Women Philosophers of Eighteenth-Century England

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Mary Astell ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
Moral Choices ◽  
Women Philosophers ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
The Mind

This volume is an edited collection of the philosophical correspondences of three English women of the eighteenth century: Mary Astell, Elizabeth Thomas, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. The selected correspondence includes letters to and/or from John Norris, George Hickes, Mary Chudleigh, Richard Hemington, John Locke, Ann Hepburn Arbuthnot, and Edmund Law. Their epistolary exchanges range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from questions about the love of God and other people to the causes of sensation in the mind, the metaphysical foundations of moral obligation, and the importance of independence of judgement in one’s moral choices and actions. The volume includes a main introduction by the editor, which explains some of the key themes and developments in the eighteenth-century letters, including an increased awareness of other women’s writings and of the concerns of women as a sociopolitical group. It is argued that if we look beyond printed treatises to the content of these letters, it is possible to gain a fuller appreciation of women’s involvement in philosophical debates of the 1690s and early 1700s. To situate each woman’s thought in its historical-intellectual context, the volume includes original introductory essays for each principal figure, showing how her correspondence relates either to her contemporaries’ ideas or to her own published views. The text also provides detailed scholarly annotations, explaining obscure philosophical ideas and archaic words and phrases in the letters. Among its critical apparatus, the volume includes a note on the texts, a bibliography, and an index.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Mary Astell ◽  
Philosophical Debates

This introduction provides an overview of the main philosophical themes and issues in the selected letters of three eighteenth-century English women: Mary Astell, Elizabeth Thomas, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. It is argued that by bringing their letters to light, it is possible to gain a fuller appreciation of women’s involvement in philosophical debates of the 1690s and early 1700s. Their letters demonstrate not only that men engaged with women’s ideas in this time but that women engaged with other women about topical issues in philosophy, especially issues related to practical-ethical and religious affairs. The introduction concludes with a brief survey of the main philosophical themes in the texts, ranging from ethics and moral theology to metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and the concerns of women as a sociopolitical group.

scholarly journals What the Women of Dublin Did with John Locke

2020 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 171-193
Author(s):  
Christine Gerrard
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
The Public ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ◽  
Laetitia Pilkington ◽  
Philosophical Debates

AbstractWilliam Molyneux's friendship with John Locke helped make Locke's ideas well known in early eighteenth-century Dublin. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding was placed on the curriculum of Trinity College in 1692, soon after its publication. Yet there has been very little discussion of whether Irish women from this period read or knew Locke's work, or engaged more generally in contemporary philosophical debate. This essay focuses on the work of Laetitia Pilkington (1709–1750) and Mary Barber (1685–1755), two of the Dublin women writers of the so-called ‘Triumfeminate’, a literary and intellectual circle connected to Jonathan Swift which met and discussed ideas at the home of Patrick Delaney. Pilkington and Barber were particularly influenced by Locke's ideas on obstetrics and childhood in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education and especially by his discussion of memory in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Both authors engage playfully and imaginatively with Locke's theories, especially in a domestic context. Not all philosophical debates took place in the public male spaces of school, coffee house and university. This essay attempts to recreate the contexts in which intellectually curious women of the ‘middling sort’ encountered and engaged with philosophical ideas, especially those of Locke, and how these shaped their writing.

Tucker, Abraham (1705–74)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. McNair
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Central Tenet ◽  
William Paley ◽  
Blank Slate ◽  
The Mind

Like many of his eighteenth-century British contemporaries, Abraham Tucker was an empiricist follower of John Locke. Tucker held that the mind begins as a blank slate and remains nothing more than a passive receptacle for ‘trains’ of ideas with ‘a motion of their own’. In his moral philosophy Tucker proposed that the motive of all our actions is the prospect of our own satisfaction, and that the maximization of everyone’s satisfaction is the ultimate moral good. (The latter view became a central tenet of the utilitarians who followed him.) According to Tucker, God ensures that our self-interested motivation will be congruent with morality, for God has arranged that we will be rewarded for good and punished for evil – either in this world or in the next. Among those most influenced by his work was the utilitarian and philosophical theologian William Paley.

Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Philosophical Discussion ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Women Philosophers ◽  
Henry More

This volume is an edited collection of private letters and published epistles to and from English women philosophers of the early modern period (c. 1650–1700). It includes the letters and epistles of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet. These women were the correspondents of some of the best-known intellectuals of the period, including Constantijn Huygens, Walter Charleton, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, John Locke, Jean Le Clerc, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Their epistolary exchanges range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from religion, moral theology, and ethics to epistemology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. The volume includes a main introduction by the editor, which explains the significance of the letters and epistles with respect to early modern scholarship and the study of women philosophers. It is argued that this selection of texts demonstrates the intensely collaborative and gender-inclusive nature of philosophical discussion in this period. To help situate each woman’s thought in its historical-intellectual context, the volume also includes original introductory essays for each principal figure, showing how her correspondences contributed to the formation of her own views as well as those of her better-known male contemporaries. The text also provides detailed scholarly annotations, explaining obscure philosophical ideas and archaic words and phrases in the letters and epistles. Among its critical apparatus, the volume also includes a note on the texts, a bibliography, and an index.

Liberty of Mind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Political Liberty ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Mary Astell ◽  
The Mind

This chapter demonstrates how early modern male and female thinkers alike were concerned not only with ethical, religious, and political liberty, but also with the liberty to philosophize, or libertas philosophandi. It is argued that while men’s interests in this latter kind of liberty tended to lie with the liberty to philosophize differently from their predecessors, women were more concerned with the liberty to philosophize at all. For them, the idea that women should be free to think was foundational. This chapter shows how some women thinkers of the period, such as Damaris Cudworth Masham (1658–1708) and Mary Astell (1666–1731), followed through on the general trend of thinking about liberty in terms of freedom of the mind, to thinking about liberty for women in wider ethical and political terms. To support this point, the chapter explores their views on education, female rationality, and moral philosophy.

Edwards and Hutcheson

1951 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Owen Aldridge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
General Plan ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Divine Beauty

Although traditionally regarded as an austere clergyman, rigidly circumscribed by narrow doctrinalism, Jonathan Edwards has the distinction of being America's pioneer esthetician. In a Dissertation concerning the Nature of True Virtue he brings together nearly all the theories prevalent in the early eighteenth century concerning the relation of beauty to virtue, and discusses the moral aspects of human passions and conduct. Francis Hutcheson is the philosopher whose influence is most pronounced. In the Dissertation he is mentioned by name three times; the general plan of his theory of moral sense is constantly suggested for comparison, contrast or illustration; fundamental doctrines and corollary principles from his system are specifically stated and attacked; and others of his notions are cited in support of Edwards' own views. It has long been known that Edwards read Hutcheson's work, but the close parallels in his own treatise, making it literally a commentary on Hutcheson, have not been generally recognized. Evidence of the extent of Hutcheson's influence may be found by comparing Edwards' dissertation with his earlier work on The Mind, a discussion of the essence of beauty or harmony in the realms of spirit and of sense. Written while its author was engaged in studying Locke, the discussion contains nearly all of Edwards' original ideas on natural and divine beauty. In the expanded and polished treatise some of the original ideas are modified as a direct result of Hutcheson's concepts, and a complete ethical and aesthetic system is developed to supplant the systems of Hutcheson and other moralists popular at the time.

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