Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen O'Neill
Author(s):  
Deborah Boyle

This chapter offers an account of the history and central issues in feminist philosophical engagements with early modern philosophy. The chapter describes a “first wave” of feminist scholarship on early modern philosophy, beginning around the 1990s, that involved examining the work of canonical male philosophers from a feminist perspective, as well as a “second wave” that focuses on the early modern women philosophers themselves. Projects involved in this second wave include (1) explaining why and how these works dropped out of view in the first place; (2) finding, editing, translating (when necessary), and publishing neglected or lost writings; (3) contextualizing, analyzing, and critiquing these works; and (4) theorizing about and experimenting with ways to integrate these works into narratives of the history of philosophy. The chapter ends with discussion of an emerging “third wave” of opportunities for publishing, presenting at conferences, and teaching about these women philosophers.


Author(s):  
Christia Mercer

Anne Conway (1631–79) was an English philosopher whose only work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, was published posthumously in 1690. Conway’s arguments against Descartes’s account of matter constitute a cutting criticism of his views and offer significant insight into an important and under-studied anti-Cartesian trend in the second half of the seventeenth century. Conway’s response to Descartes helps us discern some of the more original and radical ideas in her philosophy. Like so many other significant early modern women, Conway was left out of the history of philosophy by later thinkers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-160
Author(s):  
Jorge Ledo

The aim of this volume is not to offer a comprehensive overview of the multifarious aspects of fiction and its implications for early modern philosophy, but to be an invitation, from the standpoint of the history of philosophy, to survey some of the fundamental problems of the field, using six case-studies written by some of the finest international scholars in their respective areas of Renaissance studies. Although perhaps not evident at a first reading, these six studies are linked by common concerns such as the theoretical relationship between (literary) history, rhetoric, poetics, and philosophy; the tensions between res, verba, and imago; and the concept of enargeia. They have been arranged according to the chronology of the corpus each one considers.


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 177-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Fudge

This article is both a work of historical reconstruction and a theoretical intervention. It looks at some influential contemporary accounts of human-animal relations and outlines a body of ideas from the 17th century that challenges what is presented as representative of the past in posthumanist thinking. Indeed, this article argues that this alternative past is much more in keeping with the shifts that posthumanist ideas mark in their departure from humanism. Taking a journey through ways of thinking that will, perhaps, be unfamiliar, the revised vision of human-animal relations outlined here emerges not from a history of philosophy but from an archival study of people’s relationships with and understandings of their livestock in early modern England. At stake are conceptions of who we are and who we might have been, and the relation between those two, and the livestock on 17th-century smallholdings are our guides.


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