In the key passage above, Suchon identifies one main reason why people have doubted the truth of premise eight, that the natural law does not differ on the basis of sex: a

“Men have always boasted of their advantages and privileges in all things.”

Men have boasted in this way, says Suchon, on the basis of “corrupt and extravagant opinions” (TMP.II.128/SW 157). The corruption comes from the view that men and women differ not only on the basis of their bodies, which no one can deny, but also on the basis of their souls. Because the soul is “the effect of a single principle and the product of an infinite power,” Suchon states that there cannot be two kinds of souls that track the sex binary.2 God creates all souls “equally and fashions them in His image and likeness” (TMP.II.128/SW 157). Once we recognize this fact, we can do away with the corrupt view that men have natural or innate advantages of the mind. If we accept Suchon’s point, here, then we can accept that the natural law does not differ based on sex, which entails that women have as much right (natural and divine) to pursue the true and the good as men (point 10 above). Suchon herself addresses point 11, that women ought not be excluded from the means to pursuing the true and the good, several paragraphs after she notes that all souls are created equal. She writes: No being can truly exist without the power to act, since he would be idle and useless; power and operation are indeed inseparable from substance. It is wrong, then, to deny women such advantages as [knowledge of ] the arts and humanities [les lettres]…Rational creatures would not exist in the perfection of being if they were kept from acting in accordance with their intelligent and spiritual natures. (TMP.II.129/SW 158) Given that women are beings, they have the power to act. It is clear that Suchon thinks that this power to act is tied to the pursuit of the ends that are suited to a creature with such a substance: the rational ends of an intelligent and spiritual being. Because it is wrong to prevent a being from pursuing its end, presumably because it is unnatural and against God’s design, and women are rational beings, it is wrong to block women from knowledge. This is Suchon’s defense for point 11 above, that women ought not be excluded from the means to pursue the ends consistent with a rational being. In our key passage, Suchon writes that despite men’s empty boasting, it is “easy to demonstrate that women possess the ability and qualities necessary to gain knowledge successfully.” We can rely on women’s intelligent and rational natures (b), which Suchon has just proven. We can also rely on the authority of God (c). Beyond the problem of defying God’s design by blocking women from study, Suchon also holds that God gives some women the inclination to live a life of study. Given that all such inclinations are natural, and such inclinations are given by God, the authority of God gives women with all three types of inclination the right to pursue lives that are consistent with them (CV.Preface/SW 239–41; CV.39–40). Finally, Suchon notes that empirical evidence abounds of women being smart and capable (d). 467

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Based on these considerations of divine will, nature, and evidence, Suchon thinks that it is clear that anyone blocking women from pursuing the ends that are appropriate to their rational and intellectual natures is committing a grave offense against God and nature. Given this natural right to pursuing these ends, women ought to be able to access the means necessary to pursue them. In Suchon’s view, the conditions that are necessary and jointly sufficient for pursuing rational ends and thus acting freely, are knowledge, non-domination, and generosity.3

34.1.1  Knowledge as Freedom Suchon writes: I define freedom as a precious gift that divine generosity bestows on rational and intelligent creatures, a gift by which they become mistresses of all their actions. (TMP.I.1/SW 93) Suchon here refers to metaphysical freedom, that is, the natural attribute of rational creatures that gives them the power to govern their own actions. On her view, the will is the “proper site of freedom” and it is always guided by the “insights” that “reason conducts” to it (TMP.I.3/SW 94). Actions that fall under the domain of freedom (i.e., voluntary and non-necessary actions), says Suchon, are those that are produced by knowledge and informed by “judicious considerations” (TMP.I.9).4 Citing Plutarch, Suchon states that “only those who obey reason should be considered free” (TMP.I.9). This is because “they who have learned to will what they need [ce qu’il faut], live how they want to live.” For Suchon, we act freely in greater or lesser degree insofar as reason determines our actions. Indeed, her comments indicate that she takes freedom to increase proportionally with the degree to which knowledge determines what we choose to do. She elaborates, stating that the first condition for true freedom, Is to be elucidated by the lights of reason, which [allows us to] discover and come to know the importance, mediocrity, or triviality [petitesse] of [our] endeavors, the circumstances that ought to precede them and accompany the pains and difficulties that [we] face [in executing them], as well as the joys and contentment that they can cause; and which makes [us] enter into the consequences, whether painful or happy, that might follow: for it is certain that without perfect knowledge of all these things freedom cannot be true; because it [freedom] is the daughter of reason, which produces it as its efficient cause, or at least its directive [cause]. (TMP.I.12–13) 5 Suchon takes knowledge to be essential for free action. In particular, she seems interested in the kind of knowledge that helps us assess our projects and interests for their relative value, and predict the affective consequences of our pursuits. For her, without access to the kind of information required to assess our projects in this way, we cannot act freely. The obstacle that prevents women from obtaining this information, on her view, is (literally) manmade. The institutions and systems that have been put in place to exclude women and the way that men have willed these institutions in place, she says, force “us to conclude that the ignorance of the second sex has no greater source than the imperious domination exacted by the first” (TMP II.264/SW 184.) She continues: Men established schools, colleges, universities, academies, libraries, professors for each of the human sciences, regents, and teachers and they banished all persons of the sex [women] from these palaces of the Muses where minds are enlightened, refined, and attain their highest perfection. Nor could men tolerate that women become disciples of the scholars whose 468

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lectures they are barred from attending but from whom women would only quickly learn the debasement and scorn in which they are held. (TMP.II.264–65/SW 184) Men are to blame for the exclusion of women from places of learning. This exclusion from places of learning deprives women of the knowledge needed to exercise freedom. That it is the custom to block women from learning is an insufficient reason to continue to do so (TMP.II.265/SW 184). Women are rational beings, and so are entitled to the kind of knowledge that will help them identify the true and the good and then act on that knowledge. The situation, as it stands, is that women are blocked from attaining this condition.

34.1.2  Non-Domination as Freedom The condition of non-domination is met when there is no greater power determining the direction of one’s will. For a rational being to submit to the dictates of anything other than her own reason is inappropriate to her nature. Suchon writes, The second quality that absolute liberty must have is the power to act independently [ franchement] and voluntarily, so much so that when a greater power prevents and opposes it, where it [the greater power] obliges it [the power to act unreservedly and voluntarily] to act despite itself in the production of its acts, it ruins and entirely loses its being, which cannot subsist with violence and constraint. (TMP.I.13) 6 In a situation of obstacle, opposition, obligation, or any instance where a stronger force prevents us from doing what we will, we have no absolute freedom of action. In this passage, Suchon identifies interference—by way of prevention or coercion—as antithetical to such freedom. To be obliged to act despite oneself is to lose one’s power. The view that acting with freedom requires only the absence of interference is exemplified in the early modern period by Thomas Hobbes, who holds that freedom obtains just in case the power to act on the last judgment of one’s will is unimpeded (Hobbes 1996: 146–48). On a Hobbesian view, a wife can retain her freedom as long as her husband does not physically interfere with her voluntary actions (Broad 2015a: 81). I contend, however, that Suchon’s use of franchement in the above passage indicates that she thinks that something beyond non-interference is required for freedom. To be able to act franchement suggests being able to act in a way that is not subject to the permission, goodwill, or consent of another. To lack the ability to act independently is to have one’s will subordinated to another’s. In contrast to Hobbes, who sees constraint as an impediment to acting according to one’s will, for Suchon, constraint is the lack of the ability to act independently; it is to be in a position of domination. Philip Pettit (1997) writes that Domination is exemplified by the relationship of master to servant. Such a relationship means, at the limit, that the dominating party can interfere on an arbitrary basis with the choices of the dominated: can interfere, in particular, on the basis of an interest or an opinion that need not be shared by the person affected. (22) It is important to note that “arbitrary” here need not be taken to mean capricious or despotic, but rather in the broader sense of a master having the power to interfere by their own discretion and without consulting the person whom they dominate. For Suchon, submitting to the arbitrary 469

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rule of another is tantamount to slavery, or what she more often calls “servitude.” Servitude, she writes, Is the greatest of all evils because it not only deprives humans of freedom, which is the most precious of all goods, but also because it contains the most painful, vile, and abject services, and reduces humans to the use of the basest and coarsest things. (TMP.I.17) Suchon elaborates, writing that servitude is the “enemy of human freedom” and results in “a heart forever in fear, shadowy eyes denied all sorts of light, a soul deprived of tranquility and interior joy, and uncertainty in all things” (TMP I.122–23/SW 116). The fear, pain, disquiet, and uncertainty of having one’s will subordinated to another makes it impossible to act independently. Indeed, Suchon writes that women are not their own masters because their actions “are entirely subject to the inclination of others” (TMP I.151). Suchon’s point, here, foreshadows what Pettit writes about arbitrariness—so long as person A’s mood and discretion can determine the actions of person B without considering B’s interests and opinions, A dominates B. Suchon sees this kind of domination in all manner of women’s relationships. Thus, I take Suchon to hold a view according to which absolute freedom of action must include not just non-interference, but also non-­domination. The two central situations that put women into situations of domination are marriage and the convent.7 While she acknowledges that marriage is “a holy and divine institution,” Suchon states that married life is an “affliction that arises from the dissoluteness and corruption of men” (TMP.I.141/ SW 121). Marriage becomes a prison for women, and for this reason, it is a state where “true freedom” is “banished” (TMP.I.141/SW 121). While women have the worst lot in every vocation, Suchon identifies marriage as the worst of the worst. In this state, women’s “suffering surpasses anything we can imagine” (TMP.I.143–44/SW 124). Life with a bad husband, writes Suchon, is “a painful and rigorous kind of purgatory in its own right, if not sheer hell” (TMP.I.144/SW 124). A wife’s pain comes from the fact that she must seek the permission of her husband before she does anything (TMP I.152); she is dominated by him because his will subordinates her own. Suchon points out that the severity of one’s master can change the intensity of the pain of servitude. However, she is careful to note that a kind and tender master can alleviate but not eliminate the pain of such servitude (TMP III.69). In other words, even a gentle husband who allows his wife to do whatever she likes is still her master. Such a wife is not independent; she is not free from domination, even if some or even all of her desired actions can be executed without interference. With respect to the life of the convent, Suchon holds that there is no doubt that it is a holy life. The evil that she sees in that vocation is that women are often forced into it. To be forced into the cloistered life without a true inclination or calling for it amounts to a life of constraint (TMP.I.128). Like marriage, the convent stifles women’s innovations and initiatives because it is impossible for them to act independently, that is, without seeking approval from “outside wills” (volontez étrangeres) (TMP I.152). As such, in any life where one is rendered dependent in this way—whether on a husband or on the rules of the convent and institution of the Church— self-mastery, that is, the ability to independently determine one’s own movements and interests, is lost. In such situations, “the free use of our actions is impeded and forbidden” because “the will of others serves as a rule” to which we must submit (TMP III.69). Thus, to live the married or the cloistered life without the inclination for it is a kind of slavery. Moreover, women in these situations live without the possibility of non-domination—the wills of husbands rule over wives, and the wills of Church administrators and regulators rule over nuns. Once a woman has spoken a vow of marriage or a vow of dedication to the Church, her will no longer has the ultimate authority over her actions; she is in a state of dependence. It seems, then, 470

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that Suchon wishes to argue not only that no woman should enter into these contracts without the appropriate inclination, but also that so long as marriage and the life of the convent entail the subordination of a woman’s will under that of her superior, she is not free because the condition of non-domination cannot be met.

34.1.3  Generosity as Freedom Knowledge and non-domination must be joined by a third condition for true freedom to obtain. In a key passage, Suchon writes, [W]e still need it [freedom] to be accompanied by fortitude and generosity [de force & de générosité]. For many are elucidated who lack the capacity [ facilité] and the means to put their knowledge into practice; others have knowledge and enough power to act and execute all that is necessary and useful for their perfection; but very few join to these two qualities the third, because fear and timidity serve as obstacles in the use of a noble [haute] and generous freedom, which cannot conserve its being and perfection except by destroying its contraries, namely, ignorance, constraint, and weakness or timidity. (TMP.I.13) Suchon’s stated source for the concept of generosity is Aristotle. She cites the Nicomachean Ethics where he writes, Nor does he [the great-souled (that is, generous) person] incline towards admiration, because in his eyes nothing is great, nor towards remembering evils, because it is not characteristic of a great-souled person to harbor memories, especially of evils, but rather to overlook them. (Book 4, Chapter 3: 1125a2–6) Suchon’s employment of this concept also evokes her closer contemporary René Descartes, who in his Les passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul) states that Generosity causes us to hold in low esteem all the good things which may be taken away, and on the other hand to hold in high esteem the liberty and absolute control over ourselves which we cease to have when someone else is able to injure us. (AT XI.481/CSM I 401) Descartes makes further claims about generosity, which include the view that generosity causes one’s self-esteem to be as great as it can legitimately be, and involves the knowledge of our own freedom (AT XI.446/CSM I 384).8 While Suchon does not explicitly make this same point, her view is at least compatible with, if not suggests it. Adopting the disposition to not be affected by external things, she might say, is directly related to acknowledging that one’s excellence depends on nothing but one’s rational mind. This disposition would entail esteeming oneself in accordance with one’s true value.9 While Suchon does not cite Descartes, it is possible that her employment of “generosity” here is inspired by him.10 In our key passage, Suchon tells us that to acquire generosity, we must eliminate fear, timidity, and weakness. What does she mean by this? On her view, those who have freedom of mind (liberté d’esprit) have “the happiness of this life”; they “never use external objects to satisfy themselves because they seek and build such satisfaction in themselves and in the most intimate and hidden parts of their inner selves” (TMP.I.55). Moreover, the truly free person “disdains the opinion of men and makes themselves intrepid to all 471

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unforeseen accidents that constantly occur in this world” (TMP.I.55). For Suchon, this freedom of mind just is generosity. Those who have it, Are not surprised by unforeseen and unexpected accidents that befall them because not being attached to any thing they act in all things with full independence [pleine franchise]. This is because their contentment does not depend on the will, opinion, or the capricious and bad treatment of others. (TMP.I.58) Once we are able to shake off the constraint of caring what other people think of us, we will have the generosity to actually perform the actions that reason dictates. Opinion, writes Suchon, directs “hatred and contempt as well as esteem and respect that people have for one another.” It is for this reason, she writes, that “the free and generous mind does not rest at these illusions; it is not at all affected by disdain or flattered by praise” (TMP.I.56). The generous mind, for Suchon, does not allow opinion to dictate their view of their own worth. As long as we are ignorant (i.e., blocked from acquiring knowledge, the first condition for freedom), as long as we are under constraint (i.e., blocked from non-domination, the second condition for freedom), and as long as we are afraid, presumably of courting the negative opinion of other people, or, worse, of actual punishment by those subjugating us, we cannot have generosity. Here, Suchon suggests that the first two conditions for freedom precede the possibility of acquiring the third. Notice that Suchon adds that the generous person, the person with freedom of mind, is happy because she is not attached to external objects. The satisfaction of the free person is internally derived. This comment foreshadows an important thread that is made explicit in Suchon’s second treatise: attachments to external things is an impediment to freedom. While more will be said below about how Suchon understands the life without attachments, it is worth highlighting here that she ties generosity and happiness to such a life. Meeting the condition of generosity presents challenges that do not arise in meeting the conditions of knowledge and non-domination. For these latter two conditions to be met, women must deal with the external forces that guard the domains of knowledge and that perpetrate domination. But the condition of generosity is one that is met by looking inward. To attain generosity, women must cease to allow the “judgments, opinions, and whims” of men to determine their value (TMP.I.62); they must overcome the fear associated with how they are perceived by others, and of tying self-worth to external objects. For persons suffering under the oppression of sexism, the particular oppression that concerns Suchon, it is all the more difficult to become generous. The self-worth of members of the oppressed population is developed under the weight of the prejudice they experience. Thus, coming to see the truth of their own excellence, that is, outside of the judgments, opinions, and whims of others, is much more difficult.11 While the language is anachronistic, it is helpful to think of the obstacle to women’s attainment of the condition of generosity as internalized sexism.12 For Suchon, then, freedom is God-given to all, but as a power that exists only potentially, or at least in an imperfect state, until these three conditions of knowledge, non-domination, and generosity are met. To meet all three conditions is to live without external interference, without the subordination of one’s will, without the pernicious effects of attachment to objections and opinions, and with knowledge. Absent the impediments of interference, subordination, and attachment, the free person can use her knowledge to act in the manner appropriate to her rational nature; she can be her own master. Suchonian freedom thus includes what contemporary theorists call negative freedom (freedom from interference), republican freedom (freedom from domination), and positive freedom (freedom to self-determination). While Suchon clearly holds that 472

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women can and ought to be able to meet these conditions, she does not argue in favor of reforming the institutions, structures, and norms that prevent women from doing so. Let us see why.

34.1.4  Obstacles to Reform Suchon emphasizes the importance of knowledge for being free, but she recognizes that women do not have easy access to the knowledge they require because such access is governed by men. Women, she writes, Will always lose their case because they have no judges other than their masters, who will never consent to change the customs they established. And although they often disagree among themselves, these men all agree when it comes to debasing persons of the sex and preventing as much as they can the raising up of women. (TMP.II.267/SW 186) To champion any modifications to social, cultural, legal, or political structures that would help women live lives that include scholarly pursuit and, perhaps, something other than marriage or the convent, would mean appealing to the very ones who benefit from this structural injustice. For Suchon, reforming the system such that women could better attain the first condition of freedom, knowledge, or the second condition, non-domination, is tantamount to ask the jailer for the keys to one’s cell. When it comes to generosity, Suchon’s picture is just as bleak. Women, she writes, are often complicit in ceding their own freedom: Women would surmount some aspects of their constraint if they knew how to resist and how not to be so pliable and blind in helping to forge their own chains. But far from striving to acquire this sacred freedom, women invent a thousand ways every day that serve to imprison them further, even in the areas where they seem the most free. (TMP.I.126/SW 119–20) Suchon laments that women are vain, flirtatious, affected, fake, artificial, and puerile. Their behaviors “provide evidence that women are their own enemies, opponents of their own freedom, which they unfortunately manacle by themselves” (TMP.I.126/SW 120). Women act in ways that conform to what is expected of them. In other words, they allow the judgments, opinions, and whims of others to determine their value; they act in ways that are consistent with how others perceive their value. These very actions are the chains that prevent their freedom. Suchon’s explicit identification of women as being complicit in their own oppression is striking for being an early expression of this idea.13 Access to knowledge requires that men open the doors to education. Non-domination means not being forced into a vocation for which one does not have an inclination and in which one’s own will, not the will of another, determines one’s behavior. But, vocations are often chosen for women, not by them. An aspect of the domination suffered by women is the very set of vocations offered to them—they may have the choice between the secular or the religious life, but they themselves have not had a hand in the construction of their options.14 And, when they end up in marriages or convents, they become dependent because their wills are subordinated to their masters. Moreover, as Suchon notes, the benefits that men accrue in virtue of this status quo make it difficult to believe that they will give up the very customs that they put in place. Finally, generosity means breaking through the fog of prejudice and resisting the status quo. As I understand Suchon, this means that women must not accept and act in ways consistent with what other 473

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people think they can and cannot do. To perform versions of femininity that track popular views of how women are is to be complicit in the forging of one’s chains. The question for Suchon is: can women break free of their socialization and learn to reject the freedom-erasing attitudes and behaviors that are expected of them? Suchon has an answer to this question: women need science, research, observation, and experience. Minds that are bored, languid, and carried away by opinion can be modified, she thinks, by knowledge. Such knowledge, presumably, would help with developing generosity. But knowledge cannot help women to attain the condition of non-domination. Indeed, for the great majority of women, to secure access to books and experience of the world in order to shake off their vain behavior, they would need the permission of men. Is there thus an irresolvable tension in Suchon’s system? Is the solution to the problem of internalized sexism—knowledge—unavailable without the permission of those least likely to give it? I think that the answer to this question is, in fact, yes. In order for her recommendation for how women can escape their servitude to work, women’s situations, circumstances, and opportunities would require radical change. These radical changes would allow women to access knowledge while simultaneously preserving the condition of non-domination, which, in turn, would improve the possibility of attaining generosity. The details of what sort of change is required for this to happen are elaborated in Suchon’s second treatise.

34.2  The Neutral Life In Du célibat volontaire, Suchon is explicit that there is a particular kind of life that is free: the “celibate” life. A celibate lives “without commitments [une condition sans engagement]” (CV.2/SW 242). This life has three components: (1) total indifference: celibates live without being involved in any particular profession, where they would be required to permanently perform certain duties;15 (2) consistent with inclinations: celibates choose this life because it is most appropriate to their inclinations; (3) resolve: celibates are consistent and resolute in their choice to live with no commitment other than that for indifference (CV.2/SW 242). The celibate chooses the life of indifference, based on her inclinations, and is resolute in that choice because it is the condition that she knows that she prefers over all others. To disengage from professions and other vocations means that one is neutral with respect to them. And so Suchon uses the term “neutralist” as a synonym for the celibate.16 While marriage and the cloister are more visible as the two vocations that are possible for women, Suchon affirms that it is clear that God inclines some women to the neutral life. She concludes that there are thus three natural vocations available to women (CV.7/SW 245). By introducing a third way of living, Suchon carves out space for women to attain the conditions required for free action; in particular, that of non-domination, which, as noted above, seems difficult if not impossible to attain under typical conditions. Beyond allowing for free action, the neutral life also seems to be the kind of life, perhaps the only kind of life, that Suchon takes to be a happy one. Throughout Du célibat volontaire, Suchon uses personnes libres (free persons) as a synonym for neutralists, and vie heureuse (happy life) for the neutral life. Recall that above, Suchon tied happiness to generosity. Here, we see Suchon associating free action with the neutral life, which, in turn, is the happy life. Thus, the neutralist, as a free person, has attained the conditions of knowledge, non-domination, and generosity. And, as suggested by the inner happiness that Suchon ties to generosity in Traité de la morale et de la politique, the neutralist is happy. The three most important qualities of the neutralist, Suchon tells us, are detachment, innocence, and retreat (CV.651). The neutralist retreats from society, detaches herself from external objects, and lives an innocent life. She seeks personal tranquility as well as utility to the common 474

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good (CV.30, 354/SW 275). She prays, helps her community, converses with friends, reads, writes books to help teach others, but mostly spends her time alone.17 And while the neutralist is helpful to her community, the manner in which she performs activities of social utility must always be self-directed and self-determined; she is the mistress of her own time. Suchon notes that some neutralists live together in a community,18 some are widows who may live alone or with family, some are young and remain under the control of their parents, and others, due to necessity, make a living by working and cannot retreat from society. Suchon considers all these women neutralists, so long as their commitment to a life without attachment is firm, even if their socio-economic, age, or other life circumstances make it impossible to physically retreat (CV.15/SW 249).19 There is certainly more to be said about how Suchon understands the neutral life, especially for women who must work for a living, who are too young to be separated from their parents, and who more generally live in conditions where knowledge, domination, and generosity seem difficult to obtain. For my purposes here, I wish to highlight the fact that Suchon insists that neutralists must form “voluntary societies” (Societez volontaires) away from the religious and secular societies in order to have the space to pursue their ends (CV.372). At the outset, I stated that I would pursue Suchonian answers to the following questions: What is freedom and how is it exercised? We have seen that Suchon thinks that all humans, in virtue of being rational creatures, have God-given metaphysical freedom. I think it is clear that for Suchon, exercising that freedom, that is, acting freely, requires knowledge together with absence of external constraint (non-interference and non-domination) and the elimination of the fears and weakness that lead us to form attachments to objects and opinions (generosity). Freedom is exercised when our actions are informed by reason, and such actions are not constrained. Such freedom is possible for the neutralist. But what about everyone else? While we can, I think, envision situations where wives, mothers, and nuns are able to gain access to books and thus knowledge, the attainment of the other two conditions required for freedom is harder to imagine for these women. Given that domination, even if it is acknowledged, accepted, and consented to, is the hallmark of both secular and cloistered lives, it is difficult to see how, for Suchon, a wife or a mother or a nun can be free. A wife and mother will be constrained by the demands and wills of their household; a nun will be constrained by the demands and wills of the convent. In more present-day terms, it is equally difficult to imagine how women can develop generosity while simultaneously performing versions of femininity prescribed by their cultures. Can non-domination obtain for a willing prisoner, whose inclination is to be constrained? Can generosity obtain for someone whose identity is defined by external opinions and objects? In short, are the conditions of any vocation other than neutrality friendly to the development of non-domination and generosity? I think that Suchon’s answer is no.20 Recall that Suchon’s characterization of freedom requires that we be our own masters: we have knowledge that informs our actions and interests, we meet no interference with or domination of our wills, and we have rejected the perceived value of terrestrial things and attitudes in favor of contemplations that befit the rational mind. And, in the event that these three elements can be attained, happiness follows. It does not appear that, for Suchon, such freedom and happiness can obtain in the sorts of vocations available to women in her era: marriage and the convent. So, in order for women who are called to the neutral life to live freely and be happy, a radical shift away from the institutions that favor men and imprint freedom-restricting attitudes and ideas on women is required. Suchon seems more focused on discussing the structures of domination that oppress women, rather than the particular men who might dominate particular women. This, together with the absence of a call to reform and the elaboration of the neutral life, suggests that she is more interested in outlining the nature and consequences of, and possible release from, the patriarchy, rather than from men themselves. That is, Suchon does not appear to be interested in outlining ways 475

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for individual men to modify their attitudes and behaviors in order to ameliorate the situation of women. She does not issue a call, for example, for any man who is a husband to give up his domination of his wife. Instead, her focus is at the level of institutions—marriage, the convent, the university—institutions that are built to preserve the tenets of patriarchal privilege and domination. Taking Suchon to be discussing the structural problem of the patriarchy rather than the domination of individual men accords well with her claims, peppered throughout Du célibat volontaire, that men can be neutralists too (CV.47–48). This at least suggests that Suchon sees that there are men in her society who might wish to escape the patriarchal structure perhaps because they do not benefit (as much) from these structures due to other non-sex-based varieties of oppression visited upon them.21 These men, unlike the women who pursue neutralism, might not have had difficulty in securing knowledge and non-domination outside of the neutral life. But, just like women neutralists, men neutralists require separation to see that their true value is not determined by opinions or possessions. While men may enjoy greater freedom than women in virtue of their relative ease of access to education and non-domination, they too are prevented from attaining generosity while in the grip of measuring their worth according to socially constructed and customary opinions and practices. For Suchon, it seems, no one can truly be free, independent, or happy under the yoke of the patriarchy.

34.3 Conclusion Suchon has offered an extraordinarily compelling case for why obstacles to the search for knowledge, non-domination, and generosity are contrary to God, reason, and evidence. She recognizes that reforming the systems that make it difficult for women in particular to access the conditions required for freedom will be difficult if not impossible. This recognition leads her to offer a radical solution to the problem of women’s domination: an alternative social and political life that is not structured by patriarchal ideas. Suchon’s diagnosis of the problem of sex-based oppression and her radical solution to it shows that her work ought to occupy a more significant place not only in our understanding of the history of feminism, but also of social and political philosophy.22

Notes 1 See Papillon (1745: 298); Broad and Green (2009: 257); Shapiro (2017: 50–51); Bertolini (2000). Suchon’s discussion of women is not what we would today call intersectional. While there are moments in Du célibat volontaire where she indicates that she is aware that differences in class make securing the conditions required for free action more or less attainable, it is clear that she only has White Western European women in mind when she writes of women. 2 I see no evidence that Suchon understood sex to be a spectrum, as we do today, rather than as a strict binary. 3 While etymologically, the word “generous” derives from the Latin generosus, meaning “of noble birth,” by the seventeenth century, the term was used to refer to the character trait of equanimity. 4 When a citation to Suchon’s text does not include a reference to the SW, the passage is not included in their translation. In these cases, the translation is my own. 5 By “directive,” I take Suchon to mean that if we do not accept that reason is the efficient cause of freedom, then we at least should accept that it is the cause of the direction that the will takes. 6 I take “franchement” and later “franchise” (see page 8 below) in the way common in the early modern period: freely; independently. See Trésor de la langue française definition A for “franchise” and historical uses for “franchement.” Both words have the prefix “franc,” which in the early modern period was used to mean “freely” and as an antonym for “enslaved.” See definition A1. 7 Suchon also states that poverty is a terrible misfortune that leads to situations of domination (TMP.I.17). 8 See Shapiro (1999) for discussion of Descartes and generosity. 9 Descartes, like Suchon, is clear that the virtue of generosity means esteeming oneself in accordance with one’s true value. He, like Suchon, notes the Aristotelian roots of this definition of the virtue (AT XI.453/CSM I 388).

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Gabrielle Suchon on Women’s Freedom 10 I agree with Shapiro (2017) who notes that it seems unlikely that Suchon did not read Descartes (58, note 15). Suchon also explicitly engages with François Poulain de la Barre, whose work is very much informed by Descartes. For discussion of Suchon’s engagement with Poulain, see Wilkin (2019). 11 Versions of this phenomenon receive rich theorization in the early 20th in work by W.E.B Du Bois on racialized oppression (Pittman (2016)), and in the late nineteenth century by Marx and Engels on class oppression (Eyerman (1981)). 12 Mary Astell holds a similar view on generosity (Broad (2015b, 95–105)). Suchon could have read Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, published in 1694, while she was writing Du célibat volontaire. But Suchon does not cite Astell, and it is unclear whether Suchon read English. 13 This is another point on which Suchon and Astell agree. See, for example, Chapter 2 of Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. 14 This point is made by Einspahr (2010) in a discussion of contemporary views of freedom and feminism (10). 15 See Shapiro (2017) for a discussion of how to understand Suchon’s use of “indifference.” Shapiro argues that Suchon is here concerned with self-mastery, which, in turn, situates her view within the larger Enlightenment discussion of autonomy. I agree with Shapiro, and I take my discussion to be consistent with Shapiro’s view. 16 Suchon is not the first to use the term “the neutral life.” See Desnain (2009). 17 Despite the emphasis on friendship, Suchon states that it must not “ruin the principle that I have established, that in the celibate [life] one must love without attachment” (CV.410). Given the neutralist’s lack of attachments, it difficult to understand how they maintain friendships. 18 Suchon notes that there are historical examples of such communities in France and other places throughout Europe (CV.16/SW 249). There is reason to believe that Suchon is here referring to the medieval women’s movement of the Béguines. See Desnain (2006) for discussion. 19 It is however difficult to imagine how, for example, an impoverished woman who needs to work to survive is able to attain the condition of non-domination. Presumably, the will of her employer subordinates her own will at least some of the time. 20 Though Shapiro (2017) does not take up this point in particular, there is reason to think that her treatment of Suchon leads in this same direction. Shapiro writes: “The subtlety of Suchon’s position consists in recognizing that the freedom that is intrinsic to humankind requires proper conditions to be fully expressed” (63). 21 Although we arrive at the claim in different ways, I agree with Sabourin (2017), who argues that, for Suchon, the neutral life allows the neutralist a kind of elevation over those who do not adopt it (227). Sabourin also claims that the neutral life allows women to transcend the equality of the sexes, and to render themselves superior to men (226). I hesitate to accept this second point because of Suchon’s inclusion of men in the neutral life, which I take to mean that she holds that it is possible for both men and women to escape the pernicious effects of the patriarchal structure. 22 I thank Lisa Shapiro, Jacqueline Broad, Patricia Sheridan, Katherine O’Donnell, Ruth Boeker, Susanne Sreedhar, as well as audiences at the Society for Analytical Feminism, the Women in PhilosophyPhilosophy in Action Conference, the Early Modern Interest Group at the University of Minnesota, and the Agency in Early Modern Philosophy Workshop for valuable feedback on this project.

Bibliography Aristotle. (2004) Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. R. Crisp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Astell, M. (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. P. Springborg, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Literary Texts. Bertolini, S. (2000) “Gabrielle Suchon. Une vie Sans Engagement?” Australian Journal of French Studies 37(3): 289–308. Broad, J. (2015a) ““A Great Championess for Her Sex”: Sarah Chapone on Liberty as Nondomination and Self-Mastery,” The Monist 98(1): 77–88. (2015b) The Philosophy of Mary Astell, Oxford: Oxford University Press. and K. Green. (2009) A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. (1964–1974) Oeuvres, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Revised edition, Paris: Vrin, [AT]. (1985) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1, trans by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [CSM I] Desnain, V. (2006) “Gabrielle Suchon’s Neutralists,” in J. Perlmutter (ed.), Relations and Relationships in Seventeenth Century French Literature, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, pp. 116–31.

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Julie Walsh (2009) “The Origins of la vie Neutre: Nicolas Caussin’s Influence on the Writings of Gabrielle Suchon,” French Studies 63(2): 148–60. Einspahr, J. (2010.) “Structural Domination and Structural Freedom: A Feminist Perspective,” Feminist Review 94(1): 1–19. Eyerman, R. (1981) “False Consciousness and Ideology in Marxist Theory,” Acta Sociologica 24(1–2): 43–56. Hobbes, T. (1996) Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirsop, W. (2000) “Gabrielle Suchon et ses Libraires: Une Note Complémentaire,” Australian Journal of French Studies 37(3): 309–11. Le Doeuff, M. (2000) “Feminism Is Back in France: Or Is It?” Hypatia 15(4): 243–55. Papillon, A. P. (1745) Bibliothèque des Auteurs de Bourgogne, 2 Vols., Dijon: Philippe-Louis Joly. Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pittman, J. P. (2016) “Double Consciousness,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Sabourin, C. (2017) “Plaider L’égalité Pour Mieux la Dépasser: Gabrielle Suchon et L’élévation des Femmes,” Philosophiques 44(2): 209–32. Shapiro, L. (1999) “Cartesian Generosity,” in T. Abo and M. Yrjönsuuri (eds.), Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes. (Acta Philosophica Fennica 64), Helsinki: Societas philosophica, pp. 249–75. (2017) “Gabrielle Suchon’s ‘Neutralist’: The Status of Women and the Invention of Autonomy,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 50–65. Suchon, G. (1693) Traité sur la Morale et sur la Politique, 3 Vols., Lyon: Chez B. Vignieu, Published pseudonymously under G.S. Aristophile. [TMP.I/II/III.page] (1700) Du Célibat Volontaire ou La vie sans Engagement, 2 Vols., Paris: Chez Jean & Michel Guignard. [CV.page] (2010) A Woman Who Defends all the Persons of her Sex: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings, ed. and trans D. Stanton and R. Wilkin, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. [SW.page] Wilkin, R. (2019) “Feminism and Natural Right in François Poulain de la Barre and Gabrielle Suchon,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80(2): 227–48.

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35 THE SOCRATIC PEDAGOGY OF SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica

35.1 Introduction Though she is primarily considered a poet and a playwright, Novohispanic nun Juana Inés de la Cruz is also one of the most distinguished women philosophers from the Early Modern period— in particular, one who offered a substantial defense of the right of women to be educated in seventeenth-century New Spain. Her most well-known arguments are contained in her famous Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (The Answer to Sor Filotea de la Cruz). In this piece, Sor Juana aims to provide a systematic response to the bishop of Puebla Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, writing under the pseudonym Sor Filotea de la Cruz, who reprimanded and reminded her of her position as a nun and of the demands associated with this role by ecclesiastical and civil authorities. Numerous scholars have studied in detail the strategies and arguments that Sor Juana deploys to respond to Sor Filotea. For instance, both Georgina Sabat Rivers (1994) and María Luisa Femenías (2006) have pointed out that Sor Juana develops in the Answer a catalog of illustrious women that preceded her to create a philosophical tradition that legitimizes her endeavors to cultivate herself. Joan Gibson (2006) has argued that Sor Juana, following the admonition of Luis Vives according to which women should be taught to be chaste, uses the logic of chastity that was imposed on women to maintain that its upholding requires the education of women by women. Although much has been written about the many strategies that Sor Juana uses in the Answer to vindicate the right of women to be educated, little has been said so far about whether Sor Juana advocates some specific pedagogy in her works. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that there is a philosophical pedagogy underlying Sor Juana’s works that is in many respects Socratic. By this we mean that, in order to argue for the right of women to be educated, and given her social position, Sor Juana deploys a method of teaching that mirrors Socrates’ strategies. We conclude that the development and use of Socratic pedagogy emerges as a reaction to the paternalistic/authoritarian pedagogic model that was imposed by scholastic philosophy in colonial New Spain in the seventeenth century. In order to show this, we proceed in the following way. In Section 35.2, we present what we take to be four important elements of Socratic pedagogy, and which we identify in Sor Juana’s work: (i) the use of autobiography as a pedagogical tool, (ii) the deployment of complex irony as a way to engage interlocutors, (iii) the use of shame as an attempt to correct behavior and promote virtue, and finally, (iv) the characterization of the quest of knowledge as an erotic enterprise. In Section 35.3, we examine how Sor Juana uses autobiography in the Answer to defend herself against some of the charges raised against her. In Section 35.4, we present a few examples of Sor DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-42

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Juana’s use of complex irony aimed at engaging her interlocutors in a way that she both appears to mean exactly the opposite of what she writes and to be committed in some sense to what she writes. In Section 35.5, we show how Sor Juana uses shame as a way to motivate others (in particular, men) to correct their behavior and to promote virtue. In Section 35.6, we show how Sor Juana characterizes the pursuit of knowledge as an erotic enterprise. Finally, in Section 35.7, we offer a brief conclusion that highlights how the pedagogy that underscores Sor Juana’s works deploys key elements of Socratic pedagogy as a way to carve out an intellectual space for free inquiry as a woman in seventeenth-century New Spain.

35.2  Some Key Features of Socratic Pedagogy On the basis of an analysis of Plato’s early works and the writings of several distinguished Socrates’ scholars—in particular, Gregory Vlastos (1987), David Roochnik (1987), Paul Woodruff (2000), and Owen Gower (2008), in this section we introduce briefly what we take to be some of the central features of Socratic pedagogy. In particular, we focus on: (i) the use of autobiography as a pedagogical tool, (ii) the deployment of complex irony as a way to engage interlocutors, (iii) the use of shame as an attempt to correct behavior and promote virtue, and finally, (iv) the characterization of the quest of knowledge as an erotic enterprise. This goal, however, presents us with an immediate challenge: how can we present these features given that Socrates maintains in the Apology that he “[has] never been anyone’s teacher” (33a; Plato 1997)? The enterprise of offering an account of Socratic pedagogy might seem, in light of this pronouncement, doomed from the start. However, Socrates himself seems to suggest further down that, although he never was a teacher in the sense that Evenus or Gorgias were considered to be (i.e., as merchants of wisdom who were paid for their services), his defense in court involves, in some sense, a type of pedagogical activity since he also states: “I do not think it right to supplicate the jury and to be acquitted because of this, but to teach and persuade them” (35c; Plato 1997). Thus, by considering closely how Socrates defends himself in the Apology by teaching the jury, we can extract some of the main characteristics of his pedagogy. The analysis of Socrates’ defense also serves to highlight an interesting parallel to Sor Juana. One of the main aims of pedagogy in her work is not simply to teach her readers, but to persuade them that in engaging in philosophical thought she is not doing anything wrong. That is, much like Socrates, she teaches her readers to convince them that she does not deserve to be persecuted for the very act of teaching. One particular salient feature of Socrates’ defense consists in the use of autobiographical narrative at certain stages of the Apology. Socrates is accused of busying himself studying things in the sky and below the earth, of making the worse argument into the stronger, and of teaching others to do the same. In order to respond to these accusations, Socrates offers a brief autobiographical narrative describing his actions after being informed of the answer that the oracle of Delphi gave to Chaerephon (21b–22e; Plato 1997). On the one hand, with this autobiographical narrative, Socrates is able to show that the accusations are nothing but unsubstantiated slander propagated by certain individuals who were resentful of their critical engagements with him. But, on the other hand, the use of this autobiographical narrative in the Apology serves a more important pedagogical purpose: to teach the jury the importance of epistemic humility, since true knowledge can only come from the previous acknowledgment of one’s own ignorance. This is relevant for Socrates’ defense to justify to the jury his instructive attitude vis-à-vis his fellow citizens, which Socrates describes in the following manner: “I go around seeking out anyone, whom I think wise. Then if I do not think he is, I come to the assistance of the god and show him that he is not wise” (23b; Plato 1997). The use of autobiographical narratives with pedagogical purposes is not only limited to the Apology, but it also emerges in other early works of Plato. In particular, there is a famous passage 480

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in the Phaedo (95e–102a; Plato 1997) where, after rehearsing the objection that Cebes had earlier raised about the immortality of the soul, Socrates immediately offers an autobiographical narrative of his early life that tells the tale of his intellectual failures as a young man. Just as in the case of the autobiographical narrative in the Apology, several scholars (e.g., Gower 2008; Hoinski 2008) have argued that this passage plays a central pedagogic function, although they disagree about the exact import of what Socrates is trying to teach. In particular, while Gower takes the core lesson of this autobiographical narrative to be that “if Socrates has made philosophical progress, it is by relying on himself — and that, if we are to become philosophers, we must do the same” (2008: 341), Hoinski maintains that the central message that Socrates wants to convey concerns his philosophical praxis which is grounded upon “a first, foundational choice and on the judgment in each and every case to hypothesize the strongest speech” (2008: 353). That is, although they disagree about the exact lesson autobiographical narrative is meant to convey, they agree that it fulfills an important pedagogical role in Socrates’ teaching. In particular, it seems that the pedagogical role of autobiographical narrative is that of taking Socrates’s own life as an example to make a meta-philosophical point concerning the aim, relevance, and justification of the philosophical endeavor.1 A second noticeable feature of Socrates defense in the Apology involves the use of what Vlastos has called “complex irony,” which he characterizes in the following terms: “In ‘simple’ irony what is said is simply not what is meant. In ‘complex’ irony what is said both is and isn’t what is meant” (1987: 86). Indeed, in one of the most memorable passages after the court gives its verdict of guilty, Socrates discusses what would be an adequate “penalty” for his actions. Though Meletus had proposed the penalty of death, Socrates argues in this passage that, if it is indeed the case that his “penalty” should match his actions and that if what he did was to go to each person privately to bestow upon him the greatest benefit, what he deserves is not being put to death but rather being fed at the Prytaneum (36b–37a; Plato 1997). Given the circumstances in which he finds himself, this statement from Socrates constitutes a case of complex irony considering that, in the conventional sense of “penalty” understood as punishment, Socrates does not mean what he says but that, in the sense of “penalty” understood as desert, he does mean exactly what he says. Immediately after putting forth his suggestion, Socrates emphasizes the following point: “since I am convinced that I wrong no one, I am not likely to wrong myself, to say that I deserve some evil and to make some such assessment against myself ” (37b; Plato 1997). The pedagogical use of complex irony seems to consist in exploiting the ambiguity of the statement to get the audience to engage in a complex act of interpretation by which they reflect on how the ironic statement might be consistent or inconsistent with the rest of the teachings in order to derive further lessons. In this case, Socrates seems to use complex irony to make his audience reflect on what the “punishment” he has chosen for himself says about how he conceives of his intellectual endeavor given the inadvisability of wronging oneself. We find other cases of complex irony as a pedagogic tool in other early Platonic dialogues. For instance, in the Meno, after Socrates introduces the view that As the soul is immortal, has been born often and has seen things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising it can recollect the things it knew before. (81c; Plato 1997) and Meno asks to be taught that this is the case, Socrates responds: “You now ask me if I can teach you when I say there is no teaching but recollection, in order to show me up at once contradicting myself ” (81e–82a; Plato 1997). This statement is a case of complex irony because, on one hand, Socrates means what he says in the sense that there is no “teaching” understood as a transference 481

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of knowledge but, on the other hand, Socrates does not mean what he says in the sense that he can “teach” Meno by helping him to discard his old epistemic practices (i.e., his slavish dependence on the rhetoric and memorization techniques exemplified by Gorgias) so he can effectively recollect what he already knew. The pedagogic function of complex irony in this passage is quite obvious since, after being teased in this way, Meno responds: “No, by Zeus, Socrates, that was not my intention, but just a habit” (82a; Plato 1997), thus showing that Socrates’ ironic remonstrance has made him become aware of the problematic nature of his old epistemic practices. A third significant element in Socrates’s defense in the Apology is the attempt to elicit shame in his interlocutors and to use it to correct their behavior. For instance, at a certain point in his defense, Socrates contrasts his detached demeanor with that of others before him who have begged in tears and brought their families to court to try to elicit pity from the court when facing less dangerous charges, and he explicitly embarrasses them by stating the following: I think these men bring shame upon the city so that a stranger, too, would assume that those who are outstanding in virtue among the Athenians, whom they themselves select from themselves to fill offices of state and fill honors, are in no way better than women. (35b; Plato 1997) This use of shame is then explicitly linked to a pedagogical function since Socrates’s intention is to help the members of his audience to correct their behavior: “You should not act like that, men of Athens, those of you who have any reputation at all, and if we do, you should not allow it” (35b; Plato 1997). As we can see, the use of shame is explicitly tied here to correcting behavior that is deemed to be morally wrong. Shame as a tool in moral education—as an instrument that serves not only to identify and rectify current moral failures but also as a deterrent against potential future moral trespasses—also appears in other works from Plato as well. For instance, in the Symposium, Phaedrus explicitly says love is of the utmost importance in imparting a moral education insofar as it provides a crucial guidance which is based upon “a sense of shame at acting shamefully, and a sense of pride in acting well.” These emotions are essential from a pedagogical viewpoint for Phaedrus because, “without these, nothing fine or great can be accomplished, in public or in private” (178d; Plato 1997). In light of this, shame does clearly play a central role in Socratic pedagogy. A fourth feature of Socrates’ defense in the Apology is the characterization of what he does (i.e., philosophy) as an erotic activity. To understand this, it is important to keep in mind that, for Socrates, “[Eros] is in between knowledge and ignorance” as he points in the Symposium (204a; Plato 1997). In virtue of this status, the practice of philosophy is an instance of love in virtue of two things. First, just as Eros, who as a daimon mediates between gods and mortals, the position that philosophers occupy is one in between knowledge and ignorance. Consider Socrates’ acknowledgment of his position in the Apology in the following terms: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think that I know” (21d; Plato 1997). Second, given that, according to Socrates in the Symposium (200e; Plato 1997), the objects of love and desire for any human being are “what is not at hand and not present, what he does not have and what he is not, and that of which he is in need,” then philosophy qua practice turns out to be a particular form of erotic activity (Belfiore 2012). Philosophy involves not just a desire for wisdom, but a desire for wisdom that is born from the recognition of one’s ignorance. In other words, philosophy should be understood as the activity of those who desire wisdom which they recognize they lack. This desire is just a manifestation of our incomplete and longing nature as finite beings. Now, this characterization of philosophy as an erotic activity functions as a pedagogic instrument since it is precisely this deep yearning for wisdom that Socrates uses as a tool to illustrate 482

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often important lessons. For instance, in a famous passage in the Symposium, after Alcibiades has offered all of his possessions and himself to Socrates in exchange for Socrates’ wisdom, Socrates pushes Alcibiades to reflect on the nature of the trade he is proposing (and of the value system that underpins it) by responding in the following way: If I really have in me the power to make you a better man, then you can see in me a beauty that is really beyond description and makes your own remarkable good looks pale in comparison. But, then, is it a fair exchange that you propose? You seem to want more than your proper share: you offer me the merest appearance of beauty, and in return want the thing itself. (218e; Plato 1997) Now, in this passage, the misdirected yearning for knowledge that Alcibiades has is used by Socrates to show him that the system of values that he adopts implicitly (and upon which the exchange that Alcibiades proposes is grounded) is flawed since it puts on the same level appearance and reality. As this example shows, the erotic dimension of philosophical practice plays also a key role in Socratic pedagogy. Having presented some of the main features of Socratic pedagogy, let us turn to an examination of Sor Juana’s works.

35.3  Sor Juana’s Autobiographical Narrative and Its Pedagogic Function Sor Juana refers to herself and different events in her life at numerous points in her poetry and in her plays, providing glimpses of her social and mundane activities and of her private mental life. But it is undoubtedly her Answer to Sor Filotea that contains the most substantial autobiographical narrative that Sor Juana penned. Now, it is important to notice here that the Answer is not merely an autobiography but rather a complex piece that, as Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell stress, is “polyvocal and polysemous” (1994: 19). Indeed, though Sor Juana’s text at times imitates the traditional genre of a nun’s vita, an autobiographical narration in which the author reviews her conscience as she retraces her life, the Answer often blends elements of other genres such as the sermon or the juridical appeal to help convey other senses beyond a mere description of her early life. In particular, the autobiographical sections of the Answer seem to have both an apologetic (in the Greek sense of the word) and a pedagogical function. Much like Socrates, Sor Juana uses the Answer to legitimize her intellectual endeavors. Pedagogy is thus aimed not only at imparting knowledge, but at imparting knowledge that will convince her interlocutors to allow her to continue to engage in philosophical thought. In order to grasp clearly the apologetic dimension of the autobiographical sections of the Answer, it is important to bear in mind that, before Sor Juana narrates certain events from her childhood, she stresses that “I have never written save when pressed and forced and solely to give pleasure to others” (de la Cruz 1994: 47). Now, the theme that her intellectual drive is a force that is beyond her control is used here to address the charge that, given her condition as a woman, her writing and her desire to learn are at odds with the customs of her society. Indeed, though these customs impose boundaries on what endeavors are appropriate for women, Sor Juana suggests she is not blameworthy because Since the light of reason first dawned on me, my inclination to letters was marked by such passion and vehemence that neither the reprimands of others…nor reflections of my own...have sufficed to make me abandon my pursuit of this impulse that God Himself bestowed on me. (de la Cruz 1994: 47) 483

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As we can appreciate here, Sor Juana echoes elements of Socrates’ defense, insisting that she cannot give up her activity despite the social opposition she faces since it is, in a sense, God-mandated. Now, to support the aforementioned claim that her intellectual drive is a force beyond her control, the autobiographical narrative that Sor Juana provides includes several events that purport to show that her actions were motivated by her natural impulse to learn. For instance, she mentions that Though I was as greedy for treats as children usually are at this age, I would abstain from eating cheese because I heard tell that it made people stupid, and the desire to learn was stronger for me than the desire to eat —powerful as this is in children. (de la Cruz 1994: 49) As we can see, since Sor Juana stresses through this anecdote that her desire to learn was stronger (i.e., more natural) than the desire to eat in her early years, she provides support for her claim that she should be not blamed or disparaged for the transgression of social norms that govern women (in particular, the norms that restrict their education to simple domestic tasks) given that her intellectual drive has always been stronger than other appetites such as hunger—and, thus, beyond her control. In addition to this apologetic function, the autobiographical narrative that Sor Juana presents also has a pedagogical function. Indeed, through the telling of her early life, Sor Juana aims not only at vindicating her later actions, but at conveying certain specific lessons through certain anecdotes that have a pedagogical goal, as the following passage illustrates: I began to study Latin, in which I believe I took fewer than twenty lessons. And my interest was so intense, that although in women (and especially in the very bloom of youth) the natural adornment of hair is so esteemed, I would cut off four to six fingerlengths of my hair, measuring how long it had been before. And I made myself a rule that if by the time it had grown back to the same length I did not know such and such thing that I intended to study then I would cut again my hair to punish my dull-wittedness. And so my hair grew but I did not yet know what I had resolved to learn, for it grew quickly and I learned slowly. Then I cut my hair right off to punish my dull-wittedness, for I did not think it reasonable that hair should cover a head so bare of facts —the most desirable adornment. (de la Cruz 1994: 51, our emphasis) This anecdote is remarkable because, not only does it exhibit the natural inclination of Sor Juana for knowledge again, but it also fulfills an important pedagogical function: it aims to convey the reader a lesson gleaned from her own life experience, which is that one should not care about one’s body as much as (or more than) one cares about one’s soul. In doing this, she is clearly echoing Socrates when he states in the Apology: “For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body and your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul” (30a–b; Plato 1997). There is, of course, a crucial difference in Sor Juana and Socrates’ disregard for the body. While Socrates is concerned with the soul simply in opposition to the body, Sor Juana is concerned with the genderless soul in opposition to the gendered body.2 Sor Juana uses autobiographical narratives to emphasize the genderless soul as the subject of knowledge, and to notice the limitations imposed by the gendered body. Autobiographical narratives are a pedagogical tool to teach her interlocutors that women, trapped as they might be in the body by gender norms and expectations, are also the locus of a natural impulse for knowledge. At the same time, however, Sor Juana exploits Baroque contradiction to use autobiographical narratives not simply to disregard the gendered 484

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body, but to revalorize gender activities, such as cooking or gardening, as places ripe for philosophical reflection: “Well, and what then shall I tell you, my Lady, of the secrets of nature that I have discovered while cooking?” (1994: 75) Considering this evidence, the use of autobiography in Sor Juana’s works seems to have an important pedagogic function, just as it does for Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. Let us consider now the case of complex irony.

35.4  The Pedagogic Use of Complex Irony in Sor Juana’s Works Several scholars have pointed out that Sor Juana’s works (in particular, the Answer to Sor Filotea, but also her poetry and her plays) are permeated by a deep sense of irony that surfaces in various passages. However, none of them have pointed so far that many instances of irony appear to be cases of complex irony in which Sor Juana means what she says but also its opposite. For instance, in one of her most famous poems, the Romance titled “Finjamos que soy feliz”/ “Let us pretend I am happy” (Poem 2), Sor Juana uses complex irony when she addresses her own passion to learn and educate herself in a self-deprecating way, pointing out all the dangers and sorrows that learning potentially brings and praising a state of ignorance in which one’s mind finds happiness: ¡Qué feliz es la ignorancia How happy in his ignorance del que, indoctamente sabio, is the man unlettered yet wise halla de lo que padece who finds relief from suffering en lo que ignora, sagrado! in what no knowledge supplies! No siempre suben seguros The boldest flights of wit vuelos del ingenio osados will be buffeted by the wind, que buscan trono en el fuego though aspiring to thrones of fire y hallan sepulcro en el llanto. in tombs of tears they will end. También es vicio el saber, Learning is one more vice, que, si no se va atajando, unless deterred its ambition, cuando menos se conoce when the learned least expect es más nocivo el estrago; will lead them straight to perdition. y si el vuelo no le abaten, If its course is not deflected, en sutilezas cebado, on subtleties learning feeds, por cuidar de lo curioso impertinently inquisitive, olvida lo necesario Indifferent to genuine needs ……………………… …………………………… ¡Oh, si como hay de saber, What we need is a seminar hubiera algún seminario, with no other aim than showing o escuela donde a ignorar not the ways of human learning se enseñaran los trabajos! but those of human unknowing! ……………………… ……………………………… Aprendamos a ignorar, Thought, let’s learn not to know Pensamiento, pues hallamos since so plainly it appears que cuanto añado al discurso, that whatever we add to our minds tanto le usurpo a los años. we take away from our years. (de la Cruz 2010: 5)

This passage exemplifies, according to us, a case of complex irony in virtue of the following. At first sight, a cursory reading of poem suggests to the reader that Sor Juana is taking an antiintellectual stance since she characterizes learning as a “vice” that can lead us to become “impertinently inquisitive, indifferent to genuine needs.” She also praises ignorance as a state of happiness and contrasts it sharply with the endeavors of one’s wit or intellect which, though “aspiring to thrones of fire, in tombs of tears they will end.” In virtue of this, she appears to disparage learning. But a closer reading of these stanzas shows that, contrary to what she says, Sor Juana does 485

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not advocate taking an anti-intellectual stance and abandoning learning, but rather adopting an intellectual stance that involves a type of learning that is both self-critical and measured. Indeed, it is only when learning “feeds on subtleties” and “its course is not deflected” that it becomes a vice. Moreover, the ignorance that Sor Juana praises is not that of the ignoramus, but that of the man who is “indoctamente sabio” (“unlettered but wise”), thus showing that what she values is not sheer ignorance but rather one’s awareness of one’s lack of knowledge. In virtue of this, we do have solid evidence that the poem exemplifies not only irony, as Roggiano (1972: 67–68) and Merrim (1999: 166–67) have noticed, but complex irony since Sor Juana means in the poem both what she says (disparaging “learning” when it is manifested as an unbridled drive) and the opposite of it (praising “learning” when it involves acknowledging the limits of one’s capacities or, in her words, learning “not to know”). This case of complex irony has clearly a pedagogical dimension for Sor Juana, as we can appreciate when we reflect on a couple of stanzas. To wit, after she states that learning is dangerous when it is allowed to roam freely without any checks, she stresses the importance of having a “seminar” where people are taught not “the ways of human learning, but those of human unknowing.” What Sor Juana is advocating for here, according to us, is the need to have schools that, rather than feeding the worst impulses of students (e.g., vanity) by giving them a false impression of their intellectual capacities, would teach them to be intellectually humble by forcing them to confront their limitations and gaps. This recommendation is clearly echoed in the last stanza of the poem where Sor Juana enjoins her own mind to “learn not to know” (i.e., to be self-critical and aware of its own boundaries) by reminding her that, since Sor Juana is an embodied entity, any excessive intellectual pursuit that ignores the needs of the body will shorten her lifespan. In addition to this instance of complex irony, there are several other prominent examples in Sor Juana’s works that one can highlight. For instance, in a famous passage of the Answer, Sor Juana deploys a magnificent example of complex irony when she makes the case to Sor Filotea that one does not need books to practice philosophy since one can engage in earnest philosophical activity while performing the most mundane and seemingly trivial tasks such as cooking: Well, and what then shall I tell you, my Lady, of the secrets of nature that I have discovered while cooking? I observe that an egg becomes solid and cooks in butter or oil, and on the contrary that it dissolves in sugar syrup… I shall not weary you with such inanities, which I relate simply to give you a full account of my nature, and I believe this will make you laugh. But in truth, my Lady, what can women know, save philosophies of the kitchen? It was well put by Lupercio Leonardo that one can philosophize quite well while preparing supper. I often say, when I make these little observations, “Had Aristotle cooked, he would have written a great deal more.” And so to go on with the mode of my cogitations, I declare that all is so continual in me that I have no need of books. (de la Cruz 1994: 75) Sor Juana deploys shrewdly here complex irony to tease her reader in the following way. On one side, Sor Juana means the opposite of what she says when she states that, if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written a great deal more than what he did. Indeed, if Aristotle’s had been burdened with the task of cooking for Alexander the Great rather than teaching him, it is almost certain that he would have written nothing, or far less than what he did in fact pen. On the other side, Sor Juana means exactly what she says in the following sense: if Aristotle had occasionally cooked, he would have likely observed a series of important phenomena that take place while cooking (e.g., the browning of meat and bread or the whipping of egg whites to a froth point). And this would have perhaps led him to theorize and write about the chemical and physical processes that underlie 486

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these phenomena, just as he did theorize and write about the biological processes that underlie the generation of animals. As we said in the previous section, Sor Juana exploits Baroque contradictions to examine the complexities of gender. Complex irony is thus used in this fragment to both denounce and value women’s place in Novohispanic societal structures. On the one hand, Sor Juana uses irony to denounce the impact of gender norms and expectations on women’s intellectual endeavors. But on the other hand, she means what she says and aims at highlighting that so-called feminine activities are worthy of philosophical exploration. This case of complex irony has for Sor Juana an important pedagogical role. Indeed, since her remarks on Aristotle and cooking are intended to show that one can engage in philosophical activity without books as the closing sentence of the passage suggests, what Sor Juana intends to do in this passage is the following: while accepting her place as a nun and heeding the patriarchal command to focus on certain activities usually associated with women such as cooking, she also reclaims as her own the space that is assigned to her (namely, the kitchen) and she reshapes it into a place of inquiry and learning where the intellectual activity of women is legitimate and can freely unfold. In other words, the complex irony that Sor Juana deploys operates in a way such that, as Bokser puts it, “the kitchen becomes a pedagogical site” (2006: 12). On the basis of these two examples, we can clearly see that complex irony plays for Sor Juana an important pedagogical role, just as it does for Socrates. Let us turn now to consider the appearance and the function of shame in her works.

35.5  Shame as a Moral Emotion and as a Pedagogical Tool in Sor Juana’s Works In addition to complex irony and autobiographical narrative, Sor Juana uses shame as a pedagogical tool aimed at correcting behavior. Thus, the use of shame isn’t simply a rhetorical resource aimed at conferring Sor Juana’s writing with a characteristic tone. Instead, the role of shame as a distinctively moral emotion is to hold her interlocutors accountable for their conduct: Sor Juana uses shame to confer responsibility and to emphasize the obligations her interlocutors have failed to meet. In particular, it seems that Sor Juana uses shame not only to emphasize how men’s attitudes toward women are unfounded, but to hold men accountable for the wrongs resulting from women’s subordinate position. In the letter written under the pseudonym Sor Filotea de la Cruz, bishop of Puebla Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz reprimands Sor Juana for studying philosophy and poetry, and for writing verses. Fernández de Santa Cruz claims that, while there is nothing wrong with the education of women, they must dedicate themselves to the study of the Holy Scriptures. Further, he argues that women should not write verses that elicit admiration: not only do they risk falling prey to vanity, as they are naturally inclined, but they risk disengaging from obedience. That is, Sor Juana’s greatest transgression is challenging women’s subordinate position. Nevertheless, Fernández de Santa Cruz frames the issue of the subordination of women not as a matter of oppression, but as a matter of genuine care: in guaranteeing that women remain obedient, men in general, and the Church in particular, are looking after the salvation of their souls. In her Answer, however, Sor Juana argues against this claim that keeping her from studying and writing is not born out of benevolence, but rather out of envy: Truly, my Lady, at times I ponder how it is that a person who achieves high significance — or rather, who is granted significance by God, for He alone can do this — is received as the common enemy. For that person seems to others to usurp the applause they deserve or to draw off and dam up the admiration to which they had aspired, and so they persecute that person. That politically barbarous law of Athens remains in effect, whereby anyone possessing significant qualities and virtues was expelled from the republic to prevent his using them for 487

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the subjugation of public liberty; it is still observed in our own times, though no longer for the same reason the Athenians held. But now there is another motive, no less potent though less well founded, for it resembles a maxim of that impious Machiavelli: to abhor the person who becomes significant because that one tarnishes the fame of others. (de la Cruz 1994: 63) Further, Sor Juana compares this attitude towards her study to that of the Pharisees against Christ. She argues that being “crude and base men” it is vanity that does not allow them to see that the beauty and benevolence of Christ’s miracles were cause of love and not condemnation. Sor Juana argues that the cause of Christ’s condemnation was not that the Pharisees failed to see His greatness, but that it was precisely because of His greatness that he was condemned. The Pharisees’ vanity clouds their judgment: No, to state as cause that He worked miracles seems unfitting in learned men, and such were the Pharisees. But this is the way of things, for when learned men fall prey to passion they burst out illogically in just this fashion. (de la Cruz 1994: 65) A further example of Sor Juana’s use of shame in correcting men’s wrongful attitudes toward women can be found in her poem “Hombres necios que acusais”/ “Foolish, you men” (Poem 92): Hombres necios que acusáis Foolish, you men — so very adept a la mujer sin razón, at wrongly faulting womankind, sin ver que sois la ocasión not seeing you’re alone to blame de lo mismo que culpáis: for faults you plant in woman’s mind. si con ansia sin igual After you’ve won by urgent plea solicitáis su desdén, the right to tarnish her good name, ¿por qué queréis que obren bien you still expect her to behave — si las incitáis al mal? you, that coaxed her into shame. Combatís su resistencia You batter her resistance down y luego, con gravedad, and then, all righteousness, proclaim decís que fue liviandad that feminine frivolity, lo que hizo la diligencia. not your persistence, is to blame. Parecer quiere el denuedo When it comes to bravely posturing, de vuestro parecer loco, your witlessness must take the prize: al niño que pone el coco you’re the child that makes bogeyman, y luego le tiene miedo. and then recoils in fear and cries. ……………………… ………………………………….. Pues ¿para qué os espantáis So why are you all men so stunned de la culpa que tenéis? at the thought you’re all guilty alike? Queredlas cual las hacéis Either like them for what you’ve made them o hacedlas cual las buscáis. or make of them what you can like. (de la Cruz 2010: 109)

As we said before, shame as a moral emotion aims at conferring responsibility to agents. In this fragment, Sor Juana adopts a more confrontational tone and demands men to recognize the harmful nature of their attitudes toward women. In particular, this fragment aims at evidencing men’s conflicting expectations from women’s sexual attitudes. While Sor Juana’s point is that women are measured according to conflicting standards (either they are prudish and ungrateful, or they are licentious and vane), the power of the verses stems directly from their confrontational character: rather than appealing to the power of discourse, Sor Juana resorts to eliciting shame, not only as an invitation for men to reflect on the role they play in the perpetuation of stereotypes, but as a motivation to acknowledge their responsibility in the construction of harmful gender norms. 488

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35.6  The Pursuit of Knowledge as an Erotic Enterprise and its Pedagogic Role Let us finally consider love as a pedagogical tool in Sor Juana’s works. Just as many other central figures of the Spanish Golden Century, Sor Juana was influenced by a strong neo-Platonic line of thinking according to which love had an eminent role in the education of people (in particular, of adolescents and young adults). For instance, echoing a theme that emerges in Lope de Vega’s play A Lady of Little Sense (where one of the main characters, Laurencio, states the following: “Love, my lords, has been/ that profound intellect/termed the soul of the world/ and, as a teacher, has held/the chair of all the sciences, /because only through love/ man understands best/ their divine differences” (de Vega 1966:1113))3, Sor Juana emphasizes in her play Love is a labyrinth the view that love is not just a tool for scientific education, but also for moral education when she puts the following lines in Theseus’ mouth: Pero la mayor victoria fue, Señor, que amante tierno de la belleza de Elena, la robé: no estuvo en esto el valor (aunque el robarla me costó infinitos riesgos), sino en que, cuando ya estaban a mi voluntad sujetos el premio de su hermosura y el logro de mis deseos, de sus lágrimas movido y obligado de sus ruegos la volví a restituir a su Patria y sus deudos, dejando a mi amor llorando y a mi valor consiguiendo la más difícil victoria, que fue vencerme a mi mesmo.

But the greatest victory was, my lord, that as a lover of the beauty of Helena I took her: but the valor laid not there (though her capture costed me infinite risks); it consisted in the fact that, once I had bound to my will the prize of her beauty and the triumph of my desires, I was moved by her tears and, forced by her pleas, I did send her back to her country and family, leaving my love weeping and obtaining for my valor the hardest won victory which was vanquishing myself. (de la Cruz 2010: 722)

As we can appreciate, this passage illustrates well how love works for Sor Juana as an instrument for moral education since it teaches Theseus to do the morally correct choice by returning Helena to her family. In this case, love of others has an important pedagogical function in that it is a tool for moral education. But love of knowledge also plays a key pedagogical role, as is the case for Socrates.4 To appreciate this clearly, let us consider the following passage from the Answer in which Sor Juana draws a parallel between Peter’s love of Christ during the episode of the denial, and her own pursuit of knowledge: The Prince of the Apostles once found himself a long way indeed from Knowledge, as it is remarked in the emphatic: “But Peter followed afar off.” A long way from receiving praise as a learned man was he, who once bore the title of unknowing: “not knowing what he said.” And, indeed, when faced with an examination concerning his acquaintance with Knowledge, he himself said he had not acquired the least notion: “Woman, I know not what thou sayest. Woman, I am not [one of them].” And what befalls him? Possessing this reputation for ignorance, he reaps none of the rewards but suffers all the afflictions of the learned. And why? No other reason is given, save “This man also was with him.” Peter was fond of Knowledge, which bore away his heart; and he followed after, calling himself a follower and lover of Knowledge. And though he followed so “afar off” that he neither understood nor attained Knowledge, still this sufficed to incur in its torments. The soldier from without would not 489

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hesitate to afflict him, nor the maidservant within-door, fail to trouble him. I confess that I am far indeed from the terms of Knowledge and that I have wished to follow it, though “afar off.” (de la Cruz 1994: 71–73) This section from the Answer is quite revealing of the pedagogical function that the pursuit of knowledge conceived as an erotic activity has for Sor Juana in the following sense. By identifying Christ with knowledge and characterizing Peter as a philosopher, Sor Juana aims, in our view, to teach her reader two important lessons: (i) pursuing knowledge (regardless of gender or social location) is no different than loving God and (ii) the pursuit of knowledge, though ultimately natural and good since it is just a form of love of God, is not without costs since it involves being confronted (as Peter is) by agents of the political and social status-quo. In virtue of this, Sor Juana is, according to us, using the story of Peter’s denial of Christ in the face of social pressure despite his love of him and her own love and pursuit of knowledge despite the social pressure she experienced to abandon it (considering her gender and her social location) to convey a crucial insight about philosophy: it is fundamentally a transgressive enterprise. In doing this, we think that she anticipates Stanley Cavell’s accurate characterization of philosophy as Indeed outrageous, inherently so [because] it seeks to disquiet the foundation of our lives and to offer us instead nothing better than itself –and this on the basis of no expert knowledge, of nothing closed to the ordinary being, once, that is to say, that being lets himself or herself be informed by the process and ambition of philosophy. (Cavell 1980: 147) Now, given that the way in which philosophy was taught and practiced in colonial New Spain in the seventeenth century was, in Guillermo Hurtado’s (2016) words, “almost always lacking in originality and critical dimension” since it involved blind deference to the Church fathers, Sor Juana’s Socratic philosophical pedagogy can then be seen as a (quiet) revolt against the paternalistic/authoritarian model of scholastic thought that was imposed on her, just as Socrates’s philosophical pedagogy constituted a revolt both against the dogmatic religious authoritarianism of Euthyphro and other traditionalists and against the relativistic excesses of Protagoras and other Sophists. Gender, nevertheless, adds another dimension to Sor Juana’s use of love of knowledge as a pedagogical tool. As we saw before, in characterizing it as an erotic enterprise, Socrates highlights that philosophy is born from the recognition that we lack the knowledge we desire. Sor Juana thus uses love as a constant and quiet reminder that knowledge requires epistemic humility. This is aimed not just at putting down her detractors, but at reminding them that even men have a lot to learn. Characterizing philosophy as an erotic activity also serves to legitimize women’s intellectual aims. The pursuit of knowledge is a natural impulse, so that, woman or man, Sor Juana’s philosophical endeavor is born from this natural longing for knowledge. Finally, if characterizing philosophy as an erotic enterprise serves to highlight its fundamentally transgressive nature, Sor Juana uses this characterization to show that women’s intellectual endeavors are doubly transgressive, insofar as it involves not only a critical examination of tradition, but a critical challenge to gender norms as well. Sor Juana’s view of philosophy as an erotic enterprise constitutes a quiet revolt against oppressive gender expectations as well.

35.7 Conclusion Let us recap. We have argued here that there is a philosophical pedagogy in Sor Juana’s works, and that this pedagogy is, in virtue of its reliance on autobiographical narratives, complex irony, shame 490

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as a moral emotion, and the characterization of the quest for knowledge as an erotic enterprise, manifestly Socratic in nature. As it is the case with Socrates, we think that Sor Juana’s pedagogy can be seen as a quiet revolt against the dogmatic and religious model of thought imposed on them. Gender norms and expectations, however, add a different dimension to Sor Juana’s Socratic pedagogy. On the one hand, it seems that this was Sor Juana’s only resource to engage with her detractors, given her position as a woman and a nun. She was expected to remain observant of her subordinate position and to respect ecclesiastical hierarchy. Socratic pedagogy thus allowed her to engage her interlocutors and to surreptitiously challenge them, while apparently remaining respectful of gender norms. On the other hand, however, we think that, beyond it being her only resource to confront her detractors, Sor Juana realized that Socratic pedagogy was particularly well-suited for her aims of arguing for the right of women to be educated. As a woman, Sor Juana was not recognized as an interlocutor. In arguing for the right of women to be educated, she was partly arguing for their right to be recognized as worthy interlocutors. This presents a challenge: How can Sor Juana’s arguments be acknowledged and considered if she isn’t first regarded as a worthwhile interlocutor? Socratic pedagogy helps her argue by revealing her as an intellectual peer. This is what makes Sor Juana’s strategy particularly interesting. Instead of merely arguing for her position, she demonstrates the very thing for which she argues by seemingly toeing the line and through exchanges that appear to be innocuous and benign.

Notes 1 In this respect, Socrates’ autobiographical narrative (and, in particular, his description of his intellectual failures) constitutes a model for later autobiographical narratives such as the ones penned by Augustine and Rousseau, which provide through various vivid descriptions of the moral failures of their respective authors justifications of their philosophical endeavors. 2 Sor Juana emphasizes the importance of a genderless soul in other pieces, such as the Romance “Señor: para responderos”/“Sir, to reply” (Poem 48), (2010: 62–64). 3 Lope de Vega (1966: 1112): “Amor, señores, ha sido/aquel ingenio profundo /que llaman alma del mundo/y es el dotor que ha tenido/la cátedra de las ciencias;/porque sólo con amor/aprende el hombre mejor/sus divinas diferencias.” 4 While we focus here on love of knowledge as motivating philosophical inquiry, Lisa Shapiro (2022) argues that Sor Juana thought that, given the limits of human understanding, the natural desire to know needs to be countered by a desire not to know. For this reason, Shapiro argues that Sor Juana’s poems intend to elicit negative emotions, such as “lethargy, loss, and disorientation,” aimed at “counter[ing] the desire for knowledge, serving to temper the impulse that can lead to useless and injurious erudition. They thus offer an introductory class in how not to know” (2022: 112). This is consistent with Sor Juana’s use of complex irony highlighted before, but adds another layer to her characterization of Peter as a philosopher and his denial of Christ, which we later examine.

References Belfiore, E. S. (2012) Socrates’ Daimonic Art: Love for Wisdom in Four Platonic Dialogues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bokser, J. A. (2006) “Sor Juana’s Rhetoric of Silence,” Rhetoric Review 25(1): 5–21. Cavell, S. (1980) “Knowledge as Transgression: Mostly a Reading of ‘It Happened One Night’,” Daedalus 109(2): 147–75. de la Cruz, J. I. (1994) The Answer: La Respuesta: Including a Selection of Poems, ed. and trans. E. Arenal and A. Powell, New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. (2010) Obras Completas, 16th edition, México, DF: Editorial Porrúa. de Vega, L. (1966) Obras Escogidas. Teatro, Vol. I, Madrid: Aguilar. Femenías, M. L. (2006) “Philosophical Genealogies and Feminism in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” in A. Salles and E. Millán (eds.), The Role of History in Latin American Philosophy, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 131–57.

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Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica Gibson, J. (2006) “The Logic of Chastity: Women, Sex, and the History of Philosophy in the Early Modern Period,” Hypatia 21(4): 1–19. Gower, O. S. L. (2008) “Why Is There an Autobiography in the Phaedo?” Ancient Philosophy 28(2): 329–46. Hoinski, D. (2008) “Context, Decision and Autobiography in Plato’s Phaedo,” Ancient Philosophy 28(2): 347–55. Hurtado, G. (2016) “Philosophy in Mexico,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Merrim, S. (1999) Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Plato. (1997) Complete Works, ed. J. Cooper, Indianapolis: Hackett. Roggiano, A. A. and J. Kurfehs. (1972) “Learning and Creation in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” Latin American Literary Review 1(1): 63–70. Roochnik, D. L. (1987) “The Erotics of Philosophical Discourse,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 4(2): 117–29. Shapiro, L. (2022) “Sor Juana’s ‘Let us Pretend I Am Happy’,” in E. Schliesser (ed.), Neglected Classics of Philosophy, Vol. 2, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 97–117, Vlastos, G. (1987) “Socratic Irony,” The Classical Quarterly (New Series) 37(1): 79–96. Woodruff, P. (2000) “Socrates and the Irrational,” in N. Smith and P. Woodruff (eds.), Reason and Religion in Socratic Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 130–50.

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36 MARY ASTELL (1666–1731) Jacqueline Broad

Mary Astell presents a curious Gestalt figure among early modern philosophers: perceived in one way, she appears to be a radical progressive; seen in another, she emerges as an evangelical conservative. This ambiguity is reflected in two dominant interpretations of her philosophical views concerning women, one feminist, the other religious. On the first reading, scholars have interpreted Astell as someone who uses Cartesian ideas for feminist ends, consisting (in this context) mainly in the higher education of women so that they might cultivate a certain autonomy or independence of judgment. Most recently, this interpretation has been put forward by myself (Broad 2015: Chapter 9; 2019), Karen Detlefsen (2016, 2017a, 2017b), and Allauren Forbes (2019), but its origins can be traced back to Ruth Perry’s biography of Astell as “An Early English Feminist” (1986) and Bridget Hill’s work on Astell as “The First English Feminist” (1986). These scholars draw their evidence from Astell’s writings addressed to women, namely her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II (1694, 1697), Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), and The Christian Religion, as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705). In her arguments for women’s education, they maintain, Astell draws on Cartesian metaphysical, epistemological, and methodological principles to bolster her belief that women are naturally capable of attaining wisdom and virtue, provided that they receive the right kind of training and encouragement. On this view, Cartesianism provides strong philosophical support for Astell’s practical plans for an all-female academy of learning, a place where women can study the foundations of philosophy and religion. Detlefsen claims that these ideas are recognizably feminist insofar as they are intended to remedy an “ill” or a disadvantage that women suffer from compared to men (Detlefsen 2017a: 205), namely, that they are kept in ignorance concerning their true interests. Astell regards women’s educational disadvantages as morally wrong insofar as their ignorance prevents them from attaining virtue and happiness and therefore salvation. Detlefsen adds that Astell’s feminism requires “some social change, namely that men allow women greater freedom to flourish as rational beings” (Detlefsen 2016: 90). Her learned academy is designed to facilitate this social change by teaching women to think for themselves and to attain freedom from custom, prejudice, and authority (see Sowaal 2007: 231–34). For simplicity’s sake, I will call this the Feminist Reading of Astell’s works (though I allow that there might be other, alternative, feminist readings of her texts). On the second dominant reading, scholars have taken a more historical-contextualist approach to Astell’s writings about women (e.g. Kinnaird 1979; Smith 2007). They proceed by situating Astell’s Proposal against the backdrop of an evangelical revival of the Anglican religion in the 1690s. Against this historical background, they claim, it is possible to see that Astell uses Cartesian DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-43

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philosophical ideas to serve a conservative agenda: namely, to call for the education of women for the sake of promoting the Anglican religion in England. In terms of its chief purpose, these scholars argue, the Proposal does not dramatically differ from other Anglican manuals for women in this period, such as Richard Allestree’s Ladies Calling (1673). Lately, this reading has been defended by Hannah Smith (2007), but its origins trace back to Joan K. Kinnaird’s influential 1979 article on Astell’s “Conservative Contribution to English Feminism.” Elements of this reading can also be found in the work of Perry (1986) and Patricia Springborg (2005). This interpretation poses a problem for the Feminist Reading because it suggests that Astell’s feminism is extremely limited or even illusory or merely apparent. In this reading, the true purpose of her academy is not to enable women to acquire independence of judgment, but rather (as Astell herself says) “to stock the Kingdom with pious and prudent Ladies,” ladies who will “pay a strict conformity to all the Precepts of their holy Mother the Church,” and “serve the ends of Piety and Charity” (Astell 2002: 76, 84, 89). Let’s call this the Conservative Reading. While I do not endorse this second approach, I think it is more compelling than some scholars (including myself ) have hitherto recognized. On closer analysis, the advocates of this interpretation suggest that any Feminist Reading we might give of Astell’s texts can be accounted for by a Conservative Reading: that is, that any account of Astell as someone who puts philosophy to the service of feminist ends can be better explained by a reading of her as someone who intends to bring about a reformation in female manners for the sake of the Anglican Church. Later I will spell out this interpretation in more detail, but for now, it suffices to note that it operates much like an “argument to the best explanation.” Scholars who favor this interpretation begin with the same observational evidence that grounds the Feminist Reading, such as Astell’s value for women’s education, her emphasis on women’s rational souls (as distinct from their bodies), and her calls for women to improve their powers of reasoning. But it is implied that the Conservative Reading is the better explanation for the observed phenomena, because this interpretation is simpler, it explains more of the evidence, it fits with the historical context, and it does not make unnecessary and anachronistic assumptions about “feminism.” One implication of this approach is that it places the onus on advocates of the Feminist Reading to point to unequivocal instances in which Astell’s Cartesian philosophy serves feminist ends and not merely conservative Anglican goals. Let’s call this the Conservative Challenge. In this chapter, I propose to meet that challenge. First, I begin by spelling out those recent Feminist Readings of Astell and demonstrate how she employs certain Cartesian ideas—such as René Descartes’s mind-body dualism and his method of judgment or “right thinking”—for apparent feminist ends. In the second part, I spell out the classic Conservative Reading of Astell’s Proposal and explain why Kinnaird and Smith conclude that Astell’s plans for social reform only appear to be radical, when they are really conservative. Here I highlight the fact that the Feminist Readings have so far fallen short of meeting the Conservative Challenge. In the third and final part, I aim to meet that challenge by drawing on newly discovered marginalia suggesting that Astell was highly critical of the Anglican reformers’ ideas concerning women’s intellectual abilities. This evidence takes the form of penciled notes in Anglican books from Astell’s personal library in the Northamptonshire Record Office (NRO) in England, specifically the 1673 second impression of Allestree’s The Ladies Calling, and the 1702 third edition of Abraham Woodhead, Obadiah Walker, and Allestree’s Paraphrase and Annotations upon all St. Paul’s Epistles.1 My contention is that Astell does realize the radical feminist potential in Cartesian thought: she uses its critical tools to challenge the prejudicial attitudes of Anglican clerics toward women. More than this, her critique of the Anglican authors demonstrates that Astell intended to promote the intellectual independence of women and not simply transform them into orthodox Anglicans. 494

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36.1  The Feminist Reading In her Proposal, Astell asserts that any intellectual “incapacity” in women is the result of custom or convention rather than nature (Astell 2002: 59). In her opinion, women are not necessitated to folly and ignorance; any woman might exercise her freedom of will together with her understanding to discern the true and the good. The problem is that early modern women are actively discouraged from using their mental faculties; they are given only a rudimentary education and they are never taught to examine the foundations of their beliefs. According to Astell, The cause... of the defects we labour under, is, if not wholly, yet at least in the first place, to be ascribed to the mistakes of our Education; which like an Error in the first Concoction, spreads its ill Influence thro’ all our Lives. (Astell 2002: 60) This narrow education encourages an ignorance that is then perpetuated by custom and prejudice toward women’s intellectual capacities (see Sowaal 2007: 229). As a remedy, Astell proposes the establishment of her learned academy, a calm and quiet retreat in which women might “stand still and reflect on [their] own Minds,” and improve themselves in “Knowledge and true Religion” (Astell 2002: 68, 72). Throughout the Proposal, Astell draws on Cartesian metaphysics to support her view that women are capable of improving their capacity for judgment, and she appeals to Cartesian epistemology and methodology to provide rules for thinking that facilitate that improvement. More specifically, Astell draws on Descartes’ dualist ideas concerning the mind (or soul) and body, and his conception of the self as a purely thinking thing. The mind and the body are regarded as distinct substances with different principal attributes; the body is “Extended Substance,” while the mind is “Spiritual or Thinking Substance,” body is “corruptible,” while the mind is “immaterial” and “immortal” (Astell 2002: 183, 51). These ideas are further supported in Astell’s later work, The Christian Religion, when she presents an argument for the real distinction between mind and body, appealing to the idea that we might conceive of the mind, a thinking thing, existing apart from the body, an extended being (Astell 2013: §228). The upshot of her argument is that “because I and all other reasonable creatures think, therefore we are something that is not body” (Astell 2013: §230). In her Proposal, Astell argues that a woman’s true perfection, like that of any human being, lies in her rational nature and not the perfection of her body (Astell 2002: 62). The soul or the “self ” possesses a “particle of Divinity,” a “desire to advance and perfect its Being,” purposefully bestowed by God for the sake of her salvation (Astell 2002: 52–53, 62). These ideas ground Astell’s arguments for the view that women’s educational disadvantages are unjust or unwarranted, and also provide an ontological and epistemological basis for her plans for reform. Astell writes: For, since God has given Women as well as Men intelligent Souls, why should they be forbidden to improve them? Since he has not denied us the faculty of Thinking, why shou’d we not (at least in gratitude to him) employ our Thoughts on himself, their noblest Object, and not unworthily bestow them on Trifles and Gaities and secular Affairs? Being the Soul was created for the contemplation of Truth, as well as for the fruition of Good, is it not as cruel and unjust to preclude Women from the knowledge of the one, as well as from the enjoyment of the other? (Astell 2002: 80) In the second part of her Proposal, Astell demonstrates how Cartesian method might enable women to furnish their minds “with a stock of solid and useful Knowledge” (Astell 2002: 77–78); even 495

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without the benefit of a formal academy, they might learn to follow these rules for themselves. In various passages, she adapts the rules for thinking first put forward by Descartes in his Discourse on the Method (1637) and then reiterated in the works of Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, John Norris, and Nicolas Malebranche (see Astell 2002: 77–78, 166, 184, 189). In explaining her method, Astell begins by assuring her readers that they do not need to go beyond their own minds in order to learn it: they need only appeal to their inner “Natural Logic” (Astell 2002: 166). To discover truth, women do not need to “tumble over many Authors... but may have it for enquiring after in [their] own Breasts” (Astell 2002: 167). An important first step is for them to lay aside all passion and prejudice in order to reason with clear ideas alone (Astell 2002: 167, 175); they must “determine nothing about those things of which we have not a Clear Idea, and as Distinct as the Nature of the Subject will permit” (Astell 2002: 172). In this way, she says, they will avoid “determining Dogmatically” about subjects they know little or nothing about (Astell 2002: 173). Next, they must avoid needless digressions (Astell 2002: 176), they must proceed methodically and deduce complex ideas from the most simple (Astell 2002: 177); then they must engage in a thorough examination of their subject before making a final judgment (Astell 2002: 177–78). Finally, they must not judge anything as true that is not clearly and evidently known to be so (Astell 2002: 178). In conditions of ignorance, they must suspend their judgment until they can attain clear ideas. If practical circumstances compel them to act, then they may do so on probable grounds, but they must all the while continue to search for truth (Astell 2002: 179). It is not difficult to see how these Cartesian ideas might serve feminist ends. First, as Detlefsen points out, Descartes’ metaphysical ideas ground Astell’s feminist arguments for the intellectual equality of men and women; their equality is based on the fact that they have the same rational capacities and they “share an essential humanity” in terms of their rational souls (Detlefsen 2016: 75). Second, Cartesian epistemology dictates that clear and certain knowledge is available to all human beings, regardless of their sex. This egalitarianism enables Astell to argue for the educability of women—the fact that they can be trained up to acquire greater moral and intellectual competence (see Sowaal 2007: 227, 235). Third, the Cartesian method of her second Proposal teaches women how they might improve their natural capacities and think for themselves. Above all, Astell’s rules for thinking are designed to help women attain the goal of intellectual integrity: that is, both freedom from prejudice and independence of judgment or the freedom to judge by the light of one’s own reason (see Broad 2019: 811–12; see also Sowaal 2007: 231–34; Hickson 2017). Astell says: Reason wills that we shou’d think again, and not form our Conclusions or fix our foot till we can honestly say, that we have without Prejudice or Prepossession view’d the matter in Debate on all sides, seen it in every light, have no bias to encline us either way, but are only determined by Truth it self, shining brightly in our eyes, and not permitting us to resist the force and Evidence it carries. (Astell 2002: 135) In the Feminist Reading, such passages spell out the necessary conditions for women’s autonomy (see Broad 2015: 170–83; Detlefsen 2016: 86–89; 2017b: 28–31; Forbes 2019: 790, 796). To be autonomous agents, Astell suggests, women must recognize their beliefs and values as their own (they must take ownership of them) and make decisions consistent with their true selves or their essential natures. Cartesian method facilitates the realization of this autonomy by showing them how to reflect on their long-held beliefs and assumptions: it gives women the tools to step back and critically evaluate what they have taken for granted. Using this method enables them to overcome bad custom and “epistemic internalization injustice,” the internal assumption that they have defective reasoning abilities (Forbes 2019: 778; see also Sowaal 2007: 238). In short, the cultivation of intellectual integrity provides the necessary mindset for women to challenge 496

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oppressive gender norms and practices and to determine their life paths according to their own beliefs and values. In this reading, while Astell’s ideas may not fit with some modern-day conceptions of feminism, they qualify as feminist broadly speaking insofar as they contain the requisite descriptive, normative, and practical components of any theory worthy of the name. That is to say, when we examine Astell’s writings, we find a descriptive account of women’s disadvantages compared to men, a normative account of why those disadvantages should be rectified or removed, and a practical plan to bring about social reform (to some extent). It is therefore deemed appropriate to call her writings “feminist” on these grounds.

36.2  The Conservative Reading Nevertheless, even advocates of the Feminist Reading concede that there are limitations to Astell’s feminism. Detlefsen observes that “Cartesian epistemology should lead to radical intellectual independence, which in turn should lead to the radical challenging of customs. Yet, contrary to this logical trajectory, Astell espouses traditional social and political values” (Detlefsen 2016: 80). Detlefsen highlights the fact that “Astell’s purposes are resolutely theological” (Detlefsen 2016: 78): Astell believes that “in this life, women ought to serve God” and her “call for excellent women’s education … is not only for a woman’s sake but also a call meant to pay due heed to God” (Detlefsen 2016: 78, 84). Astell’s theology thus “precludes a more far-reaching feminism” and places limits on Astell’s feminist plans for social reform (Detlefsen 2016: 90). The Conservative Reading takes these caveats even further, to assert that Astell’s strategic purpose was never to argue for women’s intellectual liberation but rather “to enable women to live as devout Anglicans” (Smith 2007: 32). Kinnaird allows that, upon first reading, Astell seemingly deserves her reputation as “the first major English feminist” (Kinnaird 1979: 55). Kinnaird also observes that Astell draws on Cartesian philosophy to argue for the intellectual equality of men and women, to celebrate the authority of the thinking self, and to propose a method for the improvement of women’s minds (Kinnaird 1979: 62). But then Kinnaird remarks that The student of feminism … must admit to considerable consternation on discovering what [Astell’s] actual program was for the higher education of women. In Serious Proposal to the Ladies, she makes no plea that the universities should admit women as well as men; she never argues that women have as much right as men to enter the professions and take part in the public life of the nation. Rather, she proposes simply the establishment of a ‘Monastery’ … (Kinnaird 1979: 64) Kinnaird asks: how can someone who appears to be so radical and so progressive in terms of her theoretical feminist beliefs, turn out to be so conservative and so retrograde in terms of her practical feminism and her wider political vision? Her answer is that Astell’s philosophical commitments make her appear to be more radical than she really is. Astell’s “blend of Cartesian and Platonic principles” (Kinnaird 1979: 59) makes her sound anti-authoritarian because in this period Cartesianism represented a significant challenge to ancient authority; it encouraged the systematic questioning of past prejudices and assumptions. But in Astell’s case, Cartesian philosophy was not exploited for radical feminist ends—it served a deeply conservative socio-political agenda (Kinnaird 1979: 66, 73). As a High-Church Tory, Astell was opposed to the toleration of separatist religious sects in England and wrote several pamphlets against the practice of “occasional conformity” in the Church (see Springborg 2005). As a devout Anglican, she was motivated to defend the Church’s monopoly on religious worship against the threat of Protestant Dissent, a key concern in the 1690s. 497

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Accordingly, Kinnaird regards Astell as part of “an aggressive Anglican resurgence” in this period (Kinnaird 1979: 73), one that sought to recruit women as mothers and teachers of the young, to ensure the Church’s survival in succeeding generations. Astell’s plans for women’s education are in keeping with the Anglican program to educate both men and women in the Christian religion. Like many Anglicans of her time, she asserts that if mothers were better educated, then they might become “instruments of his [God’s] Glory, Blessings to this world, and capable of eternal Blessedness in that to come” (Astell 2002: 60–61). If women were given an “ingenious Education,” she says, then this ‘Twoul’d go a great way towards reclaiming the men; [because] great is the influence we have over them in their Childhood, in which time, if a Mother be discreet and knowing as well as devout, she has many opportunities of giving such a Form and Season to the tender Mind of the Child, as will shew its good effects thro’ all the stages of his Life. (Astell 2002: 106) More generally, Astell says that the great end of her institution will be “to revive the antient Spirit of Piety in the World, and to transmit it to succeeding Generations” (Astell 2002: 72). For this reason, Kinnaird writes: Mary Astell could not recognize the anti-authoritarian and pluralistic impulses inherent in the Cartesian doctrine of the thinking self. She preached the authority of the thinking self only to free women from the tyranny of ignorance and social frivolity that they might realize in their traditional sphere their full potential as wives, mothers, and teachers of the young. (Kinnaird 1979: 74) In this reading, the true purpose of Astell’s academy is to rectify women’s educational disadvantages, but only so that they will be “fitter to promote a Reformation in others” (Astell 2002: 105); that is, so they will be prepared to propagate the Anglican religion upon their return to wider society. Kinnaird concludes that Astell really promises “nothing more than a revival of Anglican nunneries” (Kinnaird 1979: 65). Along similar lines, Hannah Smith asserts that “What appears to be radical feminist zeal in Astell is in fact just a form of Anglican ‘social evangelism’” (Smith 2007: 41). In keeping with Kinnaird’s reading, Smith claims that Astell’s educational program was never about liberating the minds of individual women, but rather about training up female minds for the sake of preserving the Church’s pervasive influence in English society. Smith bolsters her case by showing how Astell’s ideas are remarkably similar to those of Anglican clerics of the time, such as Richard Allestree (1621/2–81), the author of the tremendously popular Whole Duty of Man (1658). Smith provides a useful comparison between Allestree’s Ladies Calling and the first part of Astell’s Proposal (Smith 2007: 37–38). Like Astell, in his Ladies Calling, Allestree expresses a wish that Catholic nunneries had been reformed rather than abolished (Allestree 1673: 157; Astell 2013: §379). “As for the religious order of Virgins,” he says, In the present Roman Church, tho some, and those very great abuses have crept in; yet I think ‘twere to be wish’d, that those who suppress’d them in this Nation, had confin’d themselves within the bounds of a Reformation, by chusing rather to rectify and regulate, than abolish them. (“Of Virgins,” Allestree 1673: 3)

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With these sentiments, Allestree follows in the footsteps of several other Anglicans, namely Edward Chamberlayne, Clement Barksdale, and George Hickes (see Smith 2007: 36). Like these men, he was keen to promote orthodox Anglican beliefs and values in the female sex. In The Ladies Calling, Allestree’s chief design is to do women “a service” (to “rescue the whole Sex,” he says) by helping them overcome their educational disadvantages. Like Astell, Allestree points to the fact that women “imbibe the common opinion” that they are incapable of aspiring to anything worthy or excellent (Allestree “The Preface,” n.p.). Out of charity, he proposes To acquaint them with their own Value, animate them to some higher thoughts of themselves; not to yield their Suffrage to those injurious Estimates the World hath made of them, and from a supposed Incapacity of Nobler things, to neglect the pursuit of them; from which God and Nature have no more precluded the Feminine, than the Masculine part of Mankind. (Allestree “The Preface,” n.p.) Like Astell, Allestree argues that women are spiritually equal to men and just as capable of attaining salvation. The “spiritual Essence, that ray of Divinity, owns no distinction of Sexes” and God has given “the feeblest Woman as large and capacious a Soul, as that of the greatest Heroe.” To attain excellence and dignity, women must no longer neglect their “nobler part” or “live as if they were all body,” but rather “make a juster estimate of their own worth” (Allestree “The Preface,” n.p.). Toward this end, women must be taught how to perfect the feminine virtues of modesty, meekness, compassion, affability, and piety. With respect to fundamentals, Astell’s Proposal bears a close resemblance to Allestree’s Ladies Calling. This resemblance poses a problem for the Feminist Reading because Anglican clerics such as Allestree were not in the business of promoting female autonomy and independence. While Allestree often takes a generous view of women’s abilities, he also points to biblical texts, such as 1 Timothy 2:11 (“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection”), to assert “the inferiority of the woman in regard of the creation and first sin … but also on the presumtion that they needed instruction” (Allestree 1673: 9). In his chapter “Of Meekness,” Allestree highlights the “natural imbecillity” of women “which renders them liable to seducement,” and also their passions which are “naturally the more impetuous” than those of men (Allestree 1673: 33, 39). As an antidote to their impetuousness, he recommends that women consult “sober guides” in order to understand “upon what grounds the Practice as well as Doctrin of our Church was founded” (Allestree 1673: 34). He also describes “obedience to Superiors” as “a very happy imposition” on a woman’s will, given that God and nature have placed the sex “in a degree of inferiority to the other” (Allestree 1673: 40). On the whole, it must be said, Allestree’s work is not directed toward women learning to think for themselves, for the sake of acquiring autonomous agency, but rather for the sake of adopting Anglican liturgical and devotional practices. If we return to the Feminist Reading, we can now see that Astell’s emphasis on women’s rational souls, her ideal of the thinking self, and her method of judgment can be re-read as serving a purely conservative Anglican program like Allestree’s. On the Conservative Reading, Astell gives only a descriptive account of women’s spiritual disadvantages compared to men, a religious-based normative account of why those disadvantages should be rectified, and a practical plan to bring about a reformation of female manners in society, not for women’s own sakes but for the sake of maintaining the Anglican monopoly on worship. Smith concludes that “in the Serious Proposal, Astell appears more as the High Church moralist, reacting against contemporary mores, than as a ‘first feminist’” (Smith 2007: 32). On her reading, the descriptive, normative, and practical components of Astell’s theory only appear to be feminist; in reality, they are designed to turn women into good Anglicans.

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At this point, the Conservatives might claim that their reading is the best explanation of the textual evidence. First, their explanatory hypothesis is simpler: it does not attribute radically progressive views to Astell, when she was clearly devoted to the High-Church Anglican cause. Second, the Conservatives’ hypothesis explains more of the evidence: it explains why Astell’s practical proposals for reform seem so “passive and effete,” as Perry puts it (Perry 1986: 97), and it explains why Astell repeatedly emphasizes that women ought to use their reason “about the noblest objects, and in the business of greatest consequence, therefore in religion” (Astell 2013: §5). Third, there appears to be no reason to go beyond the Conservative Reading toward a Feminist one, when the historical and textual evidence supports a more circumspect approach, one that takes into account the striking similarities between Astell and the Anglican reformers. Consequently, the onus is on supporters of the Feminist Reading to show that Astell was devoted to the intellectual liberation of women for their own sakes, and not just for the Anglican cause. This is the Conservative Challenge I mentioned at the start.

36.3  Meeting the Conservative Challenge To meet this challenge, I turn now to the handwritten marginalia in books in the King’s Cliffe School Library in the Northamptonshire Record Office in England. Astell’s books were most likely donated to this library by her friend Elizabeth Hutcheson, the executor of her will (see Perry 1986: 519, n.27). In 1744, Hutcheson joined Hester Gibbon and William Law in the English village of King’s Cliffe, Northamptonshire, where Law established a charitable school for poor girls along with a library. Both E. Derek Taylor (2005–2006) and Sarah Apetrei (2010: 81) have drawn attention to Astell’s personal items in this collection, including Astell’s annotated copy of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1697) and her copies of William Cave’s Primitive Christianity (1675), his Antiquitates Christianae (1675), and his Apostolici (1677).2 But Taylor and Apetrei omit any mention of two further texts that also bear the marks of Astell’s ownership: Abraham Woodhead, Obadiah Walker, and Richard Allestree’s A Paraphrase and Annotations upon all St. Paul’s Epistles (NRO, 3.A.10),3 and Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling (NRO, 3.K.15). The marginalia in these volumes demonstrates that Astell challenged prejudicial attitudes toward women in popular Anglican works of her time, especially the idea that women were created subordinate or inferior to men. While the NRO catalog does not officially attribute ownership of the Paraphrase and Annotations to Astell, in the top right-hand corner of one of the first blank pages, there is a handwritten inscription: “M.A. May 5th 1710.” Throughout this volume, there are also various marginal notes in pencil and ink that bear a striking resemblance to the handwriting in Astell’s extant manuscript letters to Henry Dodwell and Ann Coventry, dated from the early 1700s.4 Their contents also echo sentiments expressed in Astell’s published writings, especially the Preface to the third edition of her Reflections Upon Marriage (Astell 1996), first published in 1706. In her Preface, Astell raises several critical points against John Locke’s posthumous 1706 work Paraphrase and Notes on the First Epistle of St. Paul (see Goldie 2007: 81–85). In this volume, Locke provides a gloss on 1 Timothy 2:11–12 (“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence”), suggesting that women are in natural subjection to men, and that a woman must never act upon the presumption of her own knowledge and abilities. In her Reflections, contra Locke’s view, Astell points out that the Bible never explicitly states that a woman’s subjection to her husband is a “law of nature”; rather, the scriptures suggest that a woman’s subordination is a result of custom, contract, and civil law (Astell 1996: 26). Along similar lines, in response to the section on 1 Timothy 2:11–12 in the Paraphrase and Annotations, there is a handwritten note: “A Woman then is not naturally subject to a Man as Man, but accidentally so, and because he is her Husband” (Woodhead et al. 1702: 326).5 In her Reflections, Astell also argues that the fact that Adam was created before Eve does not prove her natural subjection 500

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to him any more than “the Living Creatures, Fishes, Birds and Beasts being form’d before them both, proves that Mankind must be subject to these Animals” (Astell 1996: 21). In a footnote to the Paraphrase and Annotations, Woodhead, Walker, and Allestree claim that because Adam was created first, he has “more worth” (Woodhead et al. 1702: 326). The author of the marginal notes retorts: “Beasts were created before Adam, are they therefore more worthy?” (1702: 326). On the basis of the handwriting and these similarities to the Reflections, it is highly probable that Astell is the “M.A.” of the inscription as well as the author of the notes in this volume; in what follows, I attribute the annotations to her.6 The marginalia reveals that Astell was critical of the Anglican clerics’ assumptions about women’s inferiority to men. In the section on “The First Epistle of S.Paul to the Corinthians Paraphrased,” the authors of the Paraphrase interpret 1 Corinthians 11:7 as suggesting that a “woman is [only] the [image, and] glory of man” (Woodhead et al. 1702: 97). In response in the margins, Astell points out that “The Scripture says that both Women as well as Men were Created in the Image of GOD see Gen” (1702: 97), alluding to Genesis 1:27 (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”). When the Anglican authors suggest both that woman is “inferior in the creation” and that woman is placed in subjection to her husband as a result of Eve’s transgression, Astell points to their inconsistency: it must follow that a woman’s inferiority is therefore “not the Condition of her Nature but the Punishment of her Sin” (1702: 97). In their footnotes, the male authors maintain that a woman ought to be covered in church as a sign of her “modesty, reverence, and subjection, the duties of the woman towards the man” (1702: 97). Here Astell’s comeback is: So Men say, but I do not find that the Word of GOD says so, further than that wives shou’d be subject to their own Husbands; but this is for other Reasons, and not because of the Natural Inferiority of the Sex. (1702: 97) When the authors subsequently contradict themselves by asserting that men and women are “equal” in the eyes of God, Astell inquires “Where then is any Natural Inferiority [?]” (1702: 98). Here we have explicit evidence that Astell was critical of the Anglican clerics’ views about women; in particular, she did not approve of their assertions that women are naturally subject or naturally inferior to men. Of course, these comments in themselves do not decisively meet the Conservative Challenge; they do not undermine the view that Astell thought that women’s understandings should be improved solely for the sake of preserving Anglican liturgical doctrines and practices. After all, she might have made these comments because the Anglican resurgence would have foundered if clerics had continued to assume that women were naturally inferior to men and did not have the ability to make rational judgments for themselves, independently of their husbands, fathers, and other spiritual directors. Here Astell may have argued for the equality of men and women in the eyes of God, simply to bolster the case for the revival of Anglican nunneries in England, to show that women were capable of being educated for higher things. She may have challenged the Anglican authors’ prejudices about women for the purpose of bringing about a more thoroughgoing reformation rather than a half-hearted one. Nevertheless, the marginal notes in the NRO copy of Allestree’s Ladies Calling suggest that Astell’s critique of the Anglican program runs much deeper. In this volume, there are even more compelling reasons to attribute the handwritten annotations to Astell. In a slip of paper bound to the inside of the book, there is an inscription “Mary Astell her Book given her,” and on a blank flyleaf in a childish hand, there is the note “Mariæ Astell Ex Dono Radulphi Astell,” indicating that the book was a gift to Astell from her clergyman uncle Ralph Astell. Throughout this volume, 501

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and especially in “The Preface” and the chapter “Of Meekness,” there are numerous comments in pencil in the margins; there is also a poem in ink on the opening flyleaf signed by “Phylia” and dated 1697.7 Upon comparison, the handwriting in these notes and the poem is identical to the hand in other Astell manuscripts and the Paraphrase and Annotations marginalia, and the intellectual content of these notes once again strongly suggests that Astell was their author. On the one hand, many of the annotations express admiration for Allestree’s work. In “The Preface,” Allestree reflects on women’s understandings, observing that it is “a little hard to pronounce, that they are naturally inferiour to Men,” when one considers the educational advantages of men (Allestree “The Preface,” n.p.). At this point, the note in the margin reads: “Not inferior in Understanding to Men.” This same observation is echoed by Astell in her Christian Religion, when she says that she is unable to discern “that women’s understandings are inferior to men’s” (Astell 2013: §266). Also in The Ladies Calling, in response to Allestree’s assertion that “whatever vicious impotence Women are under, it is acquir’d, not natural,” there is a handwritten note “Womens Faults acquir’d not Natural” (Allestree “The Preface,” n.p.). This observation corresponds to Astell’s well-known assertion in her first Proposal that a woman’s “Incapacity, if there be any, is acquired not natural” (Astell 2002: 59). The footnotes in Astell’s second Proposal and her Christian Religion explicitly acknowledge Allestree’s work as a source of her ideas (Astell 2002: 222; Astell 2013: §1). The marginalia in The Ladies Calling further indicates that Astell wrote these treatises with one eye on Allestree’s text. On the other hand, these marginal notes are also highly critical of Allestree’s opinions concerning women. In his chapter “Of Meekness,” Allestree observes that many women, “seduc’ed by the zeal of a new teacher, have given up their understandings to him” (Allestree 1673: 32). In response, Astell says: “Whence is this but from their not being taught to Use their Understandings, or imagining they have none to use [?]” When Allestree mentions that their “natural imbecillity” makes women “liable to seducement,” Astell corrects him by saying: “or rather ill Education. As he seems to allow in what follows” (Allestree 1673: 33). Later, Allestree notes that many “she-zealots” might have avoided exposing themselves to criticism, if only they had followed “sober guides” (1673: 34). In response, Astell adds “but used their own Reason in following them” (1673: 34). In the same paragraph, she further observes that “Women must Examin well the Ground of Religion” (1673: 34). Here Astell’s emphasis is on women shunning a blind obedience to their teachers and learning to judge for themselves. When Allestree notes that some women have a tendency not to judge tenets according to truth and reason but to prepossession and others’ firmly held convictions, Astell writes in the margins: “Women then must Judge and Judge conformably to Truth and Reason not to any Mans dictates” (1673: 30). These comments highlight how the Conservative Challenge might be met. As I indicated earlier, to meet this challenge it is necessary to point to those feminist ends that go beyond the goals of a mere Anglican revival. Here is one such end: that women judge according to their own reason and “not to any Mans dictates.” While Allestree encourages women to understand the grounds of their religion, he does not encourage the attainment of intellectual integrity in women: their disengagement from prejudice and the freedom to judge for themselves, by the light of their own reason. Like his Anglican contemporaries, Allestree supports female education for the sake of raising the next generation of good Anglicans; he intends for women to imbibe and propagate Anglican orthodoxy in their roles as wives, mothers, and educators of the young. In The Ladies Calling, his emphasis is on women following “sober guides” in order to avoid being seduced by the unorthodox religious views of overzealous teachers (Allestree 1673: 32, 34). In his scriptural exegesis, he emphasizes that women require “instruction” and that they must show an “obedience to Superiors” (Allestree 1673: 9). Astell also encourages women to submit themselves to the dictates of the national church, but she intends for them to do so after a process of critical reflection on their long-held beliefs and values. To acquire this capacity for critical reflection, she suggests, 502

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women must be taught how to judge with impartiality—they must be taught to imbibe those right rules for thinking of her second Proposal. Only then will women obtain “true liberty, which consists not in a power to do what we will, but in making a right use of our reason, in preserving our judgments free, and our integrity unspotted” (Astell 2013: 249). To submit blindly to the dictates of others is “an affront to God, by despising or at the best neglecting the talents He has given us, and a direct disobedience to that command of Christ’s, ‘call no man master upon earth’; that is, follow no man’s judgment or authority any further than as he brings his credentials from the great master who is in heaven” (Astell 2013: §3).8 If men expect a blind submission, she says, “if they would have us stifle, or act contrary to the sentiments of a well-informed judgment, and expect a tame compliance where honor and conscience oblige us to oppose them, in this case opposition is integrity” (Astell 2013: §303). In Astell’s view, women will always be entitled to assert “that most valuable privilege, and indefeasible right, of judging for ourselves where God has left us free to do so”; they have a right to exercise their intellectual integrity (Astell 2013: §256). The content of this marginalia reveals that Astell’s primary purpose goes beyond merely propagating the Anglican religion. Her emphasis on promoting intellectual integrity—on women following their own independent judgment and shunning the prejudices of others—might be compatible with an Anglican agenda to some extent, but the marginalia shows that there are many issues on which they might come apart, such as Allestree’s sexist attitudes toward women and his Anglican emphasis on following one’s spiritual directors without question. In short, these ­a nnotations—and the sentiments they express—provide good reasons for going beyond a Conservative Reading to a Feminist one. On the Conservative Reading, Astell’s so-called feminist ideas—both her descriptive and her normative claims about women’s disadvantages, as well as her concrete plans for social reform—can be better explained by a conservative Anglican agenda, one in which female education was central to the maintenance of the Church’s monopoly on religious worship in late seventeenth-century England. On the Feminist Reading, Astell’s principal design is to sharpen women’s minds, not merely for the purpose of bringing about an Anglican reformation in manners, but so that women might make careful evaluative judgments about their beliefs and values. The notes in Astell’s copy of The Ladies Calling and the Paraphrase and Annotations reveal why her key philosophical writings about women cannot be reduced to a Conservative Reading alone. Her marginal comments in these works provide compelling reasons to think that Astell intended her Cartesian-inspired methodology to serve recognizably feminist ends in addition to devout Anglican goals. Her criticisms of the Anglican authors—Allestree, Woodhead, and Walker—reveal that she aimed to bring about an intellectual liberation for women and not simply transform them into abiding Anglicans. By encouraging women to attain freedom from prejudice and the freedom to judge for themselves, Astell intended for women to develop the intellectual integrity that would enable them to become truly autonomous agents.

Related Topics Personal and Moral Autonomy; Men, Women, Equality and Difference; Education; Beauty, Embodiment and Sexuality; Friendship

Notes 1 These volumes are held in the King’s Cliffe School Library at the Northamptonshire Record Office, England, NRO 3.K.15, box 70, and 3.A.10, box 23. I am grateful to the NRO for granting me access to this library. I would also like to thank the Australian Research Council: the research and writing for this paper was funded by two ARC research grants (FT0991199 and DP190100019).

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Jacqueline Broad 2 See King’s Cliffe School Library, Northamptonshire Record Office, NRO 3.D.17, box 24; NRO 3.E.21, box 1; NRO 2.F.9, box 67; NRO 2.F.11, box 12. 3 The English Short Title Catalogue attributes authorship of this work to Abraham Woodhead, Obadiah Walker, and Richard Allestree; the title page of the 1708 reissue confirms this attribution. 4 The Astell-Dodwell correspondence is held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS Eng. Letters c. 28, fols. 78–79, 100–03). The Astell-Coventry letters are in the private family papers of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort, in the Muniments Room at Badminton Estate in Gloucestershire, England (“Family Papers: Lady Anne Coventry,” FmT/B 1/3/2). I am extremely grateful to His Grace and his archivist Elaine Milsom for granting me access to the original manuscripts of the latter correspondence, first published in Perry (1986). 5 In my transcriptions throughout this chapter, I have spelt out seventeenth-century abbreviations and contractions, and replaced symbols and thorns with words, to make the texts accessible to modern readers. 6 Of course, it is still possible that the author of these notes is someone else, such as her friend Elizabeth Hutcheson, who may have had similar handwriting. But in the absence of further evidence, the balance of probabilities comes down on the side of Astell and, in any case, the author of this marginalia reveals a strong familiarity with Astell’s way of thinking. 7 This poem raises the tantalizing possibility that Astell adopted the pseudonym “Phylia” in other writings. The title page of Ladies Calling is also marked “Ex Libris Phylia” in ink, with “Phylia” noted in pencil in the top left-hand corner. For further details, see Broad and Sutherland 2020. 8 On the anti-authoritarian import of Astell’s frequent injunctions to “call no man master upon earth” (Matthew 23: 9–10), see Apetrei 2008, 2010.

References Allestree, R. (1673) The Ladies Calling In Two Parts. By the Author of the Whole Duty of Man, & c. The Second Impression, Oxford: at the Theater. Apetrei, S. (2008) “‘Call No Man Master Upon Earth’: Mary Astell’s Tory Feminism and an Unknown Correspondence,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41(4): 507–23. (2010) Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Astell, M. (1986) The First English Feminist: “Reflections Upon Marriage” and Other Writings, ed. B. Hill, New York: St. Martin’s Press. (1996) “Reflections Upon Marriage,” in P. Springborg (ed.), Astell: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–80. (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I & II, ed. P. Springborg, Ontario, CA: Broadview, originally published 1694. [SP1, SP2]. (2013) The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, ed. J. Broad, Toronto, ON: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and Iter Publishing, originally published 1717. Broad, J. (2015) The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2019) “Mary Astell’s Critique of Pierre Bayle: Atheism and Intellectual Integrity in the Pensées (1682),” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27(4): 806–23. Broad, J. and C. Sutherland. (2020) “An Astell Pseudonym Uncovered,” in Project Vox Revealing Voices blog series, Available at: https://projectvox.org/uncategorized/revealing-voices-jacqueline-broad-andcatherine-sutherland/ (Accessed: 31 December 2021). Detlefsen, K. (2016) “Custom, Freedom, and Equality: Mary Astell on Marriage and Women’s Education,” in A. Sowaal and P. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 74–92. (2017a) “Cartesianism and its Feminist Promise and Limits: The Case of Mary Astell,” in S. Gaukroger and C. Wilson (eds.), Descartes and Cartesianism: Essays in Honour of Desmond Clarke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 191–206. (2017b) “Liberty and Feminism in Early Modern Women’s Writing,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 17–32. Forbes, A. (2019) “Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice,” Hypatia 34(4): 777–801. Goldie, M. (2007) “Mary Astell and John Locke,” in W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 65–85.

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Mary Astell (1666–1731) Hickson, M. (2017) “Disagreement and Academic Scepticism in Bayle,” in P. Junqueira Smith and S. Charles (eds.), Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 293–317. Kinnaird, J. (1979) “Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism,” The Journal of British Studies 19(1): 53–75. Perry, R. (1986) The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, H. (2007) “Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), and the Anglican Reformation of Manners in Late-Seventeenth-Century England,” in W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 31–47. Sowaal, A. (2007) “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom,” Philosophy Compass 2: 227–43. Springborg, P. (2005) Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, D. (2005–6) “Mary Astell’s Work Towards a New Edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II,” Studies in Bibliography 57: 197–232. Woodhead, A., O. Walker and R. Allestree. (1702) A Paraphrase and Annotations upon all St. Paul’s Epistles. Done by Several Eminent Men at Oxford, Correct’d and Improv’d by the Late Right Reverend and Learned Bishop Fell, 3rd edition, London: Printed for R. Smith.

Further Reading Boyle, D. (2011) “Mary Astell and Cartesian ‘Scientia,’” in J. Hayden (ed.), The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–112. (An excellent account of Astell’s theory of knowledge and Cartesian “scientia.”) Broad, J. (2017) “Mary Astell (1666–1731),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (An accessible online precis of Astell’s philosophical thought.) O’Neill, E. (2007) “Mary Astell on the Causation of Sensation,” in W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 145–63. (A superb analysis of Astell’s Cartesian theory of causation.) Sowaal, A. (2015) “Mary Astell,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Another reader-friendly online account of Astell’s philosophy.)

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37 DAMARIS MASHAM AND CATHARINE TROTTER COCKBURN Agency, Virtue, and Fitness in their Moral Philosophies Patricia Sheridan Damaris Masham (1658–1708) and Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749) shared interests across a wide range of philosophical topics, including metaphysics, theology, and more. In this chapter, I introduce these two innovative thinkers by focusing on their shared interests in moral philosophy, specifically, what Masham and Cockburn believe is required for fully realized moral agency. On this issue, Masham and Cockburn share remarkably similar views. For both thinkers, human nature itself is the guide to moral duty and obligation, and their accounts of moral agency arise out of a particular, and shared, conception of human nature and its virtuous self-expression. Cockburn and Masham both acknowledge that moral agency minimally involves the individual’s conformity to explicit moral laws and a recognition of their responsibility for their actions, even in cases where the motivation to obey might arise solely from the fear of punishment or the promise of rewards. However, both thinkers identify an internalized, character-driven conception of moral agency, according to which the agent perceives the intrinsic value of moral principles as arising from their natures as human beings. This moral agent self-governs in a robust sense—reflectively owning the principles that guide choices definitive of her human ends. Masham and Cockburn were both unusually prolific for their time. Masham published two major philosophical works, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous Christian Life (1705). Cockburn wrote three philosophical works (she also published plays and several works of theology): A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay (1702), Remarks Upon Some Writers in the Controversy Concerning the Foundation of Moral Virtue and Moral Obligation (1743), and Remarks upon the Principles and Reasonings of Dr. Rutherforth’s Essay (1747). Her complete works (including the above-mentioned, along with her theological works, plays, essays, and correspondence) were published in two volumes under the editorship of Thomas Birch in 1751 as The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn. I will not attempt to draw specific lines of influence between Masham and Cockburn, though there are some grounds for doing so. Masham and Cockburn seem to have enjoyed a personal relationship, and had mutual acquaintances. In her correspondence, Cockburn makes clear that the two had met and they would seem to have been friends. In a letter of 1707, Cockburn writes, “I have not yet waited on Lady Masham, but hear her son has been ill of the small pox, which perhaps has hindered her coming to me” (1751b: 204). In another letter of 1708, Cockburn expresses her sadness on hearing of Masham’s death, “having been at Hyde-Park with her not long before” (1751b: 207). Although we do not know if Masham read Cockburn’s work (though Masham may 506

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-44

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have, as Cockburn’s first philosophical work, the Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay, was published in 1702), it seems likely that Cockburn read Masham’s work—in a letter of 1705, Cockburn makes reference to expecting a work of Masham’s writing from a friend (1751b: 190). Perhaps their most famous intellectual connection lies in the fact that both women were philosophically linked to John Locke. Masham’s connection to Locke was both a personal and an intellectual one. Masham met John Locke early in her life and remained his friend and correspondent until his death in 1704. By the time of his death, Locke had taken up residence in Masham’s home in Essex, where he had lived the last 13 years of his life. Cockburn’s first philosophical work, her Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay, was a defence of Locke’s epistemology against one of his critics. Locke responded to the Defence with an appreciative letter and a gift of money and books (see Locke 2002: 309). While both thinkers draw on Lockean principles to ground their moral theories, their intellectual independence from Locke is notable and I will return to this point below.1 Given this shared connection with Locke’s views, it is not unlikely that their similar moral outlook might have arisen, at least in part, from thinking through some of the moral implications and applications of Locke’s epistemology. However, my central aim in what follows is to explore what I take to be a fascinating intellectual affinity between Masham and Cockburn and, perhaps most centrally, to draw attention to their shared account of moral agency as a virtue-ethical ideal. I will begin with a consideration of Masham’s account of agency and I will then turn to Cockburn and look at those aspects of her view that she shares with Masham.

37.1  Masham on Agency and Virtue My discussion will focus on Masham’s Occasional Thoughts, the primary aim of which is to make a case for a program of education aimed at the proper development of virtue. Famously, this work makes a sustained case for the education of girls. But, Masham’s feminist arguments arise from a broader concern with the general lack of attention to raising children as rational and self-governing agents. What she calls “loose or careless Education” (1705, Preface) has resulted in abounding vice and immorality in society. The right kind of education, according to Masham, involves a combination of good principles and well-established habits. Taken together, these will lead an individual on the path of virtue. Central to Masham’s view is the idea that mere obedience to moral rules only minimally constitutes moral agency. Masham also introduces a more robust conception of moral agency, involving the determination of one’s actions from internal principles of right—principles which the agent herself understands as the proper guides for her true happiness. It is fair to say that Masham’s predominant concern lies in the apparent inability of individuals to govern their actions appropriately, which she characterizes as the “folly and madness of the Rational Creature’s acting, as if they had no other principle to direct or determin (sic) them, than the Incitements of their Passions and Appetites” (1705: 2). Jacqueline Broad takes up the centrality of rational self-governance to Masham’s notion of moral agency, including an examination of the intellectual influences among Masham, Locke, and Ralph Cudworth (Broad 2006). Broad focuses on Masham’s notion of free will as it relates to her conception of moral accountability. Broad notes that for Masham liberty is a power for self-improvement, a “‘determining’ of oneself for better or worse” (2006: 506). For Masham, the consequences of failing to self-govern in accordance with proper principles not only affect individuals and their happiness in the afterlife, but also have wide-ranging social impacts. Acting without proper attention to governing principles is a breach of the “Eternal Law of Reason.” Such breaches, she writes, “disorder Common-wealths and Kingdoms; disturb the Peace of Families; and make by far the greatest part of the Private Infelicities of Particular Persons in this world” (1705: 2). Individual self-governance in accordance with right principles produces true happiness for individuals and has the radiant effect of creating order and harmony across 507

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societies—both at the familial level and at the level of society as a whole. An individual’s imprudent decisions affect not only her own happiness, here and in the afterlife, but affect all the people with whom she shares a significant social relationship, be it at the personal or larger social level. By setting this stage at the very outset, Masham is making clear that her program is one aimed not only at the virtue of individuals but, importantly, at individuals understood as standing in a relationship with a whole system of individuals, a system that stands or falls with the moral strength of its members. Regan Penaluna (2007) has explored the social and political dimensions of Masham’s moral philosophy, arguing that Masham’s concept of moral character is deeply enmeshed with her ideal of a Christian character—that is, of a person who follows God’s laws as articulated in revelation. Masham’s moral agent is clearly guided by Christian principles. However, as I want to show here, her morality is more fundamentally a form of virtue theory that is less focused on Christianity, per se, than it is on more broadly humanist values involving natural reason and the dictates of human nature (though she certainly believes that Christianity most perfectly incorporates these definitive aspects of humanity). This broader vision of moral virtue is, I suggest, evident when Masham specifies her central working assumption about the action-guiding principles she has in mind. When we contemplate the moral failings of others, she asserts, the more honorable among us, those who are invested in the importance of virtue, are inspired to reflect on just what that notion involves. We take occasion to assess our own actions “by the true Rules and Measures of [our] Duty…too becoming Rational Creatures…not to please” (1705: 3). First and foremost, the principles that ought to govern us are principles arising from our natures as rational beings. We must, she writes, live “as becomes our Reasonable Nature” (1705: 27). For Masham, then, the problem to be solved is that of human moral inconsistency and, at worst, depravity. The answer lies within each of us and our innate capacity for reason. However, while many of us use reason as a tool merely for the gratification of our desires, this is, for Masham, a signal failure to live up to our human potential and, likewise, to achieve proper moral agency. Joanne E. Myers (2013) has argued that for Masham the individual makes moral decisions by a hedonistic calculus, based first and foremost on personal desires. This “instrumentalizing tendency” is, for Myers, the mark of Masham’s “desiring self ” (2013: 537). While there are grounds for this interpretation, as Myers demonstrates, I want to suggest that Masham’s account of virtue is aimed primarily at self-perfection in accordance with our natures. It is true that this brings us happiness, but it is a happiness that she sharply contrasts with sensory pleasure. As she writes, sensory pleasures lose their appeal if separated from “those concomitant satisfactions which accompany them only as we are rational Creatures” (1705: 65). This she specifies as “our greatest happiness” (1705: 66). Masham’s ideal of agency is deeply entwined with her ideal of human happiness—both of which involve the authentic expression of our definitively human rationality. No one can be really happy, she asserts, if they “want that Knowledge which is requisite to direct their Actions suitably to the Ends which as rational Creatures they ought to propose” (1705: 206). Moral self-governance thus requires strong critical reasoning skills and Masham proposes training individuals from an early age to assess for themselves what they ought and ought not to believe. This might involve moral standards that children are taught from an early age as well as biblical interpretations that children learn from others. However, if children are taught principles of morality and religion without allowing them to question and understand these principles for themselves, these lessons will never stick. Children will be more likely to ignore them or adopt an unwarranted skepticism about them simply because they never fully grasped the truth of these things for themselves.2 Quite apart from the practical implications of rote or authoritative styles of teaching as simply ineffective, there is a more fundamental point that Masham wants to make—individuals ought to own their beliefs, seeing the truth of things themselves and 508

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consciously adopting true beliefs as their own. It is not only the case that individuals will have a greater commitment to beliefs that they have adopted through rational inquiry. For Masham, it is also the case that arriving at one’s beliefs rationally, and seeing the truth of them oneself, gives the act of rational assent a moral dimension. She writes: It is as undeniable as the difference between Men’s being in, and out of their Wits, that Reason ought to be to Rational Creatures the Guide of their Belief: That is to say, That their Assent to any thing, ought to be govern’d by that proof of its Truth, whereof Reason is the Judge; be it either Argument, or Authority, for in both Cases Reason must determine our Assent according to the validity of the Ground it finds it Built on. By Reason being here understood that Faculty in us which discovers, by the intervention of intermediate ideas, what Connection Those in the proposition have one with another. (1705: 32) Reasoning well allows us to determine whether a given proposition is true, false, or probable. Even divine revelation, or “Authority,” must be assented to on rational grounds, for Masham. As she explains, while divine propositions may not be empirically or rationally evident to human reason, it is nevertheless the case that assenting to any proposition that is contrary to reason would, Masham writes, “make the Testimony of our Reason useless to us, and thereby destroy also the Credit of all Revelation” (1705: 35). However, of particular note here is her clear implication that human beings have an obligation to be rational, to live up to the demands of our natures. For Masham, using reason is not merely an instrumental good, it signals the expression of a certain kind of nature. The truly rational person is living a properly human life. She continues this quote with a warning that in failing to engage in this kind of reasoning, “we degrade our selves from being Rational Creatures; and deprive our selves of the only Guide God has given us for our Conduct in our Actions and Opinions” (1705: 33). Reflective and rational assent is not only necessary for distinguishing truth from falsehood; it is a moral imperative. For Masham, the individual’s status as a moral agent depends on her capacity for intellectual independence, accountability, and ownership of the beliefs by which she will self-govern. And in so doing, the agent is living in accordance with her human nature. The moral agent therefore also directs her passions and appetites in accordance with reason, “that faculty which God has given [her] to that end” (1705: 215). For Masham, therefore, reason allows the agent to critically analyze her own beliefs, but perhaps more importantly to reflectively guide her actions in accordance with what she understands is definitive about human nature itself. At this point, we have not seen what, if anything, Masham offers by way of substantive moral principles. Reason ought to guide our actions, and this involves critical reflection and the determination of true guiding principles. But, what are these going to look like? One answer might be that these are going to be God’s commands, as articulated in revelation. Certainly, Masham spends a great deal of time talking about the importance of reason in the interpretation and assessment of biblical laws. But, this is only one part of the story for Masham. She writes at length, in this work, about virtue as a matter of following the rule, or law, of nature, which all rational beings ought to obey. These are dictates that are discoverable by reason and “are no less the Law of God to rational creatures than the injunctions of Revelation are” (1705: 52). Though the discovery of these is very difficult due to the vagaries of education and circumstance, it is, in principle at least, within our natural power to do so. It is worth noting here that for Masham revelation serves the purpose of making these natural laws explicit and, by tying sanctions to their observance, effectively enforced. Revelation was, she asserts, designed to “inforce Natural Religion” (1705: 59). I will return to Masham’s view of the relationship between natural law and God’s revealed commands further on. However, it is important to note at this stage that Masham clearly believes 509

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that almost everything laid out in revelation, with regards to our moral duties, parallels whatever reason could, at least in principle, discover on its own. Revelation, she assures us, has “an exact correspondence with, and conformity to the Nature of Things” (1705: 81). It seems clear that Masham holds out hope that a vigorous commitment to rational education may well lead us to discover our moral duty wholly independently, or at least get us some part of the way there. As it stands, she observes, for most of us our baser inclinations will get the better of us before we attain the rational capacity to “discover from the Nature of Things, the just measure of our Actions, together with the obligations we are under to comply therewithal” (1705: 53). But, this is far from a principled rejection of the possibility. There are, she laments, “very few reasonable People in the World … who endeavour to live conformably to the Dictates of Reason, submitting their Passions and Appetites to the Government and Direction of that Faculty which God has given them to that end” (1705: 215). But, this is precisely the end we all ought to be aiming at. Masham spends a great deal of time in this work discussing natural law—both its discovery and its content. What is also clear from her work is that virtue, most perfectly expressed, is a matter of living in accordance with the law of nature discovered by reason alone. This should, of course, come as no surprise. Masham’s model of agency is a radically self-governing individual. While there is certainly a role for revelation in her work, she is arguably much more interested in laying out the potential of individuals as truth-seeking and self-directing. Her emphasis on human nature and its proper realization is crucial to this point. Human agency is, at its fullest, the expression of our ends. So, what does the law of nature look like for Masham? She first defines it as a set of dictates that arise from the nature of things themselves. These are discoverable by reason, which can see things “to be what they are, and that they cannot but be what they are” (1705: 63). Opaque as this might sound, her elaboration makes clear that she is drawing on a brand of fitness theory: From which diversity and immutability in the Nature of things, there necessarily arises a diversity of respects and relations between them, as unchangeable as the things themselves wherein the Will of the Creator in reference hereunto is reveal’d to every intelligent Agent, so far as he is made capable of discerning these relations, dependencies and consequences, and whatsoever with respect to his own Actions. (1705: 63) Fitness theory presumes that there is an order to nature, such that the proper functioning of the system of beings depends on the proper expression, on the part of each individual, of its specific nature. For non-rational beings this is effected through instinct. What marks out human beings is our capacity for rational self-governance—that is, our capacity to understand our natures, the natures of other things, and what constitutes appropriate relationships between ourselves and others. Agents, as such, have the liberty to choose to act suitably to their own natures and in consideration of their relationships to others. But, this requires that we have the intellectual commitment to do so. As Masham makes clear this does not come easily, although it does come naturally. True agency as a matter of reflective action, “requires that we attentively examine, and consider the several natures of Things, so far as they have any relation to our own actions” (1705: 64). Ultimately, for Masham (and we’ll see this again in Cockburn), the harmonious order of relations indicates God’s will, which is “thereby dictated to [us]” (1705: 63). For Masham, the agent has the capacity to understand this natural order, their place in it, and the duties they have to act harmoniously within it. The agent, she writes, recognizes that God has made her “a part…of the whole” (1705: 63). It is worth pausing on this notion for just a moment, as it reveals a metaphysical assumption that lies at the background to Masham’s fitness view. The world is an orderly place. God, she writes, is “the Author of Order, and not of Confusion, [and] has fram’d all things with 510

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Consistency, and Harmony” (1705: 72). Part of this order involves natural consequences for our actions. Human beings are driven by a desire for happiness. However, Masham explains, one of the chief impediments to virtue is mistaking happiness for pleasure. The pleasures of sense, she writes, pale in comparison to the “more obvious advantages accruing to us from [the] faculty of reason, [which] plainly make known the Superiority of its Nature” (1705: 65). Our “greatest happiness…is manifestly provided for in our being indue’d with this Faculty” (1705: 66). And this kind of happiness, tied as it is to acting in accordance with reason, forms the dictates of reason into effective law: “The Law of Reason,” she writes Has its Sanction, viz. That, duly considering it, we shall evidently find our happiness or misery, are annex’d to the observance, or neglect of that unalterable Rule of Rectitude, discoverable to us by the Nature of Things, so that this Rule of Rectitude, or Eternal Will of God, has also the force of a Law given to it by that inseparable accord that there is betwixt our happiness or misery, with our obedience, or disobedience, hereunto. (1705: 72) We fail in our proper duties if, recognizing that God made us this way, we fail to use reason to measure our actions, and conform them to, the “discernable Natures of Things” (1705: 67). Reason shows us not only what we ought to do, but that we ought to do it. Understanding the order of relations is enough to tell any rational agent what kind of behavior is contradictory or inconsistent with their nature and that of others; the degree of happiness or misery that follows our actions is, by the same turn, a naturally sufficient reinforcement. The dictates of reason, Masham writes, carry the obligatory force of law quite independently of “any positive command of God to us, or his irresistible power over us” (1705: 69).3 Masham believes the grounds for this kind of self-governance lie in human nature itself. When we transgress moral law, for Masham, we not only fail to achieve the lasting happiness promised by divine reward, but we all naturally feel the self-reproach that comes with acting in opposition to reason. Few people, she writes, can endure the “uneasiness of that remorse…[the] constant Reproaches of their own Reason” that come with transgressions against our natural duty (1705: 158). God has given us this capacity with the intention that we will apply it properly and mindfully “to the consideration of the difference respects, consequences, and dependencies of Things, so as to discern from thence, the just measures of their actions in every circumstance and relation they stand plac’d in” (1705: 70). For Masham, then, virtue therefore involves making the greatest effort one can at understanding one’s moral duties oneself—that is, of being guided by one’s own reason in determining one’s actions. This is difficult, and even the most virtuous of us get sidetracked by our desires and appetites. At worst, many of us are so poorly educated that we cannot make these determinations unaided by explicit commands and the threat of divine sanctions. Nothing is more evident, Masham argues, than that peoples’ actions “should be regulated, and directed by that Faculty in them which shows them the different properties, relations, and dependencies of things” (1705: 101). Attending to reason in this way is the path to the greatest virtue and happiness for Masham.

37.2  Cockburn on Agency and Virtue In her 1747 work, Remarks on Dr. Rutherforth’s Essay, Cockburn writes the following: That the perception we have of the essential difference of things, with the fitnesses and unfitnesses resulting from thence, and our consciousness of right and wrong, have a tendency to direct us to virtue, and a right to influence our practices, seems to me as clear and certain, 511

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as it is, that we are reasonable beings, and moral agents, and that therefore they are both true causes or grounds of moral obligation…No stronger restraint can be laid upon a free agent, even by the commands of God, and the sanctions of his laws, than that of forcing him to stand self-condemned. (1747: 35) Cockburn’s conception of moral agency rests on several key assumptions: humans have access to internally derived ideas of moral right and wrong, an inherent motivation to act, and a capacity for self-reflection and self-assessment. For Cockburn, human nature itself is the source of moral understanding; through rational reflection and effective self-governance, agents may comprehend their moral duties and obligations quite independently of the institutions of civil society or God’s explicit commands. The fully realized moral agent, for Cockburn, both understands and is devoted to upholding the values that define her obligations as a moral being. It is this robust sense of agency that lies at the foundation of her conception of virtue and it forms a very similar picture to that which we get from Masham. As Cockburn states above, the perception humans have of moral distinctions along with our tendency towards moral virtue are deeply entwined with the fact that we are fundamentally rational beings. In fact, Cockburn believes that human reason represents a built-in capacity for discerning moral distinctions: “I take our consciousness of right and wrong to be the result of some perception, that every rational mind necessarily has of the essential difference between good and evil” (1747: 33). This does not mean that humans have innate ideas of morality. For Cockburn, it is through reflection on our own natures, and the subsequent perception that we are definitively rational, and social, beings, that gives rise to our understanding of morality and what it means to live a properly human life. Our nature, she writes, is “the reason and rule of moral good and evil” (1702: 58). Cockburn’s morality is therefore best categorized as virtue theoretical, predicated as it is on the expression of one’s properly human characteristics. For Cockburn, like Masham, morality is in its truest sense a matter of following nature. Cockburn understands human nature teleologically—human nature is inherently directed towards the end of moral virtue. We have many impulses that motivate our behavior, but when governed by reason, we can, she thinks, see that our various passions, inclinations, and appetites, are conducive to our ends, which are “the preservation and perfection of our own being and the benefit of society” (1751b: 118). Cockburn does not think humans are always perfectly virtuous. But, she does think we all have an innate capacity for moral perfection, effected through rational self-governance or moral agency. While following the dictates of a legislator (civil or divine) that are enforced by sanctions is the expression of a certain kind of agency, Cockburn thinks humans are equipped to do much more. Cockburn frames her discussion in terms of fitness—that is, the truest and best expression of any nature involves not only the realization of its definitive qualities but the appropriate expression of those qualities relative to a given situation and the natures of other things. According to Cockburn, the ideas we discover through reason reveal moral distinctions of right and wrong along with the understanding that justice, equity, goodness, and truth harmonize with “the reason and nature of things; from whence,” she continues, “we conclude, that acting in conformity to them must be the fittest and best for a reasonable being” (1747: 71; see Sheridan 2018 for a detailed discussion of the role of moral fitness within Cockburn’s larger moral metaphysics). This is a very similar view to that we find motivating Masham’s conception of moral agency and shares with Masham’s view of its wholistic conception of fitness relations. Morality, understood as rational self-governance, sits within the larger sphere of fitness relations and the norms that govern the natural world as a whole; as Cockburn writes, “[t]he absolute fitness of virtue in general consists in its tendency to promote the order, harmony, and happiness of the world” 512

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(1743: 433). The idea here is that if everything in nature fully realizes its nature, whether by a process of rational deliberation or, as for non-human animals, by instinct, the system of nature as a whole is orderly and harmonious—in a word, it expresses virtue. This systemic conception of virtue is particularly clear at the societal level. Humanity understood as a network of interdependent beings might be seen as requiring the same sort of harmonious, and virtuous, structure to function properly. “Mankind,” Cockburn writes, “is a system of creatures, that continually need one another’s assistance, without which they could not long subsist” (1743: 413). In fact, for Cockburn, sociability constitutes a key aspect of our ends—acting in accordance with our sociable nature is precisely what we were made to do. Human beings are, she writes, “designed to promote each other’s welfare, no part being made for itself alone” (1747: 7).4 It is clear, therefore, that moral norms are founded internally, within human nature itself. However, Cockburn also needs to account for the source of moral obligation, or the normative force of morality, which elevates moral norms to level of moral duties. While external sanctions in the form of rewards and punishments are certainly a powerful motivator, Cockburn is deeply opposed to founding motivation purely in self-interest. This, she suggests, debases the potential for moral agency within each person. Duty, Cockburn writes, “becomes us as moral agents, and must arise from a consciousness, either of the fitness or unfitness of an action, or of the obedience due to an authority commanding it” (1747: 99). For Cockburn, then, the conception of moral obligation or duty is deeply focused on the agent herself and her own perception of the rightness or fitness of an action. Where there is no such perception of fitness, even where the command of a superior authority is involved, there is, she writes, “no foundation for duty” (1747: 99). Moral obligation of this kind is, properly speaking, an internal principle that, she writes, “affect[s] the conscience [in a way that…] external motives never can do” (1747: 48). The reflective moral agent feels the obligatory force of morality as a kind of affirmation of her own moral character. The agent feels the sting of moral failure personally, beyond whatever externally imposed consequences she may suffer. As Cockburn writes, “By obligation, I understand, such a perception of an inducement to act, or to forbear acting, as forces an agent to stand self-condemned, if he does not conform to it” (1747: 380). As we can see, then, Cockburn draws a sharp distinction between internal and external motivations. The latter may work to some extent, but they do not constitute the robust form of agency that the former demand. The moral agent, robustly construed, is self-obligating and takes their reasons for acting—that is, the perception of fitness or unfitness—to be authoritative, or conclusive, reasons to act: A free-agent must always be the immediate obliger of himself…it is…the perception and judgment of his own mind, or his reason, that obliges him to act accordingly, and this is so far from being an absurdity, that it is essential to moral choice and free agency. (1743: 446) The agent’s authority comes from the very fact that she has the capacity to determine her actions according to her own rational perception of moral right and wrong. Agency involves not merely following one’s natural inclinations but doing so reflectively and consistently with her rational and social nature. Though even God’s explicit commands are effective inducements to be moral, they are, she writes, “not the proper cause or ground of moral duty. Moral obligation must arise from the reason and nature of things, not from external motives” (1747: 102). Cockburn reiterates this notion in a letter to her niece, making clear that any explicit commands from God must be consistent with the duties arising from our natures: There can be no external evidence of any thing being the will of God, more certain, than we are, that those duties, which arise from the very frame of our nature (which we are sure 513

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is his workmanship) must be his will; and therefore nothing can be received for such, that is contrary to our natural notions of justice, goodness, veracity, &c. since God cannot have two contrary wills. (1751b: 269) Cockburn and Masham are both committed to the idea that there is a harmony between the natural dictates of reason and God’s laws. The prescriptions of nature, if properly understood, are perfectly consistent with revelation, and provide both the content and obligatory force required to make them, effectively, a system of natural laws. As we saw above, Masham’s case for an education in natural virtue is twofold. On the one hand, the laws that are accepted on the basis of authority alone do not have quite the same force on the individual as those accepted on the basis of her own reason. The agent who accepts moral precepts on the basis of rational introspection will not stray from, or come to question, these rules. On the other hand, the obligatory force of these precepts is clearer to those of us who have the rational capacity to understand natural law for ourselves. Above, I mentioned that I would return to the role of natural law and God’s revealed commands in Masham’s morality. Masham is a great deal more anxious than Cockburn about the actual success of reason itself, without the enforcement of revelation, to ensure the constant obligatory force of natural law. As she writes, in making her case for revelation, humans in the state of nature could certainly reason themselves to a number of truths about God and morality, but Nothing is more undeniably true than that from the meer Light of Nature Men actually were so far from discovering the Law of Nature in its full extent or force, as that they did not generally own, and but very imperfectly discern, its prescriptions or obligation. (1705: 56) And even when they do manage to do so, The love of happiness (which consists in pleasure) is the earliest, and strongest principle of Humane Nature; and therefore whatever measures Reason does, or might, prescribe, when particular occasions occur, the sentiment of what Men find pleasing or displeasing to them, however contrary to those dictates of right Reason, is very apt to determine their choice. (1705: 71) Masham goes to great lengths to show that she is in no way suggesting that revelation is not a central feature of human moral life and, at times, does make it sound as though we could not be truly virtuous without it. I do not think Masham is inconsistent, though I do think she might be a bit on the pessimistic side where unaided human virtue is concerned. While Cockburn certainly takes some pains to make a similar case for the importance of revelation, her message seems a great deal more focused on making a case for the realizable potential of human beings to self-regulate quite independently of revelation. For Cockburn, there is no external authority or influence that can guide an agent’s decisions as effectively as can her internal perception of her moral duty. As Cockburn put it in the quote above, “no stronger constraint can be laid upon free agent, even by the commands of God, and the sanctions of his laws, than that of forcing him to stand self-condemned” (1747: 35). Cockburn is sharply critical of views that insist on the necessity of revelation for teaching humans their moral duties and enforcing their compliance with divine law. This, she asserts, depreciates human nature and religious duties. Let God, she writes, “be honoured by the dicates of our nature as well as by the assistances of revelation” (1747: 8). Even those she identifies as heathens and atheists are, she writes, “justly punishable for 514

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the neglect of moral virtue” (1747: 107). They may not have revelation as their guide, but they are still accountable for their actions since duty arises ultimately “from that perception, which we have of the essential moral difference and fitness of things, that law, which God has written in our hearts” (1747: 107). While Cockburn does not dismiss appeals to God’s explicit commands and sanctions, such appeals must be consistent with reason and the principles of fitness. We have the capacity, as rational beings, to understand our moral duties prior to revelation. Our nature itself reveals our duties, and by extension the will of God who created those natures in the first place. Jacqueline Broad discusses the virtue of atheists in Cockburn’s view, concluding that while Cockburn acknowledges that knowledge of the will of God has a motivational force, “[n]atural human reason is still the touchstone of moral knowledge” (1747: 123). I do not want to suggest that there is a wide chasm here separating Cockburn and Masham on the issue of morality’s independence of God’s explicit commands. Masham’s view of our potential for fully realized virtue can, at times, sound somewhat more pessimistic than Cockburn’s. She bemoans the fact that most of us will, at the end of day, be swayed by our passions regardless of what reason tells us. Revelation is, therefore, the best means of ensuring our compliance with moral law. Few people, she writes, would discern the law of nature completely through unaided reason alone. And even if they did, few “would find the inforcement thereof a sufficient Ballance to that Natural love of present pleasure which often opposes our compliance therewith” (1705: 53). Habits are too strong, she thinks, to be overruled by reason, Whence it may justly be infer’d that the Christian Religion is the alone Universally adapted means of making Men truly Vertuous; the Law of Reason, or the Eternal Rule of Rectitude being in the Word of God only, to those of all capacities, plainly, and Authoritatively deliver’d as the Law of God, duly inforc’d by Rewards and Punishments. (1705: 53) That said, Masham’s insistence on an education in good reasoning and the formation of proper habits, coupled with her clear commitment to the innate capacity we have for the discovery of natural law would seem to suggest that she and Cockburn are not that far apart on this issue. If anything, Cockburn seems to find evidence of natural morality at work on even the most uneducated of us while Masham is more hesitant to offer empirical evidence of natural morality on the ground. She clearly, however, seems to subscribe to a similar view of humanity’s potential for natural morality and virtue. In either case, what stands out is that both thinkers share a conception, at least in principal, of the fully formed agent as a radically self-governing individual.

37.3 Conclusion As I stated at the outset, I have not attempted to establish lines of influence between Masham and Cockburn, though their acquaintance may well be grounds for speculating that they discussed these issues with one another. But, both women were admirers of John Locke’s philosophy and I would like to finish with a brief exploration of that common source of inspiration. While a full accounting of Locke’s influence on their respective views would require more space than I have here, I will focus on one common Lockean theme that we find in both Masham and Cockburn. As I have shown, they ground their respective moral philosophies in human nature, understood through a process of self-reflection. Cockburn makes explicit use of Locke’s epistemological principle of reflection as the mechanism for this self-knowledge. As Cockburn asserts, we cannot have any idea of morality “without reflection upon ourselves” (1702: 57). It is, she concludes, “in Mr. Locke’s way [that] we can perceive what is conformable, or not, to our own nature” (1702: 58; for further discussion of Cockburn’s use of Lockean reflection as a moral foundation, see Bolton 515

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1993 and Sheridan 2007 and 2022). Masham makes a similar appeal to Locke’s principles when she writes about the natural human faculty for reasoning: Our Knowledge immediately received from Sense, or Reflection, is inlarge’d to a view of Truths remote, or future, in Application of which Faculty of the Mind to a consideration of our own Existence and Nature, together with the beauty and order of the Universe, so far as it falls under our view. (1705: 61) While this is not meant to imply that reflection is the only Lockean element of their views, it is a key one in their moral philosophies. And, it is notable that both Masham and Cockburn make use of this Lockean principle to establish the groundwork for a morality that seems distinctly unLockean. For Locke, reflection provides us with knowledge of the operations of our minds, e.g., willing, volition, etc. (Essay: 2.6.1–2). He also thinks we can, via reflection, have knowledge of our natures as a route to understanding God’s nature (Essay: 4.10.6). Locke never explicitly makes use of reflection, however, to establish the kind of anthropocentric morality we find in Masham and Cockburn. Nor does Locke develop a robust account of virtue in the Essay. Locke does, however, attend to the proper development of virtue in his work, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. This is, notably, a work that Masham directly references in her Occasional Thoughts. In his work on education, Locke lays out a program of moral instruction that is heavily focused on the nurturing of rational independence, critical abilities, and a virtuous character. I would suggest, in closing, that Masham and Cockburn no doubt drew on Locke’s epistemological principles as a foundation for their moral views but were by no means mere mouthpieces for Locke’s position. As I suggested above, they may have been inspired by some of the implications of Locke’s principles, namely the potential of reflection as a route to understanding human nature and its moral significance. I have not, in this chapter, discussed possible other sources of inspiration on their thinking, but have sought to draw out what I see as a significant commonality in their views on moral agency and virtue. And, hopefully, to contribute a bit further to our understanding of their unique contributions to the history of moral philosophy.

Notes 1 For further reading on the comparative philosophies of Masham and Locke, see: Frankl 1989; Hutton 1993; Ready 2002; Broad 2006; Penaluna 2007; Lascano 2011. For scholarship on the extent of Cockburn’s Lockeanism, see: Bolton 1996; Sheridan 2007, 2018, 2022; Gordon Roth 2015; Thomas 2015; Lustila 2020). 2 Broad 2019 examines Masham’s arguments for women’s education and the positive social impacts of extending liberty of conscience to women. 3 The role of God’s will and sanctions in Masham has generated some disagreement amongst recent scholars. Myers, for example, characterizes Masham’s theory as a brand of hedonistic egoism, in which the agent is, Myers writes, “driven and obliged by calculations of personal desire” (Myers 2013: 535). This leads Myers to conclude that Masham is a voluntarist, who locates the foundation and obligation of moral law in divine authority and sanctions. In a similar vein, Penaluna argues that Masham locates the motivation to obey God’s laws in divine sanctions, writing that although Masham makes room for an internal motivational mechanism, ultimately, for Masham, “it is only by fear of eternal damnation or reward that people have the proper incentive to follow God’s laws” (Penaluna 2007: 118). Buickerood, in his introduction to the collected works of Masham, likewise holds that for Masham, Christianity is concerned primarily with salvation, which is achieved, he writes, “only through a rational fear of God and desire to satisfy his imperatives” (Buickerood 2004: xxix). Hutton does not specifically discuss the role of sanctions in Masham’s account, but emphasizes the generally legalistic elements of Masham’s view, according to which virtue is a matter of comprehending the will of God and governing ourselves

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Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn accordingly. Hutton writes that for Masham, “moral action entails the conformity of the will to God as we understand it from Scripture” (Hutton 2017: 133). Alternatively, Broad argues that Masham’s view is explicitly anti-voluntaristic (Broad 2006). According to Broad, Masham believes God’s will is guided by the law of right reason, which is non-arbitrarily founded in the relations and determinate natures of all things. God, in other words, is guided by the harmony and order of things, a system of nature that human reason can and should likewise be guided by. I believe there are grounds for both interpretations. I hope to have shown that while God’s sovereign command forms an element of moral obligation, for Masham, it does not exhaust the grounds for the normative force of morality. While it is certainly the case the Masham thinks it is beyond the capacities of most of us to attain this degree of moral selfunderstanding, she seems to hold this out as an end worth aiming for. I will return to this point further on, in comparing Masham and Cockburn on this point. 4 Both Cockburn and Masham suggest that while the virtous agent is self-governing, she is not wholly self-sufficient. Virtue cannot be achieved in isolation from the sphere of social relations, within which the agent is embedded. Though I do not address the feminist dimensions of their work here, there is some excellent scholarship on centrality of human sociability for women moralists and the feminist implications of that emphasis: See Frankl 1989; Hutton 2007; O’Brien 2009. Hutton has argued, for example, that “the favoured discourse of…politically-conscious women of the eighteenth century was ethical rather than political.” Ethical issues, she continues, “were at the heart of their feminism” (Hutton 2007: 137).

References Bolton, M. B. (1996) “Some Aspects of the Philosophical Work of Catharine Trotter Cockburn,” in L. L. McAlister (ed.), Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 139–64. Broad, J. (2006) “A Woman’s Influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on Moral Accountability,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67(3): 489–510. Buickerood, J. G. (2004) The Philosophical Works of Damaris, Lady Masham, Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum. Cockburn, C. T. (1702) “A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding,” in T. Birch (ed.), The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, Vol. 1, London: J. and P. Knapton, pp. 44–111. (1743) “Remarks Upon Some Writers in the Controversy Concerning the Foundation of Moral Virtue and Moral Obligation,” in T. Birch (ed.), The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn Vol. 1, London: J. and P. Knapton, pp. 380–450. (1747) “Remarks Upon the Principles and Most Considerable Passages of Dr. Rutherforth’s Essay,” in T. Birch (ed.), The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, Vol. 2, London, pp. 1–107. (1751a) The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, Vol. 1, ed. Thomas Birch. London. (1751b) The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, Vols. 2, ed. Thomas Birch. London. Frankl, L. (1989) “Damaris Cudworth Masham: A Seventeenth-Century Feminist Philosopher,” Hypatia 4(1): 80–90. Gordon Roth, J. (2015) “Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Defence of Locke,” The Monist 9(1): 64–76. Hutton, S. (1993) “Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham: Between Platonism and Enlightenment,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1(1): 29–54. (2007) “Virtue, God, and Stoicism in the Thought of Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Macaulay,” in J. Broad and K. Green (eds.), Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 137–48. (2017) “Liberty of Mind: Women Philosophers and the Freedom to Philosophize,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 123–37. Lascano, M. P. (2011) “Damaris Masham and ‘The Law of Reason or Nature’,” The Modern Schoolman 88(3–4): 245–65. Locke, J. (1996) Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. R. W. Grant and N. Tarcov, Indianapolis: Hackett. (2002) John Locke: Selected Correspondence, ed. Mark Goldie, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2004) The Correspondence of John Locke, Vols. 4, ed. E.S. De Beer, Electronic edition, Charlottesville: Intelex Corp. [Print Publisher: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–1989]. Lustila, G. L. (2020) “Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Democratization of Virtue,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50(1): 83–97. Masham, D. C. (1696) “A Discourse Concerning the Love of God,” in J. G. Buickerood (ed.), A Discourse Concerning the Love of God and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum.

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Patricia Sheridan (1705) “Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life,” in J. G. Buickerood (ed.), A Discourse Concerning the Love of God and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum. (2004) A Discourse Concerning the Love of God and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, ed. J. G. Buickerood, Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum. Myers, J. E. (2012) “Catharine Trotter and the Claims of Conscience,” Tusla Studies in Women’s Literature 31: 53–75. (2013) “Enthusiastic Improvement: Mary Astell and Damaris Masham on Sociability,” Hypatia 28(3): 533–50. O’Brien, K. (2009) Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Penaluna, R. (2007) “The Social and Political Thought of Damaris Cudworth Masham,” in J. Broad and K. Green (eds.), Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women, 1400–1800, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 111–22. Ready, K. (2002) “Damaris Cudworth Masham, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and the Feminist Legacy of Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35(4): 563–76. Sheridan, P. (2007) “Reflection, Nature, and Moral Law: The Extent of Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Lockeanism in her Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay,” Hypatia 22(3): 133–51. (2018) “Some Aspects of Cockburn’s Metaphysics of Morality,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 247–65. (2022) “Locke and Catharine Trotter Cockburn,” in J. Gordon-Roth and S. Weinberg (eds.), The Lockean Mind, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 27–32. Thomas, E. (2015) “Catharine Cockburn on Unthinking Immaterial Substance: Souls, Space, and Related Matters,” Philosophy Compass 10(4): 255–63.

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38 DU CHÂTELET AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PHYSICS Katherine Brading

38.1 Introduction For philosophers of physics, the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Leibniz and Clarke 1956) provides a rich entry-point into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of space, time, motion, force, gravitation, atomism, and method, the subsequent evolution of which persists into debates in philosophy of physics today. Emilie Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics was published 23 years after the Correspondence; it offers a comprehensive and accessible update on all of these issues, and moves the debates forward. Like the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, it should be required reading for philosophers of physics, or so I shall argue. At the heart of these discussions is the theory of bodies in motion. Famously, Newton believed that developing such a theory required the introduction of absolute space and time, whereas Leibniz rejected this move. Moreover, in developing his account of planetary motions, Newton introduced his theory of universal gravitation, which seemed to imply that the planets – and indeed all particles of matter in the universe – act on one another at a distance by means of a gravitational force. Leibniz rejected action-at-a-distance, favoring contact as the only intelligible means by which bodies act on one another. Running throughout these debates is the issue of appropriate method for physics, including disagreements over the role of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII), the use of observations, and the place of hypotheses in scientific theorizing. And so, as Du Châtelet recognized, disputes concerning the motions of bodies must be addressed in tandem with those of method. The primary philosophical topic that motivates her book is bodily action, and the framework for addressing this is her account of method (see Brading 2019a). I maintain that these two themes structure and unify the Foundations. This reading allows me to argue for the main conclusion of this chapter: Du Châtelet offers a systematic treatment of the most pressing concerns in the foundations of physics of her day, one that includes innovative positions on several important topics. To that end, I begin by highlighting key features of Du Châtelet’s position on method (Section 38.2). I then turn to her general account of the nature of body (Section 38.3). I show how these together enabled her to intervene in (a) the dispute over Newtonian gravitation, and (b) ongoing discussions concerning collisions (Section 38.4), staking out her own position. Systematically related to these interventions are: her advocacy of mechanism as an explanatory ideal for physics (Section 38.5); her endorsement of a plenum over atoms and the void (also Section 38.5); and her DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-45

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attempt to construct a middle path between absolutism and relativism in the debates over space, time and motion (Section 38.6). Each of these topics deserves a more extended discussion than I can give here. However, presenting them together enables me to draw attention to some of the most interesting and innovative elements of her philosophy of physics, and to demonstrate my conclusion (Section 38.7). Du Châtelet’s Foundations was widely read and influential in the mid-eighteenth century ( Janiak forthcoming). Moreover, her contributions to philosophy of physics do not end there. She also wrote on the nature of heat and fire and on optics, and her exposition of Newton’s Principia was published alongside her translation in 1756. These texts lie outside the scope of the present chapter; further work is needed to integrate them into a comprehensive picture of Du Châtelet’s philosophy of physics.1

38.2 Method I begin with a brief review of the main elements of Du Châtelet’s discussion of method (see Brading 2019a, Chapter 2, and references therein). Du Châtelet worried about the lack of a secure epistemic basis for physics, arising from inadequacies in the various methods used for pursuing physics at the time. She had examined the methods of the Cartesians and of the Newtonians and had found them wanting. On the one hand, Cartesians were too free in their use of hypotheses, leading to books filled with “fables and reveries” (Du Châtelet 2009: Chapter 4, §55). On the other, Newtonians claimed to reject hypotheses altogether, but this goes too far the other way since the progress of physics depends on building on earlier hypotheses. How, then, to admit hypotheses as part of scientific practice, without allowing the profligate errors of the Cartesians?2 In Leibniz’s principle of contradiction (PC) and PSR, Du Châtelet found the additional resources she was looking for. She uses PC to distinguish between the impossible (that which implies a contradiction) and the possible (that which does not). When we are theorizing, and we claim that something is possible, we are required to “show that the idea is free of contradiction” (Du Châtelet 2009: Chapter 1, §6). This will be important later when we consider her discussion of atomism. Notice that Du Châtelet adopts PC as a constraint on our reasoning: it is introduced as her preferred tool (one that she contrasts explicitly with the Cartesian criterion of clear and distinct ideas, for example) by which we are to develop and assess our theoretical claims. Though PC has metaphysical import, Du Châtelet’s reasons for adopting it are its utility for us in our attempts to arrive at truths concerning what is possible and impossible.3 As a principle of our knowledge, PC is a means of reasoning concerning possibility. Similarly, in Du Châtelet’s hands, PSR is not, first and foremost, a metaphysical principle. Rather, it is how we distinguish the actual within all that is possible. In particular, the sufficient reason for the present state of something must be found in the preceding state of that thing and of everything with which it is causally connected. This will be important later when we consider Du Châtelet’s discussion of bodily interaction, including gravitation. It is not simply that PC and PSR are useful and powerful tools for theorizing. Du Châtelet makes the stronger claim that they are presuppositions that must be adopted for knowledge to be possible, and this justifies their status as methodological requirements. She writes that without PC something could exist and not exist at the same time, and that “everything could be, or not be, according to the fantasy of each person” (2009: Chapter 1, §4). So, as a consequence of supposing that it is possible for us to know things, we must adopt PC as a constraint on our theorizing. PSR is similarly entailed. Du Châtelet offers a series of examples in support of her position (see 2009: Chapter 1). The most interesting for philosophers of physics is perhaps the following. Newtonians explicitly rely on 520

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inductive practices in their empirical enquiries, but Du Châtelet claims that without the presumption of PSR, there can be no measurements, and so empirical science would not be possible. This is because measurements involve comparisons of equality and inequality, identity and difference. She writes (2009: Chapter 1, §8): Thus, for example, if I have a ball made out of stone, and a ball of lead, and I am able to put the one in the place of the other in a basin of a pair of scales without the balance changing, I say that the weight of these balls is identical, that it is the same, and that they are identical in terms of weight. If something could happen without a sufficient reason, I would be unable to state that the weight of the balls is identical, at the very instant when I find that it is identical, since a change could happen in one and not the other for no reason at all; and consequently, their weights would no longer be identical… The choice of weight here is apt. Newton’s Principia is all about gravity, and the empirical evidence on which it depends involves not only weighing terrestrial objects but also “weighing” the Moon. Where some physicists justified their use of induction by appealing to the benevolence of God in maintaining a well-ordered universe (see, e.g., ’s Gravesande 1720, Preface), Du Châtelet committed herself to PSR as a presupposition for all knowledge. This position has powerful methodological implications. If PSR must be presupposed for knowledge, then it should be respected as a constraint on theorizing. In supposing that knowledge is possible, we have no choice but to adopt PC and PSR as principles of our knowledge; having done so we must place them at the heart of our method for achieving knowledge in physics. We can ask about the metaphysical justification for PSR – the world must cooperate, and how can we know that this is the case? – but this was not Du Châtelet’s primary concern. It’s in the proper method for doing physics that I see the most important place of PC and PSR in Du Châtelet’s philosophy of physics. In the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, Leibniz argued against Newton’s absolute space, time, and motion, and against atomism, using PSR and PII. Du Châtelet’s account of method gives weight to these arguments, but does not make them decisive. This is because a good hypothesis must satisfy further requirements. In addition to respecting the principles of our knowledge (PC and PSR), it must also meet specific empirical considerations. These latter Du Châtelet spelt out in her most famous chapter, on hypotheses (subsequently reproduced in the highly influential Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert). There, she insisted on the importance of hypotheses for theorizing and theory-development, arguing that a good hypothesis is one that not only fits all known observations, but agrees with observations in all its consequences. Moreover, we should seek novel predictions, be careful about which elements of a hypothesis are confirmed (or rendered probable) or falsified by observations, and we must not make ad hoc modifications to our hypotheses. The chapter is strikingly familiar to philosophers of science today.4 With this brief review of the main elements of Du Châtelet’s method in hand (see Janik 1982; Hagengruber 2012; Detlefsen 2014; Brading 2019a; Rey forthcoming), we now turn to her discussion of bodies in motion, and their actions upon one another, where this method is at work.

38.3  Bodies, Forces, and the Laws of Motion Newton’s laws of motion are about bodies: “every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion…” and so on. But what is a body? In the early eighteenth century, physics was the subdiscipline of philosophy charged with providing an account of bodies generically: their nature, properties, and behaviors; the causes and effects of those behaviors; and so forth. This “general physics” includes both metaphysics and physics, as we would draw that boundary today. 521

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There was widespread agreement that bodies are extended, mobile, and impenetrable, and that they act on one another by contact. Nevertheless, conceptual difficulties with each of these commitments led to disputes. Moreover, there were disagreements over what other properties belong to the nature of body and what other ways bodies act on one another, if any. Du Châtelet sought an account of the nature of bodies that would resolve these problems. In my view, this is the central motivating problem of the Foundations (see Brading 2018, 2019a). Her approach to the problem of bodies begins from the Cartesian position that extension is the essence of body. Du Châtelet argues that this conception of body leads to occasionalism, which she rejects seeking instead an account in which bodies have causal efficacy (see Du Châtelet 2018: Chapter 8; Brading 2019a: 67). Moreover, any account that asserts extension as the sole essence of body violates PII, Du Châtelet says, since such matter would be entirely homogeneous and all its parts similar to one another. These two issues are addressed with a single solution: Du Châtelet adds “force” to the essence of matter in order to ensure that the parts of matter are distinct from one another and capable of acting. The argument seems to go like this. Suppose that matter were purely extension. Suppose that the parts of a portion of this matter, however small, were all at rest. Then they would be entirely similar. But this violates PSR (via PII). Therefore, the parts of matter must be in different states. Let a “force” internal to the parts of matter be the source of this real difference between them, and let it also be that which provides a body with the power to act. Then both of our problems are solved. In other words, Du Châtelet identifies the force of a body introduced to satisfy PSR with the force by which a body is able to act, so that the “internal force” is also a “force tending toward motion” and a “motive force” (see Du Châtelet 2018: Chapter 8. §139–41). This does not complete Du Châtelet’s account of body. In order for one body to act on a second, the latter must resist the action of the first, for otherwise PSR would be violated: there would be no sufficient reason for the first body to act (2018, Chapter 8, §142). According to Du Châtelet, the essence of body consists of extension, active (or motive) force, and passive (or resisting) force. The justification for this claim is our requirement that PSR be satisfied, and our experience that bodies (including our own) do indeed act. Du Châtelet claims that these three principles are mutually independent and jointly necessary and sufficient for an account of the nature of body. Next, Du Châtelet turns to motion. Her laws are similar to Newton’s, but differ from them in important and interesting ways. At the time, Newton’s laws were not universally accepted and were given different formulations by different people, so Du Châtelet was not alone in offering her own version. Moreover, the epistemic status of such laws was controversial. What justification of them was required? Are they inductive generalizations? Do they follow deductively from the nature of bodies? Are they to be derived at least in part (as Descartes suggested) from the nature of God? Newton had stated them as “Axioms, or Laws of Motion,” and in his discussion, he offered some empirical considerations while also suggesting that his laws already had the status of generally accepted principles. Du Châtelet rested her version of the laws on her account of bodies, and argued for them using PSR. She stated them as follows (2009: Chapter 11, §229): First Law. A body perseveres in the state it is in, be it rest or motion, unless some cause removes its motion or its rest. Second Law. The change that happens in the motion of a body is always proportional to the motor force that acts on it; and no change can happen to the speed and the direction of the moving body except by an exterior force; for without that, this change would happen without sufficient reason. Third Law. The reaction is always equal to the action; for a body could not act on another body if this other body did not resist it. Thus the action and the reaction are always equal and opposite.

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Du Châtelet appeals to her account of the forces of bodies (active and passive) and to PSR in order to provide a justification for each of the laws (see Reichenberger 2018 for a discussion). Whether this justification is successful is another question, and one we will not pursue here. For our purposes, we have what is important: the main ingredients in her physics of bodies.

38.4  Bodily Action: Gravitation and Collision With bodies and laws in hand, Du Châtelet is in a position to address the driving question of the Foundations: how is it that bodies act on one another? The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (1956) opens with questions of God’s presence and action in the world, and quickly turns to the issue of how one body acts on another, both in collisions and also, more famously, in accordance with Newton’s theory of gravitation. Leibniz wrote (1956: 94): But then what does he mean, when he will have the sun to attract the globe of the earth through an empty space? Is it God himself that performs it? But this would be a miracle, if ever there was any. … … That means of communication (says he) is invisible, intangible, not mechanical. He might as well have added, inexplicable, unintelligible, precarious, groundless, and unexampled. … If the means, which causes an attraction properly so called, be constant, and at the same time inexplicable by the powers of creatures, and yet be true; it must be a perpetual miracle: and if it is not miraculous, it is false. ‘Tis a chimerical thing, a scholastic occult quality. Du Châtelet addresses the question of whether bodies act on one another via gravitational attraction in Chapters 15 and 16 of the Foundations. In Chapter 15, she reviews both Newton’s theory of universal gravitation and Huygens’ vortex theory. In Newtonian gravitation, every particle acts on every other particle in the universe by a mutual attraction proportional to the masses of the particles and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, and this attraction is responsible for the motions of the planets as they orbit the Sun in otherwise empty space. Leibniz opposed Newtonian attraction on the grounds that action-at-a-distance is unintelligible. He, and others, favored instead an ether theory (such Descartes’ vortex theory), in which the Sun and planets are immersed in a medium of finely divided and fast-moving matter, swirling in a vortex around the Sun and carrying the planets around in their orbits. Huygens followed this latter path in searching for a quantitative theory of gravitation. In Chapter 15, Du Châtelet examines the empirical evidence and argues that recent measurements of the shape of the Earth favor Newton’s theory over Huygens’. Du Châtelet does not end her discussion there. First, her method requires that theories answer not only to empirical evidence but also to the “principles of our knowledge.” In Chapter 16, Du Châtelet argues against Newtonian universal gravitation via appeal to PSR, siding with Leibniz.5 Second, and surprisingly, Du Châtelet retains a role for Newtonian universal gravitation in physical theorizing. We can admit gravity as a “physical quality” and make use of gravitational attraction in doing physics, while continuing to search for a mechanical explanation of gravity (see Section 38.5).6 The other candidate for bodily action as of the early eighteenth century was contact action. In contrast to Newtonian gravitational attraction, Leibniz held collisions to be intelligible. Yet debates continued over how to theorize contact action, most famously in the vis viva controversy. If gravitational attraction is unintelligible and therefore to be rejected, while collisions are to be admitted as the only intelligible means by which one body acts on another, then the onus falls on those rejecting attraction to demonstrate the superior intelligibility of contact action.

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What would this involve? The parallel with Newtonian gravitation is instructive. Newton provided a mathematical rule for the behavior of bodies acting on one another via gravitation. The rules of collision can be thought of as analogous. Leibniz demanded that the rule for gravitation be rendered intelligible in terms of an underlying theory of matter, one which showed how it is that one body acts on another such that the upshot is motion in accordance with the law of gravitation. The analogous demand is to provide an account of the collision process, in terms of an underlying theory of matter, that renders intelligible how it is that one body acts on another such that the upshot is motion in accordance with the rules of collision. At the time of the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, and later when Du Châtelet came to write her Foundations, there existed no generally accepted account of either.7 Du Châtelet’s investigation of contact action takes place in the final two chapters of the Foundations, drawing on resources developed earlier: the active and passive force of bodies (see above), and the division of active force into “dead force” – when a body strives to move but fails – and “living force” – when a body strives to move and succeeds.8 She writes (2009: Chapter 11, §268): When a moving body encounters an obstacle, it strives to displace this obstacle; if this effort is destroyed by an invincible resistance, the force of this body is a force morte [dead force], that is to say, it does not produce any effect, but it only tends to produce one. If the resistance is not invincible, the force then is force vive [live force], for it produces a real effect, and this effect is called the effect of the force of this body. Chapters 20 and 21 develop the account in detail. When active force manifests as “dead force” we have equilibrium (Chapter 20). Then, once one body yields and motion ensues, active force manifests as living force (Chapter 21).9 In both chapters, Du Châtelet is concerned with the empirical measures of force, be it dead or living, and therefore in relating her account of the force of bodies to quantitative empirical measures. It is an open question of the extent to which she succeeded.10 Nevertheless, the task Du Châtelet set herself is clear. She aimed to meet the dual demand of her method by demonstrating the intelligibility of contact action (via her version of the Leibnizian theory of forces) with a theory that is also empirically successful, not just qualitatively but quantitatively.11 This completes her response to the question of how it is that bodies act on one another. She provided an account of the nature of bodies – in terms of extension, active force, and passive force – that enabled her to show that contact action is intelligible and empirically successful, whereas Newtonian attraction, though empirically successful, fails to satisfy the intelligibility requirement.

38.5  Mechanism and Atomism Du Châtelet prefaces her laws of motion with the following statement (2009: Chapter 11, §229): The active and passive force of bodies is modified by their impact, according to certain laws that can be reduced to three principles. Though other forms of interaction are not ruled out by this, in practice Du Châtelet seems committed to contact action as the only means by which bodies act on one another (Section 38.4). There are several places in her text where one might hope to extract an argument for this conclusion, but none seems successful (see Brading 2019a: 87–89). In my view, her commitment to mechanism is primarily methodological rather than metaphysical, in two respects. First, it represents an ideal of intelligibility for explanations, and second it encourages persistence in theorizing. Du Châtelet notes that mechanical explanations may be beyond our capacities in many cases, but maintains that we must not rush to give such explanations where this is so. Much of what we 524

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observe arises from parts of matter so finely divided and fast-moving as to be beyond the reach of our senses. So, we must begin by limiting ourselves “to observing carefully the qualities that fall under our senses and the phenomena that result” (2014: Chapter 9, §176), for “these physical qualities, which make up the effect of mechanical causes, must necessarily precede them in the explanation of phenomena” (2014: Chapter 9, §184). We should use these physical qualities, including magnetism, electricity, fire, cohesion, elasticity, and gravitation, to provide interim explanations as we work toward the underlying mechanical explanations, which may be forever out of our reach.12 Nevertheless, we should continue to seek such an explanation because “it is the only one with which one can make sense of the phenomena in an intelligible fashion” (2014: Chapter 9, §182). Insofar as that which is intelligible is that which satisfies the principles of our knowledge, Du Châtelet’s position seems to be that only mechanical explanations satisfy PSR. Mechanical explanations are an explanatory ideal, a goal that should be approached in accordance with her two-pronged method (Section 38.2). This explanatory ideal encourages persistence because, while Du Châtelet endorses appeal to physical qualities, she also urges that explanations in terms of such qualities should not be thought of as the end point of theorizing: “we must try, as far as possible, to explain the Phenomena mechanically, that is to say, by matter and motion” (2018: Chapter 8, §162). And so, even when a mechanical explanation is far from our reach, we must persist in working toward it and not stop at explanations in terms of higher-level physical qualities. Such qualities are associated with regularities in observable phenomena, and Du Châtelet notes the empirical support for atomism that this might seem to offer (see Foundations, Chapter 9). On the one hand, constructively, the same seeds consistently produce the same animals and plants, having the same properties over time. Were matter infinitely varied, these regularities would be difficult to explain. Appeal to atomism, with its stability in the shapes and sizes of the ultimate building blocks of plants and animals, makes the stability and differentiation of species over time explicable. Du Châtelet states (2014: Chapter 9, §172): The order that reigns in the universe, and the conservation of that order, thus appear to prove that there are solid particles in matter. On the other hand, destructively, “[t]he dissolution of bodies has fixed limits” (2014: Chapter 9, §172). Du Châtelet did experiments and was familiar with the limits of our ability to transform bodies of one kind (such as lead) into bodies of another (such as gold), by heating, pulverizing, etc. This limitation is difficult to explain if matter is indefinitely divisible, but readily explicable if there are species of atoms of fixed shape and size that we cannot further divide. Du Châtelet concludes: It is thus strongly likely that there are particles of matter of a certain determinate littleness which nature does not divide further. (2014: Chapter 9, §172) This is what the empirical evidence suggests. However, the principles of our knowledge tell a different story. In the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence Leibniz rejects atomism on the grounds that atoms violate PII. And, as we saw above, in light of PII Du Châtelet includes “force” in addition to extension in the essence of matter, in order to ensure that the parts of matter are distinct from one another. She repeats this conclusion in Chapter 9, writing (2014: Chapter 9, §172): indivisible atoms, or parts, of matter are inadmissible, if one considers them as simple, irresolvable and primitive matters, because one cannot give a sufficient reason for their existence. 525

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Here, she refers back to Chapter 7 (2009: Chapter 7, §120–21) where she argued against atomism. There, the question was how extended bodies are possible at all. The postulation of atoms, understood to be small parts of extended matter, fails to address this issue because it fails to explain how extension is possible in the first place. Du Châtelet urges that such beings cannot be necessary since their divisibility implies no contradiction. Moreover, given her understanding of PC (see above), we can conversely argue that the postulation of extended yet indivisible atoms risks introducing a contradiction into physics (see Brading 2019a: 55–58): unless we can show that there is no such contradiction, we have failed to show that atoms are possible, and have thereby failed to meet the methodological demands placed on us by adopting PC as a principle of our knowledge. How are we to reconcile the empirical evidence with the demands of PC, PSR, and PII? Du Châtelet’s answer is that, though divisible, there are parts of matter that remain undivided; “all the bodies that compose the universe result from the composition and the mixture of these solid particles, so that one can regard them as elements” (2014: Chapter 9, §172). The ultimate constituents satisfy PII, but they come together to form particles that persist undivided and are sufficiently similar that they serve as elements: If one asks for the sufficient reason of this actual irresolvability of the little bodies of matter, it would be easy to find in the mutual movements of its parts, for mutual movements are the cause of cohesion, according to Leibniz. (2014: Chapter 9, §173) To investigate this further would take us into her account of cohesion (see 2014: Chapter 9, §179) and too far from our present concerns. In short, Du Châtelet believes the empirical evidence to show that matter divides and is divisible far beyond the limits of our senses; that there is nevertheless a limit to this division, with stable configurations or particles of matter beyond which matter does not in fact further divide naturally; and that these particles of matter arise from constituents satisfying PII.

38.6  Space, Time, and Motion As philosophers of physics know well, any physics of the motions of bodies requires a theory of space, time, and motion, and the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence is the canonical source for the associated absolute-relative debate. Du Châtelet’s Foundations is interesting in two respects: for her summary and analysis of the state of the debate at the time, and for the ways in which she attempted to move the debate forward, taking lessons from both sides. As we will see, while she endorsed a relationist metaphysics of space, time, and motion, she sought to recover the epistemic benefits of absolutism. Du Châtelet’s space chapter begins by setting up two opposing views. According to the first (2018: Chapter 5, §72), space is Nothing over and above things, it is a mental abstraction, an ideal Being, it is nothing other than the order of things as they coexist, and there is nothing to Space except bodies This is her characterization of Leibniz’s relationist position, familiar from the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. According to the second (2018: Chapter 5, §72), space is an absolute Being, real, and distinct from the bodies it contains… an intangible, penetrable extension, lacking solidity, the universal vessel that receives the Bodies that are placed in it… 526

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This is the absolutist position, most familiar from Newton. Du Châtelet explicitly offers a container interpretation of absolute space: it is a vessel in which bodies are placed. Du Châtelet associated contemporary absolutism primarily with Gassendi, Locke, Newton, Keill, and Clarke. According to Du Châtelet, the arguments in favor of the relationist position are metaphysical, whereas the reasons for adopting the absolutist view are negative arguments against the relationist position, and these arguments are empirical. Du Châtelet offers two arguments in support of relationism, both of which rely on PSR. The first is against the possibility of atoms in a void. Were there such an atom, it would have to be of a determinate shape and size. Yet the void contains no reason for the atom to have any particular shape and size. And so there cannot be atoms in the void, since this would violate PSR. Then, since there cannot be void space, there cannot be absolute space. The second is Leibniz’s argument from his correspondence with Clarke, which we paraphrase as follows. Were there absolute space, then the finite material universe would have to be placed somewhere determinate in that space. Yet space being perfectly homogeneous, there can be no reason for placing the universe in one location rather than another. And so there cannot be absolute space, by PSR. Du Châtelet agrees with Leibniz: PSR requires that we reject absolute space. What, then, of the empirical arguments against relationism, and thereby in favor of absolutism? The arguments Du Châtelet addresses concern the plenum. This is because the first of Du Châtelet’s arguments against absolutism yielded the conclusion that there cannot be void space. This, in turn, means that the relationist must endorse the plenum, and Du Châtelet sees the arguments against relationism arising from the associated commitment to a plenum. She claims that there are three principal objections, and she dispatches all of them in one short paragraph (see 2018: Chapter 5, §76). Yet as we read the absolute versus relative debate today, we take Newton’s bucket experiment to be crucial, and to be independent of whether or not one is a plenist. The significance of the bucket and of rotational motion seems at first sight to have escaped Du Châtelet entirely. We return to this issue below. Though Du Châtelet sides with Leibniz when it comes to the metaphysical status of space, she is keenly aware of the utility of the idea of absolute space for the purposes of physics. The next several paragraphs of the chapter (2018: Chapter 5, §77–87) concern our idea of space: how we come to have this idea, and what its properties are (see Lin unpublished manuscript). In her view, we form the idea of space by abstraction from considering one thing external to another. This ideal space has the familiar Newtonian properties of being homogeneous, uniform, continuous, penetrable, immutable, eternal, infinite, and so forth (see 2018: Chapter 5, §84). Then, in the final paragraphs of the chapter, she tells us what the distinction between “absolute” and “relative” place amounts to, given her relationist account of space. We return to this below, also. Turning next to the case of time, Du Châtelet gives even more short shrift to the metaphysical arguments over absolutism versus relativism. She says that the cases of space and time are parallel, and that Leibniz’s argument using PSR is once again effective. For if time were an absolute being then the time at which the world was created would lack sufficient reason. Her chapter on time opens with the following summary of the relationist position, which she endorses (2009: Chapter 6, §94): The notions of time and space are very similar. In space, one simply considers the order of the coexistents insofar as they coexist; and in time, the order of successive things, insofar as they succeed each other, discounting any other internal quality than simple succession. However, as in the case of space, she nevertheless recognizes the importance of the idea of absolute time, and she moves swiftly to consider the origin of this idea. Here, we arrive at two asymmetries, one in the origin of our ideas of space and time, and the other in the measurement of space 527

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and time. The second is of particular interest for philosophers of physics, and we approach it via the first. For Locke, there is an asymmetry in our ideas of space and time. We arrive at our idea of space from our experience of the impenetrability of other bodies, and by distinguishing this from the extension of these bodies (see Locke, Essay 4th edition, 1700, Book II, Chapter IV). These bodies are external to us, and so our idea of space involves the idea of an extension external to us, stretching away from us in all directions. We arrive at our idea of time, on the other hand, from the succession of our ideas. Locke is at pains to show that this succession is internal to us, not deriving from our experience of the motions of bodies. Du Châtelet’s account of the origin of our idea of space also involves externality, but is different from Locke’s. In a fascinating passage, Du Châtelet appeals to our imagining objects as external to ourselves (see 2018: Chapter 5, §77), and for detailed analysis see Lin (unpublished manuscript). Moreover, for Du Châtelet, there are important similarities between our ideas of space and time. In particular, each provides a structural unity to the multiplicity of beings as we experience them. For example, in the case of space she writes (2018: Chapter 5, §77): Since we represent to ourselves in extension several things that exist external to one another and are one through their union, all extension has parts that exist external to one another and are one; and once we represent to ourselves parts both diverse and unified we have the idea of an extended Being. Time is a little more complicated (see Du Châtelet 2009: Chapter 6, §97), for in this case, we structure non-coexisting as well as coexisting things, and our idea of time arises “insofar as one gathers together these diverse existences, and considers them as making one.” Nevertheless, this similarity hides an asymmetry, for whereas the idea of space depends necessarily on the representation of externality, the same is not true for time. At the end of her account, Du Châtelet seems to agree with Locke when she says: “we would have a notion of time even if nothing other than our soul existed.” Like Locke, she denies that we get our idea of time from our experience of the motion of bodies external to us; so long as there is a succession of our ideas, then we can get our idea of time. It seems, then, that Du Châtelet has a version of the internal/external asymmetry between time and space that we have already seen in Locke. There is more work to be done on the origin of our idea of time in Du Châtelet, and on its relationship to our idea of space. Her account is highly interesting and original, deserving detailed treatment in its own right. I make these inadequate remarks here because they pave the way for a second asymmetry, one that is of particular interest to philosophers of physics.13 Suppose we think of spatiality as external in origin, whereas temporality is internal, as the first asymmetry suggests. Du Châtelet argues that, in experiencing the succession of our ideas, each of us has our own “time,” one that cannot be directly compared with anyone else’s.14 Yet our communal activities, whether in ordinary life or in doing physics, require a shared measure of time, and this means that “we have been obliged to take the measurements of time outside of ourselves” (2009: Chapter 6, §112). For example, we use the diurnal motion of the Sun as a clock. This brings us to the second asymmetry between space and time (2009: Chapter 6, §113):15 There is not, and cannot be, a very accurate measurement of time; for one cannot apply a part of time to itself to measure it, as one measures extension by pieds and toises, which are themselves portions of extension. Each has his own measurement of time in the quickness or slowness with which his ideas succeed each other… The measurement of time seems to pose special challenges not present in the measurement of space. 528

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To clarify this asymmetry, begin from the claim that the measures of extension are themselves portions of extension. This is ambiguous between two claims, both of which are interesting. The first is that, since extension is itself external to us, the external units by which we measure it are identical to actual portions of that which we seek to measure. The second is that the tools by which we measure extension – such as rulers and yardsticks – are themselves extended and so when we apply a yardstick to measure extension there is no gap between the length of a true yardstick and a yard of extension. Now consider the disanalogous claims for time. First, since time is internal to us, the external units by which we measure it (such as the motion of the Sun that yields the length of a day) cannot be identical to the internal intervals in our heads (the motions of the Sun are external, and so by definition are not taking place inside anyone’s head). And second, since the tools by which we measure time use periodic motions to indicate elapsed duration, there can be a gap between the presumed regularity of these motions and equal intervals of time itself (whether internal or external, whether relative or absolute). That is to say, any physical clock may be imperfect: it may tick irregularly with respect to time itself. The second of these claims, that the relationship between measuring tools (rods and clocks) and that which is measured (extension and duration) differs between space and time, reflects an asymmetry present in Newton’s Principia (see Brading 2019b), and one that persisted until the early twentieth century. So, in Locke’s Essay and Newton’s Principia there is a very interesting conflux of issues concerning the epistemology of space and time, and of their measures, and Du Châtelet is the first to begin to tease these issues apart and give them explicit treatment. We have seen that when it comes to the debate over the ontology of space and time, Du Châtelet sides unequivocally with the relationists. However, as we have also seen, she takes seriously the apparent need for absolute space and time in physics. She is particularly concerned with the epistemology of space and time, and with constructing ideas of space and time that suffice for the purposes and practices of physics while maintaining a relationist metaphysics. This is a bold and innovative proposal. Du Châtelet’s position is an important development in the debates over space and time, one that was widely read both in the Foundations itself and via the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert (where the entries on space and time were extracted from the Foundations). Philosophers of physics today are prone to move from Newton and Leibniz directly to Kant, perhaps with a mention of Berkeley and Euler in between, but this misrepresents the philosophical dialectic, not least because Kant read Du Châtelet. So, what does all this mean for how we analyze the arguments over space and time as they unfolded in the eighteenth century, including the mapping of the options that were made available, both explicitly and implicitly, in philosophers of the period? We don’t know: there is work here for philosophers of physics to do. With all that said, Du Châtelet’s treatment of space and time will remain unsatisfactory unless it can do justice to the role of absolute motion in physics, since this was the reason why Newton introduced absolute space and time in the first place. Elsewhere, Qiu Lin and I have argued (forthcoming) that Du Châtelet shifts the debate about motion away from the ontological underpinnings of absolute motion to the epistemic and pragmatic challenges of pursuing Newton’s goal of determining the system of the world (i.e., resolving whether the Earth or Sun sits at the center of our planetary system). In that context, Du Châtelet believed that the fixed stars provide adequate reference bodies. In astronomical theorizing, the preferred material frame had long been the fixed stars, and she believed that they would continue to suffice (2018: Chapter 5, §91): We perceive that a Being has changed location when its distance from other Beings, which are immobile (at least for us), is changed. Thus, we made the catalogs of fixed stars in order to know whether a Star changes location, because we regard the others as fixed, and indeed they effectively are relative to us. 529

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Note the phrases “at least for us” and “effectively.” What these emphasize is that, as observers on Earth, our epistemic situation is such that the fixed stars appear to be at rest relative to each other and to move uniformly, and so we can ascribe rest to them for the practical purpose of providing us with a standard of rest, even though we do not know whether they are truly at rest. “Effective absolute motions” are then motions relative to this standard of rest. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that using the fixed stars in this way is well-suited for the task of determining the changing locations of celestial bodies in our planetary system. Thus, while our lack of epistemic access to the true state of motion of the fixed stars may sound discouraging at first, it turns out that this limitation does little harm to our theorizing. Similarly, for the bucket experiment, we are permitted to choose reference bodies that work for the purposes of theorizing, always recognizing that we may need to revise those choices as we run into their limitations. As Lin and I point out, this does not help with the explanatory task of providing an ontology that distinguishes uniform from non-uniform motion, a distinction that Newton’s first law of motion requires. Instead, it re-directs our attention to the epistemic resources needed to make use of the first law, and the other laws too, in solving particular problems – be they large (such as the system of the world) or small (such as the bucket). For this, Du Châtelet’s “effective absolute motion” seems to suffice. I take her position to be an interesting response to unsolved issues in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, one that seeks to shift the debate in a new direction via careful attention to the epistemology of physics, its practices and its methods.

38.7 Conclusion Du Châtelet offered a view of physics as a communal, ongoing, and open-ended enquiry in which adherence to proper method is our constant guide and engine of progress. I have argued that, in the Foundations, she investigated the most important problems in the foundations of physics of the day, and that her proposed solutions are part and parcel of the systematic philosophy of physics she presents therein. In my view, Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics is extraordinarily useful for philosophers of physics, because of a remarkable combination of five factors. Du Châtelet: identified the most pressing foundational problems in physics of the time; articulated them with clarity and perspicuity; drew on resources from all leading philosophical approaches to physics; was current with the most recent results in physics; and moved the debates forward in interesting and novel ways. I have attempted to indicate some of the ways in which this is so, while also demonstrating the unity of the overall project. In the Preface, Du Châtelet wrote that physics is “an immense building,” and that rather than adding to its construction with a stone here or there she would “survey the plan of the building” (2009). I enjoy this conception of the philosopher of physics, and I recommend her book to all those who share it.

Notes 1 For primary sources and reference materials visit ProjectVox (https://projectvox.library.duke.edu/). 2 The proper role for hypotheses in science had become a central topic of discussion in the wake of Newton’s Principia, one in which “Newtonians” sought to distinguish themselves from their “Cartesian” opponents. Du Châtelet’s strategy is to set up the two poles of “Cartesians” and “Newtonians” and then position herself as mediating between them. See also her discussion of absolute versus relative space, time and motion. 3 The questions motivating Du Châtelet straddle metaphysics and physics. So too does her understanding of PC (and of PSR). See (Detlefsen 2014) for discussion of Du Châtelet’s understanding of PC in comparison to that of Leibniz and of Wolff.

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Du Châtelet and the Philosophy of Physics 4 The full translation is in Du Châtelet (2009). 5 Her arguments seem rather weak (Brading 2019a: 93–95). However, as Janiak (2018) and (2021) has shown, Chapter 3 of the Foundations (on essences, attributes, and modes) has a crucial role to play, for if the issue is whether gravity is an essential property of bodies, then we must be clear about what such a claim amounts to. This is something on which Newton was notoriously terse, even by his own standards, and what he does say leaves the situation unclear. See also (Chen unpublished manuscript). 6 In Chapters 15 and 16, Du Châtelet discusses action-at-a distance in general. 7 See (Brading and Stan 2021), from which this paragraph is drawn. 8 Dead force, like living force, comes in two kinds, active and passive. See (2018: Chapter 20, §529–30). 9 Her intervention in the vis viva debate has been widely discussed. See (Iltis 1977: 38–45; Kawashima 1990; Terrall 2004: 296–98; Hutton 2004, especially 527–29; Hagengruber 2012: 35–38; Reichenberger 2012: 157–71; Brading 2019a: 95–97) and references therein. 10 See (Brading 2019: 82–87) for how this account applies to collisions. 11 Or so she believed. For a critical appraisal, see (Brading 2019a: 86). 12 Qiu Lin (2022) has emphasized the importance of physical explanations for Du Châtelet’s philosophy of science, pointing out that Du Châtelet develops this idea in the 1742 second edition of the Foundations. 13 There are further fascinating analogies and disanalogies between space and time in Du Châtelet’s overall picture. For example, both space and time – considered physically and not mathematically – have finite least parts (see 2009: Chapter 6, §105 for time), but the reasons why differ subtly. 14 Except, perhaps, for the shortest interval of experienced time, during which a single idea stays in our mind; Du Châtelet allows that this might be universal (2009: Chapter 6, §115). 15 One pied was a little longer than one foot is in imperial measurements today, and one toise was six pieds.

References Brading, K. (2018) “Émilie Du Châtelet and the Problem of Bodies,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2019a) Emilie Du Châtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science, New York: Routledge. (2019b) “A Note on Rods and Clocks in Newton’s Principia,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 67: 160–66. and Q. Lin. (forthcoming) “Du Châtelet on Absolute and Relative Motion,” in C. Soto, (ed.), Current Debates in Philosophy of Science: In Honor of Roberto Torretti. Springer. and M. Stan. (2021) “How Physics Flew the Philosophers’ Nest,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 88: 312–20. Chen, E. (unpublished manuscript) “The Enchanted Palace Founded on Attraction: Du Châtelet on Essential Gravity.” Detlefsen, K. (2014) “Émilie du Châtelet,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Du Châtelet, E. (2009) “Foundations of Physics (extracts),” in J. P. Zinsser (ed. and trans.), and J. C. Bour (trans.), Emilie Du Châtelet: Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (2014) “On the Divisibility and Subtlety of Matter,” in L. Patton (trans. and ed.), Philosophy, Science, and History: A Guide and Reader, New York: Routledge. and K. Brading et al. (trans.) (2018) Foundations of Physics. Available at: https://www.kbrading.org/ du-chatelet. Hagengruber, R. (2012) “Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton: The Transformation of Metaphysics,” in R. Hagengruber (ed.), Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton, Dordrecht: Springer. Hutton, S. (2004) “Emilie du Châtelet’s Institutions de Physique as a Document in the History of French Newtonianism,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 35(3): 515–31. Iltis, C. (1977) “Madame du Châtelet’s Metaphysics and Mechanics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 8(1): 29–48. Janiak, A. (2018) “Émilie Du Châtelet: Physics, Metaphysics and the Case of Gravity,” in E. Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2021) “Émilie Du Châtelet’s Break from the French Newtonians,” Revue D’histoire des Sciences 74(2): 265–96. (forthcoming) Philosophy’s Phoenix: Émilie Du Châtelet and the making of the modern canon, New York: Oxford University Press. Janik, L. G. (1982) “Searching for the Metaphysics of Science: The Structure and Composition of Madame du Châtelet’s Institutions de Physique, 1737–1740,” Studies on Voltaire 201: 85–113.

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Katherine Brading Kawashima, K. (1990) “La Participation de Madame du Châtelet à la Querelle sur les Forces Vives,” Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan 40: 9–28. Leibniz, G. W. F. and S. Clarke. (1956) in H. G. Alexander (ed.), The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence: Together with Extracts from Newton’s Principia and Opticks, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lin, Q. (2022) “Du Châtelet on Mechanical Explanation vs. Physical Explanation,” presented at HOPOS 2022. Available at: https://dryfta-assets.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/assets/hopos2022/ editorimages/1655818796HOPOS2022programbook.pdf. (unpublished manuscript) “Emilie Du Châtelet on the Representation of Space.” Project Vox. Available at: https://projectvox.library.duke.edu/. Reichenberger, A. (2012) “Leibniz’s Quantity of Force: A ‘Heresy’? Émilie du Châtelet’s Institutions in the Context of the Vis Viva Controversy,” in R. Hagengruber (ed.), Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton, Dordrecht: Springer. (2018) “Émilie Du Châtelet’s Interpretation of the Laws of Motion in the Light of 18th Century Mechanics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 69: 1–11. Rey, A-L. forthcoming. Les Certitudes des Lumières, Paris: Classiques Garnier. ’s Gravesande, W. J. and J. Keill (trans.) (1720) Mathematical Elements of Physicks, Prov’d by Experiments: Being an Introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, Book I, Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. Terrall, M. (2004) “Vis Viva Revisited,” History of Science 42(2): 189–209.

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39 THE REAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMAGINARY THINGS Louise Dupin’s Critique of Sexist Historiography1 Sonja Ruud and Rebecca Wilkin In France, more than elsewhere, an imaginary thing becomes real as soon as it is established and takes on as much consistency as if it had always existed, and a real thing—and even the idea that it had once been possible—becomes imaginary as soon as it no longer exists.2 So wrote Louise Marie Madeleine Dupin in the late 1740s in her 40-plus Chapter Work on Women. Dupin was commenting on the strange workings of history as they pertained to women. Things that jurists recognized to be imaginary, such as the “Salic Law” that prevented women from acceding to the throne of France, had become the established law of the land, with creeping repercussions for ordinary citizens in terms of inheritance and property ownership. And conversely, things for which there was plenty of historical evidence, such as women’s exercise of political power, were no longer even considered possible; the disappearance of evidence, often due to deliberate neglect, had rendered such facts imaginary. With her keen taste for irony, Dupin would not have been surprised to learn that her assessment of history’s treatment of women accurately predicted the fate of her Work. For over two and a half centuries, it was as if her Work had never existed, or only as a difficult-to-access source for learning about the early views of her secretary.3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau entered into the service of the Dupin family in 1745. He conducted extensive research for the Work on Women, and probably participated in selecting the scores of books that he borrowed from the Bibliothèque du Roi and distilled into excerpts for Dupin. The drafts of the “articles” (or chapters) of the Work that appear most complete are mostly in Rousseau’s hand, with edits and additions by Dupin. Occasional first-person references clearly referring to Dupin show that even when the manuscript is almost entirely in Rousseau’s hand, he was either copying an earlier draft or taking dictation from her.4 Some manuscript pieces show no trace of Rousseau’s involvement, and were perhaps written either before he entered the employ of the Dupin family or after he left in February or March 1751.5 This includes the “Preliminary Discourse,”6 in which Dupin sets out an overarching rationale and plan for the work as a whole, as well as a slew of chronologies of the rulers of various European countries, through which she appears to have been building a repository of evidence of women rulers, regents, and guardians.7 Although Rousseau was hardly the passive amanuensis he claims to have been in his Confessions (Rousseau 1959–1995: 289), the Work on Women was clearly Dupin’s project. Nevertheless, it was the value of Rousseau’s hand that caused the manuscript to be sold at auction and dispersed throughout many libraries in the United States, Switzerland, and France. In some libraries, the fragments are still cataloged under his name.8

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-46

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Efforts to reconstruct the Work on Women began in the 1970s. The thousands of pages of transcriptions that Leland Thielemann made of the articles and research notes at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas never materialized into an edition, however; nor did the team effort subsequently spearheaded by Cynthia Manley from Austin College. And yet over 30 years ago, Thielemann authored an article that should have been a bombshell: he showed that Rousseau had borrowed key concepts from his first and second discourses from Dupin’s Work on Women (Thielemann 1983). What of Rousseau’s claim that the foundation of inequality among men had resulted from the gradual institution of differences? It was an extrapolation from Dupin’s claim that women’s subordination and subjection to men had been gradually established and reinforced. Five or so years before Rousseau hazarded some conjectures about the “slow succession of things”9 tending toward humanity’s final, most extreme stage of inequality, he took this dictation from Dupin: “all manner of exclusions that have been imposed on women are still fairly modern.”10 Through an analysis of seventeenth-century legal history enabled by her secretary’s research, Dupin demonstrated that “the dependence and uselessness in which women live now is even fairly newly established.”11 In brief, Thielemann showed that Rousseau not only wrote the traces of Dupin’s Work on Women out of his conjectural history of inequality, but also that by generalizing Dupin’s analysis of the institution of women’s inequality to men to a story about the foundation of inequality among men, Rousseau wrote women out of the history of humanity one more time, undermining the very purpose of the Work on Women. Hence a real thing—that a woman had theorized the institution of inequality—became impossible to imagine. And an imaginary thing—that Rousseau’s genius intuition was born sui generis in a blinding flash of light—became real. Thielemann’s claim was huge, yet his article garnered little attention, even after Angela Hunter underscored its originality and importance (Hunter 2009). Editions just published or currently in press will rescue the Work on Women from two and a half centuries of benign neglect,12 and the scholarship they make possible will finally allow Dupin to claim her rightful place in the history of early modern philosophy. There is much more to say about Dupin’s important contributions to the new history of philosophy that Eileen O’Neill calls for, in which women occupy “preeminent places either because of the important role they played in past debates or because their work, in part, has moved thought along to the place where we now are” (O’Neill 1998: 20).13 We reveal in the following just one reason why Dupin merits our attention: she was an early theorist of the far-reaching effects of gender bias—effects that ended up determining the fate of her work. Like François Poulain de la Barre, whose On the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673) she knew well, Dupin asserted the natural equality of men and women.14 But Dupin was more interested than Poulain had been in the institution of inequality, and acted as a crucial intermediary between Poulain and Rousseau. At the origin of inequality between men and women, according to Dupin, is “masculine vanity.”15 Masculine vanity, she argues, infuses all discourses, from natural philosophy to history to law. She devotes the first five Chapters of the Ouvrage to demonstrating how a narrative of masculine superiority emerges from minimal biological differences. Dupin ridicules men’s pretentions, from physicians’ musings on the magnificence of the testes16 to pride in facial hair.17 She invites readers to laugh at men’s eagerness to see qualities that they attribute to themselves—strength, nobility, dominance—reflected in male plants and animals. She wonders facetiously whether hermaphroditic animals “place their glory in one part of themselves, and their humility in the other? [and whether they] recognize on one side excellence and on the other insufficiency?”18 Following Poulain de la Barre’s Cartesian critique of unexamined judgments, Dupin defines masculine vanity as a form of prejudice: just as jaundice colors our vision, she writes, “prejudice leads some men to see their excellence everywhere and even in things they’ve never seen.”19 Poulain traces “the most specious” objections to the natural equality of women and men to 534

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self-interest (Poulain de la Barre 2011: 56), but Dupin goes a step further to show why those who cling to prejudice are impervious to reason: their motives are, in fact, rational. In effect, Dupin understands prejudice as delusional self-aggrandizement in the service of the accumulation of power. In this light, the particular form of prejudice that is masculine vanity is less the result of error than a rationale for injustice. Masculine vanity engenders and justifies the inequality of the sexes, which Dupin identifies as a political condition through the metaphor of royal rule: “The smallest foundation suffices for vanity to make a great edifice, since men place the throne of their domination on the small difference in their strength compared to that of women.”20 As frivolous as men’s self-flattery might be, its relentless character has an exponential effect. From the wobbly throne of their domination, men pursue an endless extension of empire, through claims more opportunistic than unexamined. They draw evidence of the superiority of the male sex from the animal kingdom, yet we see in that kingdom “nothing approaching the marked Empire that men exert, nor the Empire of opinion that they seek to extend to every subject.”21 Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether men adhere to absurd claims of the superiority of all things male. It is enough that those claims serve their interests in matters of inheritance, succession, and power.22 Historians justify and consolidate masculine Empire when they paint the past with sexist colors of their own time.23 Dupin catalogs historians’ strategies for diminishing women and their accomplishments: A woman who shows severity is said to take revenge with the anger and resentment of her sex. If a woman shows clemency, fear constrained her to act in that way. If she made a good decision, she dutifully followed a man’s advice. If she has good qualities, the weakness of her sex tarnishes them. If she shows great merit, then she is above her sex and does not in any way resemble other women. If she has bad qualities, satire amplifies them. If she is truly vicious, voilà the triumph of modern historians!24 Through selective storytelling, exemplary women can thus be made to reinforce timeworn claims about women’s weakness and perfidy. Dupin points out that historians associate the cunning and duplicity of Isabeau de Bavière and Catherine de Médicis to women in general. In contrast, they portray the misdeeds of Henri III and Louis XIII as individual foibles that say nothing about men as a class of people.25 An echo chamber effect further vitiates historiographical integrity when it comes to women. Dupin observes that commonplaces of dubious origin are repeated until they are accepted as truth, not unlike social media memes whose sources are rarely investigated. How else can one explain repeated allusions to a law granting Roman and Gallic husbands’ rights to the life or death of their wives and children, as if French women should be thankful simply to be alive?26 Mixed and muddled for centuries, historical material has become vulnerable, Dupin says, to “the malice and whim of compilers.”27 She targets unscrupulous freelancers who contribute their own inventions to this truthy repertoire. “People love to find examples to encourage contempt for women,” she comments with respect to false representations of Muslim women; “they fabricate them intentionally.”28 Exposing the prejudice of historians was certainly not a new gesture in the 1740s, 29 but to our knowledge, her sustained critique of sexist bias in the writing of history is the first of its kind. Though Dupin has little faith in the objectivity of historians, the true villains of her Work are jurists. Jurists bring masculine vanity to the interpretation of the historical legacy of law. Though Dupin “sets aside” modern jurists’ interpretations of marital customs as too “singular” to be credible,30 she deals extensively with their treatment of property law. For just as masculine vanity caused historians of this time period to write women out of history, making the feats of past women seem unimaginable in the present, it led early modern jurists to interpret past laws so as to deprive women of previously held rights, making it seem as those rights had never existed. 535

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Consequently, women now find themselves in a state of “perpetual tutelage,”31 subject to the authority of fathers and husbands, no matter their rank or the extent of their dowries. The claim that subjection is women’s lot, whether in marriage or in the cloister—the only two “estates” available to women—was standard in the feminist literature of the querelle des femmes by the late seventeenth century. Before Dupin, and unbeknownst to her, the ex-nun Gabrielle Suchon had described the suffering of girls sentenced to a life of conventual imprisonment in the name of family fortunes (Suchon 1693).32 Dupin similarly skewers “the inhumanity entailed by condemning 80,000 innocent and virtuous women” to a fate equivalent to criminals “sentenced to prison for perpetuity.”33 Yet Dupin more than Suchon insists not just on the recent imposition of enclosure, but also on its bitterness in the context of “the civilizing process” (Elias 1969): even as France “progressed in political art and in civility,” Dupin observes, the Parlement of Paris ratified the articles of the Council of Trent, which not only reinforced the “subjection”34 of nuns to male bishops, but stripped them of previously held “rights,” and deprived them of the ability to determine the course of their own communities.35 Dupin’s emphasis on the modernity of women’s subjection and impoverishment also sets the Work on Women apart from Poulain de la Barre’s On the Equality of the Two Sexes. Poulain supplements Thomas Hobbes’s narrative about the formation of the social contract with his own “historical conjecture” about how women were excluded from the body politic at the outset of human civilization. Poulain imagines that a division of labor to accommodate childbearing established women’s voluntary dependence on male kin, but a series of conquests transformed this pragmatic arrangement into an ideological one. “The desire to dominate,” and the greater instrumentality of male bodies in warfare, led (male) victors to feel superior to their captives, and men in general to feel superior to women in general—and to usurp from them any power they might have shared (Poulain de la Barre 2011: 66). Dupin was familiar with Hobbes’s political philosophy not just through reading Poulain, but also through her friendship with the Abbé Castel de Saint-Pierre, who used Hobbes’s social contract as a model for thinking about peace between nations.36 In the “Preliminary Discourse,” Dupin imagines how men and women depended on each other initially, but that passions multiplied along with the population. In contrast to Poulain, she insists that republics and empires emerged little by little, and she identifies women’s exclusion from all forms of power not only as the result of a long succession of chance events, but also as a pillar of the modern absolutist nation state.37 Historian Sarah Hanley has shown that from the mid-sixteenth century to Dupin’s time, the interests of the French state aligned with those of male heads of household, resulting in an alliance aimed at wresting control of marriage contracts from the Church (Hanley 2000). Anticipating Hanley’s analyses, Dupin claims that Cardinal Richelieu “made monarchy absolute and this power was copied all the way into households. Could we not say that a husband believes himself a monarch in his own home?” Wives, she protests, cannot even claim priority as their monarchhusbands’ “first subjects.”38 It was above all the new noblesse de robe that worked in its own interest to enhance the power of fathers and husbands over women and children, concurrently building the power of state it served (Hanley 2000: 63). Dupin’s comprehensive investigation bears this out: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French jurists—the core of the noblesse de robe—usurped women’s rights through biased interpretations of Roman, Frankish, and medieval French laws. Turning a Roman law meant to protect women on its head, French jurists deprived women of rights and responsibilities associated with the guardianship of minors. Through an invented Salic law, they not only barred women from the throne of France, but egregiously extended that proscription to civil law in order to deny women inheritance rights. And in defiance of French customary law, the Parlement of Paris defended husbands’ claims to the titles and associated privileges of their wives. We will briefly consider each of these cases to give a sense of the breadth of Dupin’s investigation into the nefarious effects of masculine vanity. 536

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39.1 Guardianship In the first decades of the eighteenth century, disputations and dissertations were still being written about the Velleian senatus consultum, a Roman law from 46 CE. In its original form, the law exempted women from duties of guardianship and from financial liability for contracts made by their husbands. Insofar as Roman soldiers were also exempted from guardianship, Dupin points out, it is clear that this legislation sought to spare women from a burden.39 Late medieval jurists alleged women’s inherent incapacity as a rationale for the Velleian senatus consultum, but invoking the exemption provided by the law remained a privilege. According to medieval legal historian Marie Kelleher, A married woman whose husband was squandering her dowry could plead her privileges under the Velleian senatus consultum in order to have her property sequestered from her husband’s creditors, while a widow claiming guardianship of her minor children would formally renounce this same privilege in order to take on the rights and responsibilities of an independent head of household. (Kelleher 2013: 139) By the seventeenth century, however, the exemption of responsibility allowed by the Velleian senatus consultum was no longer a privilege. Taking on a ward may have implied a financial burden in ancient Rome, but in early modern France, it could be a significant financial benefit, since one was as much a guardian of a minor’s assets as of the minor himself or herself.40 In some cases, should the minor die, the guardian would inherit those assets. Dupin accuses early modern jurists of turning the spirit of the Velleian senatus consultum on its head: a law meant to protect women from dispossession has become one more means of dispossessing them. Dupin cites “a modern treatise on guardianships,” by Jean Gillet: “women, says this author, will allow me to tell them that they would do well to stop avidly seeking guardianships, since the law plainly commands us to deny everything to them, insofar as ‘tutela est munus virile.’”41 Dupin mocks this “intelligible principle” and points out Gillet’s error: “before and since this Author, there have been several examples of guardianships in the hands of women other than mothers and grandmothers.” The young Abbé d’Orléans of the Longueville family had two guardians, one of them a woman, and two women shared the guardianship of the marquis and Abbé of Richelieu.42 Moreover, she objects to Gillet’s portrayal of women as greedy: “women have opposed the deprivation of their rights and have done some research into these rights; we aren’t running after them.”43 Jean Buon speculates that Dupin may have written the Ouvrage sur les Femmes out of bitterness—her husband sold their gem of a Paris home, the Hôtel de Lambert, in 1739 (Buon 2013: 32). Alternatively, we might simply take Dupin at her word: she wanted her reader to see that “things did not arrive at this point without opposition or usurpation.”44

39.2  Salic Law Fabricated at the outset of the fifteenth century, Salic “law”—which ostensibly barred women from inheriting, exercising, or transmitting royal power—is Dupin’s prime example of an imaginary thing that has become real, to women’s detriment. Salic “law” originated in an attempt to save face. In A toute la chevalerie (1409–1413), the prelate Jean de Montreuil, who had served as secretary to Charles V, responded to Christine de Pizan’s powerful defense of queenship in The Book of The City of Ladies (1405) claiming to have found a law that legitimated the observable exclusion of women from the throne in the genealogy of French kings. In fact, the original law expressly limiting inheritance to the “virile sex” concerned only land conceded to the Franks by 537

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the Romans in exchange for military support. The owners had to be male so that they could fight. Through selective citation and a misleading interpolation, Montreuil disguised the law’s local and contingent character, touting it as a founding law of the kingdom of France (Hanley 1998: 293–95; Viennot 2006: 361–90). As Dupin explains it, those who wanted to exclude women from the throne didn’t want to take credit for that initiative, so they attributed it to the Saliens, calling it Salic law.45 The humanist jurist Jean du Tillet acknowledged Montreuil’s forgery in the sixteenth century, and accordingly, some subsequent jurists referred to the “supposed” or “pretend” Salic law (Viennot 2003). Nevertheless, its authority increased with every crisis of succession—most vociferously when the Valois dynasty lost its last remaining male heir (Henri III) right in the middle of the Wars of Religion, and Philip II of Spain agitated his daughter’s rights to the throne of France, with support from the powerful Catholic League.46 In such situations, remarks the author of a genealogical work reviewed by Pierre Bayle in a 1704 number of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, Salic law, which ostensibly precludes female sovereigns, itself becomes “souveraine.”47 Whereas Bayle claimed that Salic law has been violated and championed in equal measure depending on the interests at play,48 Dupin describes a more decisive pattern: a law ostensibly concerning dynastic succession, inheritance, and transmission has steadily expanded into the private sphere. She cites a law that requires a husband, despite being a minor, to authorize the actions of his wife, who has attained the age of majority. “Isn’t that a ridiculous play of masculine despotism borrowed from the Salic idea?” she asks, crossing out “Law” in favor of “idea” to underscore the imaginary character of the law.49 She attacks primogeniture in “the custom of certain provinces” as an offshoot of Salic law.50 In other words, a law regulating monarchic rule that was egregiously derived from local custom has now been generalized as a principle, and has circled back to reinfuse patriarchal customs with the imprimatur of the state. Dupin worries that “soon Salic law will extend to all inheritances.”51

39.3 Titles Dupin evidences the usurpation of women’s titles and their associated privileges in Article 35 “On Nobility and Titles.” In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was not unheard of for noblewomen to exercise the privileges of their titles even after marriage and to transmit them to their descendants. Less than two centuries ago, Dupin remarks, the Dutch humanist Justus Lipsius counted seven families in Leuven that transmitted nobility through women, but “these customs are now lost and most people don’t know they ever existed.”52 In France, royal decree as well as local custom could make nobility inheritable by women and transmissible through them. Charles VII ennobled Joan of Arc’s posterity, allowing both male and female descendants to transmit nobility to their children. Yet in 1555, Henry II restricted this privilege to men alone. Peers—or pairs from the Latin par, or equal—were the highest-ranking nobles, and until the mid-sixteenth century, peerages might be inherited by women. As late as 1500, Dupin reports, the crown created new peerages that could be inherited by women unless expressly restricted to men. Peerages came with privileges and responsibilities, including participating in the criminal trials of fellow peers, and Dupin gives several examples of women who did so.53 However, the marriage in 1565 of the naturalized Louis de Gonzague, Prince of Mantua to Henriette de Clèves marked a turning point. Henriette had inherited the duchy of Nevers. Louis de Gonzague saw his wife’s peerage as an asset transferable to himself; he petitioned the crown for Letters for the continuation of the Peerage attached to the Duc of Nevers, a request for which there is no example before him, and to have the terms of confirmation applied to them, which demonstrates clearly enough the precious little confidence he had in this right.54 538

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Gonzague’s request was granted—Dupin notes that he adopted the coat of arms of his wife—but not without protest. A 1567 case brought against Gonzague by the Connetable de Montmorency led the Parlement of Paris to debate “whether peerages were real or personal, masculine or feminine.”55 According to Dupin’s contemporary, the chancellor Henri François d’Aguesseau, the tide had turned in Gonzague’s favor: People were beginning to return to the old spirit of masculinity, which is (so to speak) the soul of Peerages and that had been as if eclipsed by the abuse tolerated, for more than a century, of admitting girls to the functions of the Peerage.56 D’Aguesseau’s own family had only been ennobled in 1594—the year Salic Law triumphed with the coronation of the first Bourbon king—and had every interest in claiming the masculinity of peerages, as Dupin might have pointed out, had his Œuvres been published before she began work on her Ouvrage. We can in any case imagine how Dupin would refute his characterization of female peerages as a mere century-long exception to the otherwise immutable rule of masculinity: with examples of even earlier inheritances and transmissions through the female line, dating back to the Salian Franks, well before Charlemagne (Hanley 1998: 291). Nevertheless, Dupin agrees with d’Aguesseau that Gonzague’s request set a precedent: a husband could thenceforth ask the king for permission to exercise the rights of his wife’s peerage. In a generation or less, something real had become unimaginable: “Today, there is no such thing” as a woman peer, Dupin observes, and as in the case of Henriette de Clèves, “those few duchies remaining to women only give them the honor of having a bigger dowry.”57 While dowries have gotten bigger, expanding to include everything a woman owns and might come to own in the future, dowers—the portion of a deceased husband’s property that a widow can enjoy as long as she lives—have all but disappeared in France.58 Ultimately, Dupin exposes the marriage contract “in France today”59 as a bogus heist. The betrothed “arrive free and equal at the altar; one departs with the assets and freedom of the other who leaves despoiled and subjected.”60 The force of Dupin’s Work on Women is to show that the effects of bias are so far-reaching that imagining that things could be otherwise requires both vision and self-reflection. Dupin exposes the absurdity of “vain bias”61 and the injustice wrought by it. Through sarcasm and irony, she clears a space from which the reader can judge women’s “claim to equality”62 as a “tiers”—as an unprejudiced third party. Dupin’s heuristic of a neutral point of view nevertheless highlights the degree to which men’s self-interest informs their investment in inequality and underscores the difficulty of undoing the prejudice through which men rationalize an unjust partition of rights and resources. Twice in the Ouvrage, Dupin remarks that boys who observe that knowledge, wealth, and power are in the hands of men, “have good reason to think that women are inferior to men, because it is more reasonable to believe that, than to believe that there is injustice.”63 In other words, simply believing that there is injustice would require radical—and therefore “unreasonable”—revisions to society’s most basic workings. It would require men to set aside not just their ego or “masculine vanity,” but also—and more fundamentally—their interests, to acknowledge that they have benefitted from women’s despoilment, and that their ordinary actions perpetuate it. Because of the very prejudice she documents, Dupin never reached the readers she meant to challenge. She strove to interrupt the biases that cause women’s work and ink to become invisible, but these instead engulfed the Work on Women. It is certainly no cause for celebration that Dupin’s critique of the nefarious causes and effects of bias remains as relevant today as it was in the mid-eighteenth century. Yet as her ink emerges from invisibility, it is encouraging to be reminded that how scholars write the past matters deeply to the work of equality and justice. 539

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Notes 1 We presented an earlier version of this paper at a conference organized by Marguerite Deslauriers, Œuvres de l’époque moderne, par des femmes et sur les femmes: méthode et genre littéraire, at McGill University in November 2016. We are grateful for the feedback we received there. Laure Quérouil at the Bibliothèque d’études rousseauistes (Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau) was an invaluable resource, and we thank Angela Hunter for her support as well. 2 “En france + quailleurs une chose imaginaire devient reelle des qu’elle est etablie et prend meme autant de consistence que si elle avoit toujours subsisté et une chose reelle devient imaginaire des qu’elle ne subsiste + et per[d] même lidée davoir ete possible telle est la loy salique.” “Discours préliminaire,” f21v. Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau (henceforth MJJR), IR.2002.496.1. 3 Because of the sexist bias identified (and suffered) by Dupin, impact and influence are inadequate measures of the importance of early modern women’s philosophical writing. See Rebecca Wilkin, “Influence, impact, importance: comment ‘mesurer’ la contribution des femmes à l’histoire de la philosophie?” in Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin (ed.), Repenser la philosophie au XVIIe siècle: canons et corpus, special issue of XVIIe siècle 296 (2022): 435–450. 4 In response to the comment that Salic law might soon extend to all inheritances, we read this crossed out passage in Rousseau’s hand: “Je me tus, et je trouvais mes Gens tout aussi extraordinaire que leur proposition.” Article 28, “De la loi salique,” f17v. Yale University, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS VOL 225. Clearly Dupin dictated or otherwise supplied this sentence; Rousseau did not have servants. In the foregoing, we refer to previously cited articles of the Work on Women by article number and folio (e.g. 28: f17v) and, for the articles that were edited before this one went to press, by the editor’s name followed by the page number. 5 Jean-Pierre Le Bouler and Catherine Lafarge authoritatively established Rousseau’s dates of service to the Dupin family in “Les emprunts de Mme Dupin à la Bibliotheque du roi dans les années 1748–1750,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 182 (1979): 109, note 11. See also Frédéric Marty, Louise Dupin: défendre l’égalité des sexes en 1750 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), 97-99. 6 There are two drafts with the title “Discours préliminaire”: one at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas (henceforth HRC), which appears to be an introduction to the first section of the Work, and one at MJJR, which reads like a prospectus. We cite from the latter.FrédéricMartyhaseditedthistextasLouiseDupin,Des femmes: Discours préliminaire (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 2022). 7 Article 17, “Divers pays d’Europe.” HRC, Series I, subseries B, box 2, folder 5–9. 8 For example, at the University of Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Articles 30 and 37, “De la puissance du mari” (Post-1650 MS 0111) and “Du viol” (Post-1650 MS 0563), are searchable under Rousseau’s name only, and he alone is indicated as the author. 9 “la lente succession des choses.” Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 146. 10 “les exclusions en tout genre qui ont été données aux f. sont encore assés modernes.” Article 35, “De la noblesse et des titres,” f92. Bibliothèque de Genève (henceforth BG), Ms. fr. 215 f 79–93. 11 “la dépendance et l’inutilité dans la quelle les f. vivent maintenant est même assés nouvellement établie.” Article 12, “Avant-propos sur l’histoire,” 139. MJJR IR.2002.489. 12 Louise Dupin, Des femmes: Observations du préjugé commun sur la différence des sexes, edited by Frédéric Marty (Classiques Garnier, 2022). Marty’s title reprises a title in Dupin’s hand on the outer leaf of the HRC draft of the “Discours préliminaire.” “Ouvrage sur les femmes” was not Dupin’s language; it was inscribed on her papers by a later hand—perhaps by her great-grandnephew. In our forthcoming English translation and edition, Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections (New York: Oxford University Press), Angela Hunter and I have kept the interpolated title because it conveys the in-progress status of Dupin’s work. 13 O’Neill refers to Dupin as the author “Observations on the Equality of the Sexes and their Differences,” the first article of the Ouvrage sur les femmes. 14 “Ce qui distingue les h[ommes] des f[emmes] ne paroit en nulle façon pouvoir être la source d’une différence de mérite, d’intelligence, de lumiéres, ni d’aucune qualité quelconque.” Article 1, “Observations sur l’égalité des séxes, et sur leur différence,” f1c (MJJR IR.2002.489), edited by J.-P. Le Bouler, “Un chapitre inédit de l’ouvrage des femmes de Mme Dupin,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 241 (1986): 260. 15 Dupin uses the expression “vanité masculine” throughout the Ouvrage. See Article 2, “De la génération,” edited by Frédéric Marty in “Rousseau secrétaire de Mme Dupin. L’article 2 de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes: ‘De la génération’,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva: Droz, 2013) 74; Article 5,

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16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

“Analogie animale et végétale,” f13 and f20 (MJJR IR.2002.437.8); Article 45, “Esprit des conversations générales,” f14. Harvard University, Houghton Library (henceforth HLH), Ms Fr 182.1. “on les entend encore parler magnifiquement des merveilles de la génération, en décrivant les organes males et le feu fécond qui les anime; tandis qu’ils parlent des f. très simplement, comme un accessoire à ce feu fecond.” Marty (2013) 79–80. “si les h. avoient eu autant de prudence que de barbe au menton, ils n’auroient pas si légérement cherché des avantages dans des choses qui n’en sauroient donner.” 1: f4v and Le Bouler 266. “S’ils placent leur gloire dans une partie d’eux-mêmes, et leur humilité dans l’autre? / Il faudroit leur demander s’ils reconnoissent d’un côté l’excellence, et de l’autre l’insuffisance?” Marty (2013) 72–73. Compare to Montesquieu contrasting the two sexes in De l’esprit des lois: “[La nature] a placé dans l’un la témérité, et dans l’autre la honte.” Œuvres, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 517. “ainsi qu’avec la jaunisse on voit tout jaune, avec leurs préjugés, certains h. ont vu par tout leur excellence et même dans ce qu’ils n’ont pas vu.” 5: f4. For comparable arguments, see François Poulain de la Barre, De l’égalité des deux sexes. De l’éducation des dames. De l’excellence des hommes, ed. Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 60. “Le plus petit fondement suffit à la vanité pour faire un grand édifice, puisque les h. posent le Trône de leur domination sur la petitte différence de leurs forces à celles des f.” Article 4, “Du rapport de la force corporelle avec celle de l’esprit,” f1. MJJR IR.2002.488.1. “on ne trouve point, en général, dans les animaux, dequoi établir cette préférence mâle; et parmi ceux qui nous sont familiers, on ne voit rien de pareil à l’Empire marqué que les h. éxercent, et à l’Empire d’opinion qu’ils cherchent à étendre sur tous les objets.” 5: f4. “La consequence la plus importante qui en resulte, regarde la naissance des heritiers et l’ordre des successions [...] par exemple pour assurer dans une famille un empire, une monarchie, un état Florissant &c.” Marty (2013) 88–89. It is common that an author, without even being aware of it, “préte à tous les siécles qu’il peint, les couleurs et les opinions du sien.” Article 12, “Avant propos sur l’histoire,” f136v. MJJR IR.2002.489.1. “Une f. qui prend un parti sévére; elle se vengea avec la colére et le ressentiment de son séxe; si elle est clémente; la peur l’a contrainte dagir ainsi et elle n’a osé faire autrement. Si elle prend un bon parti, c’est qu’elle a suivi quelque conseil; si elle a quelque bonne qualité, elle les ternit par les foiblesses de son séxe. Si elle a reellement du mérite elle est fort au dessus de son séxe, et elle ne ressemble point à touttes les autres f. Si elle a de mauvaises qualités, la Satyre les amplifie; si elle est reellement vicieuse, voilà le triomphe des historiens modernes.” Article 38, “Obbsservations particulieres sur le stile des auteurs,” f156v–57, MJJR IR.2002.489. Dupin’s grand-nephew frames her Work in terms of vengeance: “Elle avait conçu le projet de défendre et de venger son sexe dans un ouvrage sur les femmes.” Gaston de VilleneuveGuibert, “Notice sur Madame Dupin” in Le Portefeuille de Madame Dupin, 15. Villeneuve-Guibert claims to have all of his great aunt’s manuscripts, but the only thing he includes in the Portefeuille on the subject of women is a letter from the Abbé Saint-Pierre to Dupin (269–302). “Discours Préliminaire,” f11v. Article 30, “De la puissance du mari et de la faveur que les lois accordent aux femmes mariées et de celles quelles pouroient leur accorder.” Sylvie Dangeville, “Deux ‘articles’ inédits de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes de Mme Dupin,” Etudes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 7 (1995): 192. “la malice et a la fantaisie des compilateurs.” “Discours Préliminaire,” f11. “on aime à trouver des ex[emples] pour favoriser le mépris des f[emmes] on en fabrique exprès.” Article 18, “De la turquie et de la perse,” f2. MJJR IR.2002.437.2. See Anton Matytsin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 246–49. “Nous laissons à part les interpretations des Jurisconsultes modernes sur les usages matrimoniaux. Ils sont, sur ce point, trop singuliers pour les écouter, pour les croire, ni même pour leur repondre en detail.” Article 29, “Des différentes formes de mariages des Romains” f12v–13. Osborn Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Osborn c403. “Tutelle perpetuelle” f101. Article 36, “Des tutelles et temoignages,” BG Ms. fr. 215 f 94–109. There is no evidence that Rousseau or Dupin consulted Suchon’s work. It is listed neither by Anicet Sénéchal, who inventoried Rousseau’s reading excerpts (“Jean-Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Madame Dupin, d’après des documents inédits, avec un inventaire des papiers Dupin dispersés en 1957 et 1958,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 36 [1963–1965]: 173–290), nor by Jean-Pierre Le Bouler and Catherine Lafarge, who tracked the books Dupin borrowed from the King’s library (“Les emprunts de Mme Dupin à la bibliothèque du roi dans les années 1748–1750,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 182 [1979]: 107–185).

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Sonja Ruud and Rebecca Wilkin 33 “On peut estre encore + surpris q[ue] des nations qui ont fait des progres dans lart politique, et dans la douceur des mœurs admettent de pareils etablissemens, sans songer au dommage q[ue] recoit un etat en laissant vivre sous de telles loix + de 4 vint mil f. parfaittement inutiles a la societé, et sans songer a linhumanité quil y a de faire vivre 4 vingt mil f. innocentes et vertueuses dans un sort pareil a celuy de ceux qui p[our] leurs mauvaises actions sont comdamnés aux prisons perpetuelles.” Article 10, “De l’état des ordres monastiques depuis le Concile de Trente,” f18. MJJR 1R.2002.437.7, transcribed by Laure Quérouil. 34 “Il est plus aisé de sentir dans cet article l’extension de l’autorité et de l’assujetissement que le motif du bon ordre et de la bienseance.” 10: f6. 35 “La Closture que le Concile de Trente a imposée aux f. R[eligieuses]. les a necessairement excluës de leurs droits, de leurs dignités de toutte espece de connoissances et les a privées de l’avantage qu’il y a de faire ses affaires soi-même.” 10: f17. Dupin anticipates Hanley’s analysis that “there were socioeconomic reasons, as well as religious ones, for the appearance and reorientation of convents... during the later seventeenth century,” including “the need of families to mobilize convents as alternative prisons.” Sarah Hanley, “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies 16 (1989): 25. 36 Dupin asked Rousseau to abridge her old friend’s Paix perpetuelle and Polysynodie. According to Merle Perkins, in The Moral and Political Philosophy of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (Geneva: Droz, Minard, 1959), even as Rousseau cast Saint-Pierre as a naive idealist, “many of the basic principles of the Contrat Social (1762) were already present in Saint-Pierre’s writings” (98). 37 “Les hommes en se multipliant multiplierent leurs passions,” “les republiques et les empires se sont peu a peu elevées et formées,” and (crossed out) “les exclusions n’étoient pas formelles comme elles le sont devenües depuis par l’effet de plusieurs hasards, et par lavantage de la force et de la possession.” “Discours préliminaire,” f2v and f4v. Compare with Rousseau’s discussion of human perfectibility, stimulated by “[le] concours fortuit de plusieurs causes étrangères qui pouvaient ne jamais naître.” Rousseau too, speaks of “les différents hasards.” Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 106. 38 “Ne pourroit-on pas dire qu un mari se croit monarque dans sa maison. La f. même n’a pas toujours l’avantage de premier sujet.” Article 30, “De la puissance du mari et de la faveur que les lois accordent aux femmes mariées et de celles quelles pouroient leur accorder.” Sylvie Dangeville, “Deux ‘articles’ inédits de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes de Mme Dupin,” Etudes Jean-Jacques Rousseau 7 (1995): 194. 39 “Il ya toutte apparence que les Loix qui ont exempté les f. de Tutelle et Curatelle ne l’ont fait que par égard, et nullement par l’opinion de l’incapacité.” 36: f102v. 40 “la tutelle regarde plustôt le bien que la personne.” 36: f99. 41 “Voici ce qu’on lit dans un traitté moderne des Tutelles. Les f. dit cet auteur me permettront de leur dire qu’elles feront bien de ne rechercher curieusement les Tutelles, le droit commande de leur nier tout à plat, d’autant que Tutela est munus virile. Voila une belle et raisonnable conclusion tirée d’un principe bien intelligible!” 36: f100. Rousseau’s reading notes to Jean Gillet’s Nouveau Traité des tutelles et curatelles (Paris: Michel Bobin, 1656) are at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. The first edition of this treatise was published in 1613. 42 “Mais avant et depuis cet Auteur, il y a eu plusieurs éxemples de Tutelles entre les mains d’autres f. que des Méres et Grand Méres. Après la mort de Mad[ame] de Longueville la curatelle de M l’Abbé d’Orleans fut partagée entre M. le Prince et Mad[ame] de Nemours. Mad[am]e la Duchesse d’Aiguillon Tante de M[essieurs] le Marquis et l’Abbé de Richelieu partagea leur Tutelle avec Mad[ame] de Pontcourlay.” 36: f100-100v. 43 “les f. ont fait quelques oppositions aux droits dont on les a privées, et quelques recherches sur ces mêmes droits: nous ne courrons pas après.” 36: f101. 4 4 “Les réflexions que chacun pourra faire sur ces faits montreront suffisamment que les choses ne sont pas venues où elles sont sans opposition et sans usurpation.” 36: f101v. 45 “Ceux qui ont cru faire une chose utile détablir en france que la succession de la couronne ne pouroit regarder que les masles n’ont pas osé le faire en leur nom[.] aussi nen est il pas question [;] cet etablissement sest fait sous le nom de la loy salique comme si nous eussions fait l’adoption dune coutume des saliens.” “Discours préliminaire,” f21. 46 Philippe II married Henri III’s older sister, Elisabeth de France. 47 “on tire la Loi Salique de son obscurité, on la montre de loin, on l’adopte, on l’ennoblit, on l’érige en Souveraine.” Pierre Bayle, “Défense du droit de la Maison d’Autriche à la succession d’Espagne,” Nouvelles de la république des lettres 75 ( January 1704): 76.

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Louise Dupin’s Critique of Sexist Historiography 48 “elle a été observée & violée en France, selon qu’on l’a jugé à propos pour l’intérêt de l’Etat, ou pour celui du plus fort.” Bayle 75–76. 49 “n’est ce pas là un jeu ridicule du despotisme masculin emprunté de la Loy lidée salique?” 28: f15v. Dupin criticizes a law that requires a husband, even as a minor, to authorize the financial transactions of his wife, who has attained the age of majority.SeealsoAngelaHunterandRebeccaWilkin,“‘L’idée’ salique selon Louise Dupin,” in Anne-Lise Rey (ed.), Philosophies: féminin pluriel. Anthologie des femmes philosophes (Paris: Classiques Garnier, in press). 50 “N’est-ce pas une espéce de Loy salique que la coutume de certaines provinces qui défére tout à l’ainé, presque rien aux cadets, et rien du tout aux filles.” 28: f16v–17. 51 “jay entendu dire qlqfois dans la converssation...qu’il avoit été question d’établir la loy salique sur tous les Héritages des particuliers.” 28: f17v. 52 “Depuis la redaction des coutumes, environ depuis 150 ans ces droits non seulement sont perdus, mais aujourdui ils sont ignorés de la pluspart des Gens.” 35: f89. 53 36: f86v. 54 “C’est ce qui porta Louis de Gonzague à demander des Lettres de la continuation de la Pairie attachée au Duc de Nevers, dont on ne voit point d’exemple avant lui, et d’y faire employer les termes de confirmation, qui marque assez la défiance qu’il avait de son droit.” Clément François, L’art de vérifier les dates des faits historiques, des chartres, de chroniques, .... par le moyen d’une table chronologique (Paris: Alexandre Jombert Jeune, 1784), II:580. 55 “Malgré cet arrêt en 1567 la question si la pairie est reelle ou personnelle, masculine ou féminine fut disputée au Parlement, en la cause entre le Prince de Mantoüe qui ayant épousé la fille ainée du Duc de Nivernois en portoit le nom et les armes, et le Connetable de Montmorency.” 35: f86. 56 “On commençoit alors à rentrer dans l’ancien esprit de masculinité, qui est pour ainsi dire l’âme des Pairies et qui avait été comme éclipsé par l’abus toléré, pendant plus d’un siècle, d’admettre les filles aux fonctions de la Pairie.” Henri François D’Aguesseau, “Observations sur l’article V du projet de reglement sur les Pairies,” in Œuvres, vol. 7 (Paris: Libraires associés, 1772), 600. 57 “Aujourdui ce n’est pas même une question s’il y a des Pairies femelles quand à l’office, et quelques Duchés qui sont restés feminins n’emportent pour les f. que l’avantage de porter leur Duché en dot à leurs Maris.” 35: f86v. 58 29: f13–14. In contrast, Dupin remarks, Greek, Roman, and Gallic women had their reserved assets, and in Poland, where marriage practices were like those of France in the tenth century, women only gave a portion of their assets to their husbands. 29: f14–15. 59 “le mariage tel quil est etably aujourdhuy leur donne [aux hommes] de gr[and]s avantages quils prennent p[our] autant davantages naturels et justes.” Chapter 42, “Education dans le mariage,” f37v. BG Ms fr. 215 f. 36–59. 60 “Ceux-ci arrivent tous deux égaux et libres à l’autel, et l’un s’en retourne avec les biens et la liberté de l’autre qui retourne dépouillé et assujeti.” 29: f1v. For an analysis of very similar language in Rousseau, see R. Wilkin, “‘Réformez vos contrats!’: From the Marriage Contract to the Social Contract in Louise Dupin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” in Derval Conroy (ed.), Women Philosophers in Early Modern France, special issue of Early Modern French Studies 43 (2021): 88–105. 61 “Nous n’avons garde de faire de pareilles interpretations, elles tiennent trop peu à la raison et trop à une vaine partialité.” 29: f3. 62 “la pretention d’egalite de la part des femmes paroistroit elle trop vaine a un tiers qui seroit sans préjugé[?]” “Discours préliminaire,” f1. 63 “Les h. se sont emparés de tout, et les enfants voyant les fortunes, les sciences les arts entre les mains des h. et rien a la disposition des f. doivent necessairement simaginer quelles sont incapables parce que cela est beaucoup + raisonnable a croyre, que de croyre linjustice.” “Discours préliminaire,” f10. “[Les garçons] ont grande raison de [penser que les femmes sont inférieures aux hommes], parce que cela est plus raisonnable à croire que de croire une injustice.” Article 39, “Effets de l’éducation dans la morale,” f3. BG, Ms fr. 215.

References Bayle, P. ( January 1704) “Défense du droit de la maison d’Autriche à la succession d’Espagne,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 75: 68–85. Buon, J. (2013) Madame Dupin: une féministe à Chenonceau au siècle des Lumières, préface M. Perrot, Tours: La Simarre.

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Sonja Ruud and Rebecca Wilkin D’Aguesseau, H. F. (1772) “Observations sur l’article V du projet de réglement sur les Pairies,” in Œuvres, Vol. 7, Paris: Libraires Associés, pp. 598–607. Dangeville, S. (1995) “Deux ‘articles’ inédits de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes de Mme Dupin,” Etudes Jean-Jacques Rousseau 7: 183–204. Dupin, L. (1884) Le portefeuille de Madame Dupin, ed. G. de Villeneuve-Guibert, Paris: Calmann-Lévy. (2022) Des femmes: Discours préliminaire, ed. F. Marty, Paris: Payot et Rivages. (2022) Des femmes: Observations du préjugé commun sur la différence des sexes, ed. F. Marty, Paris: Classiques Garnier. (In press) Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections, trans. and ed. Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin, New York: Oxford University Press. Elias, N. (1969) The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, Vol. 1, Oxford: Blackwell. François, C. (1784) L’art de vérifier les dates des faits historiques, des chartres, de chroniques,.... par le moyen d’une table chronologique, Paris: Alexandre Jombert Jeune. Hanley, S. (1989) “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies 16: 4–27. (1998) “The Politics of Identity and Monarchic Governance in France: The Debate Over Female Exclusion,” in H. L. Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 289–304. (2000) “Family and State in Early Modern France: The Marital Law Compact,” in M. J. Boxer and J. H. Quataent (eds.), Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 61–73. Hunter, A. (2009) “The Unfinished Work on Louise Marie-Madeleine Dupin’s Unfinished Ouvrage sur les femmes,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43(1): 95–112. and R. Wilkin. (In press) “‘L’idée’ salique selon Louise Dupin,” in A.-L. Rey (ed.), Philosophies: féminin pluriel. Anthologie des femmes philosophes, Paris: Classiques Garnier. Kelleher, M. A. (2013) “Later Medieval Law in Community Context,” in J. M. Bennett and R. M. Karras (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Women & Gender in Medieval Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 133–47. Le Bouler, J.-P. (1986) “Un chapitre inédit de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes de Mme Dupin,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 241: 253–69. and C. Lafarge. (1979) “Les emprunts de Mme Dupin à la Bibliothèque du roi dans les années 1748–1750,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 18: 107–185. Marty, F. (2013) “Rousseau secrétaire de Mme Dupin. L’article 2 de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes: ‘De la génération’,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 51: 47–91. (2021) Louise Dupin: défendre l’égalité des sexes en 1750, Paris: Classiques Garnier. Matytsin, A. (2016) The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Montesquieu, C. L. de Secondat, Baron de. (1951) Œuvres complètes, ed. R. Callois, Paris: Gallimard. O’Neill, E. (1998) “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and their Fate in History,” in J. A. Kournay (ed.), Philosophy in a Feminist Voice, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 17–63. (2019) “Introduction,” in M. Lascano and E. O’Neill (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, pp. 1–20. Poulain de la Barre, F. (2011) De L’égalité des deux sexes. De l’éducation des dames. De l’excellence des hommes, ed. M-F. Pellegrin, Paris: Vrin. Rousseau, J.-J. (1959–1995) “Confessions,” in B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (eds.), Œuvres complètes, 5 Vols., Paris: Gallimard. (2008) Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, ed. B. Bachofen and B. Bernardi, Paris: Flammarion. Sénéchal, A. (1963–1965) “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Madame Dupin, d’après des documents inédits, avec un inventaire des papiers Dupin dispersés en 1957 et 1958,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 36: 173–290. Suchon, G. (1693) Traité de la morale et de la politique, Lyon: B. Vignieu. Thielemann, L. (1983) “The Thousand Lights and Intertextual Rhapsody: Diderot or Mme Dupin?” Romanic Review 74(3): 316–29. Viennot, E. (2003) “L’invention de la loi salique et ses répercussions sur la scène politique de la Renaissance,” in L. Capdevila and S. Cassanges, et al. (eds.), Le genre face aux mutations: masculin et féminin, du Moyen Age à nos jours, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, pp. 181–90.

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40 CATHARINE MACAULAY’S PHILOSOPHY AND HER INFLUENCE ON MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT Karen Green

40.1  Catharine Macaulay’s Philosophical Principles Catharine Macaulay was far more influential and famous as a historian than as a philosopher. Nevertheless, her eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I was written from the perspective of a distinctive, enlightenment, political philosophy (Macaulay 1763–1783; Green 2020). From time to time, she set out to explicitly defend this political philosophy, as well as the metaphysical and epistemological principles on which it was grounded. In her Loose Remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr Hobbes’s “Philosophical rudiments of government and society,” her aim was fundamentally negative (Macaulay 1767). This work is a refutation of the assumptions concerning human nature that ground Hobbes’s monarchist and absolutist politics, to which she was fundamentally opposed. Refuting Hobbes left the way open for her own democratic version of natural law theory. According to Macaulay, humans are social by nature, morals are grounded in immutable moral truths that can be known by reason, and political society can progress toward a commonwealth, in which power and liberty are equally distributed, “the generous plan of universal happiness adopted, and common good becomes the common care” (Macaulay 1763–1783: 5.20). In looking forward to a future commonwealth as a system of universal benevolence Macaulay was, in all probability, influenced by Richard Cumberland’s refutation of Hobbes’s philosophy, De legibus naturae disquisition philosophica, which had originally appeared in 1671 and was available in two English translations (Cumberland 1727; 1750). Alternatively, she knew the translation and adaptation of this work by John Locke’s friend and contemporary, James Tyrrell, A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature (Tyrrell 1701). Cumberland had set out to oppose Hobbes’s “atheism” and to demonstrate the truth of a theologically grounded law of nature, which is that, “the fullest, most vigorous Endeavour, of each and all rational Agents, in promoting the Common Good of the whole rational System, contributes effectually to the Good of every single Part in such a System” (Cumberland 1750: xxvi). Although Macaulay does not explicitly refer to Cumberland, her language is sufficiently reminiscent of his to suggest a direct or indirect influence. Both argue for the rationality of altruism as the means to bring about the greatest happiness and share a eudaimonist understanding of what happiness consists in, which is not simply pleasure, but includes the satisfaction of virtuous self-approbation (Green 2018). In her Loose remarks, Macaulay concentrated on the inconsistencies in Hobbes’s writings, refuting his claim that humans are not born social and his idea that, once the social contract is entered into, the people, who have contracted with each other to be ruled by a sovereign, thereby become part of a new political “person” over which 546

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the sovereign has absolute dominion. She also questions his reasons for preferring a monarchical sovereign to a democratically elected one. Like Locke, she interprets the social contract as existing between the people and the sovereign, so that it is open to being rescinded, in those circumstances where the sovereign has ceased to act in the best interests of the people. This, she argued in her history, was the situation that had occurred during the English Civil War, thus justifying the trial and execution of Charles I (Macaulay 1763–1783: 4.429–31). In later works, she attempted to defend the metaphysical assumptions on which this political philosophy and her optimistic account of human nature were based. Since it is grounded on the existence of immutable moral truths, which reside in the nature of things, her political philosophy, at least implicitly, shares the theological foundation of Cumberland’s and so is open to attack from the position of skeptical atheism. In her most philosophical work, the Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, Macaulay attempts to ward off this attack and to offer a solution to the problem of evil, then and now, one of the sharpest weapons in the atheist’s armory (Macaulay 1783). Here, she develops an agency theory of free will and offers a version of that solution to the problem of evil that claims that God allowed us freedom in a world where evil exists so that we have an opportunity of perfecting ourselves. According to Macaulay, the existence of evil should lead us to conclude that, man is placed on this terrestrial globe, as in a nursery, or soil aptly fitted to give strength and vigour, and a more advanced maturity to his young and infirm reason; that he is placed on this terrestrial globe as in a school adapted to the advantages of a practical experience; and that he is surrounded with difficulties and hostile powers, for the purpose of enlarging his experience, and inducing a state of trial of that virtue which his reason and his experience enables him to acquire. (Macaulay 1783: 234) She argues that, although virtue is not always rewarded in this life, a good God would not have brought creatures into existence to live a life of suffering, so we can be assured, both that there is an afterlife in which virtue is rewarded, and that evil is a necessary element in God’s progressive plans for humanity. The Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth was written as a kind of prolegomenon to her thoughts on education. For, from the point of view of the philosophy she develops, education becomes essential as the means to the acquisition of moral knowledge and the fulfillment of God’s perfectionist aims. In the first pages of the Letters on Education, which discuss our duties toward animals, Macaulay extends this solution to the problem of evil to include animals, suggesting that God would not have created living things except to bring about a greater good, and repeating the idea that the “gift of reason and the powers of imagination” were “necessary to support man’s state of pre-eminence on this globe and to fit him for an exalted station in a future life” (Macaulay 1790: 8–9). It has to be admitted that, as a defense of the existence of God, the Treatise is not very compelling, but it has a certain plausibility as an attempt to reconcile the existence of an all-powerful benevolent deity with the existence of evil. At the heart of the picture is an account of human free agency, which Macaulay calls ‘moral necessity’ according to which judgment and the passions determine the will but we are free insofar as our rational judgments predominate. It is not entirely clear whether her view should be seen as version of what has been called “rationalist compatibilism,” or whether it is a kind of internalist, agency theory. If it is the latter, it is clear that according to Macaulay our freedom does not consist in uncaused acts of the will, but rather in the power to refrain from acting on the judgments and passions that determine the will, in order to reflect further on their validity and appropriateness (Reuter 2007; Green and Weekes 547

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2013). Although judgment directs the will, we are in some sense responsible for our judgments and capable of reflecting on the unhelpful passions and habits which may have resulted in faulty judgment, or in those akratic acts not caused by the rational determination of what is the best, or by other irrational influences. Individual liberty, on this account of human free agency, is being caused to act by right judgment. Since individual liberty is being guided by reason, it requires for its full expression, political liberty, understood as government by rational laws to which one can freely accede as a rational, social agent. Political reform thus involves the discovery of such laws, while appreciating them requires education. So, political reform and education, in the broadest sense, both in relation to judging correctly as to the facts, and in learning how to be governed by one’s rational judgments, rather than being swayed by irrational impulses, become essential for the progress of mankind, promised by the solution to the problem of evil that she develops. Thus, although seven years separate the publication of the Treatise and the appearance Macaulay’s Letters on Education, the earlier work provides the philosophical background on with the latter work rests, and indeed, a large section of Macaulay’s discussion of freedom of the will is republished in the Letters. In the body of her work on education Macaulay turns to criticizing Hume’s naturalistic account of moral principles, which, she says, mistakes humanity’s true interests, by grounding morality in utility, and which like every “system of morals founded on sentiment” will be inconsistent and changeable. She admits that reason too can be mistaken, when “confounded by sophistry, borne down by authority” or led into factual mistakes, but claims that reason is always “able to discern the moral difference of things, whenever they are fairly and plainly proposed.” She takes it that this “establishes an immutable and abstract fitness in a more satisfactory manner than what is called moral consciousness from innate principles” (Macaulay 1790: 193–94). With this comment, Macaulay may be distancing herself from the views of her acquaintance, Richard Price, whose perfectionist philosophy nevertheless had many elements in common with hers (Withey 1976). As will be discussed below, Price has been assumed to have been a significant influence on Mary Wollstonecraft, but on the issue of innateness, she is closer to Macaulay than to Price. He had argued that, in order for there to be knowledge of immutable moral truths, residing in the natures of things, it was necessary to reject Locke’s empiricist epistemology and to re-introduce innate knowledge of universals (Price 1758). Locke had rejected innate knowledge in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding but had retained the idea that there are demonstrable moral principles that can be known, on the basis of reflection on the relations among ideas, with the same level of certainty as mathematical truths (Locke 1975: IV.iii.18, 549). Macaulay follows Locke without concerning herself with the considerable difficulties in the position he develops (Green 2019b). Possibly this was because she was convinced that the claim that we can come to improve our knowledge of morals, through reflection on ideas, sits better with her progressive account of humanity, than the claim that morals are innately known. She may also have accepted that Abraham Tucker, whose The Light of Nature Pursued she recommends that advanced students should study, had shown in this work how Locke’s demonstration can be carried out (Tucker 1768; Macaulay 1790: 135). In the Letters on Education Macaulay’s defense of reason’s power to discern moral principles is soon followed by Letter XXI, “Morals must be taught on immutable principles,” which justifies the same education for both sexes, on the assumption that there are immutable moral principles, and draws the conclusion that there is therefore “one rule of right for all rational beings” (Macaulay 1790: 198–202). Near the end of the work Macaulay concludes that, admitting any opinion which militates against the immutable nature of virtue, or which lessens the idea of the perfect benevolence and transcendent excellence of God’s moral attributes, tends to weaken every fixed rule of human conduct (Macaulay 1790: 415). She thus provides a powerful but theologically grounded argument for the equal education of the sexes, and the possibility of progress toward 548

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a just, egalitarian society. These ideas profoundly influenced Mary Wollstonecraft, as will be demonstrated in the next section.

40.2  The Influence of Macaulay’s Philosophy on Mary Wollstonecraft In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft laments the fact that Macaulay had died too early to give her approbation to Wollstonecraft’s work (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.174–75). However, because of the general neglect of Macaulay’s philosophy, her influence on the younger woman was only remarked on by a few scholars (Kerber 1976). In 1995, when Bridget Hill published the brief exchange of letters between Wollstonecraft and Macaulay, it became even clearer that the latter was a significant source of inspiration for the younger writer, but it took some time for this evidence to be appreciated (Hill 1995; Green 2019a: 294–95). Since then, a number of studies have compared their views on various topics, including education, freedom of the will, and republicanism, yet it is only recently that there has been a more systematic attempt to gauge the extent of the influence of Macaulay’s philosophical outlook on her younger admirer (Gunther-Canada 2003; Reuter 2007; Frazer 2011; Coffee 2019). Here I argue for the central importance of Macaulay’s philosophy on the development of Wollstonecraft’s philosophical views and suggest that Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre should be understood as falling into three phases, the first preceded her close engagement with Macaulay’s philosophy and was heavily influenced by Rousseau. During the second, the influence of Macaulay is manifest and induces a turn away from Rousseau, but by the end of her brief career as a philosophical thinker, she had entered a third phase, developing her own synthesis of the somewhat conflicting influences that had earlier shaped her thought. The first phase of Wollstonecraft’s literary career was motivated by necessity and developed along lines determined by her circumstances. Although it is highly likely that she was aware of Macaulay, her early works don’t attest to this influence. Wollstonecraft had been born, in 1759, into a family which initially enjoyed middle-class prosperity, but which suffered from a series of bad financial decisions, resulting in increasing poverty. As a consequence, by the time she was 19, she was forced to find employment as a companion to a Mrs. Dawson, at Bath, in 1778. It is worth noting that during 1778 Macaulay was also residing in Bath and became notorious because of her second marriage, to a man 25 years her junior, in November of that year. So, it is inconceivable that Wollstonecraft was unaware of her existence. Later, in 1784, Wollstonecraft set up a school for girls at Newington Green, with two of her sisters and her friend, Fanny Blood, with financial help from Hannah Burgh, the widow of James Burgh (1714–1775). He had been a well-known political radical, author, educationalist, and schoolmaster, and friend of Macaulay’s, and this forges a further reason to assume that Wollstonecraft was aware of Macaulay’s works (Green 2019a: 88–922). After a journey to Portugal, with the newly married Fanny Blood, who subsequently died as a result of giving birth to her first child, her school having financially collapsed, Wollstonecraft became, for a time, governess to an aristocratic Irish family. She then began to make her living as a writer. Her first two published works were Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and a semi-autobiographical novel, Mary (1788). In the same year she published another educational work, Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness, and in the next year, an anthology, The Female Reader. At the same time, she was writing regular reviews for the Analytical Review for her publisher, Joseph Johnson. These educational works were part of a proliferating genre, which was among those accepted as appropriate for female authors. Sarah Fielding (sister of Henry) had published The Governess, or Little Female Academy in 1749, and from the 1750s Jeanne-Marie le Prince de Beaumont’s collections of moral tales, the Magazin des enfants and Magazin des adolescants had gone through many English and French editions (Leprince de Beaumont 1760; Fielding 1987). Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady had appeared in 1773, and in 1783 Adelaide 549

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and Theodore; or letters on Education, by Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis, had been translated from the French (Chapone 1773; Genlis 2007). In 1782, Sarah Trimmer had begun publishing six volumes of stories from the scriptures, suited to the comprehension of young minds (Trimmer 1782–1785). These works had been preceded by the educational treatises of Madame de Maintenon, Bathusa Makin, and Madame de Lambert, so by the time Wollstonecraft began publishing, educational works directed at women were one of the genres, along with poetry and novels, increasingly open to women (Makin 1673; Lambert 1769; Maintenon 1854a; b). Wollstonecraft’s Female Reader includes extracts from many of these earlier authors, and her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters follows their moralizing pattern but is distinguished by its opening with a plea to mothers to fulfill their duties of care toward their children and to breastfeed their babies. This emphasis on the importance of breastfeeding as a maternal duty and way of establishing ties of affection between mother and child is reminiscent of Rousseau. And there is no doubt that Rousseau was a significant influence on the first phase of Wollstonecraft’s publishing career. The novel, Mary, is graced on the title page with a quote from Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse, “l’exercice des plus sublimes vertus éleve et nourrit le genie” [the exercise of the most sublime virtues raises and nourishes genius] (Rousseau 1781: 3.248; Wollstonecraft 1989: 1.4). In this partly autobiographical novel, Wollstonecraft condemns the character of the heroine’s mother, Eliza, who, because of her fortune, had great notions of her own consequence, but did not imagine that “there were any relative duties for her to fulfil” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 1.7). She is depicted as making up for the brutality of her husband by filling her tedious and languid life with “those most delightful substitutes for bodily dissipation, novels” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 1.8). The cloying sentimentality of popular novels, which “force the sweet tears of sensibility to flow in copious showers down beautiful cheeks” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 1.8) is condemned by Wollstonecraft, both here and in many of the reviews that she wrote of other women’s novels for the Analytical Review. In condemning such debased sensibility, she was following Hester Chapone, whose extract on “False Sensibility” she had published in the Female Reader (Wollstonecraft 1989: 4.135). Her doubts concerning the then-very-popular notion of feminine sensibility are also one of the marked features of her later, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but in her early novel, Wollstonecraft does not associate the wrong kind of sensibility with Rousseau, but rather extracts from him the idea of an alternative, natural sensibility, associated with virtue and genius. This virtuous sensibility is represented in the character of Mary, the eponymous heroine of the novel, who, being neglected by her mother, was “left to the operations of her own mind …[and] learned to think” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 1.10). Mary is modeled on Rousseau’s natural, moral being, uncorrupted by vanity and false social conventions. Her mind is filled with sublime ideas and devotional sentiments, and it naturally turns to moral impulses. She is represented as possessing a genuine, moral sensibility, and one which is nurtured by reading works such as James Thomson’s Seasons, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, works which were also extracted in The Female Reader (Wollstonecraft 1989: 1.15, 4.307, 25, 42–46). In the novel, Mary pens a rhapsody on sensibility, “this delicacy of feeling, which enables us to relish the sublime touches of the poet, and the painter, … [and] which expands the soul” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 1.59). Sensibility is the most exquisite feeling of which the human soul is susceptible: when it pervades us, we feel happy; and could it last unmixed, we might form some conjectures of the bliss of those paradisiacal days, when the obedient passions were under the dominion of reason, and the impulses of the heart did not need correction. (Wollstonecraft 1989: 1.59) Here Wollstonecraft follows Rousseau in assuming that beneath the false doctrines instilled by society, one can find the character of natural goodness engraved on the heart. 550

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In the novel, Mary travels to Portugal, as Wollstonecraft had done, and is highly critical of the dogmas and rituals of the Catholic faith. Quoting Rousseau’s Emile, she saw that “many prayers may fall from the lips without purifying the heart” and she says of Mary that “the exercise of her various virtues gave vigor to her genius” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 1.35). But, despite, or perhaps because of her virtues, Mary does not find happiness. She has been married to a man she does not love, she has two intense Platonic relationships, one with a female, the other with a male friend, both of whom die of their consumptive illnesses. The novel ends with her being ill in her turn and taking pleasure in the thought that she will soon be in that world where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Neither the morality nor the plot of this novel is particularly original. Its themes, the horrors of arranged marriage and the distress of a woman of sensibility married, or threatened with marriage, against her will to an unfeeling brute, is found in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), and in many other eighteenth-century works. If there is something new in Wollstonecraft’s treatment of these themes, it is the way in which she mixes this well-worn material with strands of Rousseau’s natural religion. When we turn to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, we find that Wollstonecraft adopts a very different attitude toward Rousseau, indeed, a good deal of her most famous work is a sustained attack on Rousseau’s discussion of the education of women. In her second Chapter, “The prevailing opinion of sexual character discussed” she includes him among the authors who “have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters than they would otherwise have been” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.91). The fifth Chapter, “Animadversions on some writers who have rendered women objects of pity, bordering on contempt” begins by quoting at length Rousseau’s claims in Emile that woman was formed to please and be subject to man and that therefore women’s education should be relative to men, she should be taught to be useful to him, to educate him when young, and take care of him when grown, and that she should be taught early to accept restraint, because she is destined to be always subject to the imperfect creature man. Wollstonecraft objects to this, that both women and men have been created by God to perfect themselves as rational creatures, so, The most perfect education … is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.90) No creature is virtuous, whose virtues do not arise from the exercise of its own reason. This, she remarks, was Rousseau’s opinion with respect to men, and she extends it to women. Whereas, in her novel, she had rejected a false sensibility, but distinguished it from genuine natural sensibility, in the Rights of Woman she departs further from Rousseau on this issue as well. Sentiment and sensibility become suspect, and the emphasis turns to the discovery of moral truth through the exercise of reason. In Emile, Rousseau attempts to soften woman’s political subjection to her husband by suggesting that, by manipulating his passions, and in particular his sexual desire, his wife, Sophie, will in a sense, govern him. He will teach her what to think, while she will teach him what to feel, and together they will make up one moral individual. Wollstonecraft objects that this is just a chivalrous excuse for keeping women ignorant and denying them their right to moral independence. She says, Ignorance is a frail base for virtue! Yet, that it is the condition for which woman was organized, has been insisted upon by the writers who have most vehemently argued in favor of the superiority of man; a superiority not in degree, but essence; though, to soften the argument, 551

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they have laboured to prove, with chivalrous generosity, that the sexes ought not to be compared; man was made to reason, woman to feel: and that together, flesh and spirit, they make the most perfect whole, by blending happily reason and sensibility into one character. And what is sensibility? ‘Quickness of sensation; quickness of perception; delicacy.’ Thus is it defined by Dr Johnson; and the definition gives me no other idea than of the most exquisitely polished instinct. I discern not a trace of the image of God in either sensation or matter. Refined seventy times seven, they are still material; intellect dwells not there; nor will fire ever make lead gold! (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.132) Men have attempted to reduce women to inferior creatures of sense, as they have also done to slaves and the poor. Wollstonecraft now rejects Rousseau’s idea that there is a natural moral instinct that has been corrupted by society and instead claims, Moralists have unanimously agreed, that unless virtue be nursed by liberty, it will never attain due strength—and what they say of man I extend to mankind, insisting that in all cases morals must be fixed on immutable principles; and, that the being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason. (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.264) In this later work, Wollstonecraft is insisting that our moral perfection has to do with developing our immaterial soul or mind. It is here that we see the profound influence that Macaulay has had on Wollstonecraft’s way of thinking. In November 1790, working for the Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft had reviewed Macaulay’s penultimate work, the Letters on Education. Here, as we have seen, Macaulay argued for equal co-education of boys and girls, and roundly criticized Rousseau’s views on women, in a chapter called, “No Characteristic Difference in Sex.” Unlike Rousseau, Macaulay did not think that there are natural, moral instincts, corrupted by society, but she believed in immutable moral truths, which have to be discovered through reason and experience. It was apparently after writing this review that Wollstonecraft changed her views concerning the foundations of morality and developed philosophical attitudes much closer to Macaulay’s than to Rousseau’s. She moved straight from writing it to writing her first truly political work, the Vindication of the Rights of Men, her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and in this work also she follows Macaulay’s insistence that morality has to be based on immutable principles. The language of immutable moral principles, knowable by reason, and grounded in the attributes of God abounds in Macaulay’s Letters on Education. In the preface, she excuses the novelty of her ideas saying that “morals taught on immutable principles must carry a very different appearance from those founded on the discordant sentiments of selfish man” (Macaulay 1790: iii). This observation is repeated in Wollstonecraft’s review (Wollstonecraft 1989: 7.309). Such phrases are echoed in the two Vindications, which sharply depart in their orientation from Wollstonecraft’s earlier faith in innate sensibility. The extent of Macaulay’s influence on Wollstonecraft may be contested. It has been assumed that Wollstonecraft was influenced in her ethical orientation by Richard Price, who had befriended her during the years 1783 to 1785, while her school at Newington Green was in operation (Godwin and Wollstonecraft 1987: 215–19; Sapiro 1992: xx, 12, 45, 231; Taylor 2019). He had argued against Hume and Rousseau, in terms very similar to those used by Macaulay, that morality is not grounded in sentiment, but that moral judgments are grounded in reason (Price 1758). Indeed, as well as having reviewed Macaulay’s Letters on Education just prior to penning her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft had also reviewed Price’s Discourse on the Love of our Country (Price 552

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1789; Wollstonecraft 1989: 7.185–87). She had occasionally attended Price’s chapel and a letter to George Blood written in January 1788 shows that she was at the very least familiar with Price’s published Sermons and Four Dissertations, so it is reasonable to assume that she had read at least some of his other works (Price 1767; 1787; Todd 2003: 146–47). Nevertheless, although there are clearly traces of Price’s Discourse to be found in Wollstonecraft’s two Vindications there is little evidence that those of his earlier ethical writings that she had read had forced her to question the acceptance of Rousseau’s moral epistemology that is evident in her first publications. It was reading Macaulay that induced her to take a more critical attitude toward his philosophy, not just his attitude to women, but also to his understanding of the source and nature of ethical understanding. The observation that reading Macaulay’s work caused Wollstonecraft to re-assess her philosophical position is quite compatible with Price also having been an influence, for Macaulay was undoubtedly well versed in Price’s ethical views and shared his political orientation. His early excursion into the problem of the foundation of moral truth, A Review of the Principle Questions and Difficulties in Morals had first been published in 1758, and a third edition appeared in 1787. In it, Price argues that morality is grounded in immutable principles, and there is every reason to think that this work was read by Macaulay, but as we have seen, she differed from him in rejecting the idea that knowledge of morals must be innate, a difference also found in Wollstonecraft. During the 1760s Price, along with Burgh, was one of the friends who attended her Tuesday evening coteries, and the ethical language he adopts in his Review, is very close to that she uses in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (Green 2019a: 40). Nevertheless, since Wollstonecraft does not use formulations characteristic of Price, prior to reading Macaulay, and since it is only after having read the Letters on Education that she explicitly rejects Rousseau’s claim that humanity has been corrupted by society, and replaces it with an explicit belief in the progress of humanity, as argued for by Macaulay, it would appear that it is Macaulay, not Price, who is the immediate cause of Wollstonecraft’s turn away from Rousseau’s moral epistemology. Echoes of Price’s Discourse on the Love of our Country are clear in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man. He states that, Civil government … is an institution of human prudence for guarding our persons, our property, and our good name, against invasion; and for securing to the members of a community that liberty to which all have an equal right, as far as they do not, by any overt act, use it to injure the liberty of others. (Price 1789: 20–21) Wollstonecraft echoes this understanding of the purposes of civil government in her response to Burke saying that, The birthright of man … is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact and the continued existence of that compact. (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.9) In the following paragraph, she points to the ground of this right to liberty, as she understands it. Liberty, in this simple, unsophisticated sense, I acknowledge, is a fair idea that has never yet received a form in the various governments that have been established on our beauteous globe; the demon of property has ever been at hand to encroach on the sacred rights of men, and to fence round with awful pomp laws that war with justice. But that it results from the eternal foundation of right —from immutable truth—who will presume to deny, that 553

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pretends to rationality—if reason has led them to build their morality and religion on an everlasting foundation—the attributes of God? (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.9) Nothing of this kind is to be found in Price’s Discourse, rather it echoes Macaulay’s views as outlined in Letters on Education. Wollstonecraft concludes her Vindication of the Rights of Men with the same sentiment. I have often indignantly observed that some of the enlightened philosophers, who talk most vehemently of the native rights of men, borrow many noble sentiments to adorn their conversation, which have no influence on their conduct. They bow down to rank, and are careful to secure property; for virtue, without this adventitious drapery, is seldom very respectable in their eyes—nor are they very quick-sighted to discern real dignity of character when no sounding name exalts the man above his elbows. —But neither open enmity nor hollow homage destroys the intrinsic value of those principles which rest on an eternal foundation, and revert for a standard to the immutable attributes of God. (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.60) As we have seen, this conclusion, that the moral attributes of God ground the existence and possible knowledge of intrinsic values, such as the rights of men, had been previously argued for by Macaulay. It is then adopted by Wollstonecraft and provides the philosophical foundation for her attack on Burke. The same moral epistemology appears in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Now rather than assuming an innate sensibility, Wollstonecraft declaims against aristocracy which produces a “luxurious monster, or fastidious sensualist” and, Warps the understanding, till men of sensibility doubt whether the expansion of intellect produces a greater portion of happiness or misery. But the nature of the poison points out the antidote; and had Rousseau mounted one step higher in his investigation, or could his eye have pierced through the foggy atmosphere, which he almost disdained to breathe, his active mind would have darted forward to contemplate the perfection of man in the establishment of true civilization, instead of taking his ferocious flight back to the night of sensual ignorance. (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.87) Here, Rousseau’s sketch of the character of Sophie becomes “the transient effusions of overweening sensibility” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.94). Now a woman more “than commonly proud of her delicacy and sensibility” is described as a moral monster, who is incapable of recognizing her moral duties (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.112–13). The fundamental orientation of the work is set out in the first paragraphs, which state that it is reason which elevates humanity above other animals and that God has implanted the passions in us so that by struggling with them we can perfect our nature and acquire knowledge and virtue (Wollstonecraft 1989: 5.81). Here, once again, Wollstonecraft is following Macaulay, by beginning her Vindication of the Rights of Woman with a statement of the latter’s perfectionist solution to the problem of evil. She then sets out to say a good deal more concerning the claim, that there is no characteristic difference in sex, than Macaulay had done. She had earlier indicated, in her review, that Macaulay might have said more on this subject and in this work she set out to make up for this deficiency (Wollstonecraft 1989: 7.314). Although Macaulay mentions imagination as one of the gifts that were necessary for humanity’s moral preeminence, it does not loom large in her works. By contrast, in the third phase of Wollstonecraft’s philosophical writing, imagination and its centrality for moral and cultural 554

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progress, become significant, original themes. She moves beyond the thought that reason, even reason that has been taught by experiencing the passions, is sufficient for human progress toward moral knowledge. Imagination is also necessary. In her later works she attempts to develop the thought, expressed in a letter to Gilbert Imlay, dated 22 September 1794, that imagination is “the true fire stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay” (Todd 2003: 264). Imagination, she suggests, purifies the passions, and produces those “fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts.” Imagination as the catalyst for sympathy needs to be fostered. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to draw too sharp a contrast between Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, making the first a cold and calculating rationalist, while the second appreciated the importance of passions for moral understanding. By the time she published Letters on Education Macaulay had also become convinced that the cultivation of sympathy was an essential part of development of the moral individual and a “consistent system of feeling” needed to be developed (Macaulay 1790: 191). Nevertheless, from the outset, Wollstonecraft judged that Macaulay had not sufficiently appreciated the role of imagination in fostering sympathy. Already in her review, Wollstonecraft parted company with Macaulay over the question of the place of novels in education, and this was tied to the importance she placed on imagination. Macaulay deemed few novels worth reading because in general they provided a very inaccurate representations of human passions “and the circle of moral consequences as they really exist” (Macaulay 1790: 143). Wollstonecraft thought this proscription excessive, suggesting, “that we should not so widely deviate from nature, as not to allow the imagination to forage a little for the judgment” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 7.313). Wollstonecraft’s thoughts on the role of imagination in the progress of civilization constitute a perennial theme in her letters from Sweden. Imagination, she claims, calls forth the curiosity that expands the mind and entitles humans to be called the lords of creation (Wollstonecraft 1989: 6.245). She implies that its development requires a certain level of civilization but that it also promotes its further progress. “Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness” for the novelty of new sensations soon wears off, but imagination promotes understanding and refinement (Wollstonecraft 1989: 6.250). Although she does not develop a full account of the way in which the imagination plays the important role that she claims for it, she offers hints. “When a warm heart has received strong impressions, they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly retracing them” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 6.271). Even more, for strong sentiments, such as the death of a dear friend, imagination renders them permanent, and sentiments are permanently reinforced by scenes which trigger memory and emotion. With these scattered thoughts, Wollstonecraft moves beyond the innate moral sentiments, assumed by Rousseau, and the rational recognition of immutable relations of moral fitness postulated by Macaulay, and moves hesitantly toward her own theory, which places imagination at the center of moral development. She cannot be claimed to have ever fully developed such a theory, yet she was surely correct to intuit that there is more to ethical understanding than either simple innate sentiment or pure rational reflection. With her emphasis on imagination as central to the expansion and refinement of sympathy and other moral sentiments, she transitions from an enlightenment to a romantic thinker, pointing out the direction that her daughter Mary Shelley and others of that generation will follow (Green 1997; Taylor 2003; Reuter 2016).

References Chapone, H. (1773) Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady, 2 Vols., London: J. Walter. Coffee, A. (2019) “Catharine Macaulay,” in S. Bergès, E. H. Botting and A. Coffee (eds.), The Wollstonecraftian Mind, London: Routledge, pp. 198–210.

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Karen Green Cumberland, R. (1727) A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, London: R. Phillips. (1750) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Laws of Nature, Dublin: Samuel Powell. Fielding, S. (1987) The Governess or Little Female Academy, London: Pandora. Frazer, E. (2011) “Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay on Education,” Oxford Review of Education 37(5): 603–17. Genlis, S.-F. (2007) Adelaide and Theodore, or Letters on Education (1783), London: Pickering & Chatto. Godwin, W. and M. Wollstonecraft. (1987) A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Green, K. (1997) “The Passions and the Imagination in Wollstonecraft’s Theory of Moral Judgment,” Utilitas 9: 271–90. (2018) “Catharine Macaulay’s Enlightenment Faith and Radical Politics,” History of European Ideas 44(1): 35–44. (ed.) (2019a) The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, New York: Oxford University Press. (2019b) “On Some Footnotes to Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Defence of the Essay of Human Understanding,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 47(4): 824–41. (2020) Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, New York: Routledge. and S. Weekes. (2013) “Catharine Macaulay on the Will,” European History of Ideas 39(3): 409–25. Gunther-Canada, W. (2003) “Cultivating Virtue: Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft on Civic Education,” Women and Politics 25(3): 47–70. Hill, B. (1995) “The Links between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay: New Evidence,” Women’s History Review 4(2): 177–92. Kerber, L. (1976) “The Republican Mother: Women and Enlightenment-An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28(2): 187–205. Lambert, A. (1769) The Works of the Marchioness de Lambert, 2 Vols., London: W. Owen. Leprince de Beaumont, M. (1760) Magasin des Adolescents, ou Dialogues Entre une Sage Gouvernante Avec ses Élèves de la Première Distinction, 4 Vols., London: J. Nourse. Locke, J. (1975) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Macaulay, C. (1763–1783) The History of England from the Accession of James I. to That of the Brunswick Line, 8 Vols., London: Vols 1–4 J. Nourse, J. Dodsley and W. Johnston: Vols 5–8, Edward and Charles Dilly. (1767) Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr Hobbes’s “Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society, “ with a Short Sketch of a Democratical form of Government, In a Letter to Signor Paoli, London: T. Davies; Robinson and Roberts; and T. Cadell. (1783) A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, London: A. Hamilton. (1790) Letters on Education. With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects, London: C. Dilly. Maintenon, F. (1854a) Entretiens sur l’éducation des Filles, Paris: Charpentier. (1854b) Lettres sur l’éducation des Filles, Paris: Charpentier. Makin, B. P. (1673) An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in Religion, Manners, Arts and Tongues, London: T. Pankhurst. Price, R. (1758) A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals, London: A. Millar. (1767) Four Dissertations. I. On Providence. II. On Prayer. III. On the Reasons for Expecting that Virtuous Men Shall Meet After Death in a State of Happiness. IV. On the Importance of Christianity, the Nature of Historical Evidence, and Miracles, London: A. Millar and T. Cadel. (1787) Sermons on the Christian Doctrine as Received by the Different Denominations of Christians. London: T. Cadel. (1789) A Discourse on the Love of our Country, Delivered on November 4, 1789, at the Meeting House in the Old Jewry, to the Society Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. With an Appendix Containing the Report of the Committee of the Society: An Account of the Population of France: and the Declaration of Rights by the National Assembly of France, London: T. Cadel. Reuter, M. (2007) “Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft on the Will,” in J. Broad and K. Green (eds.), Virtue, Liberty and Toleration. Political Ideas of European Women 1400–1800, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 149–70. (2016) “The Role of the Passions in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Notion of Virtue,” in S. Bergès and A. Coffee (eds.), The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 50–66. Rousseau, J.-J. (1781) La Nouvelle Héloise, ou Lettres de Deux Amans, Habitans d’une Petite Ville au Pied des Alpes; Recueillies et Publiées Par J. J. Rousseau, 7 Vols., A Londres [i.e. Paris]: n.p. Sapiro, V. (1992) A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Catharine Macaulay’s Philosophy Taylor, B. (2003) Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, N. F. (2019) “The Social Contract Tradition,” in S. Bergès, E. H. Botting and A. Coffee (eds.), The Wollstonecraftian Mind, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 36–48. Todd, J. (ed.) (2003) The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, London: Allen Lane. Trimmer, S. (1782–85) Sacred History Selected from the Scriptures, with Annotations and Reflections, Suited to the Comprehension of Young Minds, 6 Vols., London: J. Dodsley; T. Longman and G. Robinson; and J. Johnson. [Tucker, A.] (1768) The Light of Nature Pursued. By Edward Search, Esq:, 5 Vol, London: T. Jones. Tyrrell, J. (1701) A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature, According to the Principles and Method Laid Down in the Reverend Dr. Cumberland’s (now Lord Bishop of Peterborough’s) Latin Treatise on that Subject. As Also His Confutation of Mr. Hobbs’s Principles, Put into Another Method, 2nd edition, London: W. Rogers et al. Withey, L. E. (1976) “Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda,” Journal of British Studies 16(1): 59–83. Wollstonecraft, M. (1989) The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 Vols., London: Pickering.

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41 PHILLIS WHEATLEY AND THE LIMITS OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Aaron Garrett

Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. – Terence

Phillis Wheatley was a strikingly original and great American poet. She was an important historical agent at a crucial juncture in American and British history, a literary celebrity, an “Afric muse,” an enslaved person stolen from Africa, a uniquely situated and insightful thinker, a deeply-believing Christian, and much more. Her changing appeal and the controversy over her work in the 250 years since the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is due in part to the ways that her poems and letters combine these and other identities in unprecedented ways. Why, though, discuss Wheatley in a volume dedicated to early modern women philosophers? She presented herself in her work above all as a poet, a calling which connected her to ancient Rome and Greece, and which through her person and her poems included Africa in the ancient world. Philosophers from Margaret Cavendish to Erasmus Darwin wrote philosophical poetry, so the poetic form is not evidence that an author is not a philosopher by early modern standards. But unlike Cavendish, there is little or no evidence that Wheatley thought of her work as a contribution to philosophy. Indeed, when she mentions philosophy her attitude is negative. Wheatley’s letter to the famous Mohegan preacher Samson Occom concludes: “How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree, – I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine” (Wheatley 2001: 153). These words suggest that the most important and pressing moral truths are clear in a way that makes philosophy unnecessary. But I will suggest that although Wheatley had little need for philosophy, philosophy needed and needs Wheatley. Because she was extraordinarily insightful and her experiences were in many central details little or nothing like those of the philosophers who were her contemporaries, her thoughts are challenging in areas in which theirs were not. Wheatley’s self-constitution through poetry allowed her to frame issues that passed by philosophers, however penetrating, due to their basic assumptions about their calling. It did more. It called basic assumptions about their frameworks into question, whether that was her intent or not. Including Wheatley in how we think about early modern philosophy points out the mind-forged restrictions that philosophers and historians of philosophy create and manacle 558

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themselves with, engaging only with those officially recognized as bona fide philosophers and central philosophical themes. These restrictions reflect an arbitrary and exclusionary history. The first two parts of this essay are a brief overview of Wheatley’s life and works. This is not just to satisfy the usual need for a preliminary potted biography. Wheatley’s circumstances and the knowledge her audience had of her circumstances were used by Wheatley to create her poetic persona in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. She also often employed a form of argument that used some readers’ negative assumptions about who she was, and about their authority over her, as a means to magnify her own authority. In the third and fourth sections of the essay, I will describe some of her intellectual, moral, cultural, and human commitments as presented in her poems. The epigraph of this essay, Terence’s famous dictum “I am human and nothing human is alien to me” sums up Wheatley’s central attitude, and her poetry is a continual reminder to readers who might dehumanize. Wheatley does not cite this dictum as far as I know, but Terence had a special role in her work. In the conclusion, I will, briefly, return to the theme of why reading Wheatley and including her in syllabi alongside the various good and great philosophers are important for our practice as historians of philosophy. Reading Wheatley is also, of course (as she was aware) important for our practice as human beings.

41.1 Life Phillis Wheatley “was brought from Africa to America, in the year 1761, between Seven and Eight Years of age” (Wheatley 2001: 7).1 She arrived in Boston as cargo of the slave ship Phillis and was sold to John Wheatley as a household slave for his wife Susanna (Carretta 2011). Their daughter Mary educated Wheatley.2 Although extremely rare, enslaved persons had been educated by masters and at least one of these enslaved persons was a poet,3 but the quality of Wheatley’s education was unprecedented in colonial America. She excelled in English and Latin literature – although it is unclear how much Latin she knew and how much of the literature was read in translation – history, geography, and religion. Wheatley began writing poetry as early as 12 years old. Her first published poem appeared in 1767 when she was 14 or 15 and was followed by a series of occasional poems – mostly funeral e­ legies – including, notably, an elegy on the death of the Countess of Huntingdon’s chaplain. Huntingdon, who would later aid the publication of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), became Wheatley’s patron. Huntingdon’s patronage aided the publication of Wheatley’s sole book of verse Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in London in 1773, after a failure to publish in Boston. The book met with a positive reception in England and Wheatley traveled to London where she met Benjamin Franklin and the abolitionist Granville Sharpe, among others. David Waldstreicher has shown that in 1772 Wheatley engaged with a number of important political actors in the escalation of tension between England and America, suggesting that we might think of this crucial point in American history as the “Wheatleyan moment” (Waldstreicher 2011). Poems on Various Subjects became available at booksellers in North America in 1773, although it was not published in America until after her death. It seems likely that Wheatley knew of the Somerset case and Lord Mansfield’s decision – Sharpe was James Somerset’s lawyer – which set a precedent for freeing enslaved persons on English soil. Wheatley returned though to Boston, cutting her trip short, to be at the deathbed of Susanna Wheatley. She was then freed by her master suggesting that she may have known she would be freed after the publication of her book. Wheatley continued to be well-known enough to correspond in 1775 with George Washington who invited her to visit him. But her star diminished somewhat from the apex of the early 1770s and her attempts to publish a second volume failed. Wheatley lived for a while with Mary 559

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Wheatley until she married a free black physician and lawyer John Peters after John Wheatley’s death in early 1778. She had a book ready for publication in 1780 which she continued to try to publish up to the year of her death. The book never appeared, likely since the last four years of her short life involved a great deal of moving and financial difficulty due to the post-war depression in the colonies. Wheatley died in 1784 while her husband was in debtor’s prison. Neither her early death nor Peters’ imprisonment4 were, sadly, uncommon in the eighteenth century.

41.2 Works Poems on Various Subjects was the first book published by an African-American author, which alone made it unprecedented for her American readers. But there was much more. The striking portrait of Wheatley looking upward, pen in hand, on the frontispiece is ringed by the words “Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston.”5 That she was not only a servant but a slave is made clear to the reader, if not already obvious, by virtue of the fact that Wheatley’s brief Preface is followed by a Copy of a LETTER sent by the Author’s Master to the Publisher” (which I quoted above with the information of her age when she arrived at the slave market in Providence). Her upward look is, assumedly, towards God, the Muses, and inspiration. But it is also the portrait of a slave awaiting the master’s interruption of her “leisure Moments. (Wheatley 2001: 5) The letter from the “Author’s Master” follows a dedication from Wheatley to her patron the Countess of Huntingdon, and a brief “Preface.” After Wheatley’s dedication, there is a note “To the Publick” signed by Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson and other notables, including John Hancock and “her Master,” to “assure the World” that Wheatley really wrote the poems. The letter assuages potential doubt due both to the fact that she was recently “an uncultivated Barbarian” and was at the time of publication “under the Disadvantage of serving as a slave.” In case a reader might doubt the attestation, a note is added that the original can be viewed by application at the bookseller. Whether intended by Wheatley or not, this was and is the background for a reader understanding her poems, in particular the first poem “To Maecenas.” “To Maecenas” would have overturned the assumptions of her mostly white readers even as they had been prepared by the attestation. The first poem published by an African-American – Hammon’s “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penetential Cries” (Wheatley 2001: 204–06) – begins “Salvation comes by Jesus Christ alone,//The only Son of God;//Redemption now to every one,//That love his holy Word” (Wheatley 2001: 202). Wheatley’s poem begins “MAECENAS, you, beneath the myrtle shade, //Read o’er what poets sung, and shepherds play’d” (Wheatley 2001: 9). In Wheatley’s poem we are not in church, not to suggest that Wheatley thought there was anything wrong with being in a church. We begin in a pastoral scene in Augustan Rome with Gaius Maecenas, the famous patron of Horace, Virgil, and Propertius among other great Augustan Poets. Although Horace is not mentioned, “To Maecenas” invokes Horace’s first ode6 which begins “Maecenas, you, descended from many kings,//O you who are my stay and my delight,” (Flaccus 2015: 3). As the first poem in Poems on Various Subjects, “To Maecanas” is a meta-demonstration of Wheatley’s skills as a poet, i.e., in the poem she describes her vocation as a poet to a classical authority and in so doing showcases her genius in an unimpeachable way to modern readers. This demonstration of vocation parallels Horace’s ode which is also a performance for Maecenas. After presenting a series of different possible lives (farmer, Olympian, soldier) Horace concludes: “But if you say I am truly among the poets,//Then my exalted head will knock against the stars.” 7 560

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Wheatley concludes similarly promising to sing Maecenas’ virtues “While Phoebus reigns above the starry train” (2001: 10). Placing herself as a potential Horace within a poem written from the first-person perspective is daring, as are the ends to which Wheately uses classical sources.8 Wheatley writes to Maecenas because a poet needs a patron, and the relationship Maecanas had with the great Augustan poets Virgil, Horace, and Propertius, was necessary to their flourishing as poets – as all made clear in their poems. Wheatley had numerous masters, as an enslaved person and a Christian. This poem places the Poems on Various Subjects in relation to a different master, and a different imagined community (potentially at odds with her present community and master).9 Unlike Maecenas’ close friend Horace though, the potential poet Wheatley finds herself lacking art and admits “the fault’ring music dies upon my tongue” (2001: 10). This makes her feel unworthy of a patron who shares the poet’s feelings “in softer language” and whose virtues inspire the poet to sing (2001: 9). The lack of a patron, and lack of access to membership in the community created by this patron, threatens to make Wheatley incapable of the art of a Virgil, Horace, and their other great contemporaries. The feelings of inadequacy dissolves when Wheatley invokes Terence, whom she notes in the sole footnote in Poems on Various Subjects: “He was African by birth” (2001: 10). She does not note, although her readers would know, that Terence, who died long before Maecenas was born, began his life in Rome as an enslaved person and was educated by his master.10 Terence allows Wheatley to assert “say ye Muses, why this partial grace, To one alone of Afric’s sable race.” Why indeed? Grace is possible for two (or more). It is notable that the feelings of inadequacy in the poem are not due to being modern and standing on the shoulders of giants. Wheatley presents herself as contemporaneous with Maecenas. They are due to a lack of poetic lineage for an African, “sable” enslaved person. The neo-classical idiom, which assumes the classical past as a superior source of what is good in poetry allows Wheately to connect to Terence, an African and unquestionably classic, and through him to the community of poets writing a hundred years after. Just as there is Homer to Virgil there is now Terence to Wheatley.11 It is notable that her name was itself classical12 like the name of Jupiter Hammon and the countless enslaved Pompeys, Belindas, Scipios, Caesars, etc., imposed by slavers.13 But through the poem and the lineage it creates she is Phillis (or Horace or Virgil) just as Scipio Moorhead, the subject of her poem “To S.M.” is Scipio through her description of his painting in her poem. The inclusion of Africa and Africans as ancient people, and in other poems as biblical Ethiopians, moves beyond Wheatley herself to give Classical and Christian footing to the colonial African community who had no such standing in the eyes of white elites. This is one of the recurring and central themes of Wheatley’s poetry.14 “To Maecenas” exemplifies the singular ways in which Wheatley uses classicism in conjunction with what the reader knows about her to forge a poetic persona. Wheatley uses what the reader knows about her in conjunction with classical allusions which seemed to many readers far beyond her, to create a history for herself leapfrogging over, and transforming (through the success of her poems) her actual condition. Wheatley’s creation of an inclusive Terentian tradition is a vertigoinducing example of poetic imagination worthy of her words in “On Imagination”: “We on the pinions can surpass the wind, and leave the rolling universe behind” (Wheatley 2001: 36). A mostly white Anglophone audience could not be wholly prepared for such unprecedented, brilliant daring.15 Indeed it was threatening to Thomas Jefferson’s contradictory and anti-black worldview. Jefferson, after dismissing Wheatley’s neo-classicism (Slauter 2004) in the Notes on the State of Virginia as merely imitative – and tacitly invoking Hume’s racist analogy between the black Jamaican Latin poet Frances Williams and a parrot (Garrett and Sebastiani 2017) – jumped in apparent non-sequitur to asserting that Terence was white (Carretta 2011: 107). Jefferson did this because Wheatley’s poetic genealogy was a problem for his anti-black arguments, as was Wheatley 561

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herself. In seeking to adhere to his philosophical typology of race and the white supremacist vision of America it supported, Jefferson had to ridicule Wheatley in Humean terms since there was no argument against her genius. Wheatley was far too great a threat to his worldview.

41.3  “Must Ethiopians Be Imploy’d for You?” Wheatley’s poetic corpus is relatively small. Over a third of the poems are funeral elegies or poems of mourning, sometimes eulogizing more than one dead (e.g., “To a Lady on the Death of Three Relations”), and death is one of the abiding themes in her work. Her response to death was very tied up with her particular Christian worldview which was in turn tied in with her other deepest and most abiding intellectual and poetic commitments. When writing to the bereaved, Wheatley repeatedly minimizes the power of sympathy to “ease the anguish of the parent’s heart” (Wheatley 2001: 18 – “On the Death of A Young Gentleman”) and instead instructs them to look at the world as Christian and “cease thy tears” (Wheatley 2001: 19 – “To A Lady on the Death of Her Husband”). Although there is variety in the ages and circumstances of the dead who Wheatley eulogizes, there is uniformity in this message. As a believing Christian, Wheatley attempts to bring the bereaved, who unsurprisingly see the world through their tears, to see the world clearly as it expresses God’s mercy and greatness. What gives her the authority to do this? First of all, what she takes to be the obvious facts of the world for a Christian. In some of her earliest unpublished poems from 1767 when Wheatley was 14, she makes clear that the experienced and perceived world of the religious and the irreligious is profoundly different. Unlike the believing Christian, the irreligious fail to see the obvious around them (“Look thou above and see who made the sky//Nothing more Lucid to an Atheist’s eye” (Wheatley 2001: 68 – “Atheism”). The proper attitude to the world is “great astonishment” but the atheist denies this due to the “rashness great” which “hast thou sense forsook” (Wheatley 2001: 67). In other words, due to their failure of belief in God and consequent “rashness” arising from quick inferences unsupported by more fundamental premises, the atheist is in a continual state of denying what the world is obviously like to someone with clear eyes. Later in “To the University of CAMBRIDGE, in NEW-ENGLAND” Wheatley criticizes the “sons of science” (i.e., philosophers) at Harvard for rashly concluding the heavens to be just a vast mechanism by failing to wonder who created the heavens and for what purpose (2001: 105). This contrast, to see the world as a Christian is to see what is obvious and to engage in philosophical (in this case natural-philosophical) reasoning is to fail to see what is obvious, is also in the poems which expressly discuss morals. “Virtue” (Wheatley 2001: 11) begins with the striking lines “O Thou bright jewel in my aim I strive//to comprehend thee. Thine own words declare// Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach. I cease to wonder, and no more attempt//Thine height t’explore, or fathom thy profound.”16 The “Thou” and “I” places us in the middle of an intimate conversation which we know from the title of the work is between Wheatley and Virtue. Wheatley then changes the subject of her address “But, O my soul, sink not into despair,//Virtue is near thee, and with gentle hand//would now embrace thee, hovers o’er thine head.” Virtue is not accessible through wisdom but is ever-present to the aware and believing soul. The 12 line stanza concludes with the couplet “Fain would the heav’n-born soul with her converse,//Then seek, then court her for her promis’d bliss” (2001: 11). Wheatley’s view that the world is continually manifesting the glory of God and virtue is always near despite the fact that deists, atheists, and other sinners are unable to see it is not novel. George Berkeley, for example, presents atheism and deism very similarly as do many sermons of the period. Wheatley notably makes her criticisms from her novel, and in this context unique, poetic persona which creates her authoritative standpoint. She presents herself in a unique position to see the world clearly and to instruct those whose moral vision is occluded by tears and sin. 562

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“Deism,” also written in 1767, begins: “Must Ethiopians be imploy’d for you//Greatly rejoice if any good I do” (Wheatley 2001: 30– “Deism”).17 The primary sense of “be imploy’d for you” here is “work to educate you” (although slavery is perhaps intimated as well), and the young Wheatley goes on to preach to the presumed older white deist about the trinity, Christ’s suffering, and Satan, in an attempt to save them. The power of the couplet is in the move from “Ethiopians” to “I,” as the assumed feeling of superiority of the white deist is undermined and Wheatley asserts her authority.18 The relation between Wheatley’s Christianity, her African origin, and her authoritative first-person standpoint glimpsed in the early “Deism” is highlighted in her briefest and most notorious published poem: “On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA.” Wheatley wrote that “mercy brought” her from her “Pagan land” in making her a Christian, which has seemed to many to be an apology for slavery.19 How are we to read this, given that a year and a half after the publication of Poems on Various Subjects she unambiguously criticizes slavery in her letter (which I will discuss in the next section) to the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom? It seems clear from many poems that Wheatley endorsed a compassionate Calvinist providentialism and saw the world as continually expressing divine Grace and structured by divine providence. For her predominantly white, and thus free, readership the poem seems to offer a kind of “if/then” as to how to understand this (Cook and Tatum 2010: 10–11). If you agree that through the slave trade providence offers rescue from pagan lands for “benighted” souls, then you also must believe that Africans are as much Christians and of God as anyone else. The juxtaposition of the two quatrains functions to place the reader who has agreed with Wheatley’s claims in the first two couplets with her, against “Some” in the second quatrain: “Some view our sable race with scornful eye, //‘Their colour is a diabolic die.’//Remember Christians, Negros, black as Cain, //May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” (Wheatley 2001: 13). I am not suggesting this was her only readership nor that this is the only way to understand the poem. Wheatley had black, and enslaved, readers. For readers who were enslaved like Wheatley the poem offers inclusion in “th’ angelic train” through identification with Wheatley and to share her standpoint of authority over “Some.” In both cases, the impetus in the poem is to expand for her readers who belong in Christian community and what this means, just as “To Maecenas” expanded the classical world to include herself through Terence. And Wheatley stresses that color is an illicit basis for exclusion paralleling how in “To Maecenas” she included the “sable race” through an African’s standing in antiquity. But, notably, she makes no claim that the institution of slavery is good, i.e. from that something can be used by God to good effect it doesn’t follow it is not the product of human sin. In fact, central to the providentialist Calvinist worldview is the idea that the more sinful humans are the more glory in God’s bringing about good from it.20

41.4  Natural Rights As I suggested at the outset I think that philosophers and historians of philosophy need Wheatley far more than she needed them. She writes from a first-person standpoint and a persona created in and through her poems and uses some of her readers’ racist assumptions about who she is to leverage the moral authority of her standpoint and build inclusive communities. “To Maecenas” is a better counter to Hume’s “Of National Characters”21 than any contemporary philosophical argument I know of. Jefferson’s abuse reinforces its threat to philosophical racism. Wheatley’s challenges to authority exhibit assumptions in the natural rights tradition which philosophers’ criticisms did not. In her classic article on Mary Wollstonecraft and slavery, Moira Ferguson suggested that there was a close connection between Wollstonecraft’s discussions of female subjection and her discussions of Caribbean chattel slavery. According to Ferguson, Wollstonecraft’s concern for slavery gave rise to important differences between the two Vindications (Ferguson 1992). In the Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft had not yet fully recognized the depths of the problem of 563

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servitude, but in the Vindication of the Rights of Women, she developed her theory on the basis of her growing understanding of the particular sort of evil that slavery was. Wollstonecraft was deeply involved with abolitionist movements, so the connection seems obvious. Female servitude and chattel slavery are both wrongs, and upon reflection, they are wrongs for connected reasons. Both involve subjection where one group of human beings has unjustified and arbitrary power over another group of wholly equal human beings. This power is demeaning and destructive. Yet, many invocations of slavery in Wollstonecraft’s work do not concern the wrongs of slavery but rather the servility of women. Women are enslaved due to their lack of education and the ability to exercise their wills and so become servile. This is both a central and a controversial feature of her arguments which like her mentor Richard Price trades on the connected meanings of slave, servant, and servile. To be a slave is to be servile, and servility is a vice inappropriate for free citizens.22 I invoke Wollstonecraft because she was a great philosopher who was deeply and actively opposed to chattel slavery and of course deeply and actively opposed to women’s servitude. But although she often used the word “slave” to characterize women’s servitude, it is not clear that she held the actual extant institutions of chattel slavery and female servitude to be wrong for the same reasons. As Carol Howard has argued To focus one’s attention on the situation in the Caribbean as the chief motivation for Wollstonecraft’s idea of slavery is to risk missing what is most important and disturbing about Wollstonecraft’s thoughts on the matter, which derive from the language of virtue and corruption. (Howard 2004: 61) Servility and corruption were not the only ways to discuss political liberty and slavery. Consider Wheatley’s poem “To the Right Honourable WILLIAM Earl of DARTMOUTH, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North-America, &c.” written in 1772, when Thomas Woolridge, a London merchant under the patronage of Dartmouth, visited the Wheatley household and asked her to write a poem on the spot by way of proof of her poetic skills (Waldstreicher 2011: 522–25). Wheatley demurred, she was of course busy, but had leisure to present him with the poem the next morning. The poem opens by invoking America as a beacon of liberty. To do this Wheatley uses the standard language of political slavery, that is, the analogy between the servility of a polity under a tyrant and chattel slaves invoked by Price, Wollstonecraft, and many others: No More, America, in mournful strain Of wrongs, and grievance undress’d complain, No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain, Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand Had made, and with it meant t’enslave the land. (Wheatley 2001: 40) This language was a legacy of Cicero’s De Officiis, probably the single most influential ancient book of moral philosophy for early modern moral philosophers.23 At its broadest the moral community included all human beings who formed an ideal cosmopolis (Cicero 2015: I.10). But for Cicero, as for Aristotle, the exemplary agent was an adult, citizen, male property owner who was the head of a household made up of wife, children, and slaves. The relations between the agent capable of possessing virtues and acting in exemplary ways and subordinate members of the household took the form of natural duties and roles. A parent had duties to the child and fulfilled these duties rightly or not, a husband to a wife and a master to slaves. The superior office in all of these relations, husband, father, and master, was lodged in one natural person – the Ciceronian philosopher, active citizen, and patriarchal head of household. Slaves were both members of the human community and at the limits of the moral community. 564

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The tension between our roles as members of communities, our natural roles due to how we are born, and our consanguinity with all human beings is in the background of many philosophical discussions of the status both of women and enslaved persons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mary Astell attempted to alter the picture in such a way as to allow women active agency in the hierarchy of duty. But although some women philosophers like Astell were able to speak to the picture, for the most part, enslaved persons were not. Instead, natural lawyers like Grotius and Pufendorf tried, wholly unsuccessfully, to navigate the conflicts internal to Cicero’s view. They, like almost all other philosophers that I know of prior to the French revolution, either considered slavery from what they took to be the authoritative perspective of Cicero’s active head of household or drew on this perspective in qualifying their criticisms when discussing actual slavery. Price again offers a good example of the latter. He famously argued that Americans do not merit their liberty as long as the slave trade is in place, and people are equal: “if there are any men whom they have a right to hold in slavery, there may be others who have had a right to hold them in slavery” (Price 1785: 83). But he then immediately suggested gradual emancipation. Perhaps this was due to the assumption that enslaved persons must gradually be less servile in order to be manly American citizens. What is notable is that as soon as he morally condemns America for slavery, he shifts to the perspective of the head of the household, not the enslaved person. Practically speaking, Price’s position is not far from Jefferson’s. This lack of attention to the experience of “inferiors” as persons with first-person authority is, I suggest, due to the fact that the identification with the agency of elites was built into the transmission and teaching of philosophy. Few if any philosophers up to the French Revolution focused on the wrongs of the Atlantic Slave trade in a way which exemplified Terence’s dictum and took enslaved persons as having first-person authority. Furthermore, very few philosophers criticized chattel slavery in an unambiguous way as philosophers, that is, in their explicitly philosophical writings and as of a piece with other philosophical arguments and themes, prior to the French Revolution. To criticize the Atlantic slave trade, as opposed to discussing slavery in the ancient world or slavery in the abstract, was even rarer.24 Wheatley is all about the power of first-person authority. She follows her presentation of American liberty with 12 lines of genius and depth which should have embarrassed her philosopher contemporaries: Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, Whence flows these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood, I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway. (Wheatley 2001: 39)

“You, my lord” who peruses my song, which as we know from the context of the poem’s writing is quite literal, is drawn into a position of empathy with “I” and so drawn to recognize that “wishes for the common good” and “love of Freedom” are the products of “feeling hearts” who empathize with Wheatley and her father. This idea, that empathy is a source of civic republicanism is not novel. What is of course novel is that empathy is directed toward a real American enslaved person as a speaker and her father, and this is used to portray England’s tyrannic sway in a poem written 565

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a few months after the Somerset decision. This has the effect of presenting the enslaved person as part of America and uniquely situated to speak to its liberty. This in turn shows the analogy between chattel slavery, servility, and political slavery to be a lie – enslaved but unservile.25 Here the wrong of slavery is made clear although the “seeming” in the cruel fate and that Africa’s happy seat is “fancy’d” points like the other poems to slavery as part of divine providence. As mentioned previously, this does not imply that slavery is not a sin or that sin doesn’t redound to the sinner who does wrong. Slavery is presented as an institution which takes children from their parents who love them and slavers – the men who brought her to America on the Phillis – need to steel themselves to be slavers. To enslave involves a failure of empathy in contrast with parental love, the sort of empathy which Terence’s dictum counsels. Wheatley and her father – “father” parallels “lord” at the beginning of the passage and Lord Dartmouth is asked to take the position of Wheatley’s father – are victims of real tyranny, but also members of families, agents, and potentially as capable as Terence. But notably Wheatley does not ask us to empathize with her but her father. One reason for this is that, as in the funeral elegies, she is not seeking empathy for its own sake. She is using empathy to show Dartmouth in a most unservile manner how to look at the obvious facts of the world in a way not occluded by sin. Even more, it challenges the assumption that his standpoint – lord, free and active white man – is the authoritative and objective one. I am not suggesting that this is the direct intention of the poem, although it may be. I am suggesting that this is what Wheatley does by inverting Dartmouth’s authority with the invocation of her history and her father, and of course through and with her brilliant verse. Much the same might be said of the assumed standpoint of Jefferson the “genius” and its many contradictions. A year and a half later Wheatley wrote the letter to Reverend Samson Occom, which was published a month after she penned it in the Connecticut Gazette (Wheatley 2001: 152–53). Occom’s initial letter is lost although we have a sense of its content since Wheatley begins by agreeing with the substance of the lost letter. Wheatley and Occom agreed that blacks, like all human beings, had natural rights. Wheatley stresses that civil and religious liberty are interconnected and that “the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa” is “converting into beautiful Order” (presumedly due to missionaries like Occom) making for greater liberty. But religion cannot be a justification for enslavement since: God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our Modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get him honour upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the ­Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically, opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree, I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine. (Wheatley 2001: 153) Unlike the earlier poems, Wheatley writes here as a free person of color, and thus as one of the delivered. Slavery was not effectively abolished in Massachusetts for nine more years when the enslaved persons Quock Walker sued for his freedom in Commonwealth vs. Jenison. Wheatley’s remark “God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time” is not quietist; Quock Walker was granted deliverance by God as she was. Two years after “Letter to Occom,” Jefferson would draft the Declaration of Independence which elided what Wheatley, Occom, and Walker all saw so clearly.

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41.5 Conclusion Near the end of her life Maya Angelou, who like Wheately brilliantly drew together autobiography and poetry in her work, suggested that everyone should consider Terence’s dictum.26 Angelou saw in it Christian humility, the capacity to understand and empathize with any human being insofar as they are human, and also the capacity to become anyone however great. I think Wheatley would likely have concurred with this reading. Through her poetry, she exemplifies it. Historians of philosophy tend to prize originality and separable, incisive arguments in those they study. Wheatley’s insights often depend on our knowledge of who Wheatley is, and classical imagery used by many other authors. Both are used to create an authoritative standpoint and persona, a counter-power, which challenges us morally. It should be obvious, even to a philosopher, that the exercise of oppressive power over others and the love of freedom do not agree. It was obvious to some philosophers in theory, but in practice, the philosophical standpoint with its Ciceronian assumptions tended to diminish the practical force of the obvious. Wheatley as Christian, African, Terentian, and the embodiment of Terence’s dictum – through poetry – is a counter-ballast to this tendency. Philosophy and Cicero did not offer a standpoint from which Wheatley could speak with authority. Poetry and Terence did. Historians of philosophy often take over their categories from the philosophers who they study, or from their philosophical contemporaries. They often also take over assumptions about who is worth studying and who not. It is notable that Olympe De Gouges was the first European author to present a slave of color as a hero in a work of fiction: “Zamore et Mirza ou l’Heureux naufrage” later revised as “L’Esclavage de Nègres, ou l’Heureux naufrage.”27 Born Marie Gouze, forced into marriage at 17, she eventually moved to Paris remaking herself as Olympe De Gouges (Mousset and Poirel 2007). Unlike her more class-privileged contemporaries, she, like Wheatley, saw exclusion with clarity. Her “Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Female Citizen” (1791) adds “and women” to each clause of the supposedly universal “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” making clear what was excluded from both “man” and “citizen.” One imagines that Wheatley (and Occom) could have seen that the “Declaration of Independence” could use similar appending. De Gouges wrote about Rousseau and on clearly philosophical themes but is not normally considered a philosopher, and is rarely included in histories of modern philosophy. Wheatley was not a philosopher. When persons and viewpoints are not part of canons, they are often excluded. Conversely, that there are so few canonical figures and such a limited set of canonical topics in the history of philosophy reflects the restrictive ways of looking at the world which give rise to these canons. Upending the restrictive process and broadening the canon in the history of philosophy is a great value of volumes such as this one. But there are persons who are not at all represented in philosophy or as philosophers, who do not have the authority to even be considered worth listening to. What is at issue for them is not considered worth listening to either, at least in the context of the history of philosophy. Wheatley’s viewpoint is valuable for many reasons, but one reason it should be valuable to historians of philosophy is it forces us, she forces us, not as a philosopher but as a clear thinker and a self-maker, to rethink the categories we assume are the most historically and philosophically relevant, and that which we presume grants them their authority.28

Notes 1 All biographical and historical information about Wheatley is from Carretta (2011) and Wheatley (2001), unless noted. 2 Unless modified by a first name, “Wheatley” refers to Phillis Wheatley.

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Aaron Garrett 3 Jupiter Hammon, widely considered the first published African-American poet, was born into slavery on Long Island and educated in his master’s family. It seems from his writings that his education was primarily religious. Today Hammon is perhaps best known for his poem praising Wheatley’s piety “AN Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley” (Wheatley 2001: 204–06). 4 “In many ways Peters’ life demonstrates the truth of the observation that ‘While slavery existed in New England, an exceptional man of color could prosper; after emancipation, the barriers became insurmountable’” (Carretta 2011: 191). 5 On the abiding power of the portrait, see Bynum (2010). 6 The first Georgic also begins with an address to Maecenas which is also tacitly invoked: “Maecenas, here//Begins my song. You brightest lights of the sky//That shepherd the year as it moves along its way” Maro (2006: 3). 7 Paula Bennett reads the relation to Maecenas and to Horace as “bitter and angry” in her excellent discussion (Bennett 1998: 68). I read her relation to Horace and Maecenas as more positive, although not entirely so insofar as in order to belong to the circle of Maecenas she needs to invoke a poetic ancestor – Terence – who wrote before the circle. It is notable that one of Wheatley’s contemporary models, Alexander Pope, did not need a Maecenas because he “had won financial independence by his verse” (Dalzell 1956), and by the time Wheatley was writing, poetic patronage was on the wane. Wheatley of course did need a patron since, unlike Pope, she was owned. 8 On Wheatley and the politics of neo-classicism see Slauter (2004). 9 Carretta suggests that the poem is also written for a real patron, perhaps the Countess of Huntingdon, but if true, the force of the poem is still that she is seeking patronage in the classical past to be among poets who are giants as compared to patrons and poets of the present. 10 And like Wheatley his authorship of his plays was disputed, perhaps due to his African slave origins, by Cicero, Suetonius, and others (Davis 2014: 392n22). 11 For a close-reading of “To Maecenas” which illuminates the classical background, see Cook and Tatum (2010: 13–24). 12 Phyllis is mentioned by Horace in tandem with Maecenas and in Virgil’s Eclogues among many other Silver Age poems. Of course, Phillis is not claiming “Phyllis,” but rather the positions of Horace and Virgil. 13 See Benson (2006: 189), for some of the complexities of naming, that is, that the classical names seem primarily to have been forced on first-generation enslaved Africans in the American colonies and the British Caribbean (Dunn (2000: 252). The classical names were so common that lists of runaway slaves read like the rolls of the Roman republic. The names were primarily meant to humiliate, as were other types of names forced on slaves: place names, names of things, and even curses and insults. Olaudah Equiano was renamed Gustavas Vassa (the king of Sweden) by a slaver, a name which was reinforced with violence. Equiano reclaimed his Igbo name when baptized and freed and then as an author (Benson 2006: 190). 14 In “To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works” she describes Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved painter, in similar terms to her description of Homer in “To Maecenas”: “breathing figures learnt from thee to live” (Wheatley 2001: 59). She suggests the relation of inspiration between poets and painters (“may the painter’s and poet’s fire//To aid they pencil, and thy verse conspire” (Wheatley 2001: 60)), which further cements the community. The frontispiece engraving of Wheatley for Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is often ascribed to Moorhead, although there is no evidence to support this. We do know that he was sold in 1775 by Mary Moorhead, “the woman to whom Phillis Wheatley addressed her first poem after her emancipation” (Slauter 2013: 109–11), a funeral elegy for Moorhead’s owner. After that Moorhead entirely disappears from records. 15 Wheatley also had contemporary black readers such as Ignatius Sancho and Jupiter Hammon. 16 The invocation of the “fool” is perhaps a reference to Psalm 14:1, familiar to philosophers from Anselm’s Proslogion, as they who deny God. 17 In the second version of the poem the couplet reads, “Must Ethiopians be imploy’d for you?//Much I rejoice if any good I do” making clear that the ambiguous “Greatly rejoice” refers to Wheatley’s rejoicing. 18 The use of ambiguous pronouns, the reference of which becomes evident as the poem unfolds, is characteristic of Wheatley. Speaker and reference ambiguity are highly Latinate devices. They are examples of Wheatley’s use of neo-classicism to her own distinctive end. Wheatley’s ambiguous pronouns often induce a kind of vertigo where the reader is not sure where they stand. She then clarifies the references in asserting her authority. 19 For a discussion of the notoriety see Gates (2003: 70–90). Understanding the poem has become more complicated due to the availability of the aforementioned letter to Occom which clearly rejects slavery.

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There are a wide array of suggestions in the secondary literature of how to read this poem raging from apologism, to sarcasm, to a changing attitude of “evangelical benevolence” (Monescalchi 2019). In “To the University of CAMBRIDGE, in NEW-ENGLAND” Wheatley again presents her enslavement as the work of the “Father of mercy” in taking her from “the land of errors, and Egyptian gloom” (2001: 105). “Egyptian” is notable since it invokes the Egyptian bondage of the Jews, a theme she returns to in the letter to Occom where she understands this as the bondage of not being a Christian. The point seems again to be that if an enslaved person Ethiop can see God’s mercy in an institution which enslaved them, then how can you privileged “sons of science” not see God? But there is no reason to think it pardons slavery. In fact, one might draw the conclusion drawn by Grotius and many others that enslaving ­Christians is clearly wrong. Poems on Various Subjects was published four years before Hume’s death and five years before the final lifetime edition of Hume’s Essays which preserved his racist remarks. In Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution published in the year of Wheatley’s death, Price notes that through foreign trade “Effeminacy, servility and venality will enter” America “and liberty and virtue be swallowed up in the gulph of corruption” (Price 1785: 77). Cicero claimed, It is well enough in those who by open force reduced any nation, and accordingly rule it with an high hand, if they do sometimes use rigour and severity, like masters towards their slaves, when there is no other way of holding them in subjection: But for those who are magistrates in a free city, to endeavour to make themselves feared by the people, is one of the maddest and most desperate attempts upon the face of the earth. (2015: II.24)

On Cicero’s influence on philosophers, see Tuck (1988) and Straumann (2015). For a sense of the import of Cicero for Locke and Hume in particular, see Stuart-Buttle (2019). 24 In some cases, the lack of concern or interest might have been due to ignorance of the nature, extent, and rapid expansion of the slave trade. But many notable early modern moral and political philosophers did have knowledge and were connected, to varying degrees, with the slave trade: they owned slaves (Berkeley and Jefferson), were members of associations involved with slavery (Hugo Grotius) and were counselors on slavery to the politically powerful ( John Locke and David Hume). That this was not out of bounds for a philosopher was reinforced by their ancient models, particularly Cicero, who held many, many slaves. Even those who do unambiguously criticize slavery, like Francis Hutcheson, and do so in a way close to the passage from Wheatley, do so from the perspective of the master: that is, slavery is intrinsically opposed to benevolence and so cannot have a place in the family of man. Montesquieu and Rousseau both did criticize slavery, but for various reasons they too are ambiguous in the application of criticisms to African chattel slavery. For an overview see Watkins (2017). 25 See Wheatley (2001: xxviii–xxix) and Carretta (2011: 130–33) for further discussion. 26 See Angelou (year unknown). 27 Translations of the plays and essays, De Gouges’ life from birth to guillotine, and a wide-range of materials are available at https://www.olympedegouges.eu/index.php (see Palmer 2022). 28 Thanks to James Uden, Charles Griswold, Margaret Watkins, and Lisa Shapiro.

References Angelou, M. (year unknown) I Am Human (Speech). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= ePodNjrVSsk, Fall 2022. Bennett, P. (1998) “Phillis Wheatley’s Vocation and the Paradox of the ‘Afric Muse’,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 113(1): 64–76. Benson, S. (2006) “Injurious Names: Naming, Disavowal, and Recuperation in Contexts of Slavery and Emancipation,” in G. vom Bruck and B. Bodenhon (eds.), An Anthropology of Names and Naming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bynum, T. (2010) “Phillis Wheatley’s Pleasures: Reading Good Feeling in Phillis Wheatley’s Poems and Letters,” CommonPlace 11(1). Available at: http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-11/no-01/bynum. Carretta, V. (2011) Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Cicero, M. T. (2015) On Duties, ed. and trans. M. T. Griffin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Aaron Garrett Cook, W. W. and J. Tatum. (2010) African American Writers and Classical Tradition, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Dalzell, A. (1956) “Maecenas and the Poets,” The Phoenix 10(4): 151–62. Davis, J. (2014) “Terence Interrupted: Literary Biography and the Reception of the Terentian Canon,” The American Journal of Philology 135(3): 387–409. Dunn, R. S. (2000) Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Ferguson, M. (1992) “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery,” Feminist Review 42: 82–102. Flaccus, Q. H. (2015) The Odes of Horace, trans. D. Ferry, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Garrett, A. and S. Sebastiani. (2017) “David Hume on Race,” in N. Zach (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Race, New York: Oxford University Press. Gates, H. L. (2003) The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers, New York: Basic Civitas Books. Gouges, O. de (1791) Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne. Howard, C. (2004) “Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on Slavery and Corruption,” The Eighteenth Century 45(1): 61–86. Maro, P. V. (2006) The Georgics of Virgil, trans. D. Ferry, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Monescalchi, M. (2019) “Phillis Wheatley, Samuel Hopkins, and the Rise of Disinterested Benevolence,” Early American Literature 54(2): 413–44. Mousset, S. and J. Poirel. (trans.) (2007) Women’s Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Palmer, C. (2022) Olympe de Gouges (English Translations of the Original French Texts). Available at: https:// olympedegouges.eu, Fall 2022. Price, R. (1785) Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and the Means of Making It a Benefit to the World, London: T. Cadell. Slauter, E. (2004) “Neoclassical Culture in a Society with Slaves: Race and Rights in the Age of Wheatley,” Early American Studies 2(1): 81–122. (2013) “Looking for Scipio Moorhead: An ‘African Painter’ in Revolutionary North America,” in A. Lugo-Ortiz and A. Rosenthal (eds.), Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Straumann, B. (2015) Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stuart-Buttle, T. (2019) From Moral Philosophy to Moral Theology: Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuck, R. (1988) “Optics and Sceptics: The Philosophical Foundations of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” in E. Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waldstreicher, D. (2011) “The Wheatleyan Moment,” Early American Studies 9(3): 522–51. Watkins, M. (2017) “‘Slaves Among Us’: The Climate and Character of Eighteenth-Century Philosophical Discussions of Slavery,” Philosophy Compass 12(1): 1–11. Wheatley, P. (2001) Complete Writings, ed. V. Carretta, New York: Penguin Classics.

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42.1 Introduction The legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is inextricably bound up with one transformative moral and political claim and one transformative historical event. The claim is that women and men are equal by nature and so equally entitled to freedom. The event is the French revolution. Most of the attention to Wollstonecraft’s work has been focused on the matter of equality between men and women and, consequently, on her most famous and widely read work: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (published in 1792). In the history of early modern thought, she features mostly as a defender of women’s rights and legitimate claim to moral and civic equality, and justifiably so. How transformative her views on equality between the sexes really were has however been and continues to be a matter of debate. Does her vindication of women’s rights represent a truly liberating philosophy for women, or is it something less palatable? There is indeed an arrogant tone in some of what Wollstonecraft says about women (“the follies and caprices of our sex”, Wollstonecraft 1995a: 87) and some have claimed that she favored education and freedom for women mainly so that they would become less silly and more useful at what they remained destined by nature to be: “good Christians, wives, mothers, and neighbours” (Tomaselli, 2016: 21. See also Gatens 1991; Abbey 1999; Bahar 2002: 41.) I have argued elsewhere that the second interpretation is mistaken (Halldenius, 2007. See also Sapiro 1992: 161; Taylor 1999; and Bergès 2013. On Wollstonecraft’s utopian vision of the family, see Brace 2019). Realizing the transformative – even revolutionary – character of Wollstonecraft’s argument on equality between the sexes does however require a bit of effort. Importantly it requires that one zoom out from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – where this question is explicitly addressed – to a wider appreciation of the character of her philosophy on morality and politics. When we do so we will also see the philosophical entanglements between her feminism and her general understanding of unfreedom and inequality, and how her interventions in the debate on the revolution in France fit into her approach to doing philosophy. Her views on the French revolution indicate her views on the challenges of transformative political change in general, but they hold a personal component too. Her initial intervention in the revolution debate – A Vindication of the Rights of Men (published in 1790) – is a deeply felt and drily witty critique of Edmund Burke’s defense of aristocracy (Burke 2014), on behalf of her friend Richard Price. Price had roused Burke’s anger by using the centenary of the English Bill of Rights from 1689 to celebrate the upheaval in France (Price 1991). In Wollstonecraft’s circle of intellectual friends, defending the revolution was a given, as was regarding it as part of the same DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-49

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republican project as the American independence. Again, in order to see that, and how her views on the revolution were integrated into her philosophy, we need to attend to her wider concerns. Both these issues – the revolution and the relative standing of men and women – are approached by her in the same way: as a matter of understanding how oppression and inequality operate, in the structure and institutions of society, in relations between individuals and groups, and on the minds of women and men. My aim here is to analyze these wider concerns and how she pursued them. It can and has been argued that Wollstonecraft did not have a method, that her writings are impressionistic. In the loving and frank memoir written immediately after her death, her partner, philosopher William Godwin, says that “The strength of her mind lay in intuition. […] in the strict sense of the term, she reasoned little” (Godwin 1987: 272f ). Godwin meant no disrespect, but women’s intellectual projects have often been belittled in this way, as if they get things right by accident. My claim is not that Wollstonecraft systematically kept to a method, but that there is a discernible method to her project. In this chapter, I will pursue three interlinked themes. First, we need to appreciate what I have already hinted at and will develop in the next section, namely that Wollstonecraft’s philosophy is first and foremost a comprehensive critique of hierarchy and entrenched inequalities. The complex relationship in her thought between morality and politics serves in that endeavor. Second, we will see the importance of the fact that she analyzes inequalities as deviations. They are moral deviations from proper standards of rightness – they are unjust violations of the equal entitlement to freedom – but they are also contingent and explainable deviations from the proper and reason-governed path toward progress. Inequalities cause rifts and division, corrupt people’s characters, bolster vanity and envy, and promote wealth over virtue. They are destructive causes in the world. In the third section, we will discuss going back to first principles and the moral constant, and her method for philosophically unveiling inequalities as moral and contingent deviations. Wollstonecraft’s way of doing philosophy – of reasoning and observing – is intrinsically linked to her critique of hierarchy. On the very last page of her book on the French revolution (An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, published in 1794), which she wrote in France during the Terror, she refers to the “philosophical eye” which alone and by looking into “the nature” can “discern the cause, which has produced so many dreadful effects” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 235; see also Favret 2020). In this context, she is referring to factors that explain why the revolution turned violent, but this is also a general articulation of what she takes herself to be doing. The “philosophical eye” is the eye of reason and of acute observation. Reason is a capacity for discerning truth, but privilege and power clouds or warps this capacity. In the last section, we will see how the philosophical eye serves as a metaphor for moral clarity, but also how what is clear in principle can be overwhelmingly difficult and dangerous in real life. In her defense of the French revolution in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft says that the foundation of liberty – the first principle – must be laid “either by poor men, or philosophers” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 49, emphasis in original). What she means is not that poor men are in actual fact disinterested or have more reason. Inequality of rank corrupts everyone and “must ever impede the growth of virtue” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 48), but equality is in the interest of the laboring classes and will only come through the interventions of poor people; the rich will not dismantle the structure that favors them. People with privileges have a vested interest in status quo and in inculcating into the minds of the unprivileged that their lot is natural and rightful. The revolution in France could happen because poor men and women no longer believed them. The “philosophical eye” observes society and the causes that operate in it with a moral clarity that coincides with the interests of the unprivileged and is informed by knowledge of what it is

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like to live under someone’s thumb. The experiences of women and the poor are Wollstonecraft’s philosophical source material.

42.2  Critique of Inequality as a Comprehensive Philosophical Project Wollstonecraft’s case for equal rights for women needs to be understood within her philosophical and political commitment to republicanism (see Sapiro 1992: 28f, 208f ), yet her republicanism is idiosyncratic. I have argued elsewhere that Wollstonecraft should be read as a feminist republican (Halldenius 2015; 2019; compare Vega 2002). Her republicanism has a radically egalitarian streak that is based on a combination of a moral commitment to equality as a principle of justice and on an analysis of the destructive effects of inequality on the minds of individual people and on society as a whole. Her critique of a sexually divided society, her attack on hereditary privilege and wealth, and the mental corruption that it causes are parts of the same package (Coffee 2012). Her philosophy is republican in that she supported representative government under a republican constitution, the political and civic rights of citizens, the legal sovereignty of the people, and a conception of personal freedom understood as independence from arbitrary rule. Under an absolute ruler no one is free, however privileged they might be. Her feminism challenges republicanism by pushing against the adulation of the male figure and of masculine virtue so common in republicanism, where women’s role typically is to mother citizens, not to be one (see Bergès 2013a: Chapter 8). In revolutionary politics, she sympathized with the Girondists (Hammersley 2020: 157f ). In republican thought, being free as person is to enjoy the status of citizen in the sense of being a subject in one’s own right, capable of acting independently in public and representing oneself to others (Skinner 2001: 248–49, 2008: 86–87; Coffee 2016). Being unfree is “to live at the mercy of another” (Pettit 1997: 4–5), vulnerable to their whim. Freedom is a status more than a matter of what you actually can or cannot do. A slave who has practical freedom of action because her master grants her a certain leeway remains a slave, just as the wife of a lenient husband remains his property because law and custom make him master over her. Such unfreedom is not only unjust; it breeds mental corruption. Virtue will not prevail as long as society is structured around inequality of privilege, where people are either masters or slaves. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft expresses a “wild wish” to see “the distinction of sex confounded in society” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 132; Gunther-Canada 1996). She accepted that women were, on the whole, weak in character, ignorant, and emotional (hence the common allegation that Wollstonecraft was no “friend to women”, Tomaselli 1995: xi), but she explained this weakness by the sexual apartheid that relegated women to an undignified life of trying to “please fools” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 180). Willfully kept ignorant, trained to be inoffensive and meek, denied a proper education, women are then told that they are unfit by nature for anything but trivial pursuits. Women are always women, never allowed to be persons, and good looks and marriageability are their only assets. The oppression of women is particularly devious since women are taught not only to endure their subordination but to take pride in it, to accept that this is what virtue is for them: to “hug their chains, and fawn like the spaniel” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 161f ). It is also rational for them to “square their behaviour” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 228) within these confines of the acceptable; the social cost of doing otherwise is high, as the heroines of Wollstonecraft’s novels knew all too well. Since liberty and virtue are interdependent for Wollstonecraft, women’s lack of freedom means that they are robbed of the opportunity to develop true virtue (Reuter 2022: 51f ). Wollstonecraft repeatedly asserts that destroying the distinction of sex is required by morality. Reason gives “no sex to virtue” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 48); there can be no difference in men’s and

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women’s virtue if “morality has only one eternal standard” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 95). The only morally relevant distinction there could be between the sexes would be if women did not possess reason, but then they would be outside of morality altogether – like brutes – without rights but also without obligation. And the men who “endeavour to keep women in the dark” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 93) certainly do not want women to think that they are without duties. Here is the battle for Wollstonecraft: to establish that men and women share the human function of being persons of reason and that the distinction of sex cannot justify any moral or political differentiations in status or freedom. Women’s subordination is an instantiation of the logic of oppression, which cannot be explained without the blind respect for property and rank that comes with inequality. Her defense of the French revolution proceeds from the same analysis and observations of what oppression and misery do to people. The latter serves to explain why the revolution turned violent. We do well to note that Wollstonecraft’s support for the revolution in France was not only a conventional republican cheer for representative rule taking the place of monarchy but was equally due to what she termed a “mighty revolution in property” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 50), including women’s right to property in their own persons (Gunther-Canada 2001: 79. On the material conditions of women’s independence, see Mackenzie 1993). Unless civic transformation brings an equalization of property, the new system will likely not amount to much more than a nominal “choice of masters” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 50). Wollstonecraft wove several strands together in her defense of the revolution and her account of what caused it to happen. Most obviously, the oppressive old regime was illegitimate. It represented a violation of natural morality and man’s natural right to liberty. Liberty has an external aspect, the quality of the relations in which we stand to other people, which requires that we are not subordinated to their arbitrary will (Halldenius 2013; 2017). This aspect of freedom is importantly a function of institutional arrangements and law but also of property dissemination (On republican politics and property regimes, see Meiksins Wood 2012: 289ff ). Poverty is therefore not only a condition of hardship, but also a state of unfreedom: it makes you dependent on the will and whim of others, on their sense of charity. But liberty also has an internal aspect – independence of mind – which is partly predicated on external liberty. If you have neither social status, title, or wealth – or the right sex – you will be regarded as without worth by others but also by yourself. Hierarchy corrupts the mind and society; true happiness, she claims, can only come from friendship enjoyed by equals (Wollstonecraft 1995: 9). For Wollstonecraft, this analysis of inequality, of the arrogance and despotism of rich men, and the humiliation of women and the poor who need to make spectacles of themselves in order to elicit some pity (“Misery, to reach your heart, I perceive, must have its cap and bells”, Wollstonecraft 1995: 14; also Halldenius 2014), explains how rebellion against oppression – like the one in France – is both justified and inevitable. It serves the purposes of the powerful to keep the poor and oppressed unfit for critical inquiry. Despotism is “supported by false notions of duty, enforced by those who were to profit by the cheat” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 17). But even in a people broken by despotism there is a potential force that will erupt eventually; once the “bent bow recoils”, it does so violently (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 162). Hence, temperance and measured thinking cannot be expected by those who have only known injustice and misery. Chastising the poor for retaliating against their tormentors is adding insult to injury. As we have seen, Wollstonecraft concludes The French Revolution with a reference to the “philosophical eye”, an eye that looks beyond the selfish guarding of privilege and reveals that the revolution and its bloody aftermath were caused by a prior denial of rights, a cruel deviation from morality. There is, in Wollstonecraft’s thought, a moral constant, discernible through reason. We will now move on to reflect on her philosophical method for getting at the moral constant, so blindingly obvious in principle and so difficult in real life. 574

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42.3  Axiom and Deviations: Revealing the Moral Constant In her unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (published posthumously in 1798), Wollstonecraft’s heroine finds herself locked up in an asylum for the insane. Her husband has exercised his legal privilege to have her confined in order to gain access to an inheritance. Maria ruminates over the unhappiness of her fellow inmates. Their madness is a loss of reason, and by losing their reason they have lost “their very selves” (Wollstonecraft 1992a: 73). Maria herself, by contrast, finds room for reflection in the relative isolation of the asylum, despite the humiliation and anguish of it all. This is a theme to which Wollstonecraft returns, that solitude – even enforced solitude – can free or uncloud the mind. We get a similar picture in The Rights of Men. A wretch imprisoned in the Bastille, separated from all human contact, somehow remains in control of his own mind, and is even capable of cheering himself up a bit in his dreary circumstances by “new combinations of thought” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 26–27). Her point is not to belittle the horrors of the prison; no one should be surprised if prisoners or slaves descend into madness. The point seems rather be that beyond or without reason – where madness lies – we have left whatever we can understand about the moral. Morally the loss of reason is a “monstrous flaw”. This is not a very helpful expression, but when Wollstonecraft moves on to say that it “eludes all investigation” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 27) – presumably all moral investigation – it makes more sense. If we cannot presume reason, there is simply nothing to talk about in moral terms; the issue does not arise. Maria’s fellow inmates inhabit an amoral world and that is their tragedy. Reason, then, is a necessary moral postulate. In The Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft offers a more formalized exposition of this point, of why it is important for her, and what function it serves in her social and political critique. She proceeds by asking and answering three questions: In what does man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that half is less than the whole; in Reason. What acquirement exalts one being above another: Virtue; we spontaneously reply. For what purpose were the passions implanted? That man by struggling with them might attain a degree of knowledge denied to the brutes; whispers Experience. (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 79) Equally undeniable, she adds, is that knowledge and virtue “naturally flow” from the exercise of reason, from the exercise of unclouded reason, that is. She implies that these are obvious truths, the answers being “as unequivocal as the axioms on which reasoning is built”. But the obviousness of these truths does not mean that they obviously influence men’s thoughts and practices. On the contrary, the reason of men “in general” is clouded by prejudice, which in its turn makes them use their reason to further justify prejudices. The fact that the starting point of a train of thought was a false or prejudicial assumption will not be transparently available to whoever is doing the thinking; hence they can find no fault in it. Say that the laws and mores of society state that education in the sciences is wasted on women, that women should not be allowed to own property, and that wives must defer to their husbands in all things. If such laws and mores are the logical consequences of a false but widely held belief that women have weak understandings and are incapable of rational thought, then those laws and mores will appear justified. Any opposition to them will, by the same token, look like bad reasoning. If the opposition comes from women – that is from those creatures who are believed to be unfit for the kind of reasoning that their own critique would require – it can be dismissed as self-interested rantings of deluded souls who unwisely venture above their intellectual station. 575

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This is the biggest challenge that a social critic has to face. In a society like Wollstonecraft’s own, prejudiced and unfair “truths” that hold women and the poor down would have made perfect sense to most people, even to those groups who suffered under them. Suggesting that wives should be the legal equal of their husbands would come across as a bad joke. Indeed, as long as women’s legal subordination is the logical consequence of a taken-for-granted assumption of women’s natural inferiority it will be a joke. Consequently, the critic will only succeed in making herself look ridiculous, easily brushed aside as irrelevant and as confirmation of women’s inability to reason. We get an illustration of this in Wollstonecraft’s novel Maria, in a curious court-scene (quotes in this paragraph are from Wollstonecraft 1992a: 142–45), described as an action by Maria’s husband against her lover (whom she met in the asylum) for seduction and adultery. Maria writes a statement that she requires to be read in court. In it she describes “the rigid laws that enslave women” and make wives the property of their husbands, how the only morality allowed women is a false one where virtue is the same as chastity and submission. On this basis, she disavows the bond between herself and “my, what is termed, lawful husband” and claims a divorce. The judge is not impressed. Allowing women to speak of their feelings and, what is more, use their feelings as an excuse for violating the sacred marriage vow is to open the “flood-gate for immorality”. A woman’s duty is to bow to the better judgment of her family, and to love and obey the man they choose for her. The judge concludes that “the conduct of the lady did not appear that of a person of sane mind”. A woman declaring herself free from her husband and insisting on her right to choose whom to love must surely be mad. The radical critic always needs to be alert to the allegation that she is mad, particularly when the critic is arguing for equality for women in a situation where the laws and mores are based on the assumption that women must be incapable of the kind of thinking such critique requires. We do well to keep the judge’s words about Maria in mind when we return to what Wollstonecraft says in The Rights of Woman in preparation for the three questions I quoted earlier. A critic who wants to tackle unfair laws and customs needs to attack not only the laws and customs themselves but the assumptions that serve – or can be made to serve – in the justification of them. Given the state of society where women are made weak and stupid by slavish dependence while the rich are made “vain and helpless” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 76) by a life of empty amusements and deference from others, we need to “go back to first principles” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 79f ). But going back to first principles is not merely an intellectual pursuit; it is where the struggle is. Succeeding in rooting out prejudice requires of the critic to backtrack through the chain of (false) reasoning to detect and disclose the errors, the deviations from truth. And the point of doing this is, again, not merely the intellectual gain. It is – pardon the drama – a matter of life and death. The prejudices that make inequality and subordination look natural are deviations from truth but, crucially, they function as destructive causes in the world. Instilling in someone the belief that their subordination is part of the natural order of the world is an effective way of keeping them down, be it women under men, poor under rich, slaves under masters, or noblemen under kings. False conclusions based on prejudices are often effective for the reason that they are not wholly false or wholly unfounded, or they are founded but on the wrong consideration, say on efficiency rather than morality. Take the example of property ownership. There are sound pragmatic reasons for legal protection of individual persons’ property: it makes life more predictable, one does not need to be constantly on guard, it ties in with fair reward for work and industry, etc. One practical – perhaps unintended – consequence of property protection, however, is that it serves to perpetuate existing inequalities in ownership, thus easily taking on the appearance of protection of that inequality. The mere fact of inequality of ownership comes 576

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to look like a morally merited inequality of distinction: the rich surely are rich because of their industry and ingenuity, and the poor surely are poor because of bad choices and lack of dedication. When property becomes venerated as a symbol of greatness, and the rich manage to exploit the principle of property to turn it into a protection of their own privileges, any redistribution of goods from rich to poor will look like an injustice against the rich, for which they need to be compensated. In The French Revolution Wollstonecraft’s critical remarks on Necker’s fiscal politics are couched in these terms: “as these privileges were a kind of property, it was necessary to find out a compensation, an indemnity, before they could be done away – with justice” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 58). This is a trick played on the poor: taxing them to pay for the upkeep of the social structures that oppress them is, they are told, simply normal taxation and not a violation of anything. In The Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft emphasizes how “taxes […] grind the poor to pamper the rich” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 233). The result is that only the property rights of the rich are secured: “when was the castle of the poor sacred?”, as she ironically puts it in The Rights of Men (Wollstonecraft 1995: 13). The only way one can gain support for a measure to assist the poor is if that same measure also benefits the rich. Thus are the privileges of the rich artificially propped up as a taken-for-granted pillar of the system through the corruption of a principle – protection of property – that taken on its own looks perfectly reasonable. “Almost every vice that has degraded our nature might be justified by shewing that it had been productive of some benefit to society”, Wollstonecraft notes in The Rights of Men (Wollstonecraft 1995: 54). Pointing to some benefit, then, is not enough and might be irrelevant for moral justification. Manners and convenience vary; the base of morality does not. Debating what might be beneficial for what at any particular time is not the test of morality. “Injustice had no right to rest on prescription” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 53). We do not find proper justification of anything by considering convenience, policies, or contingent benefits, nor – and this is a recurrent theme in her critique of Burke – by looking back in time. Hence the need to backtrack, not through time but through the artificial deviations from true morality, to unravel the corruption and reach back to “first principles”. It is crucial for Wollstonecraft that true morality is a constant and that this moral constant translates into what can only be termed an imperative: “Respect thyself!” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 22). And one’s proper self, the self that warrants this specifically moral self-respect, is the self that thinks and acts on reason. As she says in The Rights of Woman, virtue and knowledge flows naturally from the exercise of reason. That reason is the capacity that sets man apart “is as clear as that half is less than the whole” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 79). It does not need to be proven; it is an axiom. Neither does it matter what we term this imperative or this “principal of action”, which is the only one needed (“One principal of action is sufficient”). There are alternative languages available for expressing this principle: it can be a religious principle expressing love of God or a moral principle expressing love of justice, or it can be an expression of self-love emanating out of a desire for true happiness (on morality and religion, see Taylor 2003: 104–09). It is all the same, which shows that although the principle be expressed in various morally salient ways, it is not grounded in any of them. It is a moral postulate, logically prior to any substantial conception of what it is right or wrong to do in various situations. It is this principle that is the moral constant, not any list of dos and don’ts. This is why Maria’s fellow inmates – who lost “their very selves”, their reasoned selves that is, to madness – are beyond morality. This conception of virtue as a principle of self-respect, and not as a catalog of rules of good behavior, serves importantly in the idea that morality is an exercise of reason and thus of freedom of the mind (on the exercise of reason, see Reuter 2022: 9–12). If morality were a list of rules for good behavior, then acting morally would be an exercise of abiding by those rules. That morality is to do the right thing without questioning it is exactly what the powers that be – the men, the 577

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rich, the masters of slaves, of women, and of other pieces of property – want to imprint on the minds of whoever is under their foot. That is how you keep people pliant. As Wollstonecraft let Maria put it: “Men, more effectually to enslave us, may inculcate this partial morality [that wives must love their husbands because it is their duty], and lose sight of virtue in subdividing it into the duties of particular stations” (Wollstonecraft 1992a: 114). The first Chapter of The French Revolution is one of the clearest examples of Wollstonecraft’s analysis of how the moral constant impinges on the circumstances of politics. Political despotism violates people’s liberty, not only through bare oppression but also through “false notions of duty” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 17). Instead of acting on the principle of reasoned self-respect people are turned into accomplices in their own unfreedom. With limited knowledge and without ever being permitted to participate in “political science”, they are made unfit to consider what their rights are and are instead taught to value the pomp and false finery – the theatrics – that comes with hierarchies of wealth and power. Society is defective to the extent it makes people submit out of ignorance to “a kind of self-denial”, a denial of their capacity to think and act on reason (Wollstonecraft 1989: 22). This looks all rather bleak, but Wollstonecraft’s philosophy is still that of a philosophical optimist. The optimism is due to the fact that the moral constant is not obscure. It is as clear as the light of day once the cobwebs that cloud our moral vision are wiped away. Viciousness is an error. And since virtue is not only simple, true, and easily visible but also exhilarating in the freedom it promises, it will prevail in the long run. Of this she is certain. The revolution in France happened because the people could no longer stand their misery, and – here is the philosophical optimism – once people do rise, they will see through the complicated and contrived trappings of hereditary riches and privileges. The emphasis is on the long run: “things must have time to find their level” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 47). Wollstonecraft repeatedly describes the hierarchies of class society and the contrived rules of behavior that go with it in terms taken from the theatre, where things are said and done for “stage effect” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 25) and everyone plays the part they have learnt (Wollstonecraft 1987: 186, Letter 22). Even war is theatre, propped up by false notions of heroism and what is worth dying for. Falsely refined manners and notions of duty are a drapery in front of true morality. The point is that viciousness is false and complicated, whereas morality is true and simple. Hierarchies are unstable constructions that need to be maintained, and they can be maintained only as long as ordinary people whose taxes “pay for the support of royalty” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 237) are tricked into believing that it is all real: the “useless parade” of the idle rich “before a gaping crowd”, meant to inspire admiration instead of the contempt which is the only proper response to it. This propped-up grandeur will come tumbling down the moment people see through the cheat. An observation she made on her Scandinavian journey was that the French revolution had changed how the common people regarded themselves in relation to “their seigniors” (Wollstonecraft 1987: 78, Letter 3. On Wollstonecraft’s journey in Scandinavia, see Nyström 1980). They no longer saw themselves as a different kind of being, destined by nature for hardship and subordination, but as oppressed – a rectifiable and unjust political condition. Hierarchy is a contrived structure with a long way to fall (“Down fell the temple of despotism”, Wollstonecraft 1989: 85), while equality is simple and already on a level. It cannot fall. This, of course, is simplicity in principle only. So, what does it mean to go back to first principles? What I have shown so far is that, for Wollstonecraft, inequality and hierarchies of privilege and wealth, despotic power, and other forms of viciousness are contingent (“casual”) deviations from the moral constant. They rely on a cheat and can be exposed as false. Going back to first principles is the process of exposure. True morality – reason as the only necessary principle of action – is thus revealed as the constant in the human world. 578

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42.4  Moral Vision: The Philosophical Eye Wollstonecraft’s moral creed, if we want to call it that, is that the truth of the simplicity of equality will reveal itself when the scales fall from the eyes of people who have been duped into believing that slavery is freedom, that the rich are entitled to their privileges, that men are the natural lords of women, that blind obedience can ever be legitimate, and that change is impossible. In real life, of course, it is not simple at all. Wollstonecraft’s faith in this process is coupled with a conviction that it does not happen through the heroic intervention of some remarkable individual, but through collective undertakings. This is why both her novels end in melancholic despair. Each novel is a personal narrative of an individual woman with “thinking powers” trying to retain some dignity (or “grandeur […] derived from the operation of its own faculties”) in a society designed to exclude and humiliate women (Wollstonecraft 1992: Author’s advertisement). Morally righteous but politically isolated, women are oppressed by “partial laws and customs” (Wollstonecraft 1992a: Author’s preface) and by arrogant, stupid men whose legal prerogative it is to tell them that they have no right to anything. Alone they cannot change society, only adapt to it or resign from it. Change is political in the sense that it requires a kind of collective awakening through education, which she stresses in the introduction to The Rights of Woman (on Wollstonecraft’s philosophy of education, see Laird 2008) or, to put it more generally, through the discovery, in the whole of society, of useful truths (Wollstonecraft 1989: 109). Wollstonecraft subscribes to the Enlightenment thesis of progress and processes of civilization, but more in the version of Condorcet than of Hume or Smith (Meiksins Wood 2012: 300–05). The open cruelty of the past – as in feudal times – when the people could be led to slaughter by masters who didn’t even have to pretend that what they did could be justified has turned into a more polished oppression where the great men of the day at least feel a need to “put a gloss of morality on their actions” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 112). This is progress of a kind; it opens a crack in the door for moral argument. Her commitment to the idea of progress implies both that she trusts in perfectibility and the need to respect human limitations. We should not expect anything – and certainly not the human mind – to be perfect since “every thing around us is in a progressive state” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 191). Politically, civilization hitherto is partial. A point she repeatedly makes is that civilization has not benefitted all, and has refined rather than eliminated oppression (Wollstonecraft 1989: 111; 1995: 8; 1995a: 74, 80; 1987: 198 Appendix). She grants that some persons will have better judgment than others, but the politically pertinent point is that people regardless of class are equally capable of moral improvement. It is therefore tyrannical of a government to contrive to exclude large groups of citizens – the poor and the women – from its benefits: “For all the advantages of civilization cannot be felt, unless it pervades the whole mass” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 220). In Wollstonecraft’s estimation, the improvement of the world takes place in what we might call two temporalities. There is the long arc of time, from the infancy of human society onward, where we see a slow but constant improvement of the “centrifugal rays of knowledge and science” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 224). This gradual process will at certain stages be interjected with sudden changes or ruptures, in the short arc of time. These ruptures can be violent and, in the short run, seem like setbacks, but form an inevitable part of the slow process. Revolts against oppression cause chaos and possibly anarchy in the immediate moment but will – in the long arc of time – serve improvement. The violent rupture of the French revolution would not have happened at all without the long process of improvement up to that point, however partial, since in darker times people would not have had the perception of themselves as thinking human beings to which power can be held to account. When Wollstonecraft traveled in Scandinavia in 1795, she noted that the French 579

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revolution had weakened the respect for the upper classes. The Scandinavian peasantry now complained of oppression (Wollstonecraft 1987: 78, Letter 3), a sure sign that the spirit of inquiry had begun to take root. As long as the poor and downtrodden are too ignorant and broken to do anything other than labor for survival, while vanity and idleness prompt the rich to care only about maintaining their superiority, reason will never reveal its “captivating face” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 22). Deference is properly due only to reason and deference to reason is the same thing as being of independent mind, but this will take hold only in a “body-politic” that supports it. Wollstonecraft’s faith in progress could look naïve or plain conventional, but a useful insight here is that unfreedom and inequality are not only violations of principles of justice but existential conditions of life that draw our attention to the circumstances of living unfreely: humiliation and pain, frustrated attempts at something else, or resignation under the inevitable. These things are going on at the same time in Wollstonecraft’s writings: the simplicity of it all on the level of principle and the overwhelming difficulty of challenging power and the arduous process of intellectual exertion to gain independence of mind. The philosophical promise of that insight, at least partly, lies in a kind of moral vision, which forms into a philosophical approach to the world, or method, if you will. Reading Wollstonecraft’s works one is struck by the violence of her language. The injustices, misery, and humiliation are not merely morally assessed, they are keenly felt. “The world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator, we must mix in the throng, and feel as men feel before we can judge of their feelings”, she notes in The Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 196). Feeling wrongs keenly is not pity, it is knowledge necessary for growing wiser in the world without hardening the heart. This is where the “philosophical eye” comes in. The philosophical eye is a metaphor and can only take us so far, but it provides a clue to Wollstonecraft’s approach to doing philosophy – her method – which is a kind of moral anthropology. What I mean by that is that she philosophizes from inside lived experiences, in order to understand why people do what they do and what an unjust society does to them. The point is to address existing injustices in the world rather than formulating utopias from idealized assumptions that abstract away from the complexity of actual societies. Mix in the throng, wade through the mud, step in the blood (as she did in the streets of Paris, Gordon 2005: 211); it all contains relevant information. In the midst of political tumult, the moral vision – the unclouding of reason – is a piercing gaze that sees everything: It is only the philosophical eye, which looks into the nature and weighs the consequences of human actions, that will be able to discern the cause, which has produced so many dreadful effects. (Wollstonecraft 1989: 235) It is the philosophical eye that sees through the casual deviations, unravels the causes of injustice to settle on first principles. But the philosophical eye is not a view from nowhere and it is not an abstraction. It is not the eye of the unmoved spectator; it is “the cool eye of observation” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 6), a practical enterprise of moral analysis, grounded in real life and real experiences. The “knowledge of others” and of ourselves that can come about through mixing in the throng is not knowledge of an abstracted “Man” but of what deviations from true morality in the form of inequality and oppression do to real men and women. We have already noted that in her defense of the French revolutionaries, Wollstonecraft says that the foundation of liberty – the first principle – “must be laid by poor men, or philosophers” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 49): philosophers because they should be wise enough to have moral vision unclouded by prejudice, and poor men because they have no privileges to lose and so no vested interest in the status quo. Seeing the world through the “philosophical eye”, we understand, is seeing it through the eye of the dispossessed: the poor, the women, the slaves. We should be careful 580

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not to confuse this piercing gaze with another of Wollstonecraft’s ocular metaphors, which is that judgments of right and wrong may not be determined by “the point of sight” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 54f ). What she means by that is that morality is not relative but an invariable standard, the same for everyone. We are all shaped by our circumstances; the poor and the women are likely to develop cunning and deceit while the corruption of the rich produces vanity and contempt for weakness. The philosophical gaze sees beyond all that, thereby avoiding moral judgments being made from the point of sight, while seeing the causes that make moral agency so difficult for persons living in non-ideal societies. Understanding what the circumstances of subordination do to the minds of those who live unfree lives does not relativize morality – this is crucial – but it does prompt the question of what it is reasonable to expect of people in terms of acting on moral principles and developing a virtuous disposition, if all their efforts go into surviving from one day to the next. As she put it in The Rights of Woman: “how can a being be generous who has nothing of its own? or, virtuous, who is not free?” (Wollstonecraft 1995a: 236; see also 1989: 6 on “attending to circumstances”). This is a reason why the purpose of government is to destroy inequalities (Wollstonecraft 1989: 17): inequality itself constitutes a violation of natural morality, but also causes “depravity and weakness of intellect” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 231), thus hampering moral progress both on an individual and a societal level. If inequality is not rectified politically, the poor and marginalized will either be ground down by misery or turn to violence. We see Wollstonecraft’s method not only in her obviously philosophical works, but also in both her novels and in her travelogue from Scandinavia. Each of the novels is a study in the psychology of oppression. In the Letters from her Scandinavian journey she observes, among other things, circumstances for political change and what poverty does to the mind. The same is true of her book on the French revolution, where she uses her own observations from Terror-stricken Paris in a combined “outsider-insider position” (Gordon 2005: 209). The psychology of how people live under misery and despotism, what makes them snap and what dynamics are set in motion once they do, is necessary source material. In The French Revolution we see how Wollstonecraft conceived of the character of her philosophical undertaking. Her conclusions regarding the improvement of society and of man was, she maintained, grounded in “political science” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 117). Analyses of ideas based on observation and experiment are capable of generating “analytical truths, including political”. (Remember that reason is “the simple power of improvement” and the understanding is the “power of generalizing ideas” (1995a: 126–29.)) She saw herself as part of the modern scientific revolution, walking in the footsteps of Descartes and Newton, but with her observing eye focused on the effects of political and social circumstances on the human mind and thus also how crucially important the organization of political society and political culture of “inquiry and discussion” (Wollstonecraft 1987: 93, Letter 5) is for human development. As she notes in the letters from Scandinavia: since “situation seems to be the mould in which men’s characters are formed”, then “the same energy of character, which renders a man a daring villain, would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized” (1987: 191, Letter 23; 168f, Letter 19). Protect the weak, destroy inequality, defend freedom, educate everyone, let children roam out of doors, reward labor, encourage curiosity, uphold representation and accountability, and let people live without fear: these are no mere intellectual admonitions. They are deductions of experience (Wollstonecraft 1989: 122), turning analytical truths into useful knowledge. Wollstonecraft oscillates between practical suggestions for progressive social schemes – like her detailed plan for a school curriculum in The Rights of Woman and the discussion of penal reform in the Scandinavian letters – and exasperation over the overwhelming challenge of it all. The dynamics of power and corruption of character that are at the heart Wollstonecraft’s analysis serve to explain why change is so difficult. But it remains true that the hierarchies that keep the poor 581

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and the women down – the casual deviations from rightness – are destructive causes in society and their destruction is in turn required by justice. This is the first principle and it is indeed a revolutionary deduction.

References Abbey, R. (1999) “Back to the Future: Marriage as Friendship in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 14(3): 78–95. Bahar, S. (2002) Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy: ‘An Eve to Please Me’, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bergès, S. (2013) “Mothers and Independent Citizens: Making Sense of Wollstonecraft’s Supposed Essentialism,” Philosophical Papers 42(3): 259–84. (2013a) The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London: Routledge. Brace, L. (2019) “Family,” in S. Bergès, E. Hunt Botting and A. Coffee (eds.), The Wollstonecraftian Mind, London: Routledge. Burke, E. (2014 [1790]) Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Iain Hampsher-Monk, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coffee, A. (2012) “Mary Wollstonecraft, Freedom and the Enduring Power of Social Domination,” European Journal of Political Theory 12(2): 116–35. (2016) “Mary Wollstonecraft, Public Reason, and the Virtuous Republic,” in S. Bergès and A. Coffee (eds.), The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Favret, M. A. (2020) “Writing the French Revolution,” in N. E. Johnson and P. Keen (eds.), Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gatens, M. (1991) “‘The Oppressed State of My Sex’: Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality,” in C. Pateman and M. Lyndon Shanley (eds.), Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Godwin, W. (1987 [1798]) Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman,” ed. R. Holmes, London: Penguin Books. Gordon, L. (2005) Mary Wollstonecraft. A New Genus, London: Little, Brown. Gunther-Canada, W. (1996) “Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘Wild Wish’: Confounding Sex in the Discourse on Political Rights,” in M. J. Falco (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. (2001) Rebel Writer. Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Halldenius, L. (2007) “The Primacy of Right. On the Triad of Liberty, Equality and Virtue in Wollstonecraft’s Political Thought,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15(1): 75–99. (2013) “The Political Conditions for Free Agency. The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft,” in Q. Skinner and M. van Gelderen (eds.), Freedom and the Construction of Europe, Vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2014) “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Critique of Property. On Becoming a Thief from Principle,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 29(4): 942–57. (2015) Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism: Independence, Rights, and the Experience of Unfreedom, London: Pickering & Chatto. (2017) “Mary Wollstonecraft and Freedom as Independence,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2019) “Feminist Republicanism,” in S. Bergès, E. Hunt Botting and A. Coffee (eds.), The Wollstonecraftian Mind, London: Routledge. Hammersley, R. (2020) Republicanism. An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press. Laird, S. (2008) Mary Wollstonecraft. Philosophical Mother of Coeducation, London: Bloomsbury. Mackenzie, C. (1993) “Reason and Sensibility: The Ideal of Women’s Self-governance in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 8(4): 35–55. Meiksins Wood, E. (2012) Liberty and Property. A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment, London and New York: Verso. Nyström, P. (1980) Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Journey, Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps- och Vitterhetssamhället. Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Mary Wollstonecraft Price, R. (1991 [1789]) “A Discourse on the Love of our Country,” in D. O. Thomas (ed.), Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reuter, M. (2010) “Revolution, Virtue and Duty: Aspects of Politics, Religion and Morality in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Thought,” in M. T. Mjaaland et al. (eds.), The Body Unbound: Philosophical Perspectives on Politics, Embodiment and Religion, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. (2022) Mary Wollstonecraft, Cambridge Elements, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapiro, V. (1992) A Vindication of Political Virtue. The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Skinner, Q. (2001) “A Third Concept of liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117: 237–68. (2008) “Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power,” in C. Laborde and J. Maynor (eds.), Republicanism and Political Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, B. (1999) “Misogyny and Feminism: The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Constellations 6(4): 499–512. (2003) Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomaselli, S. (1995) “Introduction,” in S. Tomaselli (ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2016) “Reflections on Inequality, Respect, and Love in the Political Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft,” in S. Bergès and A. Coffee (eds.), The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vega, J. A. (2002) “Feminist Republicanism and the Political Perception of Gender,” in M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. Volume 2 The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wollstonecraft, M. (1987 [1796]) Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, ed. R. Holmes, London: Penguin Books. (1989 [1794]) “An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution,” in J. Todd and M. Butler (eds.), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft 6, London: William Pickering. (1992 [1788]) Mary: A Fiction, ed. J. Todd, London: Penguin Books. (1992a [1798]) The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria, ed. J. Todd, London: Penguin Books. (1995 [1790]) “A Vindication of the Rights of Men,” in S. Tomaselli (ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1995a [1792]) “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in S. Tomaselli (ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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43 REMORSE AND MORAL PROGRESS IN SOPHIE DE GROUCHY’S LETTERS ON SYMPATHY Getty L. Lustila

43.1 Introduction Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822) is best known for translating Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) into French. Her translation, which appeared in 1798, remained the foremost French edition until 1999.1 Alongside her translation, Grouchy published a series of essays, Letters on Sympathy, which look to expand on Smith’s “system of sympathy.”2 Like Smith, Grouchy argues that sympathy is the basis of morality. By understanding how sympathy functions, she claims, we can grasp the nature of moral thought and action. Importantly, Grouchy’s Letters also mark the end of the sentimentalist tradition, whose roots lie in John Locke’s science of human nature and its expansion in the work of the French sensibilists, along with the polite writings of Shaftesbury and Joseph Addison.3 According to Smith’s “system of sympathy,” our ability to sympathize with others explains how we develop a concern for their happiness. If our sympathy is cultivated, this concern extends to include all of humanity. But there are limits to what sympathy can accomplish in terms of motivating us. This sympathy-produced motive to benefit humanity is quite weak, being easily overpowered by the motive to act on behalf of more parochial concerns. Sympathy also contributes to faction by reinforcing the bonds we have to those near and dear over the interests of distant others. For instance, the sympathy we have for our friend explains why we hope for their success and wish failure upon their competition. To function in a morally beneficial way, the thought goes, sympathy therefore requires assistance. For Grouchy this assistance is found in the attitude of remorse. We experience remorse whenever we harm another, even if doing so was seemingly justified. Our remorse weakens the undue confidence we have in our own judgments and limits any attempt to license harming others for the sake of some local good. By recognizing these limits, we thereby awaken our “sentiment of natural equality,” which grounds just norms and institutions (Grouchy 2019: 66). Moral progress occurs when remorse checks our norms and institutions by ensuring that they are made coincident with natural equality. This chapter is divided into five Sections. First, I examine how, for Grouchy, sympathy gives rise to a concern for humanity. Second, I explore the complications of personal sympathy (i.e., bonds of love, friendship, or party) that result from enthusiasm, and which bolster self-conceit and faction. Third, I discuss Grouchy’s account of remorse and show how it addresses her concerns about self-conceit. Fourth, I illustrate how, for Grouchy, remorse amplifies the sentiment of natural equality, which grounds our moral norms and helps to obstruct faction. Lastly, I argue that 584

DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-50

Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy

Grouchy’s moral philosophy is progressive, and that she sees remorse as the principal engine of moral progress.

43.2  Extending Our Concern Grouchy refers to sympathy as “the disposition [we have] to feel in a way similar to others” (2019: 59). There are two aspects to sympathy: sensitivity and reflection. We are naturally sensitive to displays of pleasure and pain.4 When we witness someone fall on a patch of ice, hurt themselves, and begin to cry, we register the person as “in pain” and experience pain ourselves. Our pain is short-lived, and perhaps only results in our wincing at the sight of their fall. Still, from here, reflection abstracts from this particular experience, which leads us to exercise caution when we walk, or ensures that we clear away any ice from our property lest it cause anyone to fall. For Grouchy, the proper functioning of sympathy then depends on educating our sensitivity and reflection. In this section, I discuss this process of education, the aim of which is to ensure that we develop a concern for humanity.5 According to Grouchy, “sensitivity” is the disposition to be impacted by the sight of another’s expression of pain or pleasure. Two factors determine one’s sensitivity: first, the extent to which one is “acquainted with the symptoms of suffering”; second, the scope of one’s “sensibility, imagination, and memory” (Grouchy 2019: 61). The first factor influences our ability to recognize a certain display of emotion as an instance of pleasure or pain, while the second alters the vivacity of this impression we receive from experience. So, if you have previously fallen and hurt yourself, seeing someone cry after having fallen on ice will have a greater impact on you than if you have never before fallen. In this way, shared experiences and the ability to imaginatively place ourselves in another person’s situation determine our degree of sensitivity to their pleasure or pain, and thus to our capacity of sympathy. Though we are naturally sensitive creatures, Grouchy claims, there is much which “tend[s] to lead sensitivity astray” (2019: 63). Children are taught to mind “their charms, their accomplishments, their employments,” and their own success (Grouchy 2019: 65). Yet, success often comes at another’s expense, and so we “tacitly become habituated to count the misfortunes of others as a personal gift” (Grouchy 2019: 93). Seeing another in pain may bring us relief, or even joy, if we consider them to be our competition. For Grouchy, this result is an aberration of nature, the responsibility of which lies with our norms and institutions. The very institutions meant to provide us with the conditions for our security and happiness often foster division and resentment, which dulls our sensitivity to the suffering of others. The aim of moral education, for her, is therefore to combat this dulling of sensitivity.6 How can education properly address this dulling? According to Grouchy, the solution lies in appreciating how our institutions negatively reinforce certain aspects of our nature, particularly our self-conceit. For instance, we experience pleasure from “feeling our own strength,” or exercising our capacities (Grouchy 2019: 96). Improperly curbed, children “acquire an exaggerated opinion of their own strength…childhood self-love…become[s] in them the source of all the mind’s defects and the heart’s vices” (Grouchy 2019: 97). In this way, self-conceit poisons our sensitivity. An educator can help to check our self-conceit by giving us the resources to develop our reflection: “It is reflection, which, when we see someone oppressed by pain, reminds us that we, too, are subject to that same tyrant” (Grouchy 2019: 67). Reflection extends our sensitivity, resulting in “an active and permanent sentiment out of the humanity of our souls,” which obstructs our self-conceit (Grouchy 2019: 68). While education sharpens our reflection, however, this process of extending sympathy “begins in the crib,” (2019: 70). In this state, our happiness is dependent on those around us, a condition that disposes us to be concerned for their fate alongside ours. At first, the expansion of this concern 585

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is the “result of habit, and does not require any special or reflective attention to our own interest” (Grouchy 2019: 71). Over time, we appreciate the ways in which others also impact our happiness. Our sympathy extends to those on whom we “rely for help and support” and to that company we find “fitting and agreeable” (Ibid.). Gradually, we are made to be “sensitive to the sufferings and needs of humanity” (Grouchy 2019: 115). Reflection then becomes second nature: those who “acquired the habit of always extending or generalizing their ideas never stop doing so” (Ibid.). Education cements this habit. Even if we are successful in cultivating a concern for humanity (“general sympathy”), however, it will be weak when considered alongside the concern we have for friends and loved ones (“personal sympathy”).7 After all, our connection to humanity is governed by abstract sentiments rather than the “sweet affection” of friendship and love (Grouchy 2019: 77). This problem extends to personal sympathy. For Grouchy, bonds of personal sympathy are the result of enthusiasm, which makes them impervious to considerations of humanity. It follows, first, that local concerns will override remote ones and, second, that sympathy reinforces parochialism and instills undue confidence in us about our own aims. This self-conceit therefore leads us to conflate our interests with the general interest. To address this issue, Grouchy argues we must cultivate our sense of remorse. Before examining remorse, however, we must first turn to consider the threat of enthusiasm and personal sympathy.

43.3  Personal Sympathy and Enthusiasm According to Grouchy, the “multitude” are “impervious” to what “does not directly bear on their own existence and happiness” (2019: 67). The average person recognizes that people to whom they bear no relation suffer and rejoice, and that these people’s lives are of equal value to their own; still, these observations are insufficient to “forc[e] our compassion into action” (Grouchy 2019: 77). In other words, our concern for humanity is no match for our more local concerns. For Grouchy, the way forward for most people is to cultivate their personal sympathy, or “intimate ties” of friendship and love; in so doing, one becomes “more refined and more prone to feeling” regarding other people (Ibid.). Consider someone who becomes receptive to the issues facing working parents after having a child of their own. The love they have for their own child thereby extends this concern to others. The problem, for Grouchy, lies in the nature of personal sympathy, which makes transitioning from ties of intimacy to a more reflective concern for humanity difficult. Personal sympathy is initially based in a perception of beauty and merit (Grouchy 2019: 78–79). We desire intimacy with those whom we see as beautiful or admirable. Our perceptions are amplified by enthusiasm, or the tendency of the mind to “represent to itself…all the pleasures or all the pains we would gain from a particular situation, or from a certain person and our relationship with him or her” (2019: 79).8 Our mind “bring[s] together in one instant what should, in reality, span months, years, and sometimes an entire lifetime” (Ibid.). We come to treat our friend as the standard of beauty and admirability. In this way, enthusiasm presents its object in an “exaggerated” way, involving “error” on a personal and collective level (Ibid.). On a personal level, Grouchy uses the example of being seduced by the charms of a gallant (2019: 84).9 On a collective level, she refers to the phenomenon of crowds, or interest groups. Crowds make it easy for people to have the “dispositions of their soul” manipulated for foolish or inhumane ends (Grouchy 2019: 100). Part of what makes crowds compelling is they proceed with self-certainty, which appeals to that aspect of us “weary of doubt” (Ibid.). The desire to be free of doubt leads us to adopt views we would shun or avoid expressing out of “ridicule or danger,” so long as they are shared by others. This willingness to give ourselves to “uncertain ideas or sentiments” is also explained by a “need to be moved” (Grouchy 2019: 100; 75). Once we find 586

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ourselves in a crowd, we find sympathetic concordance, which grants us access to sentiments we would not otherwise be able to experience. Personal enthusiasm also plays a role in explaining our connection to a crowd. For Grouchy, we are typically linked to a crowd through a charismatic leader, who we tend to “vest with supernatural powers” (2019: 101). For this leader, “it is enough to use a few key words to inspire a sort of worship and enthusiasm through the grand thoughts the words suggest” (Ibid.). They put “together words in such a way as to replace reason and thinking,” leaving their audience with the impression that they have been liberated from falsehood (Ibid.). This perceived liberation plays into our self-conceit: “we are vain…about seeing – even through someone else’s eyes – what others did not” (Ibid.). As a result, Grouchy claims, we develop an exaggerated attachment to our compatriots in the crowd, which ends up gradually driving a wedge between the general interest and those of our own particular group. The most troubling consequence of these attachments to party is that we are apt to cause harm when another’s interests are not coincident with our own. In this way, enthusiasm is a primary cause of injustice, which Grouchy defines as a “preference to local and particular interests over general ones” (2019: 133). This preference fosters divisions between people by providing them with incentives to dominate others (Grouchy 2019: 137).10 If one group succeeds in attaining a position of privilege, their interests will come to be seen as representative of the general interest. This conflation gives members the justification to pursue conformity from others and to harm them when doing so is necessary for its establishment. In so doing, the partisan then dulls their sensitivity, and gifts themselves the means of “deceiving their own heart” by believing this dulling is merited for some end (Grouchy 2019: 142). Let us take stock: through education, Grouchy argues that we can extend our sympathy beyond our narrow sphere of concern to include the good of humanity. Still, these sentiments of humanity stand little chance against those of love, friendship, and party. More concerning, for Grouchy, is that these latter sentiments can be a product of enthusiasm, making them impervious to abstract concerns like the good of humanity. As a result, there are limits to how far a person’s sympathy can naturally extend. Their identity is ultimately tied to their bonds of intimacy, but these bonds give rise to faction, bolster self-conceit, and generate spurious justifications for us to harm others. The solution to this problem, Grouchy claims, lies in developing a proper sense of remorse. By cultivating our remorse, we thereby increase our receptivity to the suffering of others and thereby weaken our self-conceit.

43.4  Making Room for Remorse Enthusiasm jeopardizes our moral development by dulling us to the suffering of those with whom we are not already bound in personal sympathy. However, we are averse to the suffering of others; an aversity “sharper still when we are the voluntary, or even the involuntary, cause of this unhappiness” (Grouchy 2019: 107). The pain we feel on account of causing harm to another, either voluntarily or involuntarily, is what Grouchy refers to as remorse. Unlike other unpleasant sensations, remorse remains after “the painful memory of the harm we caused is no longer distinct in our minds” (Grouchy 2019: 108). The resiliency of remorse pertains to the imagination: harms cannot be undone, so the imagination cements a relation between the harm and ourselves, fortifying our sense of remorse (Grouchy 2019: 109). Not surprisingly, our fear of remorse is a chief motive against vice (Ibid.).11 That said, Grouchy neither expects nor wishes that we escape remorse altogether. Each of us is guilty of at least “a small misdeed” and can consequently expect to be saddled with some degree of remorse in our lives, a fact that she finds fortunate rather than tragic (2019: 109). For Grouchy, we should cultivate our capacity for remorse, which, in turn, plays two roles in our 587

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moral development. First, our experience of remorse is the foundation of our idea of moral evil: “an act that is harmful to others and which is prohibited by reason” (Grouchy 2019: 111). Second, remorse checks our natural self-conceit, which clears a path for the sentiment of natural equality and, in time, moral progress. I leave these latter two points for Sections 43.4 and 43.5 and focus here on the attitude of remorse itself. As discussed in Section 43.1, reflection leads us to consider how our actions impact those beyond our narrow sphere (Grouchy 2019: 109). The cultivation of reflection and the education of sentiment leads to our development of general sympathy. As children, we are concerned with the good of those on whom we depend for our happiness; with education, this concern can extend to all of humanity. Consequently, our remorse extends as well. Any harm we produce, either voluntarily or involuntarily, gives rise to remorse. Once we reach a stage of maturity, we treat even the smallest harms as worthy of remorse. The only justification for causing these harms, we conclude, is if by doing so we create a benefit for others. Eventually, we come to accept the view that “any good or evil that reason approves or disapproves of corresponds to that which is useful or harmful to humanity” (Grouchy 2019: 111).12 In time, this principle is imprinted on our heart and takes the form of our conscience (Grouchy 2019: 112). Whenever we are tempted to sacrifice the general happiness for the “promise of a private good…the idea of evil tells us that remorse will follow” if we proceed (Ibid.). In this way, there is no need to “weigh or calculate the consequences of doing so” to awaken this sense of remorse (Ibid.). Prior to calculation, we know that if we were to sacrifice the happiness of others for our own sake, we should experience remorse. Importantly, Grouchy is not saying that moral judgment is made easy by remorse taking the form of conscience – her claim is that remorse is not fooled by calculation since the two function separately: self-conceit cannot argue us out of feelings of remorse altogether. It follows that we experience remorse even in cases where, given the scope of possible actions, we have acted rightly. In these cases, our sense of remorse “will be softened by the stronger satisfaction of having prevented the more serious harm,” but will still persist (Grouchy 2019: 111). Satisfaction does not weaken our remorse but ensures that our overall mental state is bearable by reminding us that we have acted well. Whether we attend to remorse or to satisfaction is then a function of our character. Grouchy explores two different “characters” in this context to illustrate the contrast in response: first, are those whose “souls are easily moved” and second are those “whose sensibility is deeper and more reasoned” (2019: 113). Each of these characters interacts differently with their sense of remorse, which gives Grouchy the opportunity to examine the complexities of its role in morality (Ibid.). The “easily moved” person is apt to be led astray by their remorse, which they experience as overwhelming – this experience prompts them to act “rashly” and without regard to what is called for by a particular situation (Grouchy 2019: 113). In this way, those easily moved lack orderliness in their decision-making, resulting in actions that are foolish or dangerous. In contrast, the person of reasoned sensibility possesses a remorse that is “less fallible and more efficacious” (Ibid.). From here, we might conclude that Grouchy views the “easily moved” person with suspicion. Still, she also finds fault with the sensible person, whose orderliness and “stubborn determination to seek the best” leads them to “neglect the good” of those people whose interests are thereby sacrificed for what is best (Ibid.). For her, neither of these characters should be taken as an ideal – each has an important role to play. Grouchy places these character’s roles in a political context to illustrate her point, noting that “the large number of men who have only superiors or equals” should be among those who are easily moved while “those who rule and govern” should be people of more reasoned sensibility (2019: 113). For Grouchy, the former type of remorse pushes us to consider the suffering of individuals, while the latter draws our attention to the overall balance of suffering. In this way, legislators are 588

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to make all-things-considered judgments about policy that impact the suffering of others, while the rest of us attend to the suffering of those with whom we encounter and remind the legislators of its existence. On Grouchy’s view then, remorse is a self-correcting mechanism: sensible remorse recommends we act in way to reduce overall suffering; rash remorse guards against the selfcertain satisfaction which comes from good all-considered policies by reminding us of the continued existence of suffering. It follows that, for Grouchy, remorse obstructs self-conceit, which is instrumental to our moral development. Despite self-conceit being “only weakly condemned and weakly punished by morality and opinion” it produces violence and “hidden injustice or oppression” (Grouchy 2019: 114). She identifies three of the four “impulses toward injustice” as being rooted in self-conceit (2019: 133). The pervasiveness of self-conceit makes it a formidable foe. Remorse pressures its acceptance by ensuring we cannot silence the suffering of others, regardless of whether we view their suffering as reasonable. Remorse forces us to address the suffering party as an equal; we recognize that we could also undergo “an unanticipated reversal of fortune,” or be harmed (Grouchy 2019: 69). This experience of remorse places us in a position to heed the sentiment of natural equality, to which I turn in Section 43.4. So, according to Grouchy, remorse is central to our moral lives. While our fear of remorse is an important motive to act virtuously, our aim should not be to avoid remorse altogether, which we could never hope to achieve. After all, we feel remorse even in cases where we have acted rightly; the purpose of this experience is not to burden us with unending shame but for us to appreciate that we have caused another person to suffer. To ignore this suffering would be, Grouchy claims, to “abort our precious gems of sensitivity,” which otherwise make our face “turn pale at the sight of suffering” and our “heart brim with indignation for injustice” (2019: 65). The remorseful person guards against the deleterious influence of self-conceit and is motivated to address the suffering of their fellow beings, even if this is an unending task: their guide, Grouchy argues, is the sentiment of natural equality.

43.5  The Sentiment of Natural Equality If we do not properly attend to our sense of remorse, Grouchy claims, the “oppressive barriers, raised between man and man from need, strength, and vanity,” will go unaddressed and the humanity that “secretly pleads for them [those weak and unfortunate] from the depths” of our heart is swamped by self-conceit (2019: 66). In this way, for Grouchy, remorse “awak[ens] in us the sentiment of natural equality” (Ibid.). When this sentiment is given audience, we abhor oppression, injustice, and “vicious institutions” that give “permission to look upon the evil of which they are the source and for which they become the excuse, as inevitable, necessary, politically indifferent, or even useful” (Grouchy 2019: 142). More than putting us in a position to detest injustice, the sentiment of natural equality gives us the resources to reshape our institutions in a way that recognizes equality and lays the groundwork for moral progress. With the assistance of remorse, this progress becomes actual. Though Grouchy never defines the “sentiment of natural equality” it seemingly refers to our natural abhorrence of cruelty, oppression, and inequality. For her, this sentiment grounds our respect for others, while rules of justice guide our respect to ensure equality is realized (Grouchy 2019: 120–21). However, these rules are only motivationally efficacious if they recognizably contribute to the common good. That said, Grouchy argues, our “vicious institutions…have isolated men from each other, making probity and justice useless and alien to them by annihilating all their advantages and any reasons to act on them” (2019: 152). This problem, according to her, is clearest in the case of property laws, which exacerbate inequality by allowing some people to accumulate “oppressive riches” under the guise of a “sacred title of right,” while others are left in a state of 589

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poverty and destitution (Grouchy 2019: 121).13 Without the reformation of these laws, Grouchy warns that people will over time be made “strangers to each other,” unable to see one another as equals (2019: 150). If people are unable to see one another as equals, for Grouchy, they will have little regard for the common good. The wealthy will view property laws simply as an instrument of their own “greed,” allowing them to protect their “heaps of gold…the smallest and least illegitimate of which probably has, in secret, a thousand victims to its name” (Grouchy 2019: 150–51). Meanwhile, the multitude, who cannot hope to attain what the wealthy possess, will consider property laws as the tools of their oppression. To both parties, these laws will then appear absurd and without substantial justification “established, apparently for reasons of utility…preserved as if they were sacred prerogatives and properties” (Grouchy 2019: 151). As a result, Grouchy points out, a state of nature will arise in civil society: the rich and powerful “will oppress the other [worker] nearly without remorse, while the other will cheat him…even believing he is in this way bringing justice to himself ” (2019: 152). Notice the importance of remorse here. Both the powerful and the less powerful worker will find it difficult to feel remorse for harming the other, even in cases where the harm is caused intentionally, because each is insensitive to the suffering of the other. As discussed in Section 43.1, for Grouchy, even though our sensitivity to the pleasure and pains of others is natural, it can be obscured by prejudice, enthusiasm, or a warped system of values. The result of this obstruction is not only a deficit of remorse but the sense that one is justified in causing harm to another. According to Grouchy, this disturbing situation is the fault of our institutions, which separates us from one another; the only solution is to find a way to awaken our sentiment of natural equality so we can establish laws based in the common good. The first step to awakening this sentiment is to cultivate our remorse. Without remorse we are left with those feelings of humanity that produce only a weak motive to relieve the suffering of those with whom we are not already bonded; a motive that is easily overcome by local or factional concerns, especially when these concerns are reinforced by our institutions. Still, while the wealthy and the less fortunate find it difficult to experience remorse when it comes to each other, their remorse is never extinguished altogether. In fact, as discussed in Section 43.3, Grouchy thinks most people are prone to this rash form of remorse. It is only the more cultivated, the wealthy and powerful, whose remorse abstracts from individual suffering. Still, it is this abstraction that enables the cultivated to access the common good; provided their vanity is somehow checked, remorse gives rise to the sentiment of natural equality, which brings us to the second step in this process. According to Grouchy, the vanity of the powerful could be checked if “all appointments were granted by a general choice and free election” and that, once appointed, “one were bound by law and forced to act in according with it (2019: 137).” The former policy change would then correct for the “sanctioning [of ] heredity rights,” which “enable[s] presumptuous mediocrity to rise… [that] becomes tyrannical if it is not established and limited by general interest,” that latter change would help to reverse the current state, whereby, “man is dominated by man rather than laws” (Grouchy 2019: 136–37). Eventually, this change would remove the “corrupting means that are too often necessary for success” and the motivation to commit “injustices inspired by ambition” (Grouchy 2019: 137). Instead of pursuing “exaggerated rewards” and those “intoxicating honors” of vanity, Grouchy argues that the powerful will seek the “true glory” that arises from service to the interest of humanity; once their conscience is liberated, they will begin to see others as their equals (2019: 152; 138). Once the sentiment of natural equality is awakened in the powerful, the institutional changes necessary to realize this equality can commence; law can cease to be an obstacle to equality and become its instrument. Grouchy stresses that without the influence of our institutions, “reasonable 590

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laws” would be sufficient to strengthen our conscience against the temptation to commit injustice (2019: 145). By removing any incentive for the powerful to dominate others, and by rewarding “probity and virtue,” laws that were previously “oppressive chains” to the citizens can be reformed in light of the general interest (Grouchy 2019: 151; 136). The sentiment of natural equality helps to guide this process by informing our shared conception of justice, which ensures there is equal consideration in both the formation and enforcement of law. This sentiment lays the foundation for respect between citizens, provided this equality is realized and that people can access the goods necessary for happiness. Grouchy cautions that progress will take more than just awakening the powerful to the equal worth of the multitude. The vanity of the powerful requires checking, thus her recommendation of free elections. More importantly, however, the reasonable form of remorse to which the powerful are disposed will also need to be curbed. Even a policy that is conducive to the general interest will have its victims. Without the input of a rasher form of remorse, the powerful will remain satisfied with its implementation; after all, crafting policy that benefits the public is all that is expected as a legislator. In this case, the powerful are at risk of dulling their sensitivity to the pain of those who are adversely impacted by overall good legislation. It is the role of the multitude, whose remorse is easily moved, to remind the powerful of this suffering, even if it appears insignificant. According to Grouchy, a dynamic tension exists between the two forms of remorse, as well as the two classes of society. Provided that each can perform its role, the sentiment of natural equality will be felt by all, thereby providing the tools necessary to reform our norms and our institutions. Still, Grouchy does not provide a sketch of a well-functioning system of morals or politics in her Letters. Her aim there is to criticize existing institutions and ways of thought. Nonetheless, Grouchy lays the foundation for a better society in the Letters. The only obstacle for us pursuing this end is the courage necessary to undertake this process. In the next section, I explore the process by which this reform is meant to take place. In so doing, I consider the final work of Grouchy’s husband, Condorcet. I claim that, for Grouchy, moral norms are provisional, and remorse is the engine of moral progress.

43.6  Moral Progress Given the centrality of remorse to Grouchy’s moral theory, one might worry that her account is forced into the following problem. Enforcing a norm or law always produces some pain, meaning that remorse is always fitting. In light of this fact, we can either hold, first, that no laws or norms are authoritative in the face of sincere remorse since they cause suffering to at least someone; or, second, that we should enforce these norms despite our remorse. In other words, should we retreat into irony or grin and bear it as we knowingly cause others to suffer? In this final section, I forward the view that Grouchy adopts a progressive theory of morals, which treats the content of moral norms as provisional and their authority as subject to change. On this view, recognition of suffering is the engine of change by which we come to see our existing norms as increasingly inadequate considering future needs. This progressive theory of morals is also presented in Condorcet’s work, Sketch for the Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) (Bergès 2018). Sandrine Bergès has argued that Grouchy played an extensive role in the completion of the Sketch. In this work, Condorcet presents a stadial theory of the human mind, proceeding from tribal society to the future of humanity, where he concludes that “the perfectibility of man is infinite” (Condorcet 2012: 146). It is in these final sections of the Sketch where Bergès claims that Grouchy exercised the most influence. In support of this interpretation, Grouchy’s Letters begin with a comment on the perfectibility of the mind (Grouchy 2019: 57). She hoped that the Letters would awaken our humanity by exposing the 591

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obstacles to our moral improvement. In this way, they are a companion piece to the Sketch, complementing its social philosophy with a moral theory. But how do we make sense of perfectibility and its connection with remorse and the progress of morals? First, it is important to distinguish “perfectibility” from perfectionism, in both an Ancient and Modern sense.14 Grouchy and Condorcet use the term perfectibility in manner similar to Rousseau, who defines it as that innate, “almost unlimited faculty,” which “successively develops all the others, and allows us” and helps to explain our ability to exceed our natural capacities (Rousseau 1997: 141).15 For Rousseau, this capacity is responsible for our greatest virtues and our worst vices; our institutions determine whether this perfectibility gives rise to liberation or enslavement. As we have seen, Grouchy also maintains that existing institutions have a deleterious effect on our humanity: “far from guarding man against his own weakness, often they would take advantage of it in order to corrupt him” (Grouchy 2019: 145). The hope, for her and for Condorcet, is to reshape our institutions so that they enable the proper development of our sentiments while also correcting for those vices that result from our nature. For Grouchy, we should treat our norms as perfectible as well: treating their content as open to revision and their authority as conditional. In this way, our norms can track our moral development. We ensure this concordance by experiencing proper remorse. Consider Grouchy’s appeal to the reader on behalf of all women: “unhappy, especially, [is] the sex who one moment is gifted by nature with its brightest gifts, but for whom nature soon turns into a cruel mother” (2019: 154–55). If we are properly remorseful, we have no choice but to recognize the unhappiness felt by women. This recognition gives us reason to revise gender norms. While revising these norms will lead to instability, this fluidity allows for the innovation needed for norm revision. We cannot predict or control this process: we can only provide the conditions for change to occur and for hearts to follow. Her hope is that this process will continue, from gender to class; from religion to occupation, as we become ever happier and freer. In this chapter, I have argued that, for Grouchy, the cultivation of our sense of remorse is central to moral progress. Our openness to the suffering of others allows us to recognize the impact that our conduct has on them. Life teaches us that people suffer for reasons outside of their control and that moral desert is worth little in a world ruled by fortune.16 As a result, we should exercise due consideration in our conduct and aspire for humility in our judgments and our endorsement of moral norms. Grouchy argues that the trappings of self-conceit have little influence over us once we are sincerely committed to our moral development. With some degree of effort, we can begin to see ourselves and the world around us, as a work-in-progress to which we are obligated to positively contribute. In so doing, we will enjoy the highest degree of happiness afforded to us in this life. With this chapter, I hope to lay the groundwork for two further lines of research. The first would explore the connection between Grouchy’s progressive moral theory and her policy proposals in the Letters. A point of contact worth considering is her view of punishment, where her views about remorse, the applicability of moral norms, and the validity of penal institutions meet. A second line of research would consider the relation between Condorcet’s Sketch and Grouchy’s Letters. Philosophers are late to considering the Sketch to be alongside other works of philosophical anthropology and social philosophy from the period. The prospect of treating the Sketch and the Letters as a combined defense of a unique theory of moral and political philosophy is both notable and worth pursuing.17

Notes 1 Grouchy’s translation of the TMS was replaced by Bizioux et al. 1999. 2 Smith refers to his own moral theory as a “system of sympathy” (Smith 1985: 7.3.1.4).

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Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy 3 The concept of “sentimentalism” is a fraught one, for which there is little agreement. Questions about whether and to what extent Grouchy is properly labeled a “sentimentalist” moral thinker therefore go beyond the scope of this chapter. What can be said is that Smith’s “system of sympathy” is a subset of sentimentalism – a school of thought to which Smith considers himself and Hume adherents – and that Grouchy’s Letters operate within this system, regardless of her disagreements with the particulars of Smith’s moral theory. 4 The idea of sensitivity (sensibilité) played a crucial role in the eighteenth-century French philosophical and scientific context. Grouchy’s methodological commitments are in line with those of the French sentimental empiricists (e.g., Georges Buffon, Denis Diderot, and Étienne Condillac). For more on this tradition, see: Riskin 2002. 5 Much has been written on Grouchy’s account of sympathy, the relation it bears to Smith’s view in the TMS, and how she means for it to serve as a foundation for morality. My treatment of sympathy has benefitted from reading: Dawson 1991; Forget 2001, 2003; Tegos 2013; Malherbe 2015; Bréban and Dellemotte 2016. 6 Moral education is a central topic in Grouchy’s Letters. Many of these discussions center on a critique of status quo methods of education. Rather than instill in us a concern for humanity, Grouchy argues that education inflames our vanity and desire for distinction. Even moral education proceeds in a didactic fashion, presenting children with “isolated precepts in no particular order,” and leaving them with no better understanding of how these precepts relate to our nature (Ibid., 116). Grouchy’s comments on education will surely remind the audience of similar ones made by Rousseau, in Èmile (Book One), and Mary Wollstonecraft, in the Vindication of the Rights of Women (Chapter 2), as well as Smith’s discussion of casuistry in the TMS (Smith 1985: VII.iv.33). 7 The idea of humanity plays a central role in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. The concept of humanity has its roots in Cicero’s De Officiis. To possess humanity, for Cicero, is to appreciate the obligations which bind us to our fellow beings, which acknowledge our existing in the “fellowship of the human race” (Cicero 1991: 60). Readers who are familiar with Hume’s moral writings will also notice a degree of similarity between him and Grouchy in their discussions of sympathy and humanity. Evidence suggests that Grouchy was unfamiliar with Hume’s work so the parallel is most likely coincidental. The presence of the idea of humanity in Grouchy’s Letters says more about the ubiquity of Cicero and the importance of his writings during this period. 8 Enthusiasm is a central concern for figures writing in the early modern period. Much of this concern developed in the context of the wars of religion and debates about tolerance, though some of this uneasiness proceeded merely from observations about the structure of human psychology. In both cases, Locke is a key source for discussions about enthusiasm (see (Locke 1975, 2.33, 4.19; Jolley 2003; Corneau 2011, 141–68; Tabb 2018; Anstey 2019). Locke’s account of enthusiasm was adopted by a number of figures, such as Voltaire, who discussed both enthusiasm and fanaticism in his Philosophical Dictionary. (See Voltaire 1901: IV.238–44; V.5–30.) 9 Grouchy’s discussion of gallantry illustrates a concern for the experience of women in eighteenthcentury France. This concern is expressed in her discussions of love and marriage (Grouchy 2019: 83–85, 139–41). Consider her closing comments in the Letters: Unhappy, especially, the sex who one moment is gifted by nature with its brightest gifts, but for whom nature soon turns into a cruel mother. He must not neglect or ignore you, for he will spend half his life with you, and (if it is possible) forget that enchanted cup that the hand of time spills for him in the middle of their journey! (Ibid., 154–55) For more on this, see: Bergès 2015a, 2018. 10 For more on Grouchy on the problem of domination, see: Bergès 2015b and Tegos 2019. As many scholars have aimed to show, concerns about domination in the context of political and social life gave rise to a renewed form of republicanism in the early modern period. The chief source of this thought in France was François Fénelon, and, later on, Rousseau, who was also responding to contemporary liberal thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu. Women played an important role in the British and French movements during this period. For more on the French context of republicanism (see Ball 2019; Bergès 2019; Coffee 2019; Green 2019, 2021). For an alternative perspective on Grouchy as a potential founding figure of liberalism, see Schliesser 2017b. 11 I do not discuss Smith’s view of remorse in this chapter. While Smith mentions remorse at various points throughout the TMS, he thinks of its role in morality differently than does Grouchy. For Smith, remorse works in conjunction with our norms rather than puts pressure on us to rethink them. There is space in

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Getty L. Lustila Smith’s theory to expand the function of remorse – Grouchy does precisely that – but he seems largely uninterested in doing so. Still, Smith’s analysis of remorse surely had an impact on Grouchy: It [remorse] is made up from the sense of impropriety of past conduct; of grief for the effects of it; of pity of those will suffer by it; and of the dread and terror of punishment from the consciousness of the justly-provoked resentment of all rational creatures. (Smith 1985: TMS 2.2.2.3.) According to Grouchy, I argue, our experience of remorse – particularly that of grief and pity – forces us to revisit our ideas about propriety, provided that their application results in the suffering of others. 12 (Grouchy 2019: 111). Grouchy seems committed to utilitarianism in the Letters. When she introduces her view of the moral good, she contrasts it with Vauvenargues’ account, which states that “moral good and evil refer to whatever is more useful or harmful to humanity in general” (2019: 111). Notably, Grouchy points out, “these two definitions [Vauvenargues’ account of moral good and evil and her own] are fundamentally the same” (Ibid.). The only difference is that Vauvenargues’ account seems to preclude ordinary people from partaking in the idea of moral good because “ordinary reason and conscience are not enough to understand good and evil from a universal perspective” (Ibid.). As there is little known about Vauvenargues’ work, it is difficult to judge the validity of Grouchy’s criticism. Delving further into this topic goes beyond the aim of this chapter. 13 Grouchy’s comments on economic theory and policy show the influence of Turgot, Quesnay, and Condorcet. For each of these figures, wealth is problematically concentrated in the church, aristocracy, and the royal family. Under these conditions, most people cannot attain the resources necessary for safe and secure lives, removing the incentive to produce and thereby contribute to the nation’s growth. Without such an incentive, the thought goes, growth is impossible. That said, Grouchy’s concern is less with the lack of economic progress, than with the poverty produced by this stagnation. In this sense, she mirrors Smith’s concern in the Wealth of Nations. 14 There are two species of perfectionism: human nature perfectionism (HP) and objective goods perfectionism (OP). For HP, we are morally required to cultivate natural human capacities to the highest degree. If humans are by nature sociable, we are required to become maximally sociable or to perfect our sociability. For OP, there is no such appeal to human nature; instead, one is required to cultivate certain goods that are seen as objectively valuable (e.g., a disposition to be just). Both HP and OP enjoyed a great deal of popularity in modern moral philosophy, though my discussion here focuses on HP. For more on perfectionism, see Wall 2017. 15 Rousseau 1997: 141. Notably, Condorcet does not mention Rousseau when discussing the “doctrine of the indefinite perfectibility of the human race,” noting instead that “Turgot, Price, and Priestley were the first and most brilliant apostles [of this view]” (Condorcet 2012: 102). Given Rousseau’s second Discourse was published in 1755, years prior to Priestley’s Essays on the First Principles of Government (1768), Turgot’s Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (1770), and Price’s Two Tracts on Civil Liberty (1778), it seems odd that Condorcet would resist making note of him. Then again, there are no references to Rousseau in the Sketch, despite his dominance in late eighteenth-century French intellectual life and the enormous influence of his work on the Letters. 16 Luck has a central place in Grouchy’s view of the moral world. This emphasis is seen most in her examination of tragedy and its value for moral development (Grouchy 2019: 72–76). Considering this discussion would take us too far afield given the aim of this chapter. I will simply note that this topic is underexplored in the literature for two principal reasons. First, because discussions about the relationship between tragedy and the cultivation of virtue were prominent in eighteenth-century France (seen in the work of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean Racine, Rousseau, and others). Second, due to the role that luck plays in Smith’s moral theory. 17 Thank you to Lisa Shapiro and Karen Detlefsen for their tireless work in organizing this handbook, and for choosing to include this chapter in its contents. Thanks to Sandrine Bergès and Eric Schliesser, whose masterful 2019 translation of Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy made writing this chapter a good deal easier. Thanks to the New Narratives in Philosophy Early career working (2020–2021) group, for their comments on this chapter, for sharing their research and for helping to foster a community amidst a global pandemic. Thank you to Alyssa Stockdale, Alex Yen, Taru Auranne, and Malin Lalich for providing comments on this chapter at various stages in the process. And thank you to the students in my Spring 2021 Modern Philosophy course, who forced me to think more deeply about many aspects of Grouchy’s thought. This chapter is dedicated to them.

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Bibliography Anstey, P. R. (2019) “Locke, The Quakers, and Enthusiasm,” Intellectual History Review 29(2): 199–217. Ball, P. (2019) “Alternate Currents in Women’s Republicanism During the French Revolution,” Australasian Philosophical Review 3(4): 392–402. Bergès, S. (2015a) “Is Motherhood Compatible with Political Participation? Sophie de Grouchy’s Care Based Republicanism,” Ethical Theory and Practice 18: 47–60. (2015b) “Sophie de Grouchy on the Cost of Domination in the Letters on Sympathy and Two Anonymous Articles in Le Republicain,” The Monist 98: 102–12. (2016) “Wet Nursing and Political Participation: The Republican Approaches to Motherhood of Mary Wollstonecraft and Sophie de Grouchy,” in S. Bergès and A. Coffee (eds.), The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 201–18. (2018) “Family, Gender, and Progress: Sophie de Grouchy and Her Exclusion in the Publication of Condorcet’s Sketch of Human Progress,” Journal of the History of Ideas 79(2): 267–83. (2019) “Revolution and Republicanism: Women Political Philosophers of Late Eighteenth Century France and Why They Matter,” Australasian Philosophy Review 3(4): 350–70. Bizioux et al. (1999) Théorie des Sentiments Moraux, trans. M. Bizioux, C. Gautier and J.-F. Pradeau, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bréban, L. and J. Dellemotte. (2017) “From One form of Sympathy to Another: Sophie de Grouchy’s Translation of and Commentary on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments,” History of Political Economy 49: 667–707. Cicero, M. T. (1991) On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins, New York, Cambridge University Press. Coffee, A. (2019) “Women and the History of Republicanism,” Australasian Philosophical Review 3(4): 443–51. Condorcet (2012) Condorcet: Political Writings, ed. S. Lukes and N. Urbinati, New York: Cambridge University Press. Corneau, S. (2011) Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dawson, D. (1991) “Is Sympathy So Surprising? Adam Smith and the French Fictions of Sympathy,” ­Eighteenth-Century Life 15: 147–62. Forget, E. L. (2001) “Cultivating Sympathy: Sophie Condorcet’s Letters on Sympathy,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 23(3): 319–37. (2003) “Evocations of Sympathy: Sympathetic Imagery in Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and Physiology,” History of Political Economy 35: 282–308. Green, K. (2019) “On the Philosophical Significance of Eighteenth Century Female ‘Republicans’,” Australasian Philosophy Review 3(4): 371–80. (2021) “The Rights of Women and the Equal Rights of Men.” Political Theory 49(3): 403–30. Grouchy, S. (2019) Letters on Sympathy: A Critical Engagement with Adam Smith’s ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’, trans. and ed. S. Bergès and E. Schliesser, New York: Oxford University Press. Jolley, N. (2003) “Reason’s Dim Candle: Locke’s Critique of Enthusiasm,” in P. R. Anstey (ed.), The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives, New York: Routledge, pp. 179–91. Malherbe, M. (2015) “From Scotland to France: From Smith’s sympathy to Grouchy’s Sensibilité,” in J. François Dunyach and A. Thomson (eds.), The Enlightenment in Scotland: National and International Perspectives, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, pp. 139–51. Riskin, J. (2002) The Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1979) Emile: Or, on Education, ed. and trans. A. Bloom, New York: Basic Books. 1997. The Discourses and Early Political Writings, ed. V. Gourevitch, New York: Cambridge University Press. Schliesser, E. (2017) “Sophie de Grouchy, the Tradition(s) of Two Liberties, and the Missing Mother(s) of Liberalism,” in J. Broad and K. Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 109–22. Smith, A. (1985) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Tabb. K. (2019) “Locke on Enthusiasm and the Association of Ideas,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 9: 75–104. Tegos, Spiros. (2013) “Sympathie Moral et Tragédie Sociale: Sophie Grouchy Lectrice d’Adam Smith,” Noesis 21: 265–92.

