The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Reading path · Going further

Women philosophers of early modern Europe

6 stops

Five women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who argued with Descartes, Locke, Newton and Rousseau about mind, matter, science and the education of women.

Women took part in the great debates of early modern philosophy, in letters, treatises and translations.

This path meets five of them, from a princess pressing Descartes on how mind and body interact to a radical who argued that women, as rational beings, need the same education and rights as men.

The path

  1. Elisabeth of Bohemia

    1618–1680 · Western

    Princess Elisabeth’s letters asked Descartes how an immaterial mind could move a body, and pressed him on the passions, virtue, happiness and how to rule.

  2. Anne Conway

    1631–1679 · Western

    Anne Conway answered Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza with a metaphysics in which everything God creates is alive: body and spirit are not two substances but degrees of one.

  3. Mary Astell

    1666–1731 · Western

    Mary Astell argued that the supposed weakness of women’s reason was a prejudice produced by their upbringing, and held against Locke that everyone, whatever their sex or station, can think clearly.

  4. Émilie du Châtelet

    1706–1749 · Western

    Émilie du Châtelet made the standard French translation of Newton’s Principia, and gave his physics a metaphysical foundation drawn from Leibniz.

  5. Mary Wollstonecraft

    1759–1797 · Western

    Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued, against the educational theories of Rousseau’s Emile, that women are rational beings who need the same education and rights as men.

  6. Women and gender

    Theme

    The theme of women and gender carries the question back to antiquity and on to the twentieth century, from Aristotle to Simone de Beauvoir.

For discussion

  1. How might Descartes answer Elisabeth's question about mind and body, and would the answer convince her?
  2. Astell and Wollstonecraft both blame women's education for what passed as women's nature. Are their arguments the same?
  3. Why might these philosophers have been less read than the men they argued with?

Sources

  1. Lisa Shapiro, Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  2. Sarah Hutton, Lady Anne Conway, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  3. Alice Sowaal, Mary Astell, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  4. Karen Detlefsen, Émilie du Châtelet, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  5. Sylvana Tomaselli, Mary Wollstonecraft, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  6. Charlotte Witt, Lisa Shapiro, Christina Van Dyke, Lydia L. Moland and Marcia Robinson, Feminist History of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy