Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy

Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy EILEEN O’NEILL It has now been more than a dozen years since the Eastern Division of the APA invited me to give an address on what was then a rather innovative topic: the published contributions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women to philosophy.1 In that address, I highlighted the work of some sixty early modern women. I then said to the audience, “Why have I presented this somewhat interesting, but nonetheless exhausting . overview of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women philosophers? Quite simply, to overwhelm you with the presence of women in early modern philosophy. It is only in this way that the problem of women’s virtually complete absence in contemporary histories of philosophy becomes pressing, mind-boggling, possibly scandalous.” My presen- tation had attempted to indicate the quantity and scope of women’s published philosophical writing. It had also suggested that an acknowledgment of their contributions was evidenced by the representation of their work in the scholarly journals of the period and by the numerous editions and translations of their texts that continued to appear into the nineteenth century. But what about the status of these women in the histories of philosophy? Had they ever been well represented within the histories written before the twentieth century? In the second part of my address, I noted that in the seventeenth century Gilles Menages, Jean de La Forge, and Marguerite Buffet produced doxogra- phies of women philosophers, and that one of the most widely read histories of philosophy, that by Thomas Stanley, contained a discussion of twenty-four women philosophers of the ancient world. In the nineteenth century, Mathurin de Lescure, Alexander Foucher de Careil, and Victor Cousin wrote books on Hypatia vol. 20, no. 3 (Summer 2005) © by Eileen O’Neill 186 Hypatia such fi gures as Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Emilie du Châtelet, Madeleine de Scudéry, and Madeleine de Sablé. But, and this point is important, when it came to the general histories of philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only a handful of token women—largely “mystics,” who were not taken to be real philosophers—were mentioned.2 No woman was anywhere described as a signifi cant, original contributor to early modern philosophy. How did early modern women philosophers come to disappear from the history of philosophy by the twentieth century? In my 1990 address, I discussed a number of reasons internal to the practice of philosophy that led to the women’s disappearance.3 One such reason I called “the purifi cation of philosophy.” The bulk of the women’s writings either directly addressed such topics as faith and revelation, on the one hand, or woman’s nature and her role in society, on the other. But the late eighteenth century attempted to excise philosophy motivated by religious concerns from philosophy proper. And many German historians, taking Kantianism as the culmination of early modern philosophy and as providing the project for all future philosophical inquiry, viewed treatments of “the woman question” as a precritical issue of purely anthropological interest. So, by the nineteenth century, much of the published material by women once deemed philosophical no longer seemed so. With respect to the women’s views considered “solidly philosophical” even from a post-eighteenth-century vantage point, some utilized a style or method, or expressed an underlying “episteme” that simply did not win out. For example, the writings of Madeleine de Scudéry and Anne Conway, with their underlying Neoplatonic episteme, may seem too removed from our present philosophical concerns to gain a place in our histories. Notice that such a decision assumes that our histories of philosophy take our current philosophical concerns as their main point of departure in choosing which aspects of philosophy’s past to recognize. I will turn to the topic of methodology in the history of philosophy in a moment, but fi rst I want to note what I have argued elsewhere, namely, that an odd feature of “philosophical views that did not win out” is that they have frequently been characterized as feminine.4 For example, the Neoplatonism of the seventeenth-century French salons, and of the Cambridge Platonists, came to be regarded at the end of the seventeenth century as feminine. The point was not that it was the philosophy of women, but rather that it was a degenerate philosophy of both men and women on its way out. But a good deal of slippage had transpired between feminine (that is, outdated) philosophy that perhaps “deserved” to be left out of the canon, and philosophy written by women. This is particularly obvious in the attack on feminine scholarly style in the second half of the eighteenth century. For example, when Rousseau attacks the scholarly style issuing from the French salons, it is not feminine style per se that he attacks, but the infl uence of real women on style.5 Eileen O’Neill 187 My hypothesis, about the alignment of the feminine gender (and women) with ultimately unsuccessful philosophical topics and methods, however, applied equally well to the erasure of some women from seventeenth-century histories as it did to the more extensive disappearance of women philosophers in subse- quent centuries. And while my focus on the rise of Kantian critical thought, and the “purifi cation” of philosophy, did identify the nineteenth century as the pivotal era of disappearance, it was unable to explain why virtually all women’s philosophical contributions were lost to sight at this point. Near the end of my 1990 address, I suggested that the dramatic disappearance of women from the histories of philosophy in the nineteenth century could be fully understood only by moving beyond changes internal to philosophy and by examining the social and political climate in the aftermath of the French Revolution. At the very commencement of modern democracy, culture’s anxiety was focused on whether women’s limited entrance into the newly democratized public sphere would lead to women’s equal participation in economic and political power. In this period, the woman author came to epitomize all women’s increasing autonomy and the possibility of their economic independence.6 She symbolized the possibility of the dismantling of the patriarchal order. But it was the female theoretical authors—especially philosophers—who received a particularly nasty reception in the early nineteenth century.7 For, to be a philosopher in this period was to be a shaper of culture: it was to have the power to demarcate and distinguish all the branches of knowledge, and to decide the value of alternative avenues of inquiry and methodology. But what if “philosopher queens” could rule in the polis? Such a dismantling of male hegemony at the birth of modern democracy was more than most of democracy’s staunchest supporters could manage. Thus ensued enormous social and political pressure to erase and to forget the “woman who dabbles with philosophy and writing,” as Proudhon called her.8 I ended my 1990 address by noting that while explanations are readily available for the disappearance of women philosophers from our histories, no justifi cation exists for the wholesale exclusion of early modern women from the histories of philosophy. I pointed out that scholars were already hard at work, producing historical reconstructions of the arguments of the early modern women philosophers, and showing how the women’s philosophical contributions were dialectically related to those of their male counterparts. This form of “disinter- ested” history attempts to make intelligible the presuppositions and patterns of inference that past philosophers used—even if we now take these presuppositions or inferences to be unacceptable. Those engaged in historical reconstruc- tion take the signifi cant issues, strategies, and texts to be the ones deemed so by the philosophers of the past. Thus, if our current historical reconstructions of that period fail to include published works or writings by women circulated in 188 Hypatia scholarly circles and acknowledged in their own time as philosophically useful, our histories are incomplete and distorted. Since a wealth of published texts by early modern women had now surfaced, the time seemed ripe for historians to begin adding new chapters to our histories of philosophy. I also noted that contemporary feminist philosophers were beginning to produce rational reconstructions of the early modern women philosophers’ arguments. Rational reconstructions interpret the positions and arguments of past philosophers in light of our current views. They underline the extent to which we share, with past philosophers, a tradition of both problems and argumenta- tional strategies for solving the problems. I observed that feminist philosophers had already begun to turn to the women philosophers of the past in the attempt to trace a history of feminist thought. Michèle Le Doeuff’s treatment of Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft in Hipparchia’s Choice had been precisely the attempt to provide a Geistesgeschichte that will make women visible again in the history of philosophy (Le Doeuff 1991).9 Well, that was the state of things back in 1990. What has happened in the intervening years with respect to scholarship about early modern women philosophers?10 There is no question but that there has been a fl urry of scholarly activity on this topic. We now have the groundbreaking four-volume history of women philosophers, completed under the general editorship of Mary Ellen Waithe (Waithe 1987–1995). Several collections of essays on women philosophers, and collections of essays on individual women philosophers have also seen their way into print, and I am aware of a number of collections now in progress.11 Of special note is the feminist series, Re-Reading the Canon, under the general editorship of Nancy Tuana, which consists of edited collections of essays devoted to the work of a single philosopher.

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