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Getty L. Lustila 2019. “Excluding Manners and Deference from the Post Revolution Republic: Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy on the Conditions of Non-Domination.” Australasian Philosophy Review 3.4: 413–21. Voltaire. (1901) The Works of Voltaire. A Contemporary Version, ed and trans. W. F. Fleming, New York: E.R. DuMont. Wall, S. (2017) “Perfectionism in Moral and Political Philosophy,” Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perfectionism-moral/ Wollstonecraft, M. (2009). A Vindication of the Rights of Women and a Vindication of the Rights of Men, ed. J. Todd, New York: Oxford University Press.

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44 MARY SHEPHERD (1777–1847) Antonia LoLordo

44.1 Introduction Mary Primrose was born in Scotland in 1777. As was typical for the daughters of wealthy families, she was educated at home. In 1808, she married a lawyer, Henry Shepherd, and moved to London, where she later hosted a salon that “gathered both the scientific and literary sides of the learned world, into easy and intimate intercourse” (Brandreth 1886: 4). Members of her social circle included Charles Babbage, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Mary Somerville, William Whewell, and William Wordsworth. Babbage, the inventor of a proto-computer, and Whewell, the historian and philosopher of science, were particular friends, and despite some Romantic turns of phrase, Shepherd seems to have been significantly more oriented toward the scientific side of the learned world. Shepherd began writing philosophy in her late teens or twenties, perhaps in response to some controversies over Humeanism in Edinburgh at the time.1 However, she seems not to have published anything until much later, after her move to London. Shepherd’s first publication under her own name was 1824’s Essay on the Relation of Cause and Effect (ERCE) (Shepherd 1824).2 This was followed by the 1827 Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (EPEU) (Shepherd 1827) and three short pieces, “Observations by Lady Mary Shepherd on the ‘First Lines of the Human Mind’” (Shepherd 1828a), “On the Causes of Single and Erect Vision” (Shepherd 1828b), and “Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics” (LMSM) (Shepherd 1832). She seems to have published nothing after that, although she lived until 1847.3 Why she stopped writing—if indeed she stopped writing rather than stopped publishing—is unknown. In these works, Shepherd lays out a systematic philosophy encompassing metaphysics, epistemology, and the theory of perception. It centers on issues concerning causation and knowledge of the existence of the external world, but is supposed to have implications for the scientific method, the relationship between mind and body, the fundamentals of the Christian religion, the nature of life, and more. Here, because space is limited, I’ll focus on Shepherd’s account of knowledge of the external world, along with the theory of causation it relies on.

44.2  Shepherd’s Opponents Shepherd presents her system in opposition to prominent philosophers of the recent past, and her three main opponents in the EPEU are Berkeley, Hume, and Reid, with Hume as the biggest DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-51

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target.4 In Treatise 1.4.2 (Hume 2001), Hume argued that our belief in the existence of continuous objects distinct from ourselves derives from the imagination, operating according to the laws of association, rather than from reason. Shepherd responds that “it is reason, which … affords those proofs “of body” which first generate … the belief of its existence” (Shepherd 1827: 3). In making this claim, she is simultaneously explaining the belief ’s origin and attempting to guarantee its epistemic credentials: on her view, “the method nature takes to generate the notion of independent existence, proves it” (Shepherd 1827: 12). Both her account of causation and her account of knowledge of the external world attempt to make explicit the “latent reasoning silently generated in the minds of all men, from infancy” (Shepherd 1827: 14). For even in infancy, “Custom and Habit alone are not our guides; but chiefly reason, for the regulation of our expectations in ordinary life” (Shepherd 1824: 28). The role of reason in producing our beliefs is also a key aspect of Shepherd’s reply to her second main opponent, Reid. Reid attributes belief in the existence of external objects to what he calls natural instinct (Hume 1975: 6.10). Shepherd finds this attribution unacceptable because it gives us no reason to think that belief in an external world is true. She also finds the suggestion unintelligible: “I do not know what ‘instinctive belief ’ means, except as applied to the mysterious manner in which animals know of the qualities of bodies previous to experience, by some laws beyond our scrutiny” (Shepherd 1827: 138). Shepherd’s third opponent in the EPEU is Berkeley. She fears that although Berkeley’s views were “intended as the foundation of the most secure belief in Deity,” they are too easy for readers like Hume “to convert, by an enlarged application of them … into a source of universal skepticism” (Shepherd 1827: 5).5 At the same time, she recognizes that many readers will see something of Berkeley in her system. Thus, her response to Berkeley is also intended as a way of distinguishing herself from him. Despite the way Shepherd presents her system, however, it is not best understood as an attempt at a direct refutation of Hume, Berkeley, or any other philosopher. The theory of cognition she takes as her starting point is quite different from anything her opponents made use of.6 Shepherd describes herself as an empiricist, writing that “our living conscious sensations … are the only, the original and immediate materials of our knowledge” (Shepherd 1827: 222). But she counts far more things as sensations than her predecessors, including as sensation “the results of their comparisons as again forming a new class of sensations, ideas of reason” (Shepherd 1827: 222). Shepherd’s system thus constitutes a response to Hume and Berkeley in something like the way that Kant’s transcendental idealism does: it offers a more attractive alternative. The alleged attractions of Shepherd’s system as a whole, and her theory of perception in particular, are varied. It allows us to maintain that an external world exists; that this external world is material; that cause and effect are necessarily connected; and that reason is the source of most of our beliefs about the material world and the causal relations of its inhabitants. Thus, Shepherd’s system “admits of examining nature without skepticism” (Shepherd 1827: 263) and allows both everyday life and the practice of science to be grounded in reason. In addition, Shepherd’s system is supposed to justify the belief in a God who is the creator of the universe, and thus offers some support to orthodox religion and morality. Finally, it “may enable physiologists and physicians, moralists and divines, parents and instructors, better to observe, and more wisely to act than they do, with respect to the health, the opinions, and the practices of those under their care” (Shepherd 1827: 265), by making clear the extent to which health, temperament, and education shape our sensations.

44.3 Causation Shepherd is adamant that “the nature and reality of external existence can only receive a satisfactory answer, derived from a knowledge of the relation of Cause and Effect” (Shepherd 1827: xiv). Thus, 598

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she says, the argument of the EPEU depends upon and presupposes the conclusions of the earlier ERCE. At the same time, the conclusions of the EPEU are supposed to help us gain a deeper understanding of causation: To analyze the operations of our minds in such a manner as shall distinctly show the limit of ‘what we know of body,’ will materially help the mind in forming an idea of how it operates ‘when acting as a cause.’ (Shepherd 1827: xv) Once we know that matter itself is a power, we will be better able to understand what the causality of matter amounts to, and hence what causality more generally amounts to. At the end of the ERCE, Shepherd claims that four principles are “the only true foundations of scientific research, of practical knowledge, and of belief in a creating and presiding deity” (Shepherd 1824: 194).7 Here they are: The Causal Principle: “objects cannot begin their own existences;” rather, any object that begins to exist must have some external cause.8 The Causal Likeness Principle: “like Causes, must generate like Effects.” Roughly, for two objects to be like is for them to be of the same natural kind, or for them to have components that are of the same natural kind and arranged in a similar way. The Uniformity Principle: “objects, of which we have had no experience, must resemble those of which we have had experience, for … the course of Nature continues uniformly the same.” The principle that “like objects, must ever have like qualities.” (Shepherd 1824: 193–94) I’ll discuss these in turn, starting, very briefly, with the last, unnamed principle. The principle that like objects must have like qualities may be understood as a gloss on what the likeness of objects amounts to. But it also turns out to be redundant, given the Causal Likeness Principle. For, in Shepherd’s view, the qualities of an object simply are its effects.9 The Uniformity Principle is supposed to follow from the Causal Principle and the Causal Likeness Principle, taken together. To see how, consider how the course of nature could fail to continue uniformly the same (Beebee 2011). There are two possibilities. First, perhaps objects in the future will belong to the same natural kinds as objects in the present, but nevertheless have different qualities or effects. Perhaps, for instance, in the future, there will be fire that does not feel hot or consume its fuel. If this happened, it would constitute a change in the course of nature. This first possibility is supposed to be ruled out by the Causal Likeness Principle. Fire that did not feel hot or consume its fuel would be something that is like past and present fire but has different qualities. And hence, according to the Causal Likeness Principle, it cannot exist. Second, perhaps in the future there will be entirely different natural kinds, and hence entirely different objects, even if they superficially resemble the objects that exist today and the kinds they instantiate. For instance, perhaps in the future, there will be things of some new kind, schmire, that looks a lot like fire but has some different causal powers. The Causal Likeness Principle cannot rule this second possibility all on its own, since schmire is not like fire in the relevant sense. We need to bring in the Causal Principle here as well. Schmire, we are supposing, is a thing that does not yet exist but will begin to exist at some point in the future. Hence it needs a cause. But what could be the cause of the first instance of a new natural kind? If the cause is something that exists now—for instance, the combination of two objects never before combined—then this hardly seems like a violation of a law of nature. (The 599

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birth of a mule for the first time was not a violation of the Uniformity Principle.) But if the cause of the new natural kind does not yet exist, then something else must have been the beginning of its existence, and so on. Next, the Causal Likeness Principle. Shepherd has two lines of argument for this. One relies on the Causal Principle. Suppose that two like causes did not have like effects. In other words, suppose that there is a difference between the effects of the two causes. Now, a “difference is an Effect, a change of being, an altered existence, an existence which cannot ‘begin of itself ’ any more than any other in Nature” (Shepherd 1824: 48). But since we are supposing that the two causes are like, there is nothing that could begin this difference. Thus, it is impossible for like causes to have unlike effects. The second line of argument for the Causal Likeness Principle relies on Shepherd’s claim that for two objects to be “like” is for them to have the same causal powers. (On her view, both primary and secondary qualities are causal powers.) So, if two causes have different effects, then at least some of their causal powers must be different. But then, contrary to the initial supposition, they cannot actually be “like causes.” As I understand it, this argument is supposed to play a secondary role. That likeness consists in like causal powers is something that, Shepherd thinks, accords with ordinary belief, given that the only other live option seems to be that likeness consists in like sensible qualities alone. Shepherd’s arguments for the Uniformity Principle and the Causal Likeness Principle rely in large part on the Causal Principle, so now let’s look at arguments for the Causal Principle itself. Shepherd describes the Causal Principle as a “primeval truth” (Shepherd 1827: 138n). At the same time, she offers arguments for it. I think these should be understood along Reidian lines, as reinforcing belief in the principle even though their premises are no more certain than the principle itself. Consider the following: [I]f my adversary allows that, no existence being supposed previously in the universe, existence, in order to be, must begin to be, and that the notion of beginning an action (the being that begins it not supposed yet in existence,) involves a contradiction in terms; then this beginning to exist cannot appear but as a capacity some nature hath to alter the presupposed nonentity, and to act for itself, whilst itself is not in being.—The original assumption may deny, as much as it pleases, all cause of existence; but, whilst in its very idea, the commencement of existence is an effect predicated of some supposed cause, (because the quality of an object which must be in existence to possess it,) we must conclude that there is no object which begins to exist, but must owe its existence to some cause. (Shepherd 1824: 36) There is some disagreement in the literature concerning the nature and role of Shepherd’s attempts to argue for the Causal Principle. Boyle glosses the argument above (2018: 7), which she takes to be intended as a demonstrative proof, as follows. Suppose that an object can come into existence without a cause. This coming into existence is an action, and an action is a quality of an object— but of which object is this coming into existence a quality of? It can’t be the object itself, since that doesn’t yet exist, so it must be a quality of some other object. Boyle does not say whether she finds this argument compelling. Fantl understands the argument roughly as Boyle does, and says that it is question-begging (2016: 13). Paoletti thinks that Shepherd is simply taking the Causal Principle for granted (2011: 51). Bolton says that Shepherd offers no non-question-begging argument for the Causal Principle, that Shepherd thinks it and related principles “are products of a natural predisposition of human reason,” and that Shepherd thinks our assent to such principles is justified (Bolton 2017: 2).

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In the later EPEU, Shepherd also gives what may be a different argument for the Causal Principle: The idea is very soon learned, that it is a contradiction to suppose things to begin of themselves; for this idea is occasioned by the impression, (the observation,) that the beginning of every thing is but a change of that which is already in existence … Changes therefore require beings already in existence, of which they are the affections or qualities. (Shepherd 1827: 170–71) This passage is most naturally read as suggesting that the Causal Principle is derived from an empirical claim, namely that every beginning is a change of something already existing. This would be consistent with the Causal Principle being a necessary truth, in Shepherd’s view: claims like fire consumes its fuel are necessary truths that can only be known by experience. However, I am not convinced that it is observation alone which leads us to believe that every beginning is a change of something already existing. It may instead be the product of a “latent reasoning” that even “the meanest understanding” is capable of (Shepherd 1827: 170). The key here is Shepherd’s expansive conception of reason. On her view, reason is not a mere connector: it provides us with knowledge of first principles. This is not supposed to be a form of nativism. Our reason-based knowledge of first principles is not the contemplation of innate ideas, but the perception of the relations between our various sensations. Our ability to perceive such relations is a basic feature of the human cognitive apparatus: First principles are the perceptions of the corollaries, inclusions, or necessary relations of our simple impressions; and infants who have not a capacity fitted to generate such perceptions, are born idiots. (Shepherd 1827: 315) Thus, Hume’s theory of cognition does not describe the function of normal human beings, whether adult or infant. Rather, it describes the cognition function of—to use the earlynineteenth-century technical term—idiots, that is, people who have “an incapacity for further perception than what resides in the immediate impressions created by the use of the five organs of sense, and the power of motion” (Shepherd 1827: 315). The Causal Principle and the Causal Likeness Principle, together with the various considerations advanced in favor of them, give rise to a model of the relationship between cause and effect. According to this model, “objects … are nothing but masses of certain qualities … which, when independent of our senses, are unknown powers or qualities in nature” (Shepherd 1824: 47). Causation involves “a new object exhibiting new qualities” (Shepherd 1824: 50) and requires “[t]he junction of two or more qualities or objects (Shepherd 1824: 187). When two or more objects are joined or, as Shepherd more often puts it, mixed, the union or mixture “is the proximate Cause of, and is one with the Effect” (Shepherd 1824: 187). In other words, cause and effect are not distinct entities—a truth which is obscured only by the fact that we have two separate words for cause and effect (Shepherd 1824: 29–30). Because of this, although “it is universally imagined that a Cause is, in its very essence, before its Effects,” cause and effect are actually always simultaneous (Shepherd 1824: 186). This allows Shepherd to assimilate the cause–effect relationship to the subject–quality relationship: A Cause, therefore, is such action of an object, as shall enable it, in conjunction with another, to form a new nature, capable of exhibiting qualities varying from those of either of the objects unconjoined … An Effect is the produced quality exhibited to the senses, as the

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essential property of natures so conjoined. Necessary connexion of cause and effect is the obligation qualities have to inhere in their objects, and to exhibit their varieties according to the different human senses with which they come in contact. (Shepherd 1824: 63) This model of causation hangs together as a whole and is supported by the four principles discussed in Section 44.2. It is also supposed to be supported by experience: If a body is not operated on, or operates not on another body, no reason can exist for any alteration or change taking place in that body; any new body must therefore always be occasioned by the operation of two other bodies, or antecedents, or rather the action of two bodies, at fewest, must always take place antecedent to any new body, or the production of any new property. In many chemical operations, there are three or four antecedents necessary for the production of a single substance; and in no single instance that has either come under my observation, or that I could conceive of, is there a single substance that can effect a change on itself, or be the consequent of one antecedent. (Shepherd 1824: 56) It follows from all this that claims like “fire consumes its fuel” are necessary truths, just as claims like “2 + 3 = 5” are necessary truths. For this reason, Shepherd argues that “the science of mathematics is truly but one branch of physics” (Shepherd 1827: 278–79). Both rely on the principle that like causes have like effects: each time we put fuel in the fire, it is consumed; each time we add two and three, we get five. In conceiving of the relationship between mathematics and physics in this way, Shepherd is again writing in opposition to Hume on one hand, and Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart on the other.10 At the same time, she recognizes that in practice, conclusions in physics are often significantly more tentative than conclusions in mathematics. This is because in mathematics, we are “able ourselves to limit the data, by which means we know that nothing can occur to make a difference in the formation of future mathematical diagrams” (Shepherd 1832: 707). In contrast, when investigating causes in physics we must contend with our “want of ability to detect their similarity with any previously given data; but … could any given cause be ascertained, its connexion with its effects would be necessary” (Shepherd 1832: 707).

44.4  Perception of the External World Now let’s look at how Shepherd uses her account of causation to explain perception of the external world. According to the Causal Principle, each thing that begins to exist must have a cause. Throughout the course of our lives, new sensations arise in consciousness. Each one of these new sensations must have a cause. And according to Shepherd’s model of causation, that cause must be the mixture of two or more previously existing things. Two ingredients of the mixture are readily apparent: the mind and the sense organs. However, there must be a third ingredient as well. The mind and the sense organs, Shepherd assumes, “are the same upon any occasion as on a former one” (Shepherd 1827: 233). But our sensations are extremely varied. And so, their third ingredients additional to the mind and sense organs must also be extremely varied: [T]he varieties of the causes, (which create varieties in the effects,) are instantly perceived and detected, and that immediately with the conscious use of the senses; whilst also the mind as

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immediately mixes that idea of which the understanding is aware; viz. that these varieties, as complex objects, continue to exist unperceived and independent, when unnoticed by the senses. (Shepherd 1827: 67–68) Shepherd distinguishes [T ]wo sets of objects in nature; viz. the exterior objects, the acting causes of nature, independent of the senses; [and] the internal objects, the sensible effects of these, meeting with the human senses, and determining their specific qualities upon the mind. (Shepherd 1827: xiv) An external object is a thing as it is in itself, independent of the human perceptual and cognitive apparatus. An internal object is what results when an external object acts on us. It is “a compound being” made up of “a certain collection of sensible qualities,” together with “an idea … of such qualities being formed by a ‘continually existing outward and independent set of as various and appropriate causes” (Shepherd 1827: 197–98). In other words, internal objects combine sensations with the idea that these sensations correspond to something external. This idea is produced by reason, as an integral part of the process of sensation. Shepherd insists that although philosophical analysis distinguishes the contributions of “the conscious powers of the understanding, and the senses,” “in nature they are united as intimately as are the prismatic colours in one uniform mass of light” (Shepherd 1827: 67). Thus, the two aspects of internal objects—the sensations and the idea that they correspond to something external—are not separable. It is important to Shepherd that sense-perception is not passive. Rather, internal objects are actively constructed by our cognitive faculties. Shepherd explains, speaking of the union of the mind and sense organs with external objects, that In this union, and with it, is the creation and production of all sensible complex qualities called objects, such as we know them. These objects are what Berkeley calls “ideas,” and “sensations in the mind;” what the ancients perhaps called species or phantasms; what the moderns call images, ideas, &c. And they all, as I think, err in this, in considering them as first formed, and then contemplated, and taken notice of afterwards. Whereas, the sensible qualities of things are only formed by being taken notice of. (Shepherd 1827: 71–72) This applies to primary quality sensations (qualitative awareness of size, shape, and motion) as well as secondary quality sensations (qualitative awareness of color, sound, etc.). For Shepherd, as for Berkeley, “nothing can be like a sensation but a sensation” (Shepherd 1827: 38).11 It follows that external objects lack any qualities resembling size and shape as we perceive them, although we know that they have the power to produce various sensations in us. More generally, it follows that we do not know what external objects are like in themselves, only how they affect us. Shepherd uses an analogy to explain this: “[a]ll our ideas are as algebraic signs, which give evidence both of their own existence, and the quantities also signified” (Shepherd 1827: 38). In the later “Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics,” written in response to criticism by the contemporary idealist John Fearn, Shepherd expands on the comparison, explaining that just as “algebraic signs express the relations of the quantities which they represent” (Shepherd 1832: 703), internal objects provide us with knowledge of the relationships between external objects: “the external causes of

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our sensations must exist among themselves in the same proportions as do the internal varieties of sensation, their effects” (Shepherd 1827: 240). Shepherd also uses the algebra example in an effort to explain how it’s possible for us to refer to external objects: [T]he unknown causes of all our perceptions, are as the unknown quantities in algebra, which yet may be measured, valued, reasoned on by their signs; and the signs of these outward objects are the sensations they can create; and they may always be spoken of, and compared together, as though they did truly exist, in these forms in which they appear to the mind. (Shepherd 1827: 48) We typically use the same names for internal objects and the external objects we know to be their causes. This is the best option available to us, and we should take it. At the same time, we should also make sure not to let language mislead us into thinking that external objects resemble internal objects, or that their qualities resemble our sensations: The names for the qualities may indifferently be applied to the causes, or external objects, or to the effects the inward perceptions; or to both together, as compound beings. It is in the latter sense they are always popularly applied, and on account of which circumstance there has been so much confusion in the minds of philosophers upon the subject … It is, however, unavoidable that it should be so; for it is impossible to name unknown things so well by any other names, as by those given to their constant and invariable manifestation. (Shepherd 1827: 61) Thus, for instance, we can use the term “external extension,” or simply “extension,” for the “unperceived cause fitted to create or produce the idea of extension on the mind, and also to be a capacity for the admission of unperceived motion” (Shepherd 1832: 698).

44.5  Continuous, Independent External Objects All of our perceptions of external objects are interrupted, by sleep, shifts in attention, the motion of our bodies, or other factors. Why then do we all think that external objects exist continuously, independently of us, even when we are not perceiving them? When Shepherd asks this question, she is issuing a correction of Hume, who asked why we believe that our sensations exist externally, continuously, and independently of us. Shepherd holds that “we do not conceive our sensations so to exist, but by habit associate them with the notion of some sort of corresponding continuous existences” (Shepherd 1827: 10). It’s worth disentangling the separate contributions of reason and association here. Reason does two things, separable in analysis although blended in practice: it produces the idea of something that exists externally, continuously, and independently of us, and at the same time it produces the belief that some such thing exists. Reason, in other words, is what we add to sensation to get an internal object. All that association adds is the tendency to think of external objects as if they resemble internal objects. This tendency to associate is something “our Maker has ordained for practical purposes,” and it is irreproachable, even helpful, in everyday life—“but monstrous when held as an abstract truth in analytical science” (Shepherd 1827: 125–27). How does reason produce the belief that something exists continuously, external to us and independent of us? The main consideration Shepherd offers in favor of the continuous existence of objects is that they are always “ready to appear, upon the applications of the organs of sense” (Shepherd 1827: 230). Shepherd thinks of the power to move our own bodies as a “sixth organ 604

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of sense” (Shepherd 1827: 230). When I close my eyes or walk downstairs, the desk I was sitting in front of disappears. When I open my eyes again, or come back upstairs, I seem to see the same desk I’ve seen every day for years. Thus, it is reasonable to believe that the desk has existed continuously, even when I have not been looking at it.12 The main consideration in favor of the independence of external objects is that they can be perceived by many different perceivers: [W]e gain the notion of the independency of objects from the observation of one object affecting many minds … If five men see a pond, and can only walk round one pond, then there is one pond seen five times over, not five ponds; so the pond whatever it may be when unperceived, must at least in its unperceived state, be independent of, and I may add external to all the minds; for if the pond were only in the mind, there would be five ponds, and every person who perceived a pond would create another pond, and yet this multitude of ponds in perception, would in many respects but merit the definition due to one pond. (Shepherd 1827: 80–81) Of course, you might think this just pushes the problem back a step: how do we know there are other minds? Here again, Shepherd seems to be relying on some sort of inference to the best explanation. She explains that “the chief ground of all our belief in a plurality of minds” is that certain objects “appear like ourselves plus or minus the varieties of qualities; and we to ourselves are independent of others, and are minds, beings, capable of sensations” (Shepherd 1827: 78).

44.6  Dreams and Illusions Shepherd’s account of the external world is intended as a reply to Berkeley as well as to Hume. Berkeley claims that “it is possible we might be affected with all the ideas we have now, though no Bodies existed without, resembling them” (Berkeley 1999: 1.8). He provides as evidence of this possibility that in dreams, we are sometimes affected with ideas exactly like the ones we have in waking life. And, of course, in dreams, our ideas are not caused by bodies that exist outside us and resemble our ideas. From this, Berkeley infers that our perceptions provide us with no good reason to think that external objects exist. How does Shepherd reply? On her view, whether there are any external objects that resemble our sensations in dreams is beside the point: there are never any external objects that resemble our sensations. But, as she recognizes, Berkeley didn’t really need to put the point in terms of resemblance. He might instead have said that in dreams we have all the same sensations we have in everyday life, even though those sensations are not caused by external objects. He could then have inferred to the same conclusion, namely that even in waking life we have no reason to think that external objects exist. Shepherd’s reply is that what Berkeley supposes is not genuinely possible: Bishop Berkeley says … “Suppose, what no one can deny possible, an intelligence, without the help of external bodies, to be affected with the same train of sensations and ideas that you are ….” I answer to this, that I do not consider it as possible for a person to be affected with the same train of sensations, and in the same order in a dream, or frenzy, as out of them; precisely similar effects must have precisely similar causes. (Shepherd 1827: 92) Shepherd is a disjunctivist. Whatever is going on in dreams and hallucinations, it must be quite different from what’s going on in veridical perception. She is committed to disjunctivism by her claim 605

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that like causes must have like effects, and vice versa. Like sensations must have like causes, so if a dream sensation is like a waking (that is, genuine) sensation it must have the same causes. But the causes of a genuine sensation include both the use of the sense organs and the existence of an external object. The causes of dream sensations include neither the use of the sense organs nor the existence of the relevant external object. So genuine sensations and dream sensations cannot be alike. Shepherd thinks that in ordinary waking perception, we are conscious of whether we are using our sense organs: in fact, “consciousness whether the organs of sense be used or not, in perceiving objects, is the great criterion of a sane, or insane state of mind, of its waking or sleeping condition” (Shepherd 1827: 203). She recognizes, however, that “in dreams, insanities, &c. the organs of sense are thought to be in use”: this is “the great difficulty and mystery in the affair” (Shepherd 1827: 235–36). Dream toast may be qualitatively identical to real toast, and while I am asleep, I may think I taste it. However, dream toast is not real: it does not continue to exist when I cease looking at it, it does not satisfy hunger, and it cannot be seen by everyone at the table. Dream objects “are not capable of fulfilling their definitions” (Shepherd 1827: 87). This is important because The circumstance of objects fulfilling their definitions, or not, is what renders them real, or the contrary. It is not on account of the superior order, variety, and force in which they appear to the mind, as Berkeley and Hume contend to be the case. (Shepherd 1827: 29–30) Shepherd allows that there may be cases in which dream objects “are considered as those, which are in relation to the senses, and they are thence expected to be capable of those further qualities which are necessary to their definitions” (Shepherd 1827: 235). She thinks this is unfortunate: “although there may be truth in the world, yet the discovery of an absolute criterion of an understanding capable of detecting it, does not seem to be the lot of human nature” (Shepherd 1827: 236). The lack of an absolute criterion of infallibility is simply a consequence of the limited nature of the human cognitive faculties, and not something we should build our metaphysics around the need to solve. Thus, although Shepherd denies that dreams can be like reality, she is not claiming that it is impossible to confuse the two. There is an important metaphysical distinction between dream objects and ordinary internal objects. And although we sometimes mistake one for the other, this does not have the epistemic implications Berkeley thinks it has. Rather, the problem of distinguishing dreams from waking life is a special case of a more general problem, “the difficulty there lies in the mind detecting the presence of exactly similar objects when it perceives only some of their qualities” (Shepherd 1827: 96). Just as I can think I’m looking at the fire when I’m actually asleep in bed, I can think I’m looking at a glass of water when I’m actually looking at a glass of vodka. In some cases, it’s easy to tell whether apparently similar objects are really the same. I can taste the clear liquid. In other cases, it might take scientific investigation to be sure whether apparently similar objects are really the same. The world is complicated, and we sometimes make mistakes. This is a reason to be careful, not a reason for skepticism.

44.7 Conclusion I want to conclude by outlining the scope and limits of our knowledge of the external world, on Shepherd’s view. There is quite a lot that we do know about the external world. We know that external objects exist, that they are independent of us, and that they continue to exist when unperceived. We know that they have the power to produce our sensations, and hence that they have color, shape, size, and extension—although not color, shape, size, and extension as we perceive them. Predecessors such as Locke, Clarke, and Newton had conceived of matter as that which 606

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is extended and impenetrable, and Shepherd agrees with this conception of matter. Hence, she holds that we know that there is a material world that causes our sensations. However, Shepherd’s conception of matter is quite different from that of Locke, Clarke, and Newton. They conceived of extension as a categorical property, while she conceives of it as a power. And while they conceived of matter as that which has the categorical property of extension, she conceives of matter as a power. Matter is “the capacity of exhibiting upon a sentient nature, the sense of solid extension in general” (Shepherd 1827: 242). Note that matter is not that which has the power, but the power itself—presumably a very complex one. Nevertheless, Shepherd repeatedly suggests that something about the nature of external objects is hidden from us. She says that “we know not what extension unperceived is” (Shepherd 1827: 165) and that “the real essences of matter and mind we know not” (Shepherd 1827: 244). But what is it that we do not know? If matter is just a power, then don’t we know all there is to know about it? One possibility is that we do not know the real essence of matter because knowing the real essence of matter would involve knowing not just how it affects the human sensory apparatus but how it affects innumerable other things, including the sensory apparatus of beings very different from us.13 A second possibility is that matter is unknown in the sense that we know only its effects: we have only a Reidian relative notion of it. These two possibilities could both be true at once.14 Our knowledge of external objects is limited, then, because we do not grasp their real essences. It is also limited in another sense: it is always fallible. Shepherds thinks we know that external objects exist independently and continuously, but she admits that she cannot rule out the possibility of error altogether: [A]s we never can experience the fulfilment of that part of the definition of external objects, viz. their existence after our own ceases; so although it be an inference of high probability, yet it is short of strict demonstration … All we can do is to refer compound similar and various effects, to compound similar and various causes; which occasions an inference that such causes are like ourselves, plus or minus the varieties, and we finding ourselves independent of them, are led to conclude they will in like manner be independent of us. (Shepherd 1827: 187–88) That the existence of all external objects will cease upon our death is a form of solipsism, and Shepherd’s willingness to allow its possibility shows that she does not claim to have ruled out all forms of skepticism. This is not an admission of defeat. Her goal is to show that reason can give rise to a justified belief in the existence of external, continuous, independent material objects. She thinks that this belief amounts to knowledge because she brackets out global skeptical scenarios such as those envisaged in the first Meditation. If such scenarios were to obtain, then, I think, our belief in the external world would still be justified but it would not constitute knowledge. Shepherd proposes to defeat Berkeleyan idealism and Humean irrationalism, not to defeat all forms of skepticism.

Notes 1 Morrell 1975 and Bow 2013 describe the controversy. 2 An anonymous work, the 1819 Enquiry respecting the Relation of Cause and Effect (Anonymous 1819) is often attributed to her as well. Jennifer McRobert included it in her edition of Shepherd’s Works (McRobert 2000). 3 (McRobert unpublished): 174 attributes the anonymously published Philosophy of Theism (Anonymous 1857) to Shepherd, although the attribution is not generally accepted. 4 Other opponents include the philosopher and poet Thomas Brown, who defended Hume’s system; the associationist Condillac and followers of his including Cabanis, De Gérando, and Destutt de Tracy; the

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References Anonymous. (1819) Enquiry Respecting the Relation of Cause and Effect, Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Company. (1857) Philosophy of Theism: an Inquiry of the Dependence of Theism on Metaphysics, and the Only Possible way of Arriving at a Proof of the Existence of God, London: Ward & Co., Paternoster Row. Beebee, H. (2011). “Necessary Connections and the Problem of Induction”. Noûs 45(3): 504-527.

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Mary Shepherd (1777–1847) Berkeley, G. (1999) Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bolton, M. (2017) “Mary Shepherd,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Boyle, D. (ed.) (2018) Lady Mary Shepherd: Selected Writings, Exeter: Imprint Academic. Brandreth, M. E. S. (1886) Some Family and Friendly Recollections of 70 Years, London: C. Hooker. Fantl, J. (2016) “Mary Shepherd on Causal Necessity,” Metaphysica 17(1): 87–108. Hume, D. (1975) Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (2001) A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Landy, D. (2020) “Shepherd on Hume’s Argument for the Possibility of Uncaused Existence,” Journal of Modern Philosophy 2(1): 13. McRobert, J. (2000) Philosophical Works of Lady Mary Shepherd, Bristol: Thoemmes Press. (unpublished manuscript) Mary Shepherd and the University. Paoletti, C. (2011) “Restoring Necessary Connections: Lady Mary Shepherd on Hume and the Early Nineteenth-Century Debate on Causality,” I Castelli di Yale, XI (11): 47-59. Shepherd, M. (1824) Essays on the Relation of Cause and Effect, London: T. Hookham. (1827) Essays on the Perception of an External Universe, London: J. Botson and Palmer. (1828a) “Observations by Lady Mary Shepherd on the ‘First Lines of the Human Mind’,” Parriana: or Notices of the Rev. Samuel Parr, LL.D. Collected from Various Sources, etc 1: 624–27. (1828b) “On the Causes of Single and Erect Vision,” The Philosophical Magazine 3(18): 405–16. (1832) “Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 5(30): 697–708. Stewart, D. (1829) The Works of Dugald Stewart, Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown.

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45 WOMEN AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE GERMAN CONTEXT Corey W. Dyck

Women in the German-speaking lands of Europe1 made important contributions to intellectual culture in the early Modern period. Some of these, through their own works and through their correspondence with major male thinkers (especially Descartes and Leibniz) had an impact on the development of ideas that extended beyond Germany. These include the polymath Anna Maria van Schurmann (1607–1678), who was born in Cologne; Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who was born in Heidelberg and later served as an abbess of a convent in Herford; and the “two Sophies,” namely Elisabeth’s younger sister Electress Sophie of Hanover (1630–1714), and Sophie’s daughter Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia (1668–1705). In addition, there are a number of German women whose influence was primarily exercised within the German context, upon a German audience (of men and women). Indeed, while the contributions of these women are comparatively less well known, they contributed significantly to the modernization of German intellectual culture, in spite of its enduring religious, political, and social conservatism. Much as was the case with the rest of Europe, a number of women engaged with and published interventions in the context of the ongoing querelle des femmes, including most notably Dorothea Christiane Erxleben (1715–1762), who would become (in 1754) the first German woman to receive a doctorate (in her case, a medical doctorate; see Dyck 2021). However, perhaps the most impactful, if now largely overlooked, contributions by women within the German context in this period were in connection with the so-called “Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy,” a system of thought first formulated by Christian Wolff (1679–1754) but which was thoroughly informed by Leibniz’s metaphysics and epistemology (in addition to a variety of other sources, including Descartes, Malebranche, and Newton). After its initial elaboration in a series of texts published in the 1710s and the early 1720s, this philosophical system gained ascendancy in Germany and became a catalyst for the modernization of the philosophical curriculum, which had still been mired in the old scholastic formalism. On account of its wide influence, the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy also became a lightning rod for criticism, and Wolff’s opponents even succeeded in having him exiled from Prussia in 1723, on pain of hanging, on the presence of the alleged incompatibility of the pre-established harmony with military discipline. In any case, among Wolff’s most important innovations was his decision to publish his initial series of textbooks in German rather than in Latin. As was the case with Locke’s Essay and the French edition of Descartes’ Meditations, Wolff’s decision to publish in the vernacular had the wholly salutary effect of making modern ideas newly accessible to a wider German audience, and especially to women. As we will see, the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy proved to be an important point of reference, and departure, for the ambitious projects of a couple of gifted German thinkers, namely, 610

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Luise Adelgunde Viktorie Gottsched (1713–1762) and Johanna Charlotte Unzer (1725–1782).2 However, a considerable obstacle to gaining a proper appreciation of these women’s contributions is presented by the fact that neither published what would today be regarded as original, self-standing philosophical treatises. Gottsched’s most philosophically relevant texts consist of translations (and not always with attribution to her), whereas Unzer’s principal philosophical publication is a digest of Wolffian logic and metaphysics intended for female readers. Yet, we will find that in spite of the unconventional character of the texts and the assorted difficulties in discerning the hand of the author, a distinctive philosophical agenda comes to light in the cases of both of these women, a result that only underlines the importance of expanding our conception of the genre of philosophical text and the methods through which philosophical thought is enacted.

45.1  Luise Adelgunde Viktorie Gottsched Luise Adelgunde Viktorie Gottsched, née Kulmus, was born in Danzig on April 11, 1713. Her father, Johann Georg Kulmus (1680–1731), was a medical doctor and at one point personal physician to the Elector of Saxony (and king of Poland) August I. Her mother, Katherina Dorothea, née Schwenk (1689–1745), came from a wealthy patrician family that had relocated to Danzig from Augsburg. Kulmus’ father was an independent and rigorously scientific thinker, a fact reflected in his medical practice and writing, particularly his dissertation on sleep which rejected supernatural explanations of sleep and dreaming in favor of strictly physiological ones and which exposed him to criticism and even persecution. Kulmus clearly benefitted from her enlightened family, as she received an education that was fairly extensive for a young German woman in the eighteenth century: her mother taught her French from a young age; her uncle, an anatomist (and former student of Boerhaave) and professor at a local Gymnasium, taught her to write and instructed her in the rules of German prosody; her half-brother, also a physician, taught her English, while her father employed her in copying Latin manuscripts. Additionally, she played piano, excelled at catechism study and recitations, and her mother also instructed her in the household arts, although her father at one point reacted angrily to this out of concern that it would ruin her eyesight for reading (cf. Goodman 1999: 199). She also likely benefitted from the intellectually active and distinctive milieu in the Prussian port city (Goodman 2015). During these early years, she wrote occasional poetry and translated the French novel La Princesse de Clèves into German though never published it. Kulmus met her eventual husband and collaborator Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) in 1729, during his visit to Danzig. Kulmus’ verse had first come to Johann Christoph’s attention in connection with a planned collection of German poetry in 1727 (when Kulmus was only 14 years old), though that he should take an interest in the young woman’s work is not surprising given his early efforts to promote female writers in a periodical he published. After meeting, they struck up a correspondence that continued until they were married in 1735. The courtship was protracted by the death of Kulmus’ father and likely by the fact that Johann Christoph only obtained a salaried professorship at the University of Leipzig in 1734, but Kulmus seems to have considered this period as a sort of apprenticeship, as Johann Christoph sent her books and recommendations and also arranged to publish her poetry and translations. Among these texts were a translation of the Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes (1727) by the Parisian salonnière Anne-Thésèse, Marquise de Lambert, which appeared as Neue Betrachtungen über das Frauenzimmer (1731), and which Johann Christoph apparently published without Kulmus’ permission, as well as a translation of Madeleine Angélique Poisson de Gomez’s Le triomphe de l’éloquence (1730), which was published in 1735 as Der Sieg der Beredsamkeit (which, significantly, bore the translator’s name on the title page). After they married in April 1735, Kulmus (now Gottsched) continued to put her talents to good use, particularly in support of Johann Christoph’s various projects relating to the development and promotion of German language and culture (and audited his various lectures, albeit in 611

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a private room behind a drawn curtain). Her contributions included foundational research and translations for his history of the German language, poetry, and oratory, and for his later history of German drama (cf. Goodman 1999: 217); she also translated six plays and wrote five of her own for Johann Christoph’s collection of plays for the German stage (Goodman 1999: 218, and Brown 2012: 210–11). Her own translation work, which included but was not limited to suggestions of texts from Johann Christoph, ranged across a number of diverse topics; so she translated English poetry (including Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”) and criticism (including nearly half of the issues of Addison’s and Steele’s The Spectator), natural scientific writings (such as an exchange between Du Châtelet and Mairan relating to the proper measure of force), philosophy (including of Leibniz, Bayle, Berkeley, and Shaftesbury, though these latter two were not published; cf. Brown 2012: 50–51, 209), and texts on any number of topics included within her two-volume translation of the Mémoires of the Academie royale (cf. Brown 2012: 213–14). The wide scope of her intellectual interests and contributions also brought her to the attention of Frederick II (the Great), who insisted on seeing a sample of her work during an audience with Johann Christoph in 1757 (during the Seven Years’ War, the human cost of which Gottsched frequently lamented), and led Empress Maria Theresa to dub her “the most learned woman in Germany” during a private audience in Vienna in 1749 (Goodman 1999: 286). Gottsched’s extreme work schedule, however, and the persistent demands made on her by Johann Christoph, took a toll on her health, leaving her unable to write in 1760 (as a consequence of which she had to dictate a translation her husband had requested) and, after a series of strokes left her blind and partially paralyzed, she died on June 26, 1762. As already indicated, Gottsched’s philosophical output largely comprises translations, and her own texts and contributions to larger works are often incorporated into a final text that did not bear her name. This circumstance, of course, reflects longstanding and by no means distinctively German views about allowable forms of female participation in the intellectual sphere. Significantly, however, this does not prevent Gottsched from advancing a distinctive philosophical agenda of her own through her activity in translation, an agenda that can be seen to run continuously from her early translations of French authors through to her latter translations of philosophical and scientific writings in collaboration with her husband. Indeed, the texts which she elects to translate as well as her various supplements to them signal her own vision of philosophy’s position with respect to other forms of learned endeavor and, particularly, her commitment to the necessity of philosophical cognition for the cultivation of virtue. Relating to her early translations, Gottsched took a particular interest in rendering the Marquise de Lambert’s Réflexions into German over similar educational texts aimed at women by Fontenelle and Fenelon. Lambert (1647–1733) was well known for her salon, which counted a number of philosophers among its regulars, and which deviated from the current fashion by featuring a sober discussion on edifying topics. Her Réflexions sound a similar note as she denounces Molière’s comedy Les Femmes Savantes as responsible for inducing women to reject the pursuit of learning and cultivation of virtue in favor of the frivolous pursuit of pleasure. For Lambert, this speaks to the need to develop what she refers to as a “Metaphysics of love [Métaphysique d’amour]” to lead women to virtue by means of their sensibility or passions. For Gottsched, by contrast, this only serves to show how essential it is that women be educated in philosophy, as traditionally understood, for the sake of their moral vocation, a nuance reflected in her decision to render Lambert’s “Métaphysique d’amour” as “a metaphysical love [eine metaphysische Liebe]” (compare Lambert 1727: 4 and the preface to Lambert 1731). The importance of philosophy becomes particularly clear in Gottsched’s Triumph der Weltweisheit (Triumph of Philosophy) of 1739. This text includes her translation of Gomez’s original Triomphe (the Sieg der Beredsamkeit of 1735), in which oratory is judged to be superior to philosophy, history, and poetry, but that discussion is now supplemented with a new, original treatise of Gottsched’s own in which philosophy’s preeminence is defended. In her preface (one of the few 612

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that she rather than Johann Christoph wrote for her works), Gottsched asserts that she has a “certain inborn drive which from childhood on has spurred me toward the doctrines of philosophy” (see the preface in Gottsched 1739). In her own presentation, which emulates that of Gomez, Gottsched stages speeches by representatives of philosophy, history, poetry, and oratory intending to prevail upon a young Marcus Aurelius. In the speech in praise of philosophy (given by the Stoic philosopher and Marcus’s tutor, Junius Rusticus), Gottsched contends that philosophy is most useful to a country precisely on account of the fact that it develops and promotes the virtue of its citizens, making them trustworthy in their contracts but also willing to endure sacrifice for the greater good (Gottsched 1739: 74–75); moreover, philosophy is the ultimate source of any good or utility that proceeds from the other disciplines (72–73). These two texts by Gottsched thus outline a case for the importance of philosophy in general, but especially for women, both as desirable in itself and because in cultivating women’s virtue (and man’s appreciation rather than ridicule of this quality in women), it makes them an appropriate and worthy object of desire, and thus ultimately contributes to their fulfilling of their (traditional) role in the family and in society (which conception of women’s role Gottsched does not undertake to challenge). It is, however, difficult to see how Gottsched’s later philosophical efforts, particularly in her many collaborations with Johann Christoph, are consistent with her early focus on philosophy’s importance for women’s moral self-improvement. Most notably, Gottsched made substantial contributions to both Johann Christoph’s translations of Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, and of Leibniz’s Théodicée. The translation of Bayle, published in 4 volumes from 1741–1744, was particularly important as the first translation of that work into German. It bears noting that Johann Christoph did not begin the work himself, but it was actually a lawyer in Leipzig, Paul Gottfried von Königslow (1684–1759), who had translated a portion of it after receiving official permission to translate the controversial text. Johann Christoph’s publisher, Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf, was hesitant to leave the sensitive text in the hands of a jurist, and so the project was turned over to Johann Christoph, but it was Gottsched who was responsible for transforming the original translation into elegant German and correcting many of the Greek and Latin translations, as well translating Leibniz’s responses to Bayle’s criticisms of the pre-established harmony and integrating them into the “Rorarius” article. Moreover, Gottsched ultimately proofread the entire four folio-volume edition three times (even reading it aloud before Johann Christoph).3 Gottsched likewise made important contributions to her husband’s new German translation of Leibniz’s Théodicée (Leibniz 1744). In an appendix she provides the first German translations of two, now central Leibnizian texts, the “New System,” in which he outlines the pre-established harmony, and his compact presentation of his philosophy in the “Principles of Nature and Grace” (Leibniz 1744: 768–88; Till 2002: 666). That Gottsched’s work in translating these core treatments and defenses of Leibnizian metaphysics and natural theology has no obvious connection to the specific task of cultivating virtue might be taken to suggest that whatever agenda she might have had for the philosophical education of women was superseded by her husband’s divergent priorities in promoting the abstruse Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophical system to which he had long subscribed (as in Kord 2000: 5, 185). However, to view Gottsched’s co-operation in these projects as a sharp departure from her earlier conception of philosophy is to overlook the important connection asserted within the Wolffian philosophy between the cultivation of the intellect and moral self-improvement. Johann Christoph’s exposition of the Wolffian system, the Erste Gründe der gesammten Weltweisheit (First Principles of all Philosophy), is relevant here, which text was published in two volumes (1733–1734). As a comprehensive presentation of Wolff’s thought in German, the text became quite popular with women (Goodman 1999: 86) and Gottsched herself was directly familiar with it (Brown 2012: 73n9). The second volume (the “practical part”) begins with a general presentation of Wolffian intellectualist ethics, which takes all motivation to have as its ground the cognition of 613

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some object or aim as good. The will, then, is just our faculty of acting in accordance with what the intellect perceives as good, though it is only when we have a distinct cognition of the object that we can be confident that the resulting action will in fact promote our own perfection, and as a result count as free.4 The importance of distinct cognition for motivation leads Johann Christoph, again like Wolff, to differentiate a specific class of duties to ourselves to cultivate our own understanding, particularly through the reading of moral theorists (such as Plato and Cicero), so that we can better understand the rules that govern our nature and of what lies in our power to accomplish (Gottsched 1734: 111, 131–32). Yet Johann Christoph identifies the aim of this self-improvement to be a kind of philosophical “conversion [Bekehrung],” through which our will is improved and we become committed to virtue. For this to take place, an inner conviction regarding the splendor of virtue and the harmful character of vice must be awakened, and Johann Christoph contends that this additionally requires an excursus into natural theology and theodicy to convince us of God’s goodness and the providential organization of His creation: To this end [of a philosophical conversion] one needs to engender in someone, first, a distinct concept of God and of His attributes; and one must convince him, also by means of experience, that God governs the world through His providence, wisdom, goodness, and justice. One instructs him through examples how through good and ill fortune God punishes the evil and rewards the good, and how His entire aim with rational creatures is none other than to make them happy. (Gottsched 1734: 85–86) In light of this, Gottsched’s activity in translating Leibniz’s Théodicée connects seamlessly with her earlier understanding of the role of philosophy in moral improvement, even if it is now expressed in the Wolffian idiom. So, Leibniz’s attempted vindication of God through the dissolution of the problem of evil is precisely what is here required for the durable attainment of virtue, and the same purpose is served by the translation of Bayle, which would risk spreading moral corruption if not addressed through a number of additions (including those supplied by Gottsched herself ) intended to work as a “counter-poison [Gegengift]” to Bayle’s suspected skepticism and atheism (Dingel 2009: 190–94). Accordingly, Gottsched’s activity in translating these texts can be seen as a fulfillment of the duty to help promote the development of the understanding of others, and in this case of women in particular, so that they are better able to pursue and attain virtue (Gottsched 1734: 152–53). This intellectualist character of Wolffian ethics also provides the essential context for Gottsched’s contributions toward the defense of the various domains of the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy. As Wolff emphasized, his philosophical views constituted an interconnected system of thought, unified through a shared method and common first principles. This arguably accounts, for instance, for Gottsched’s interest in scientific debates, such as that concerning the existence and proper measure of so-called “living force” or vis viva. While the debate originated with Leibniz’s rejection of the Cartesian measure of force in terms of quantity of motion, in favor of his own novel conception of force, along with a distinct formula for its measurement, Du Châtelet had recently defended the Leibnizian conception in the last chapter of her Institutions de Physique (1740), and was criticized for this by her countryman, Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan, in an open letter, to which Du Châtelet responded in a letter of her own (Reichenberger 2011). Gottsched translated this exchange in her Zwo Schriften of 1741, and added a preface of her own in which she provides a summary of the dispute, and highlights Du Châtelet’s learnedness, even supplying an ode dedicated to her, while dismissing Mairan’s criticism as evidence of French hostility toward German thinkers (see the preface to Gottsched 1741, and Hagengruber 2011: 25–26). Gottsched would 614

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also translate a treatise by Louis de Beausobre defending Leibnizian optimism in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake (Beausobre 1758). In any case, Gottsched’s efforts to defend Wolffian thought in these non-ethical domains are plausibly understood as motivated by her recognition of the interdependence of the elements of the Wolffian system across these distinct domains, such that, for instance, the concept of power as deployed in physics draws on the same metaphysical conception that is deployed in the context of Wolff’s psychology which, in turn, grounds his ethics. Moreover, Gottsched devises a variety of ingenious means to defend the Wolffian philosophy. These include penning a highly ironical sermon ostensibly against Wolffian rationalism (cf. Brown 2008), but also, and most controversially, a play entitled Die Pietisterey im Fischbein-Rocke, oder die Doctormäßige Frau (Pietism in a Petticoat, or the Woman who would be Doctor), published anonymously in 1736 (with a falsified place of publication). The play was based on the French play La Femme Docteur, ou la Théologie Janseniste Tombée en Quenouille by Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant, but in Gottsched’s version, her target is the hypocrisy and pedantry of the German Pietists and especially the intellectual pretension of Pietist women. Gottsched might thus be accused of making learned women an object of ridicule, and in this way contributing to the damage done by Molière which the Marquise de Lambert had sought to redress. Yet, Gottsched’s primary target in this play are the fanatical Pietists responsible for Wolff’s expulsion from Halle (Goodman 1999: 226–30), and insofar as learned women are brought in for criticism it is precisely on account of the fact that their pursuit of learning is ultimately for the sake of their own vanity and with little connection to the task of their own moral improvement (and indeed for the most part with the contrary result). As a result, Gottsched’s critique here is quite consistent with her continuing commitment to the necessity of philosophy, sincerely pursued for the sake of understanding, for woman’s cultivation of virtue.

45.2  Johanna Charlotte Unzer Like Gottsched, Johanna Charlotte Unzer became well-known in her own time primarily in virtue of her literary contributions (in Unzer’s case, she was a poet). Born Johanna Charlotte Ziegler in Halle an der Saale on November 27, 1725, she benefitted from important familial connections with the university and strongly bears the traces of the influence of Halle’s distinctively modern intellectual climate. Ziegler was the daughter of Anna Elisabeth (née Krüger 1699–1651) and Johann Gotthilf Ziegler (1688–1747), a gifted musician and former student of J. S. Bach, who worked as an organist at the St. Ulrich’s church. Ziegler’s father had attended the Paedogogium regium in the famous Pietist orphanage (Meyer 2018: 10). However, and in contrast with Gottsched, Ziegler herself seems to have had little in the way of a rigorous education as a child. While she would later seem to complain of the strictness of her upbringing, it is likely that this only extended to the inculcation of moral precepts and perhaps the basics of a religious education, as her knowledge of languages, for instance, was rather limited (Gehring 1973: 14 and Unzer 1995: 10–11). Instead, Ziegler’s education derived from conversation and informal instruction from the many academics connected with her parents. By all accounts, the Ziegler household was intellectually vibrant as it was regularly trafficked by university students who took music lessons with her father, and by university faculty, including her uncle on her mother’s side J. G. Krüger (1715–1759), a professor in the medical faculty, and the Wolffian philosopher Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777). Among her father’s students was Johann August Unzer (1727–1799), then a medical student at Halle, who apparently took a personal interest in expanding Ziegler’s education, culminating in a series of letters in which he translated and annotated large sections of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica for her (Unzer 1995: 31; Green 2014: 124). The year 1751 was something of an annus mirabilis for Ziegler, as she published a remarkable number of texts on a variety of topics. Her own reflections on, and many augmentations to, Johann August’s translations of Baumgarten became the basis for her Grundriß einer Weltweisheit 615

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für das Frauenzimmer (Outline of a Philosophy for Woman) of 1751, which attempted to make the logical and metaphysical teachings of the Leibnizian-Wolffian school more accessible to a female readership. This text was quickly followed, also in 1751, by the Grundriß einer natürlichen Historie und eigentlichen Naturlehre für das Frauenzimmer (Outline of a Natural History and Proper Doctrine of Nature for Women) which undertook a similar project with respect to Krüger’s Naturlehre (Krüger 1740). In addition to these (broadly speaking) philosophical texts, both of which were very positively received, Ziegler published a volume of poetry in 1751, a volume that was so successful it prompted a new edition in 1753. It was also a personally eventful year as it was in 1751 that Johann August took up a medical practice in Altona, and Ziegler joined him soon thereafter, with the pair marrying around this time. It was, in fact, as a poet that Ziegler (now Unzer) enjoyed her greatest success. As a result of her first volume of poetry, consisting of Anacreontic verse, she was named poet laureate of the university of Helmstedt (where her uncle had been named vice-rector), for which occasion she composed an ode on an appropriately lofty theme (Krüger/Unzer 1753), and she was also made an honorary member of the German societies at Helmstedt and Göttingen. This was followed in 1754 with a volume of poems on more serious topics. In Altona, Unzer was engaged with the budding literary scene in nearby Hamburg, and she was editorially involved in a couple of journals (Roethe 1895). The following years saw her publish further poetic texts, and a second edition of the first Outline (including a new preface) in 1767. After a rather productive couple of decades, Unzer published nothing in the 1770s, though she had the good fortune of having a nephew who took up the cause of burnishing and defending her literary legacy. And though their marriage suffered numerous hardships, including the death of their two young children and a protracted period of illness, Unzer and Johann August enjoyed a happy marriage. Unzer died at the age of 57 in Altona on January 29, 1782. Unzer’s Outline of a Philosophy for Woman (hereafter simply Outline) takes on the extraordinarily challenging, if not entirely unprecedented, task of presenting the latest (Wolffian) philosophical theories to a female readership. In attempting this, Outline takes a place among the more familiar texts within the genre of Damenphilosophie ( Jauch 1991), or texts that attempt to communicate influential philosophical ideas for a popular and primarily female audience. Texts within this tradition include Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (originally of 1686, but translated into German by Johann Christoph Gottsched in 1726 and frequently referenced by Unzer— Gehring 1973: 27–28), Algarotti’s Il Newtonianismo per le dame (of 1737), and the lesser-known La belle Wolffienne by Samuel Heinrich Formey (published serially between 1741–1753) which, despite taking on a similar aim, Unzer never references. Even considered within this, at this point, relatively new tradition, Unzer’s text is very distinctive as not only is it the only example to have been actually written by a woman, but it also constitutes a highly original experiment in genre in its own right which works to situate the Leibnizian-Wolffian system within Unzer’s own distinctive vision for philosophy. Before turning to these features, we should note first of all that Unzer is explicit about the motivation for her project. Unzer makes clear in her introduction (the portion of Outline which she claims as wholly her own contribution; Unzer 1995: 31) that she (like Gottsched) is convinced that the pursuit of philosophical cognition is essential if a woman is to lead a happy life. In Unzer’s case, this is on account of her insistence on recognizing women as active inquirers, possessed of a natural curiosity which cannot be satisfied through a knowledge limited only to the proximate causes of things. As Unzer contends, historical cognition, or cognition that something is the case, Does not suffice at all to satisfy the curiosity of nobler souls. No, it is much more natural for these to endeavour to supply a ground as to how it happens that this or that should take place so and not otherwise, and to discover the sources of all the changes with which our senses 616

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are daily occupied. And, in truth, such a noble curiosity is not at all to be spurned but rather deserves much more that one continually seeks to inflame it. (Unzer 1995: 34) In order to satisfy this curiosity, women (at least those with “nobler souls”) cannot content themselves with historical cognition or mere belief (Unzer 1995: 35), but must seek the ultimate grounds or causes of things, which is to say philosophical cognition or science (Unzer 1995: 36–37). Consistent with this, Unzer emphasizes at numerous junctures in Outline that she is seeking to equip women with the tools to actively discover truths through their own inquiries and to evaluate those of others, which aim particularly informs her presentation of logic. So, Unzer notes that “[w]e want to learn to discover truths for ourselves, and to think up proofs of these truths, whose grounds are not yet known to us, by ourselves” (Unzer 1995: 115, 121). She emphasizes that not merely observation but also active experiment is important for gaining knowledge of causes (Unzer 1995: 106–07, 132–33), and also claims that observing the rules of logic will allow women to achieve a true appraisal of their own powers but also equip them to evaluate the discoveries presented in philosophical writings (Unzer 1995: 141). As she herself notes, an ability to understand and appraise the written texts of others is especially important for women who do not have access to formal oral instruction and who cannot, except in rare cases, make up for this loss through their own efforts, or through informal conversation with members of their own or the opposite sex (Unzer 1995: 137–38). Significantly, Unzer’s focus in the Outline is on providing the foundations for philosophical cognition in the otherwise abstruse domains of logic (including philosophical method) and metaphysics. To this end, Unzer adapts Wolff’s treatment of logic in his textbook, originally of 1713, and Baumgarten’s presentation of metaphysics in his Metaphysica of 1739, to her own purposes. Accordingly, she seeks a manner of presenting the doctrines contained in these texts in a form accessible to women, and ultimately finds a way to do so not only by rendering Baumgarten’s theses into German from the Latin but also by explaining the core ideas in a more engaging way that presupposes little in the way of scholastic training and that is stripped of the formalisms of the Wolffian mathematical manner of presentation. She effects this by accompanying her explanation of logical or metaphysical doctrines with illustrative verses or evocative prose drawn from contemporary writers (including of course herself ). In attempting this, Unzer is implicitly taking issue with one philosopher’s views in particular concerning what constitutes the appropriate objects of women’s investigation and the method according to which such topics should be taught. So, in a program for female education that he published in his journal, Der Gesellige, in 1748, G. F. Meier (the family friend and Halle professor) is quite explicit in excluding the abstruse doctrines of metaphysics from his conception of what sort of learnedness (Gelehrsamkeit) is appropriate for women. Meier contends that only beautiful things are suitable for them to learn (Meier 1748b: 355), which he takes to rule out any consideration of logical definitions and technical terms from a woman’s education (Meier 1748b: 355, 357), but he also argues that it excludes highly abstract logical and metaphysical doctrines that cannot be presented in a “beautiful” manner, and here he makes specific mention of the mathematical method and the Leibnizian monadology. Regarding the former, he “warn[s] all women from making such formal inferences,” which implies that women cannot learn anything with mathematical certainty, and goes as far as to say that women should not even know the name of the mathematical method (Meier 1748b: 356, 358). Concerning metaphysics, Meier notes that only the argument from design is appropriate for women, and in spite of his own acceptance of the doctrine, he advises “any woman who would want to be learned” against “concerning herself with monads” (Meier 1748b: 355). In fact, Unzer’s Outline amounts to a rebuttal of Meier’s attempted exclusion of the deepest topics of metaphysics from woman’s education, as she tackles just these, and a variety of other highly 617

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abstract doctrines. The first part of Outline is devoted to Vernunftlehre (logic), and closely follows Wolff’s presentation in his textbook on the subject (cf. Unzer 1995: 178); so, she begins with the classification and acquisition of concepts, proceeds to the doctrine of propositions and judgments in general, followed by a presentation of syllogistics and then a comparatively condensed presentation of the “practical” part of logic. In addition to a detailed treatment of definitions, in the course of which she offers her Leserinnen advice on formulating nominal and real definitions and warns against the overuse of the method of division (Unzer 1995: 87–88), she also offers a complete presentation of the mathematical method, covering Wolff’s discussion of axioms, postulates, theorems, and problems, and their use in constructing demonstrations and the discovery of new truths. Unzer’s presentation of metaphysics likewise follows the Wolffian division of topics. Beginning with ontology, or Grundwissenschaft, Unzer’s discussion touches on all of the principal topics, including the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason, the essence of things, and the definition of substance, but also devotes considerable attention to the doctrine of monads, with Unzer offering an argument for the necessity of monads (on the basis of the definition of composite things) but ultimately acknowledging the doctrine’s controversial character (Unzer 1995: 184–85). This is followed by a brief consideration of cosmology, and then psychology, which is divided into empirical and rational psychology and with much more detailed consideration of what can be known of the soul by means of experience rather than through inferences. Finally, Unzer presents a truncated natural theology, but makes a point of providing the (AnselmianCartesian) proof of God’s existence based on the fact that He contains all perfections and existence is a perfection (Unzer 1995: 347–48). Moreover, Unzer’s effort in the Outline to illustrate and reinforce metaphysical doctrines through verses of poetry or excerpts from fables can be seen as an attempt to make these logically distinct theses aesthetically lively for her readership. In doing so she draws on Meier’s own account of “beautiful thought [schönes Denken]” which he evidently gleaned from Baumgarten’s lectures on aesthetics, and presented in his own Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften (First Principles of all Beautiful Sciences). There, Meier introduces the beautiful, or sensible perfection of cognition, as a counterpoint to the more familiar notion of logically perfect cognition; so, cognition is beautiful not insofar as it is distinctly represented (that is, insofar as the marks of a given cognition are clear), but rather insofar as it is indistinct and the sensibly represented manifold it contains agrees with or harmonizes with itself (cf. Meier 1748a: 46–47). Among the perfections that are proper to beautiful cognition are aesthetic richness (Reichthum), or the fact that it serves to represent many things (Meier 1748a: 48–51), but also that it is lively (lebendig), which is to say that it “causes pleasure or dissatisfaction, desire or aversion, through the intuition of a perfection or imperfection” (Meier 1748a: 59–60). Unzer references Meier’s discussion in her own account of beauty (Unzer 1995: 295–96), singling out the liveliness of cognition in particular, which she understands in terms of a “moving cognition, one which produces effective strivings” (Unzer 1995: 300). However, where Meier might extol such beautiful cognition as the only “tasteful” and socially acceptable form of learning for women (Meier 1748b: 616), Unzer’s aim in rendering the truths of logic and metaphysics in a lively way is instead to promote an effective desire for further (and presumably ultimately logically distinct) philosophical cognition; as she writes, “I have no doubt whatsoever that, the better acquainted my female readers are with philosophy, the more pleasure they will gain from it” (Unzer 1995: 39).

45.3 Conclusion As should in any case be clear, in addressing Meier’s challenges, Unzer produces something more, namely, an innovative genre of philosophical text that effectively blends logical and aesthetic features by way of securing the accessibility of her text to the widest possible audience. Yet what 618

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also comes to light in Unzer’s case, as well as in Gottsched’s translations, is a commitment to a conception of philosophical activity as responding to an essentially human desire to know and to develop one’s inherent capacities (especially, but not only, moral capacities), and it is this that motivates both to make philosophical cognition and the tools for philosophical investigation not just accessible to women, but on the whole less abstruse, more applicable to the world (as indicated in Unzer’s preferred term for philosophy: Weltweisheit, or “worldly wisdom”), and deeply interconnected with other areas of learned and literary endeavor. This is a vision of philosophy that anticipates so-called Popularphilosophie (“popular philosophy”) the movement that would soon become ascendant in Germany and which led to the stark decline of the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy from the 1760s onward. In their rejection of the new scholasticism, the popular philosophers took inspiration from the Ciceronian ideal of Socrates bringing philosophy down from the heavens to make it walk in the city among human beings. Against these philosophers, however, the works of Gottsched and Unzer, show that there is no forced choice between philosophical rigor and a popular mode of expression, and that the interest in matters of “speculation” is not separable—neither in men nor in women—from our interest in virtue.

Notes 1 In what follows, I will simply refer to these as “Germany.” 2 For ease of reference, in what follows I will refer to the two subjects of this chapter by their married last names (“Gottsched” and “Unzer”), referring to their husbands (both of whom published actively) by their first names. 3 For accounts of Gottsched’s contributions to this enormous undertaking, see the preface to Bayle 1744 and Brown 2012: 53. 4 Following Wolff’s presentation, Johann Christoph sets out from the Leibnizian definition of a free act in terms of spontaneity (or the fac that it proceeds from the agent’s will) and intelligence or knowledge (Wissen); cf. Gottsched 1734: 13–14. Compare Wolff’s discussion in the German Metaphysics §§514–20 (in Dyck 2020: 117–18).

References Algarotti, F. (1737) Il Newtonianismo per le Dame, Naples. Baumgarten, A. G. (1739) Metaphysica, Halle: Hemmerde. Bayle, P. (1744) Historisches und Critisches Wörterbuch: Nach der Neuesten Auflage von 1740 ins Deutsch Übersetzt, Vol. 4 (“Q bis Z”), trans. J. C. Gottsched, Leipzig. Beausobre, L. I. (1758) Gedanken über die Glückseligkeit, oder Philosophische Betrachtungen, über das Gute und Böse des Menschlichen Lebens, trans. L. A. V. Gottsched, Berlin: Haude and Spener. Brown, H. (2008) “Luise Gottsched the Satirist,” The Modern Language Review 103(4): 1036–50. (2012) Luise Gottsched the Translator, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Dingel, I. (2009) “Leibniz als Gegengift—Pierre Bayles Dictionnaire Historique et Critique im Deutschsprachigen Raum,” Studia Leibnitiana XLI: 183–202. Dyck, C. (2020) Early Modern German Philosophy 1690–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2021) “On Prejudice and the Limits to Learnedness: Dorothea Christiane Erxleben and the Querelle des Femmes,” in C. W. Dyck (ed.), Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fontenelle, B. (1726) Gespräche von Mehr als Einer Welt Zwischen Einem Frauenzimmer und Einem Gelehrten, trans. J. C. Gottsched, Leipzig: Breitkopf. Formey, J. (1746–1753) La Belle Wolfienne, La Haye. Gehring, T. (1973) Johanna Charlotte Unzer-Ziegler 1725–1782. Ein Ausschnitt aus dem Literarischen Leben in Halle, Göttingen und Altona, Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Gomez, M. A. (1730) Le Triomphe de L’éloquence, Paris. (1735) Der Sieg der Beredsamkeit. Aus dem Französischen der Frau von Gomez Übersetzt, durch Luise Adelg. Victoria Kulmus, trans. L. A. V. Gottsched, Leipzig: Breitkopf. Goodman, K. (1999) Amazons and Apprentices: Women and the German Parnassus in the Early Enlightenment, Rochester, NY: Camden House.

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Corey W. Dyck (2015) “Luise Gottsched, Freethinker,” in J. Pustejovsky and J. Vansant (eds.), ‘Wenn sie das Wort Ich Gebraucht,’ Festschrift für Barbara Becker-Cantarino von FreundInnen, SchülerInnen und KollegInnen, Leiden: Brill. Gottsched, J. C. (1733–1734) Erste Gründe der Gesammten Weltweisheit, 2 vols, Leipzig: Breitkopf. Gottsched, L. A. V. (1735) Der Sieg der Beredsamkeit. Aus dem Französischen der Frau von Gomez Übersetzt, Durch Luise Adelg. Victoria Kulmus, Leipzig: Breitkopf. (1736) Pietisterey im Fischbein-Rocke, oder die Doctormäßige Frau, Rostock. (1739) Triumph der Weltweisheit, Nach Art des Franzosischen Sieges der Beredsamkeit, Leipzig: Breitkopf. (ed. and trans.) (1741) Zwo Schriften, Welche von der Frau Marquis von Chatelet, Gebohrner Baronessinn von Bretuil, und dem Herrn von Mairan, Beständigem Sekretär bey der Französischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Das Maaß der Lebendigen Kraft Betreffend, Gewechselt Worden, Leipzig: Breitkopf. Green, K. (2014) History of Women’s Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hagengruber, R. (2011) “Emilie Du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton: The Transformation of Metaphysics,” in R. Hagengruber (ed.), Émilie Du Châtelet: Between Leibniz and Newton, London: Springer. Jauch, U. P. (1991) Damenphilosophie & Männermoral. Von Abbé de Gérard bis Marquis de Sade. Ein Versuch Über die Lächelnde Vernunft, Vienna: Passagen. Kord, S. (2000) Little Detours: The Letters and Plays of Luise Gottsched (1713–1762), Rochester, NY: Camden House. Krüger, J. G. (1740) Naturlehre, Halle: Hemmerde. and J. C. Unzer. (1753) Johann Gottlob Krügers Dichterkranz ertheilet Frauen Johanne Charlotte Unzerin, gebohrne Zieglerin, Halle: Hemmerde. Lambert, A. T. (1727) Réflexions Nouvelles sur les Femmes, Paris. (1731) Neue Betrachtungen Über das Frauenzimmer, trans. L. A. V. Gottsched, Leipzig. Leibniz, G. W. (1744) Herrn Gottfried Wilhelms Freyherrn von Leibnitz Theodicee, das ist, Versuch von der Güte Gottes, Freyheit des Menschen, und vom Ursprunge des Bösen, trans., J. C. Gottsched, Hanover and Leipzig: Erben. Meier, G. (1748a) Anfangsgründe Aller Schönen Wissenschaften, Vol. 1, Halle: Gebauer. (ed.) (1748b) Der Gesellige, Parts I and II. Halle: Gebauer. Meyer, U. (2018) PhilosophinnenLeben. Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Aachen: ein-FACH-verlag. Reichenberger, A. (2011) “Leibniz’s Quantity of Force: A ‘Heresy’? Emilie du Châtelet’s Instituions in the Context of the Vis Viva Controversy,” in R. Hagengruber (ed.), Émilie Du Châtelet: Between Leibniz and Newton, London: Springer. Roethe, G. (1895) “Unzer, Johanne Charlotte,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 39: 331–34, Till, D. (2002) “Leibniz-Rezeption und Leibniz-Übersetzung im 18. Jahrhundert: Zur Medialen Konstruktion der Leibniz-Wolffschen Schulphilosophie,” Daphnis 31: 643–99. Unzer, J. C. (1751) Grundriß einer Natürlichen Historie und eigentlichen Naturlehre für das Frauenzimmer, Halle. (1995) Grundriß einer Weltweisheit für das Frauenzimmer, ed. H. Bennent-Vahle, Aachen: ein-FACHverlag. (reprint of the 2nd edition of 1761). Wolff, C. (1713) Vernünftige Gedanken von den Kräften des Menschlichen Verstandes und ihrem Richtigen Gebrauch in der Erkenntnis der Wahrheit, Halle: Renger.

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PART IV

State of the Field

46 WHAT DIFFERENCE? THE RENAISSANCE OF WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS Sarah Hutton

The chapters in this volume testify to a remarkable development which has taken place in the last 30 years: the drive to recover women philosophers of the past and to restore them to visibility. Despite the now incontestable fact that there have been women philosophers throughout philosophy’s history, their contribution to philosophy was largely forgotten, their works overlooked and, in many cases, lost. By celebrating the recovery of the lost philosophical voices of many women who lived ca. 1600–1850, the present volume is a landmark in the ongoing efforts to remedy historic neglect. It is fair to say that historians of early modern philosophy have led the way, but now the work of recovery is extending to other periods and other places. Scholars are now engaged in ‘search and find missions’ from antiquity to the twentieth century, with work ongoing in many areas, from women Pythagoreans (Pomeroy 2013; Pellò 2018; Dutsch 2020) to the first all-female school in Analytic Philosophy (O’Hear 2020; Lipscomb 2021; Nassar and Gjesdal 2021; Stone and Alderwick 2021; Connell and Janssen-Lauret 2022).1 The combined effect of this work is that there is the prospect of real change: not just in early modern philosophy, but in the canon of Western European philosophy, and, indeed in philosophy worldwide (see, for instance, Wang and Ivanhoe forthcoming).2 This holds the prospect of a new Renaissance—a Renaissance not of the Greek philosophers of antiquity, but of philosophy by women. The reappearance of female philosophers raises the question of what difference this will make. No doubt the new attention to philosophy by women will bring changes in all areas of philosophy, and not just to feminist philosophy. However, it is too soon to be able to tell with any degree of confidence what the difference will be, or how extensive. As far as concerns the recovered philosophy of early modern women—as represented by this volume—the implications for our perception of philosophy’s history are already apparent. This body of philosophy by women challenges long-established forms of history of philosophy which supported and were supported by teaching canons across the globe. It puts the history of philosophy itself under scrutiny and, among other things, raises the question of whether women’s philosophy and its history should be separated from the rest of philosophy. These issues apply not only to the history of early modern philosophy, but have far-reaching implications beyond it because, like it or not, philosophy of every period has a past which cannot be ignored, and how philosophy today relates to its history is indicative of the state of philosophy as practiced. But in this chapter, I shall confine the discussion to early modern philosophy in order to consider two of the issues at stake: whether women’s philosophy be separated from male traditions and whether the history of philosophy is fit for purpose—the charge against it being its restricted scope, exemplified by the fact that its dominant narrative routinely ignores the contribution of women. I shall explore the notion of a “new Renaissance” as a lead-in DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-54

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to arguing for an inclusive view of philosophy’s history. But I shall start with a brief overview of the results of the work of recovery in early modern philosophy. The present volume illustrates several obvious fruits of the work which has been done to recover women’s philosophy. First, the success of the drive to recover women philosophers is reflected in the fact that it is now recognised not just that there were women philosophers but that there were plenty of them. The 15 or so women who are the subject of individual studies in the present volume are just the better known among early modern philosophers. Four of these have now become almost canonical in new accounts of women’s philosophy (Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish and Emilie Du Châtelet). Several others are discussed, among them Anne Dacier, Anna Maria Van Schurman, Laura Bassi, Madame de Maintenon, Hannah More, Frances Reynolds and Mary Wollstonecraft. Furthermore, the geographical coverage of the volume, as represented by philosophers from France, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Italy (with work ongoing on Nordic philosophers), is an implicit rebuke to the narrowness of coverage in traditional accounts of the history of European philosophy in the period. Secondly, the work of recovery, as represented by the contributions to this volume, shows that women philosophised on all the same topics as their male contemporaries, in all branches of philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, natural philosophy), and on any number of philosophical themes, from the existence of God to scepticism. Early-modern women had things to say about causation, mind and human nature, reason, epistemology, the nature of virtue, the passions, the good life, free will, freedom, moral autonomy, politics, law, equality, natural philosophy and all branches of the sciences (physics, optics, chemistry, medicine). The volume also illustrates the fact that women reflected on themes and issues which related directly to their experience as women—for instance, human nature, sexuality, equality, difference, education, marriage and family, beauty, embodiment, and friendship. And this highlights the fact, acknowledged in the foregoing papers, that extra-philosophical factors such as institutions, religion and social circumstances play into the history of philosophy. Finally, those who work on philosophical women no longer work in isolation, but in the company of other scholars engaged in the same enterprise. This collection of essays is the latest in a steadily growing body of scholarly writing on women thinkers and their philosophy. Not so very long ago you could read everything there was to be read in an afternoon (except that you couldn’t because it was often difficult to get hold of the material—there were few articles in mainstream journals, no books published by mainstream publishers, and very little available online). Now it is a job just keeping up with the literature. Newcomers to the field are likely to be unaware of how much of a support it is to have a body of work on which to draw and on which to build. Crucially, today, there are modern editions and translations of texts which make it easier to access women’s philosophy. And there is enough material for scholars to debate and disagree. Even now, the teaching canon in early modern philosophy is changing to include women (see, e.g., Shapiro and Lascano 2021),3 and a canon of female philosophers is emerging. And some of the foregoing papers show that the philosophy of early modern women is not irrelevant to themes and debates in contemporary philosophy.

46.1  A New Renaissance? This work of recovery has not been without precedent. The history of philosophy is in fact full of philosophy that has been lost or forgotten, only to be recovered at a later point. Throughout the history of philosophy, different philosophers have attracted interest for different reasons, at different times. Some philosophers and philosophies have fallen into desuetude for varying periods of time until a revival of interest at a later date, for example, the philosophy of Plotinus and Pyrrhonic scepticism recovered in the Renaissance, not to mention most of the dialogues of Plato which were unavailable throughout the Middle Ages. More recent examples are Leibniz (restored to philosophical attention as a logician by Bertrand Russell) and Spinoza (who is riding the crest of 624

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a wave of interest unimaginable half a century ago). Even Descartes, whose place in the development of modern philosophy is now considered foundational, has had his years in the philosophical wilderness. The fate of women’s philosophy is comparable: Conway, Cavendish, Du Châtelet, Astell, Masham and Suchon are all examples of philosophical women whose thought was ignored and forgotten after their deaths until the end of the twentieth century. The on-going drive to recover the women thinkers of the past will produce further examples of this kind. Now, the most important period for philosophical recovery in Europe was the period known as the Renaissance. Although the philosophical side of the Renaissance contribution to philosophy tends to be ignored by philosophers and historians alike, the Renaissance was in fact a period of great importance in the development of European philosophy. The lost ancient writings recovered in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries included philosophical texts and their recovery stimulated a revival of interest in long-forgotten philosophies. As already mentioned, this was the period which saw the recovery of the philosophy of Plato and Plotinus, the revival of scepticism and the writings of the ancient atomists. It also saw the recovery and re-translation of the work of known philosophers, notably Aristotle. There are many parallels between the Renaissance recovery of ancient philosophy and the twenty-first-century recovery of women philosophers. The history of women philosophers as we know it now is peopled with ‘dormant’ figures, philosophers who have suffered neglect until a revival of interest at a later date. And, as in the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a body of philosophy which has lain forgotten for centuries, is being brought back into view. This process, like the Renaissance recovery of the philosophy of classical antiquity more generally, involves the recovery of forgotten writings and the editing and translation of texts—for example the writings of Oliva Sabuco (Sabuco 2007), Elisabeth of Bohemia (Descartes 1989; Elisabeth of Bohemia 2007), Anne Conway (Coudert and Corse 1996), Margaret Cavendish (Cavendish 2001; Cavendish 2003). In the process, previously unknown philosophers have been brought to our attention, for example, Hannah Newcombe (Connolly 2019). Others who were not formerly regarded as philosophers are recognised as such (e.g., Mary Wollstonecraft). But there are other parallels between the Renaissance recovery of ancient philosophy and the present-day recovery of female philosophers. We can take inspiration not just from the precedent set in the Renaissance for restoring forgotten philosophies to view, but also from how fifteenth-century Humanists set about it and the problems which they faced. They too had to grapple with the fact that most of the philosophy of the ancient world was lost or broken. In their search for texts, the Renaissance Humanists developed techniques for recovering them and figured out how to interpret them. This involved applying historical, linguistic and editorial skills in order to transcribe, translate and edit their texts. It also involved refreshing familiar philosophers by producing new editions and translations of his works: the dominant philosopher of the medieval canon, Aristotle, was re-edited in humanistic rather than scholastic formats. But this would never have happened without historical insight and linguistic competencies—most of which were developed during the process of recovery by the humanists responsible. The Renaissance renewal of philosophy, as of other classical culture, had the impact which it did, because it was carried by new technology: printing (Eisenstein 1980). The recovery of as-yet-un-recovered philosophy by women finds a precedent in the activities of Renaissance Humanists, who went searching for texts, and who developed techniques for recovering them. As with the Renaissance Humanist’s recovery of the culture of antiquity, the recovery of women philosophers is the fruit of historical investigations which have been forged in the process, as well as linguistic skills to understand and translate texts in other languages. And, as in the Renaissance, the enterprise of recovery is carried forward with the aid of new technology. Although the received story of the Renaissance recovery of classical culture includes the recovery and translation of philosophical texts by Renaissance Humanists, it is literature, history and 625

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rhetoric which attract most attention from scholars today. The received account usually overlooks the fact that the recovery of ancient philosophical texts contributed to the enrichment and re-invigoration of philosophy.4 The Renaissance re-discovery and recovery of ancient philosophy was not sterile antiquarianism. The recovered texts were read as philosophy and adapted for the period in which they were re-discovered. In this way, some of the most famous philosophers of antiquity were brought back into philosophical debate. The enrichment of philosophy from these new streams is evidenced by the fact that new philosophical themes emerge (e.g. love), as do new ways of doing philosophy (e.g. the dialogue form). It is not irrelevant to mention that old philosophies opened up ways of thinking about women which differed from Aristotelian orthodoxy—something not lost on the women philosophers of the time, Tullia d’Aragona, Lucrezia Marinella, Moderata Fonte and Arcangela Tarabotti, who decried Aristotelian misogyny and developed arguments for gender equality by turning to other philosophical traditions, for example, Platonism. This kind of creative engagement with the philosophy of antiquity by thinkers of the Renaissance (men as well as women) paved the way for the emergence of new philosophies forged by philosophers who dared to think differently from inherited ways of doing things— thinkers like Michel de Montaigne, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, Girolamo Cardano and Francis Bacon.5 In their turn, these thinkers anticipate the emergence of radical new philosophies in the seventeenth century (Muratori and Paganini 2016). Arguably, therefore, unlike more recent recoveries of philosophers (e.g. Leibniz and Spinoza), the Renaissance recovery of ancient philosophers changed philosophy itself. One difference between the current revival of women’s philosophy and the revival of philosophical antiquity in the Renaissance is that there never was a ‘golden age’ of women’s philosophy in the same way as there was with the philosophical culture of ancient Athens or the traditions of philosophy developed in the classical world: Plato and Neoplatonism, Cicero and Roman philosophy. There is, of course, a story of women’s contributions to those traditions which has been forgotten or ignored. But that is not the same thing. And the last thing one would want from a ‘renaissance’ of women’s philosophy is the ‘restoration’ of women thinkers to the marginal place which many of them had among the philosophers of their own time in the past. Renaissance does not mean restoration, but a dynamic engagement and re-integration, as happened to ancient philosophy when it was absorbed into European philosophy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was this inclusivity which accounts for the impact of ancient philosophy in the Renaissance.

46.2  Impact of Recovery If the parallel with the Renaissance holds, the recovery of women’s philosophy has the potential to reshape and reinvigorate both philosophy and its history. We can look forward to the enrichment of philosophy by the addition of new philosophers, new philosophies, and different philosophical themes. The opening up to new streams of philosophy is an exciting prospect. But it is too soon to tell exactly what the impact of this on philosophy will be. Before this can happen, there are a number of questions raised by this prospective ‘new Renaissance’—whether women’s philosophy should be treated as a sphere on its own, and the attendant question of whether there should be ‘women only’ canon, and whether women’s philosophy should be taught separately from men’s. To my mind, for philosophy by women to have an impact on philosophy as a whole and how we understand its history, it is essential that it be part of philosophy as a whole. Philosophy as a discipline and a practice will be richer for it. To treat women’s philosophy as a separate philosophical sphere is not without its dangers, the obvious one being the danger of side-lining women’s philosophy by separating it from what is taken to be the mainstream, as has happened in the case of Feminist Philosophy, which is often taught separately from the main philosophy curriculum, and even outside philosophy departments. To separate women’s philosophy from philosophy by 626

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men carries the danger of downgrading women thinkers, by inventing a kind of ‘women’s page’ in philosophy, women’s philosophy an optional extra, or gender curiosity. Were that to happen it would take women’s philosophy down the one-way street of a re-forgetting, the new amnesia (Hutton 2019). Devoting a whole volume to female philosophers seems to suggest that gender separatism is the way we are going, but it does not inevitably follow that gender-apartheid in philosophy is the direction of travel. Not at all. And here are three reasons why (1) What this collection does in fact show is that women’s philosophy is not sui generis different from men’s philosophy. In fact, as the table of contents shows, women of the past philosophised on all the same topics as their male contemporaries, in all branches of philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, natural philosophy—see above), using the established philosophical discourse of their time. There are often, of course, differences of emphasis and theme among women—as the chapters in this volume show. Such differences are in the main reflective of women’s interests and experience, which differ from men’s. (2) To devote a volume entirely and exclusively to philosophy by women is a response to the information deficit on female philosophers, not a claim for separatism in philosophy. Women-only collections of papers are important as reparation of historical neglect. I’d like to think that one day such collections will become redundant as women reclaim the mainstream. But I am not such an idealist as to think that will happen any time soon. Certainly not in my lifetime. Having a whole volume devoted to women philosophers is an important transitional undertaking which furthers the end of recovering them as philosophers by serving the practical purpose of allowing women’s voices to be heard in their own right. (3) A collective volume on the philosophy of women is hugely important for countering the corrosive effect of age-old assumptions and modern stereotypes (Saul 2013)—old chestnuts such as that women can’t think, that women didn’t think, or that only exceptional women are capable of philosophy. Such views are more likely to flourish where there is a dearth of sources. In such a context an individual woman philosopher is likely to be drowned out in the male maelstrom of philosophy, whereas weight of numbers presents more of a challenge. A collection of studies of the present kind on female philosophers shows that historically women were part of philosophical culture and have been throughout history. A related prejudice, which has not completely disappeared even now, is the accusation of double standards: that women are only admitted to the lists of philosophy because they are advantaged by the double standards whereby women and not men may be considered philosophers—special pleading on their behalf, or over-elastic criteria to enable them to qualify as philosophers. Such views are fuelled in part by resistance to more inclusive conceptions of philosophy. But overly enthusiastic and uncritical recruitment of a diverse range of women from playwrights to queens to swell the ranks of philosophers (as happened in the early days of feminist recovery) has perhaps unwittingly provided a fig leaf of post-justification for such essentially misogynist attitudes. The best antidote to such prejudices is a substantial concentration of work on female philosophers and that is just what this volume devoted solely to women philosophers can provide. For all these reasons this collection of studies on early modern women’s philosophy is an important step towards an inclusive history of philosophy.

46.3  Renewing the History of Philosophy A collection of papers on the philosophy of early-modern women invites the question of where their philosophy sits in relation to the history of philosophy as generally conceived, and whether the history of women philosophers should be treated separately as a history on its own. These questions have a particular urgency now, because of negative views of the history of philosophy in circulation. The relevance of the history of philosophy to philosophy is an area of 627

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contention and on-going debate—loaded with anti-historical attitudes with deep roots among practitioners. The anti-historical position has been given a new edge by the fact that the history of philosophy has such a poor record on women philosophers. It is often said that the history of philosophy is in consequence not fit for purpose, and that it should therefore be abandoned. After all, the history of philosophy should reflect what actually took place in history. Since one of the things that actually happened in history is that women did philosophy, the exclusion of women from the received history of philosophy in the form we know it now renders it not fit for purpose. To put it crudely, if the canonical pillars of philosophical wisdom are Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, there will be no women in sight. Seventeenth-century philosophy, which, by received tradition, is generally held to have laid the foundations of philosophy as we know it today, but in standard accounts of it you are unlikely to find women. And you certainly won’t encounter any mention of the fact that women were at the forefront of new thinking of the time. But that was actually the case with several of them: Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia was one of the first to recognise the originality of Descartes’ philosophy. The first defence of Locke was by a woman (Catherine Trotter Cockburn’s A Defence of the ‘Essay of Human Understanding’, Written by Mr. Lock 1702). Mary Astell’s correspondence with John Norris engages with the then-new philosophy of Malebranche. Emilie du Châtelet broke boundaries by promoting Newtonian natural philosophy in France, and in introducing the philosophy of Leibniz to the French. To my mind, it goes without saying that it is important for women philosophers to know that there were female philosophers in the past. And it is equally important that all philosophers know that there have always been women philosophers. It is to history of philosophy that we must turn to demonstrate this. But women’s philosophy is also part of the history of philosophy for men. So, while I agree that the omission of women is a major failing which renders the history of philosophy unfit for purpose, it does not follow that the history of philosophy is therefore a dead duck. On the contrary, the history of philosophy has played a vital role in recovering women philosophers. Without the work of historians of philosophy, there is no question that, as far as women’s contribution to philosophy is concerned the recovery of philosophical women could not have happened. But this was not history of philosophy on the old model: not only does that fail to recognise women’s contribution to philosophy, but it is methodologically unequipped to recover them. An inclusive history of philosophy is one in dialogue with history. It is history of philosophy refreshed and re-focused so as ensure that women’s philosophical achievements are not overlooked. For the new history of philosophy to be inclusive it is essential that it is a history which acknowledges the circumstances in which women philosophised in the past. There is no question that historically women’s philosophy was produced under different conditions from men, and their participation in philosophy was different from men’s. Simply by virtue of their sex, for social and cultural reasons, women had to face many impediments not usually faced by men. These have varied according to time, place, and culture, but in all periods, women philosophers have had to confront social constraints, which restricted their educational opportunities and life choices. Even privileged women, women from the ruling class and upper echelons of society were not exempt. Women suffered these disadvantages right up until and into the twentieth century, despite the removal of social, political and educational barriers. In earlier periods, few women received much education, and most of them suffered from forms of misogyny which denigrated female intellectual capacities and imposed subordination to men. It is not surprising, therefore, that a recurring theme among women thinkers is their demand for education and intellectual freedom as the basis of gender equality and moral autonomy. To be able to philosophise at all was more difficult for a woman in the past because of what were called, euphemistically, circumstances “proper to her Sex, and Condition” (Masham, Occasional Thoughts, 228). Given that, in earlier times, women were not usually free to philosophise, it is important to understand the conditions under which women philosophers achieved what they did. I might add that although differences in opportunity for female philosophers vary according 628

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to time, they apply just as much to nineteenth- and twentieth-century women philosophers who are both historically and philosophically closer to us, with similar interests and patterns of thought. What is needed, therefore, is not the kind of history of philosophy which has been perpetuated by the teaching canons of the twentieth century, but a history which reflects the realities of the conditions of philosophising for both women and men. If disparities of circumstances are ignored in the historical accounts, the time may come when women are again cast as ‘minor’ philosophers on quantitative grounds, as justification for re-emergent philosophical misogyny. The need for a more inclusive history of philosophy is well understood by historians of philosophy working on women’s philosophy.6 Nor has it been lost on campaigners for gender equality in philosophy teaching. For example, in Women in Philosophy: what needs to change? Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins, raise “the problematic issue of how male voices dominate the history of philosophy” (Hutchinson and Jenkins 2013: 17).7 In her essay in the same book, Michelle Bastian calls for a new kind of history of philosophy: To present the history of philosophy in a more comprehensive and accurate manner, we need to recognise the way it consists of multiple traditions with varying trajectories, which cannot be confined to a single canonical sequence. (Bastian 2013: 24) I would go further, to suggest that there is more in common between campaigners for gender equality in philosophy and the new approaches to history which are required for re-integrating women into the history of philosophy. There is, I submit, a convergence between them. In their examination of contemporary exclusion and inclusion of women in philosophy, the volume edited by Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins focuses on: The social and institutional conditions of contemporary academic philosophy in the Anglophone world, as well as its methods, culture, and characteristic commitments. (Hutchison and Jenkins 2013)8 It may also be said of an inclusive history of philosophy that ‘social and institutional conditions’ are just as relevant to approaches to the history of philosophy that are hospitable to women. Institutions, religion and family circumstances are all contributory factors when it comes to participation in philosophy in the past as they are today. The recovery of women’s philosophy in the course of the last quarter century is a truly remarkable achievement. But it is still a work in progress. The philosophy of early modern women is only part of the story. But it augurs well for the Renaissance of women’s philosophy.

Notes 1 See also the ‘In Parenthesis’ project based at University of Manchester, UK: https://www. womeninparenthesis.co.uk/tag/womeninphilosophy/. 2 See also the South American organisation, ‘La Red Latinoamericana de Estudios sobre Filósofas en la Historia’, https://reddem.org. 3 Other examples of teaching curricula are shared on Project Vox: http://projectvox.org/teaching/. 4 There are, of course, notable exceptions to this rule, for example Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Christopher S. Celenza, The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language,  Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Also, Jill Kraye (ed.), Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2002). 5 It is not irrelevant to note that several female philosophers were also accomplished translators of philosophy: in particular, Van Schurman, Dacier, Barbapiccola, Du Châtelet.

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Sarah Hutton 6 A notable example is the ‘Extending New Narratives’ project dedicated to developing new narratives in the history of philosophy from the Middle Ages through the early twentieth century: https://www. newnarrativesinphilosophy.net/index.html. 7 This collection of essays is chiefly concerned with the teaching of philosophy in anglophone universities and the under-representation of women in philosophy departments. 8 See: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/women-in-philosophy-9780199325610?cc=us&lang=en&#.

References Bastian, M. (2013) “Finding Time for Philosophy,” in K. Hutchison and F. Jenkins (eds.), Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavendish, M. (2001) On Experimental Philosophy, ed. E. O’Neill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2003) Political Writings, ed. S. James, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Celenza, C. S. (2018) The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning, New York: Cambridge University Press. Connell, S. M. and F. Janssen-Lauret. (eds.) (2022) “Lost Voices: Women in Philosophy 1870–1970’: Special Issue,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30(2): 199–210. Connolly, P. (2019) “Susanna Newcome’s Cosmological Argument,” British Journal of the History of Philosophy 27(4): 842–59. Conway, A. (1996) The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, trans. A. Coudert and T. Corse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Copenhaver, B. P. and C. B. Schmitt. (1992) Renaissance Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Descartes, R. (1989) Correspondance avec Elisabeth, ed. J. M. Beyssade and M. Beyssade, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Dutsch, D. M. (2020) Pythagorean Women Philosophers. Between Belief and Suspicion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eisenstein, E. (1980) The Printing Press as the Agent of Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elisabeth of Bohemia (2007) The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, ed. and trans. L. Shapiro, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hutchison, K. and F. Jenkins (eds.) (2013) Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/women-in-philosophy9780199325610?cc=us&lang=en&. Hutton, S. (2019) “Women, Philosophy and the History of Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27(4): 684–701. Kraye, J. (ed.) (2002) Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy, Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum. Lipscomb, B. J. B. (2021) The Women Are up to Something. How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muratori, C. and G. Paganini. (eds.) (2016) Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy, New York: Springer. Nassar, D. and K. Gjesdal. (eds.) (2021) Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century. The German Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Hear, A. (ed.) (2020) “A Centenary Celebration: Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 87. Pellò, C. (2018) Women in Early Pythagoreanism, Ph.D. Dissertation, Cambridge University. Pomeroy, S. B. (2013) Pythagorean Women: Their History and Writings, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sabuco de Nantes, O. (2007) New Philosophy of Human Nature (1587), trans. M. E. Waithe, M. C. Vintro, and C. A. Zorita, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Saul, J. (2013) ‘‘Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy’, in K. Hutchison and F. Jenkins (eds.), Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, New York: Oxford University Press. Shapiro, L. and M. P. Lascano. (eds.) (2021) Early Modern Philosophy. An Anthology, Peterborough: Broadview Press. Stone, A. and C. Alderwick. (2021) “Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 29(2). Wang, H. Y. and P. J. Ivanhoe. (trans.) (forthcoming) Korean Women Philosophers and the Ideal of a Female Sage: The Essential Writings of Im Yunjidang and Gang Jeongildang, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Adams, Abigail 263 Adams, John 363 Addison, Joseph 122, 123, 584 Agnesi, M. G. 4, 174–78, 183; Instituizioni analitiche (Analytical Institutions) 174, 175; Propositiones Philosophicae 178 Agrippa, H. C. 269, 271 Algarotti, F. 177, 179–83, 616; Newtonianism for the Ladies 174, 176, 180 Allen, K. 205, 208 Allestree, R. 494, 498–503; Ladies Calling 494, 498–502; Paraphrase and Annotations upon all St. Paul’s Epistles 494, 500; Whole Duty of Man 498 alternative possibilities (AP) 216 altruism 52 American Revolution 3, 362 Amo, A. W. 5, 6, 321; On the Impassivity of the Human Mind 313; modern dissertation 313–16; new science 312–13; A Philosophical Disputation 313; Philosophical Dissertations 315; race and gender 311; On the Rights of Moors in Europe (De iure Maurorum in Europa) 313; Treatise on the Art of Soberly and Accurately Philosophizing 313 Angelou, M. 567 Anscombe, G. E. M. 35 Anstey, P. 165 Antoine-Mahut, D. 31 Apetrei, S. 500 Aquinas, Thomas 255, 321, 392 Arenal, E. 483 Aristotelian gender norms, confutation of 391–94 Aristotle 2, 35, 192, 195, 228, 229, 256–57, 263, 287, 333, 338, 386–87, 486–87, 564, 625; arguments 390; Categories 270; De Anima 383; De partibus animalium 382; gender concepts 381–83; Historia animalium 389; History of Animals 122, 391; metaphor 305; Metaphysics 270; Meteorology 191;

misogynistic tradition 384; misogyny 390–91; moral slavery 299; Nicomachean Ethics 389, 391, 393, 471; Physics 270; political philosophy 293, 381; Politics 389, 391; teleology 254 Arnauld, A. 259, 260, 332, 496 Astell, Mary: The Christian Religion 65, 493, 495; conservative reading 497–500; feminist reading 495–97; on freedom and action 65–68; on God’s nature 64–65; Goodness of God 68; on happiness and perfection 68; meeting conservative challenge 500–503; on natural determinism 223–24; new science 312–13; oppression of women 316–21; and selfdetermination (SD) 221–23; Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II 23, 66, 330–32, 493–95, 498–500; Some Reflections upon Marriage 65, 493, 500; ways of knowing 145–48; writings about friendship 232–35 Aurelius, Marcus 613 Ávila, Teresa de: acquaintance 398–400; love, selfinterest, and self-denial 403–5; self-knowledge (I) 396–98; self-knowledge (II) 400–403 autonomy: feminist implications 290–93; Fonte’s feminist vision 294–95; heteronomy and tyranny 293–94; marriage and heteronomy 288–90; modern argument 284–88 Babbage, Charles 597 Bach, J. S. 615 Bacon, Francis 2, 3, 168, 626 Bacon, Roger 165 Baier, A. 255 Ball, P. 4 Barbauld, A. L. 362, 363, 371–72, 371–74; equality 372–73; political philosophy 374 Barclay, Robert 132, 133 Barksdale, Clement 499

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Index Barlaeus, Caspar 14–16, 20 Bassi, Laura 4, 167, 174–77, 183, 624 Bastian, M. 629 Bayle, P. 104, 538, 613, 614; Dictionnaire historique et critique 613 Bennett, J. M. 358 Bergès, S. 3, 4, 591 Berkeley, G. 6, 8, 117, 157, 178, 203–5, 445, 446, 529, 562, 597, 598, 603, 605, 607, 612, 628; dialogues 431; Principles of Human Knowledge 116; scholarship of early modern philosophy 29 Bernoulli, James 174, 176, 465 Bidwell-Steiner, M. 195 Bingen, H. V. 23 Birch, T. 506 Bobbio, N. 292 Bodin, J. 19 Boileau-Despréaux, N. 425 Bokser, J. A. 487 Bolton, M. 207, 600 Bourgeois, L.: Observations diverses sur sterilité, perte de fruict, foecondité… 187 Boyer, Claude 465 Boyle, D. 2–3, 8, 205, 436, 438, 444, 600 Boyle, Robert 165 Brading, K. 4 Branscum, O. 4 Breitkopf, Bernhard Christoph 613 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre 363 Broad, J. 4, 6, 65, 115, 129, 223, 232, 233, 507, 515 Bruno, Giordano 626 Buck-Morss, S. 306 Buffet, M. 6, 32, 268, 269, 272, 274, 275, 338, 341–43 Burch, L. J. 424 Burgh, James 549, 553 Burke, E. 353, 354, 356, 361, 371, 552–54, 571, 577; Reflections on the Revolution in France 363, 552; Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 363 Campanella, Tommaso 626 Campiglia, Maddalena 193, 382 canon, European philosophical: canonical histories 7; uses and disadvantages of 29–31 Capra, G.F. 382, 384 Cardano, Girolamo 626 Cartesian dualism 114 Castiglione, B. 269, 271, 293, 384, 386 Cavell, S. 490 Cavendish, M.: The Blazing World 166, 168–69, 436, 443; coherence 95; content, genre, and method 46–48; critique of mechanism 90–91; divided ontology 114–18; finite immaterial spirits 442–44; God and nature 90–93, 440–42; God’s creation of immaterial beings 96; Grounds of Natural Philosophy 114, 118, 435–36, 441, 443–44, 446; against human exceptionalism

94–97; immaterial souls 94–96, 440–44; metaphysics 436–40; methodological choices 168–70; Observations upon the Experimental Philosophy 33, 435–36, 440–45; occasional causation 83, 90; (un)orthodoxy 444–47; Philosophical Fancies 436; Philosophical Letters 33, 81–83, 91, 94–97, 107, 114–15, 117, 435–36, 443, 445; Physical and Philosophical Opinions (PPO) 42–48, 107, 435, 436, 443; Poems and Fancies 435, 436; prefaces 43–48; prefaces of 46–48; question of women’s intellectual capacities 43–46; and question of women’s intellectual capacities 43–46; rationality 94; rejection of dualism 90–97; risk of polytheism 96; vitalistic causation 81–83; vitalist monism 107–9; ways of knowing 140–45 Cave, William: Primitive Christianity 500 Cereta, L. 22 Chamberlain, C. 109, 205 Chamberlayne, Edward 499 Chapelain, Jean 422, 423 Chapone, H. 549, 550; Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady 549 Charleton, W. 115, 117, 118, 157 Charron, P. 128, 134, 418, 423 Cicero, M. T. 127, 128, 229, 262, 301, 302, 306, 564, 565, 567, 626; De Officiis 564 Clarke, S. 179, 260–62, 527, 606, 607 Classical Age: method and explanation 165–67 Clavel-Vázquez, A. 3, 5 Cockburn, C. T. 3–4; on agency and virtue 511–15; conception of moral agency 512; The Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding 121, 506, 507, 628; early modern theories of obligation 260–62; Great Chain of Being 122–23; internal and external motivations 513; mankind as system 261–62, 513; metaphysics of matter 121–23; moral fitness theory 260–62, 512; moral obligation 513; relationship between God and created matter 122; Remarks 121, 506, 511 Coffee, Alan M. S. J. 4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 597 Colson, John 177 Comenius, J. A. 21 compatibilism 215 complex irony 481 Condorcet 579; Sketch for the Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind 591, 592 Conley, John J. 4, 6, 42 Conrart, Valentin 422 Conway, A.: basics of philosophy 451–52; creation 457–58; creaturely plenitude 454; from dead to living matter 102–3; divine perfection 453; emanative causation 453–54; essence, attribute, and mode 452; evil with sin 62–63; freedom 62–63; God 452–53; God’s goodness 61–62; on human exceptionalism 98, 106–7; from

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Index immaterial to material spirits 104–5; Of the Immortality of the Soul 78; language of reward and punishment 100–101; logos 455–57; against matter 118–21; mechanistic explanation 97–98; monism and moral order 101–2; on moral and metaphysical change 63; moral order of nature 98–101; normative order 98; panpsychism and emanation 459–60; panpsychism and perfectibility 460; panpsychism and vitalism 460–61; perfectionism 63–64; philosophy, challenges and historical importance of 450–51; The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy 61, 78–80, 450–52, 454–55, 461; rejection of dualism 97–107; seventeenthcentury context, panpsychism in 459; space and time 158–60; spirits and bodies 105–6; structure of creation and universal perfectibility 458–59; sympathetic harmony and normative enhancement 454–55; theological and teleological assumption 100; transmutations in nature 98–100, 103; vitalistic causation 78–81; vitalist monism 107–9 Corinna 273, 284–86, 288, 295 Corneille, Pierre 422 Cudworth, Damaris See Masham, Damaris Cudworth, Lady Cudworth, R. 89, 507 Cumberland, R. 255, 546, 547 Cunning, D. 3, 438 Curran, A. S. 312 Dacier, Anne 21, 22, 176, 624 D’Alembert, J.-R. 166, 175–77, 529 Daoust, L. 3 Darnton, R. 175 Darwall, S. 254, 255 Degérando, Joseph-Marie 31 De la Cruz, S. J. I. 4, 5, 241; autobiographical narrative and pedagogic function 483–85; knowledge as erotic enterprise 489–90; pedagogic use of complex irony in works 485–87; shame as moral emotion 487–88; socratic pedagogy 479, 480–83 De la Forge, Jean 32 Descartes, R. 7, 14, 16, 44, 115–16, 127, 131, 143–44, 146–47, 195, 240, 244, 246, 435, 437, 457–59; account of freedom 219; animal spirits 107; Discourse on Method 210; discoveries in optics 200; divine contemplation 400; duration of power 159; Foundations of Physics 165; human exceptionalism 87–88; ideal of self-mastery 300; immaterial entities 88, 97, 98, 104, 106; intellectualism 405; material-immaterial substance dualism 113–14, 118–19; Meditations on First Philosophy 333, 396, 610; mind-body dualism 74, 82, 132, 219–21, 494–96; “the nature of motion” 76; philosophical canon 31–33, 132–33, 136–37, 423, 625, 628; physics 75,

171; Principles of Philosophy 75, 77–80, 112, 178; Recovery Project 6; scholarship of early modern philosophy 29; Scientific Revolution narrative 2–3, 157, 581; self-perception 399; virtue of generosity 65, 67, 471; “wonder” [admiration] 245 Deslauriers, M. 3–5, 129, 131, 229, 230, 293, 302, 305 determinism 215; intellectual 216; natural 216; physical 216; theological 216 Detlefsen, K. 6, 8, 34, 320, 441, 493, 496, 497 Diderot, D. 175–77, 529 Digby, Kenelm 114, 435 doctrine of ‘commixture’ or complete blending 437 dogmatism 128 Dona Sabuco: New Philosophy of 193–95 Du Bois, W. E. B. 311 Du Châtelet, E. 1, 3–4, 6, 33, 174–75, 178–80, 624–25, 628; bodies, forces, and laws of motion 521–23; Discourse 247–48; effective absolute motion 530; Essai 181; Foundations of Physics 69, 519–20, 522–24, 526; on freedom 69–71; on God and creation 68–69; gravitation and collision 523–24; on human perfection 71–72; innovation 51, 52; Institutions 176, 182; On Liberty 68; mechanism and atomism 524–26; method 520–21; methodological choices 170–71; and philosophy of physics 519–20; space, time, and motion 160–61, 526–30; translations 50; on women, education, and translation 48–52 Du Moulin, Marie 17, 22 Dupin, L. 3, 6; comprehensive investigation 536–37; guardianship 537; masculine vanity 534; Salic law 537–38; titles 538–39; Work on Women 533–36, 539 Dyck, Corey W. 3, 5, 42 early modern philosophy 2–4 Ebbersmeyer, S. 31, 35 Einstein, Albert 179 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 597 Emmett, K. 4 English Civil War 3 epistemic injustice 47 equality 267–72 Equiano, Olaudah: Interesting Narrative 559 Erculiani, Camilla 384–88; Letters on Natural Philosophy 188–93 Erculiani Gregetta, C. 6, 187–93, 195, 384–88, 394 Erizzo, Sebastiano 192 Euler, Leonhard 174, 176, 178, 529 exclusion of women 31–36 facts of nature 394 Fearn, John 603 Febvre, L. 17, 18 Femenías, M. L. 479 feminism: activities 487; in eighteenth century 353; feminist implications 290–93; First Wave of feminism 7; Fonte’s feminist vision 294–95;

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Index ideas 503; slavery and servitude in seventeenthcentury 297–99 Fénelon, François 423, 612 Ferguson, M. 563 Fernández de Santa Cruz, Manuel 241, 479, 487 Fielding, Sarah: The Governess, or Little Female Academy 549 Fletcher, A. 318 Fogelberg Rota, S. 134 Fonte, M. 193, 268, 269, 271–73, 275, 276, 284, 285, 287, 288, 292–95, 384–88, 394, 626 Fontenelle, B. 174, 176, 177, 612, 616; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds 174 Forbes, A. S. 4, 493 Formey, S. 174, 176, 616; La Belle Wolfienne 174 Franklin, Benjamin 559 French revolution 3, 20, 256, 263, 368, 372, 565, 571–72, 574, 577–81 Fricker, M. 47, 231 Fuller, Margaret 362 Galileo, G. 2, 3, 157, 165, 312 Gallegos-Ordorica, Sergio Armando 3–5 Garner, N. 359 Garrett, A. 3, 5, 42 Gassendi, P. 14, 114, 134, 140, 158, 435, 459, 527 Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité de: Adelaide and Theodore; or letters on Education 549–50 genres of writing 7–8 geographical focus 5 German context, women and philosophy in: Gottsched, Luise Adelgunde Viktorie 611–15; Unzer, Johanna Charlotte 615–18 Gessell, B. 4 Geulincx, Arnold 113 Gibson, J. 479 Gillet, Jean 537 Gilligan, C. 255, 256 Godeau, Antoine 422 Goggio, B. 382, 383; De laudibus mulierum 382–83 Gombaud, Antoine 423 Gomez, M. A. 611–13 Gondola, M. 6, 384–88 Gordon, Thomas 364 Gorham, G. 4 Gottmann, F. 51 Gottsched, J. C. 611, 616 Gottsched, L. A. V. 611–15; activity in translating works 613–14, 619; philosophical output 612, 613; Triumph der Weltweisheit (Triumph of Philosophy) 612; against Wolffian rationalism 615 Gouges, Olympe de 263, 362, 567 Gournay, Marie le Jars de 4, 6, 17, 22, 127, 129–31, 136, 244, 268, 269, 275, 276, 337, 417; On the Equality of Men and Women 32, 339; portraits in philosophy 415–18; Preface to the Essays 230; skepticism 129–31; strategies of self-portraiture

409–12; struggles of lofty soul 412–15; writings about friendship 228–32 Gower, O. S. L. 480, 481 Great Chain of Being 13 Green, K. 3, 4, 129, 254 Grouchy, Sophie de: humanity 586; Letters On Sympathy 584, 594n17; moral progress 591–92; personal sympathy and enthusiasm 586–87; as remorse 587–89; remorse and moral progress in 584–85; sensitivity 585; sentiment of natural equality 589–91; sympathy 585–86; translation of TMS 584–85 guardianship 537 Guez de Balzac, Jean-Louis 416, 422 Gunther-Canada, W. 369, 370 Halldenius, L. 3, 4, 6, 368 Hammon, Jupiter 561 Hancock, John 560 Hanley, S. 291, 536 Harrington, James 364 Harvey, William 2, 3, 194, 195; in Scientific Revolution narrative 2–3 Hays, M. 32, 362; Female Biography 32 Hegel, G. W. F. 292 Heinsius, Daniel 14 Hellins, John 177 Helm, P. 217 heteronomy: marriage and 288–90; and tyranny 293–94 Hetherington, S. 33; What Makes a Philosopher Great? 33–34 Hickes, George 499 Hicks, P. 369, 370 Hilbert, D. 205 Hill, B. 366, 493, 549 Hillman, R. 339 Hipparchia 31 Historian’s Manifesto 195–96 historiography of philosophy 36–37 Hobbes, T. 33, 78, 81, 94–95, 101–2, 202, 255, 262, 277, 286, 291, 435, 440, 446–47, 457–59, 469, 628; De Corpore 84n14, 113; Epicurean materialism 436; formation of social contract 536; Leviathan 112–15; materialism of 77, 116, 119, 140; political philosophy 361, 536, 546; sense perception 141; spatio-temporalization of nature 157 Hoinski, D. 481 Hooke, Robert 168, 436, 444 Howard, C. 564 Hume, D. 6, 8, 141, 144, 150, 202, 255, 312, 361, 363, 369, 370, 552, 579, 598, 602, 604–6, 628; cause-effect relationships 148; Essays 569n21; irrationalism 607; naturalistic account of moral principles 548; “Of National Characters” 563; racist analogy 561; scholarship of early modern philosophy 29; theory of cognition 601; Treatise 332, 597

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Index Hurtado, G. 490 Hutchinson, Thomas 560 Hutchison, K. 629; Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? 626 Hutton, S. 2, 8, 64, 75 Huygens, C. 14, 15, 325, 523

of contradiction (PC) and PSR 520; scholarship of early modern philosophy 29; in Scientific Revolution narrative 2; Théodicée 613–14 Lewis, D. 313 libertarianism 215 Lipsius, Justus 412, 538 Lister, A. 319 living force or vis viva 614 Locke, J. 8, 113, 158, 161, 179, 286–87, 291–93, 317, 334, 361, 364, 527–28, 546, 548, 606–7, 628; account of divine eternity 161; conjugal society and civil existence of women 262; definition of freedom 65, 67, 69; definition of slavery 65, 306; definition of understanding and will 66; doctrine of suspension of desires 65, 70; epistemological principles 516, 548; Essay Concerning Human Understanding 114, 121–23, 161, 332, 507, 516, 529, 610; moral obligation 263; Paraphrase and Notes on the First Epistle of St. Paul 500; philosophical program 32, 515; political views 65; primary and secondary quality distinction 203; scholarship of early modern philosophy 29; science of human nature 584; Two Treatises of Government 316; voluntarism 320 LoLordo, A. 3, 4 lords of creation 556 Louis XIV 329, 423, 425, 427 Lovejoy, A. 122, 123 Lucretius 52, 435 Lustila, G. L. 3, 4

Imberti, Domenico 384 inadequacy, problem of 167–68 inclusion, strategies for 31–36 intellectual determinism 216; Princess Elisabeth and 219 Italian women philosophers in sixteenth century: Aristotelian gender norms 391–94; Camilla Erculiani 384–88; Lucrezia Marinelli 388–91; Maria Gondola 384–88; Moderata Fonte 384–88; Third Book of Il Cortegiano 383–84; two treatises in praise of women 381–83 James, S. 208 Janiak, A. 4 Jefferson, Thomas 562–63, 566; Notes on the State of Virginia 561 Jenkins, F. 629; Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? 626 Johnson, C. L. 358 Johnson, J. 372, 549 Jones, R. 355 Kant, I. 2, 144, 160, 171, 177–78, 529; Critique 332; Metaphysics of Morals 374; Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime 176; scholarship of early modern philosophy 29, 33; transcendental idealism 36, 598 Keill, J. 527 Kelleher, M. A. 537 Kendrick, N. 232, 233 Kepler, Johannes 157, 200 King, M. 284, 294 Kinnaird, Joan K. 494, 497, 498 Knox, J. 20 Kohlberg, Lawrence 255 Krüger, J. G. 615, 616 Kuklick, B. 30 Labadie, Jean de 14 Laerke, M. 36 Laertius, Diogenes 262; Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 31, 127; querelle des femmes 32 Lascano, M. P. 3 Leibniz, G. W. 6, 7, 32, 33, 104, 113, 122, 123, 160, 164, 170, 177–79, 314, 423, 452, 459, 465, 529, 624, 628; argument using PSR 527; Essays on Theodicy 169; law of continuity 182; Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence 519, 521, 523–26, 530; Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy 610, 613–14, 616–17, 619; mechanical reason 166; metaphysics and epistemology 610, 613; principle

Macaulay, C. 4, 372–73; corruption of virtue 367–68; education and social reform 371; equality 366–67; History of England 363, 546; Letters on Education 548, 552, 555; moral necessity 547; philosophical principles 546–49; philosophy 549–55; purpose of state 364–65; republican tradition 362; theories of state 363–64; Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth 363, 547; virtue and liberty 365–66; women and state 368–69; women’s political role 369–70 Magdalene, Mary 18, 418 Maintenon, Madame de 3, 324, 325, 550, 624; Dialogues and Addresses 329–30; history of philosophy of education 332–34 Makin, B. 22, 23; Essay 22 Malebranche, N. 36, 65, 74, 76, 113, 223, 496, 628 Malthus, Thomas 597 Mandeville, B. 42, 167; Fable of the Bees 48–51 Manning, G. 3–5 Manson. M. 3, 4, 6 Marinelli(Marinella), L. 32, 193, 388, 392–94, 626; beauty and gender 353–54; beauty and power 351–52; equality and difference 268–76; and Excellence of Women 388–91; Italian women philosophers in sixteenth century 388–91; The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men 32, 271, 350, 394

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Index marriage: contract 290–91; critiques of 284; and heteronomy 283, 288–90; patriarchal marriage 283–84, 292–94 Masham, Damaris Cudworth, Lady. 4, 6, 32, 164, 240; on agency and virtue 507–11; concept of moral character 508; desiring self 508; A Discourse Concerning the Love of God 506; moral agent 508– 9; morality 514–15; moral philosophy 508; notion of free will 507; Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous Christian Life 506, 507, 516 material culture 196 Meibomius, Marcus 31 Meier, G. F. 615, 617, 618; Der Gesellige 617 Ménage, Gilles de 422, 423; History of Women Philosophers (Historia Mulierum Philosopharum) 32 Mendelsohn, S. 444, 447 Menn, S. 313, 315 Mercer, C. 4, 455, 456 Merrim, S. 486 Mersenne, Marin 114 Micraelius, J. 452 Miller, S. 344 Mills, C. 35 Milton, John 364, 550; Paradise Lost 550 mind–body problem 461 mockery: anonymity, pseudonymity, and silencing 240–42; communities of resistance 248–51; passions, independence 246–48; strategies of retreat 248–51; structures of Censure and Ridicule 242–45; Women’s Lives, passions and concrete conditions of 245–46 Montaigne, Michel de 2, 7, 22, 127–31, 133, 134, 136, 228–32, 334, 411, 412, 415, 418, 422–24, 431, 626; Apology for Raymond Sebond 2; Essays 127, 129–30, 136, 229 Moorhead, Scipio 561 More, H.: An Antidote against Atheism 78, 81, 113; Democritus Platonissans 76–78, 81; dualism 88–90; Enchiridion Metaphysicum 77, 113; Immortality of the Soul 78, 81, 123; Psychodia Platonica 113; “Spirit of Nature,” or “Hylarchic Principle” 88–89; vitalistic causation 75–77 Myers, J. E. 508 Nadler, S. 74, 83 Nagel, F. 181 natural determinism 216; Astell on 223–24 Navarre, Marguerite de 423 Newman, K. 430 Newton, I. 6, 33, 113, 160, 170–71, 581, 606–7, 610; apotheosis 157; bucket experiment 527; Cradle 142, 151n11; Essai 180, 183; hypotheses non fingo 178; ideas in Italy 176; incomparable book 179; interlocutors 178; inverse-square law for gravitational attraction 182–83; laws of motion 521; mechanics 177; Newtonian approach 180, 182; Newtonian popularizer mindset 182; Newtonian women 177; Opticks 180; personal psychology

179; planetary theory 180; Principia mathematica 165, 170, 174, 177, 179, 180, 182, 184n19, 520–21, 529, 530n2; principles 161; prism experiments and theory of color 200; scientific achievements of 3; universal gravity 179, 519, 523–24 Newtonianism 177 Nicole, Pierre 332, 496 Norris, J. 65, 223, 232, 240, 242, 243, 245, 496, 628 Nyquist, M. 304 Offen, K. 297 O’Neill, E. 32, 35, 129, 131, 162, 202, 440, 444, 447, 534 Paine, Thomas 364 Pal, C. 3, 132 Paoli, Pasquale 368 Parageau, S. 168 Pascal, Jacqueline 3, 258–60, 324, 325, 327–29, 331–34, 431; and distrust of reason 259–60; A Rule For Children 327–29 Passi, G. 268, 350, 389, 390 Patrizi, Francesco 193 Patterson, O. 298, 304 Pellegrin, M.-F. 4, 6 Penaluna, R. 508 perception, theories of: and causation 200–203; objects of 203–7; perceptual error and epistemic restraint 207–10 periodization, issues of 2–4 Perry, R. 305, 493, 494, 500 persons, souls, and bodies 269–70 Pettit, P. 469, 470 Philippi, Johann Ernst 315 philosophia Newtoniana 184n19 Phlipon Roland, Marie-Jeanne 362, 363 physical determinism 216 physics and optics 174–83 Piccolomini, A. 387 Piccolomini, Francesco 193 Pizan, C. de 3, 256, 261, 263, 264, 268, 390, 391, 537; The Book of the City of Ladies 22, 23 Plastina, S. 3–5 Plato 128, 134, 192, 228, 254, 267, 299, 307, 333, 334, 387, 391, 393, 396, 431, 485, 624, 626; Apology 480–82, 484; Phaedrus 396, 398–99, 401, 403, 404, 482; philosophical traditions 269, 625; Republic 301, 391, 453; Symposium 398, 403, 482–83; Timaeus 100, 106, 122; time and place 41; use of memory 398 Plotinus 351, 624, 625 Plutarch 32, 387, 422, 468 Popkin, R. H. 127, 128 Popularphilosophie (“popular philosophy”) 619 Poulain de la Barre, F. 32, 244, 339, 342, 345, 346, 350–52, 534, 536; beauty and power in work of 351–52; beauty, gender, and power 351–52; On the Equality of the Two Sexes 32

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Index Powell, A. 483 power, in eighteenth century 353 Price, R. 364, 548, 552, 553, 564, 565, 571; Discourse on the Love of our Country 552–54; Four Dissertations 553; A Review of the Principle Questions and Difficulties in Morals 553; Sermons 553 Priestley, Joseph 364 Primrose, Mary 597 Princess Elisabeth 6, 17, 32, 91, 127, 131–33, 201, 216–21, 610, 628; Fideism 131–33; and intellectual determinism 219; skepticism 131–33; on theological determinism 216–19 public philosophy 337 Queen Christina 133–36 Quesnel, C. 339 rationalist compatibilism 547 Rawls, J.: A Theory of Justice 35 Reid, J. 597, 598 Reid, Thomas 602 religion, critical perspectives on: arguments of authority 338–41; (re)interpretations of scripture 341–46; public philosophy 337 renaissance of women philosophers: impact of recovery 626–27; new Renaissance 623–24; new renaissance 624–26; re-discovery and recovery 626; Renaissance Humanists 625; renewing history of philosophy 627–29 representationalism 204 Reuter, M. 3 Rey, A.-L. 4 Reynolds, F. 6, 350, 351, 353–56, 359, 624; beauty and gender in 353–55; Enquiry of 353–55 Ricardo, David 597 Richardson, Samuel 551; Clarissa 551 Rivet, André 14, 22 Roggiano, A. A. 486 Roochnik, D. L. 480 Rousseau, J.-J. 262, 286–87, 291, 295, 361, 533–34, 549; Emile 264–65, 333–34, 551; La nouvelle Héloïse 550; moral epistemology 553; natural religion 551 Rozemond, M. 3 Russell, B. 398–400 Ruud, S. 3, 6 Sabourin, C. 3 Sabuco de Nantes y Barrera, O. 6, 187, 188, 194, 195, 625; New Philosophy of Human Nature 188 Saint Bernard 346 Saint Jerome 337, 345, 346 Saint Paul 18, 20, 241, 340, 341, 346 Saint Thomas 344, 346 Salic law 537–38 Sarrocchi, M. 6, 193, 382 Saumaise, Claude 14 Schiebinger, L. 312

Schmaltz, Tad M. 3, 218 Schmitter, A. M. 4 scientia 224 scientific revolution 188 Scott-Douglas, A. 46 Scott, J. W. 167 Scott, Sarah 551; Millenium Hall 551 Scott, Walter 597 Scudéry, M. de: gender, oppression, language 429–31; philosophical formation 422–25; philosophy of virtue 425–29; Salon Philosophy 431–32 Secada, J. 3, 5 self-determination (SD) 215; Mary Astell and 221–23; Princess Elisabeth and 219–21 sexual differences: anatomical and physiological differences 273–75; are trivial, sexes are equal 275–76; differences in soul 273; establish superiority of women 273–75 Shanley, M. 291 Shapiro, L. 7, 164, 218, 221, 236 Sharpe, Granville 559 Sharp, H. 4, 5 Shelley, Mary 362, 555, 597 Shepherd, M.: causation 598–602; continuous, independent external objects 604–5; dreams and illusions 605–6; Essay on the Relation of Cause and Effect (ERCE) 148–50, 597, 599; Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (EPEU) 150, 152, 210, 597–99; ‘First Lines of the Human Mind’” 597; “Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics” (LMSM) 597; “On the Causes of Single and Erect Vision” 597; opponents 597–98; perception of external world 602–4; ways of knowing 148–51 Sheridan, P. 4 Sidney, Algernon 364 Simmons, A. 3, 203 skepticism: early modern skepticism 127–28; influences of 133–36; in Marie de Gournay’s thought 129–31; in Princess Elisabeth’s thought 131–33; in Queen Christina’s thought 133–36 slavery and servitude: arbitrary rule 302–5; against nature 299–301; as reality or metaphor 305–6; in seventeenth-century feminism 297–99 Smith, Adam: “system of sympathy” 584; The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) 584 Smith, H. 494, 498, 499 Smith, J. E. H. 312–14 Somerville, Mary 597 Sowaal, A. 224 space and time 157–61 Spinoza, B. 7, 33, 36, 77, 113, 144, 158, 446, 459, 624, 628; scholarship of early modern philosophy 29 Springborg, P. 65, 316, 494 Stahl, Georg Ernst 314 Stanley, T.: History of Philosophy 32

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Index Stewart, D. 602 Stillingfleet, Edward 179 Stolpe, S. 134 Stoneham, T. 3, 4 Suchon, G. 341; Du célibat volontaire ou la vie sans engagement (CV) 465, 467, 474–76; generosity as freedom 471–73; knowledge as freedom 468–69; neutral life 474–76; non-domination as freedom 469–71; obstacles to reform 473–74; rights of rational creature 466–68; Traité de la morale et de la politique (TMP) 465–73; writings about friendship 235–37 Tarabotti, A. 4, 293, 298–304, 306–8, 626; Innocence Deceived 302; Paternal Tyranny 298, 302–3 taste, in eighteenth century 353 Telesio, Bernardino 193 theological determinism 216; Princess Elisabeth on 216–19 Thielemann, L. 534 Third Book of Il Cortegiano 383–84 Thirty Years War 3 Thomas, E. 3 Thomson, James 550; Seasons 550 titles 538–39 Trenchard, John 364 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 8; Silencing the Past 8 Trousset, A. 269 Tucker, A. 548 Tycho, Brahe: in the Scientific Revolution narrative 2 Tye, Michael 205 Tyrrell, J. 290, 546 Unzer, J. C. 611, 615–19; Outline of a Philosophy for Woman 616–17; Popularphilosophie (“popular philosophy”) 619; Weltweisheit, or “worldly wisdom” 619; women and philosophy in 615–18 Van Helmont, F. M. 78, 118–20 Van Helmont, J. B. 33, 83, 115 Van Schurman, A. M. 3, 14–17, 20–22, 133, 324–27, 331–34, 338, 610, 624; Dissertatio 325–27 Vesalius, Andreas 2 Villanueva Gardner, C. 431 Virgil 71, 560, 561 virtue and moral obligation: enduring love of virtue 256–57; gendered historical account 254–55; obligated to obey 257–59; women and moral theorizing 255–56 Vlastos, G. 480, 481

Waithe, M. E.: History of Women Philosophers 32 Waldstreicher, D. 559 Walker, O. 494, 500, 501, 503 Walsh, J. 4, 236, 237, 302 Warren, Mercy Otis 363 Watkins, M. 5, 6 Watson, G. 215 Weaver, E. B. 303 West, P. 3, 4 Wheatley, P. 3, 5; life 559–60; and limits of history of philosophy 558–59; “Must Ethiopians Be Imploy’d for You?” 562–63; natural rights 563–66; Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral 558–60; “Wheatleyan moment” 559; works 560–62 Whewell, William 597 Wilkin, R. 3, 6, 129, 130 Wilkins, E. 442 Williams, Frances 561 Wolff, C. 610, 613–15, 617, 618 Wollstonecraft, M. 3–4, 6, 246, 251, 256, 259, 350–53, 362–63, 370; Analytical Review 549–50, 552; axiom and deviations 575–78; beyond resolution to revolution 262–65; critique of aristocracy 356; critique of inequality 573–74; The Female Reader 549–50; The French Revolution 577, 581; Historical and Moral View 358; influence of Macaulay’s philosophy on 549–55; intervention 356–59; Mary 549, 550; moral vision 579–82; Original Stories from Real Life 549; revealing moral constant 575–78; The Rights of Men 575, 577; The Rights of Woman 575–77, 579–81; and slavery 563–64; theory of moral obligation 264; Thoughts on the Education of Daughters 549, 550; A Vindication of the Rights of Men 358, 371, 549, 550, 552–53, 563–64, 571–73; The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria 575, 576 women 5–6; and Church 17–20; education and social reform 371; exclusion of 31–36; and family 16–17; innovative philosophical perspectives 6; and institutions 13–16; monarchy, patriarchy and home 369; philosophers of the past 6; philosophical interests 6–7; as political agents 369–70; Recovery Project 6; and state 368–69 Woodhead, A. 494, 500, 501, 503 Woodruff, P. 480 Woolf, V. 23, 24 Wordsworth, William 597 Wright, Frances 362 Young, Edward 550; Night Thoughts 550 zetetics or enquirers 128 Ziegler, Johann Gotthilf 615, 616

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