The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Marguerite de La Sablière

1640–1693

Also known as Madame de La Sablière, Marguerite Hessein

Paris salon host, patron of La Fontaine and early woman astronomer, whose moral writings held natural virtues to be disguised vices and only the theological virtues genuine.

Painting of a young woman in a blue satin dress, in a landscape
Portrait after Henri and Charles Beaubrun. Château de Bussy-Rabutin.Photo: Benjamin Gavaudo · Public domain · See the original

Marguerite Hessein was born in 1640 into a Huguenot banking family of Paris. She became the host of a prominent literary salon and patron of La Fontaine, and carried out research at the Paris Observatory that has earned her a place among the first women astronomers.

Devotional writers later celebrated her as the model convert, who left the scepticism and sexual freedom of the salon to serve the incurably ill. Only in the late twentieth century did she emerge as a philosopher. She died in 1693.

Key ideas

Natural virtues are disguised vices
Her ethics holds that the natural moral virtues are vices in disguise, and that a truly moral life rests on the theological virtues alone.
Moral rigorism
She treated questions of moral agency and responsibility with notable severity.
Self-abandonment and the hidden God
Recognising God’s essence requires self-abandonment, a detachment from imagination and intellect, which makes possible a negative, apophatic knowledge of God.
Tradition
Western
Region
Paris

Sources

  1. John J. Conley, Marguerite de La Sablière, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy