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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Janiak & Mercer on forgotten early modern female philosophers…

Brian Leiter

…in The Washington Post of all places!  It's quite a nice overview, and especially remarkable that it appeared in a mainstream outlet.  (They do suggest, less plausibly, that the neglect of some of the early modern figures they mention has something to do with the underrepresentation of women in academic philosophy.)  Herewith a question for other scholars and students of the history of philosophy:  what do we know about why these figures were neglected?  In every period I know something about there were figures of enormous importance in their day who are now largely unknown (e.g., Ludwig Buchner's Kraft und Stoff, a polemic and brief on behalf of materialism, was the best-selling book in Europe in the 19th-century after the Bible, though is almost wholly unknown today–Beiser devotes a chapter to Buchner and the materialist controversy in a recent book, the first extended treatment I had ever seen in English).  Sometimes the explanation is changing philosophical fashions, something the explanation is that the work really wasn't very good (that's Buchner, in my view), and sometimes other kinds of bias and prejudice.

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8 responses to “Janiak & Mercer on forgotten early modern female philosophers…”

  1. grad

    Why do you think it's less plausible that such neglect has something to do with the underrepresentation of women in the discipline? Surely they're not claiming it plays a huge role. But a lot of women leave philosophy–if it counts as leaving–after their first class. So if courses like a lower-level modern survey focus exclusively on men, it seems like this fact could be part of a not obviously implausible explanation for the dearth of women.

    BL COMMENT: It presupposes what seems to me implausible motivations on the part of students attracted to philosophy; but that aside, the women I've known or talked to who left philosophy "unwillingly" as it were were all victims of sexual harassment or discrimination. But let's drop this topic, which is really a side issue, which we are probably not well-situated to adjudicate. What I'd like to learn more about is the history of the history of modern philosophy, how the canon was shaped, and so on.

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  2. p

    I think the canon is already quite visible in Hegel's History of Philosophy, though it is still wider than what is usually taught in History of Modern Philosophy classes today (as it includes people like Wollaston, Cudworth, Oswald, and so on). His division is also not quite the usual Empiricists vs Rationalists division. Still, you do not see women much, if at all, and the canonical modern figures are all highlighted (though not only they). My own guess is that women got excluded from the canon partially through the self-understanding of the early modern male philosophers (i.e., if they refer to others it is usually their male counterparts)and so partially because they were not in fact taken always seriously by the male philosophers (or even each other?). In other words, perhaps besides Elisabeth (whom I always knew and was taught about), they were isolated from the "mainstream". This is then reflected in Hegelian and post-Hegelian history of philosophy building activities, which bring about gradual simplification of that history since learning about all but the most important figures would become untenable as hisotry of philosophy becomes a regular education subject. I think, pedagogically speaking, inclusion of women is a great thing. But I also think that if their work is really good, it does not matter whether it was or was not isolated and/or influential in their time, we should study it. after all, there were quite a few great male philosophers who were not all that influential in their own times and lives and are famous posthumously.

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  3. Jim Weatherall

    Isn't the du Chatelet case, as Janiak and Mercer describe it, telling? Du Chatelet was a major 18th century commentator on Newton and as I understand it, she was one of the first people to bring the Newtonian and Leibnizian traditions together. Her work was quoted extensively, but without attribution, in Diderot's Encyclopedia; it seems she was also a significant influence on Voltaire (on Newton). So there's good reason to think her ideas were influential, but that she was never given appropriate credit. This seems like a recipe for being written out of history, irrespective of one's contributions. Do we need a further explanation? (Of course, if this is what happened with Du Chatelet, we should be very troubled indeed by contemporary citation patterns.)

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  4. p

    Right, so the isolation might have not been only in the sense that they were not paid attention to, but that they were in fact paid attention to but not acknowledged, so, basically, plagiarized and so with the feeling that "it's OK"…

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  5. Lisa Shapiro

    Early modern women philosophers were hardly isolated from the mainstream. Mary Astell, for instance, published an exchange with John Norris, _Letters Concerning the Love of God_ dealing with metaphysics and philosophy of mind in the Cartesian/Malebranchian tradition). Damaris Masham corresponded with Leibniz and Locke. There was a lively salon culture in 17th and 18th c France (that was prominent enough to merit mocking by Moliere — that they were targets suggests influence). Women published both pseudonymously and under their own names. Women were intellectually active enough in the 17th century to inspire Gilles Menage to write his _History of Women Philosophers_ as a supplement to his translation of Diogenes Laertius. The 18th century includes not only women natural philosophers (like Du Chatelet and Marie Thiroux D'Arconville) but some great political philosophers, like Wollstonecraft and Sophie de Grouchy. Really, one could go on and on. And while we lack records of the influence of (some of) their work, it is not like early modern philosophers shared our footnoting practices. Descartes did not acknowledge any of his sources, nor did Spinoza or Hume, hardly. Scholars figure out lines of influence by looking to their library holdings. So simply not being cited properly cannot be the whole explanation.

    Bruce Kuklick has a wonderful article in the wonderful volume _Philosophy and Its History_ volume which argues persuasively that our early modern canon is an accident of curricular decisions at Harvard, no doubt by neo-Hegelians. (As an aside there was a lot more reflection on the history of philosophy in the mid1980s than there is now, and one might wonder why that is.) Brian is correct that there are always figures who were influential in their time, but who are nonetheless left behind (Addison, anyone?), but one really does have to wonder how it could just so happen that women are so comprehensively left out.
    In any case, the times are changing. I know of at least two anthologies for early modern survey courses in the works that will include women (I'm co-editing one of them)

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  6. Bill Wringe

    If I remember correctly, quite a lot of work's been done on how the early modern canon was formed: for example there's a paper by Jonathan Ree on precisely this issue (in a volume by Westoby, Ayers and Ree) which I read as an undergraduate; and there's more recent – but still quite long-established – work by Eileen O'Neill on the same issue.

    From my own reading – and recollection of this arguments – part of the answer seems to be that a lot of these figures were difficult to fit into the Rationalist/Empiricist narrative that we inherited from Kant. That certainly seems to be true of one figure that I've read up on in this context – namely, Anne Conway. Something similar looks as though it might also be true of Margaret Cavendish.

    (I hasten to add that I don't claim to be in any sense an expert on these issues. Still, I think the issue that Brian raises has been discussed in the scholarly literature, and anyone wanting to arrive at a well-informed judgment on the issue might want to start from there.)

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  7. p

    Is the idea that the curricular decisions at Harvard shaped the canon in Europe – both western and eastern?

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  8. Bill Wringe

    It'll probably occur to anyone who reads comment threads charitably that when I composed and posted my comment, Lisa Shapiro's was still in the moderation queue (and thus not visible); but since in its current position mine now looks like a paradigm case of 'mansplaining', I going to say explicitly that this is what happened.

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