Karen Green

Modern Meinongians and noneists assume that objects of thought are objects and so, when we think or speak about what does not exist, we are speaking and thinking about non-existent objects. Yet the existence of non-existent objects appears paradoxical and was rejected by Russell. Perhaps surprisingly, Russell suggested that Frege, as well as Meinong, proposed that some objects of thought, even when they don’t exist, have kind of a Being, which is in no way dependent on their being objects of thought. Russell had in mind the fact that, according to Frege, what enables us to think and speak about what does not exist is that we can think about empty concepts and unasserted thoughts. These have a kind of being different from objects, which are identified by their location in spacetime. Properties, processes, similarities, functions, thoughts, and concepts, as well as objects, can be objects of thought. Frege’s semantics makes them objects of thought, without assimilating them to objects. This, it is argued, is an advantage of his semantics over that of noneists. However, Frege did recognise one non-existent object, the False, so a tweak to his semantics is proposed to eliminate reference to this non-existent object. Finally, it is argued that not only does Frege’s introduction of functions allow him to avoid Meinong’s distinction between bestehen and existieren, what Meinong intended, when he spoke of Sosein and Sein, is better captured using Frege’s distinction between the instantiation of a concept by an object and the subordination of one concept to another. Ultimately, it is claimed that anything Meinong does, Frege does better. Fregeans do everything better than noneists.

This chapter demonstrates how a number of women in eighteenth-century Europe exploited a contrast between ‘liberty’ and ‘licence’ in their political writings. The authors discussed include Catharine Macaulay (1731–91) and her contemporaries Catherine II of Russia, Octavie Belot, Louise Keralio, and Elise Reimarus. It is shown that, in their works, these women are strongly opposed to unfettered licence, the freedom to do as one wills in the absence of external impediments and constraints. They distinguish this kind of freedom from their own positive notion: the freedom to govern one’s self in accordance with the moral law of reason. In this respect, this chapter argues, these women adapt the earlier ideas of English philosopher John Locke. It is shown that in the writings of Macaulay, in particular, Locke’s sentiments about liberty and law are taken to a radical democratic conclusion: an ideal of fair and equal representation of the people.

A feminist humanism, unlike those developed by men, would recognize that the authoritative, human subject comes in two sexes. While not being essentialist, it would accept the existence of biological, sexual difference, while taking seriously historical and cultural diversity. It would find female subjects, not in their bodies, but in their contributions to intellectual history. To defend this feminist humanism, this paper counters the post-structuralist critique of humanism, criticizing the structuralist account of language on which post-structuralism built, which it retained even in going beyond it. At the same time, it repurposes the Foucauldian idea of an archeology of knowledge to propose a feminist humanism, anchored in an archeology of women’s texts. It claims that the findings of the archeological investigations so far undertaken suggest that while man characteristically deems himself an isolated individual, made social by culture and artifice, woman, in general, experiences herself as social by nature.

Michael Dummett stands out among his generation as the only British philosopher of language to rival in stature the Americans, Davidson and Quine. In conjunction with them he has been responsible for much of the framework within which questions concerning meaning and understanding are raised and answered in the late twentieth-century Anglo-American tradition. Dummett's output has been prolific and highly influential, but not always as accessible as it deserves to be. This book sets out to rectify this situation. Karen Green offers the first comprehensive introduction to Dummett's philosophy of language, providing an overview and summary of his most important arguments. She argues that Dummett should not be understood as a determined advocate of anti-realism, but that his greatest contribution to the philosophy of language is to have set out the strengths and weaknesses of the three most influential positions within contemporary theory of meaning - realism, as epitomised by Frege, the holism to be found in Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson and the constructivism which can be extracted from Brouwer. It demonstrates that analytic philosophy as Dummett practices it, is by no means an outmoded approach to thinking about language, but that it is relevant both to cognitive science and to phenomenology.

In his earlier writings, Dummett made a distinction between deep and shallow arguments for being suspicious of bivalence. Deep arguments brought with them a commitment to anti‐realism, shallow arguments did not. This distinction was motivated by a certain understanding of the significance of the context principle, according to which it is the sentence which is the primary vehicle of meaning. In later writings Dummett has despaired of making clear the distinction between deep and shallow arguments for rejecting bivalence. He has adopted the position that all deviations from bivalence involve anti‐realism of some kind. In this paper I argue that this in effect removes any clear connection between Dummettian anti‐realism and idealism. A suspicion of bivalence should often be interpreted as the result of an anti‐realim of the error theoretic kind.

From the inception of women’s response to male philosophical misogyny, women have focused on issues connected with virtue and educability. Two factors lie behind this tendency. The first is that arguments for women’s subjection in marriage, and for their exclusion from positions of power, have traditionally emphasized women’s moral incapacity, duplicitousness, and lack of prudence. So women seeking to defend themselves from such charges have interrogated the concept of moral virtue and sought to show how women are capable of being virtuous agents. Second, as traditional educators of the young, women have historically recognized the importance of early education in providing good habits of mind and the right decision-making capacities for later in life. In this paper, we examine the convergence of these two topics—virtue and education—in women’s texts of the pre-enlightenment and enlightenment eras. We narrow our focus to those works by women and about women, while acknowledging that many similar ideas and arguments might be found in male writings of the period. We choose to highlight women’s ideas because we think that they provide an interesting pre-history to the development of women’s feminist arguments for political equality from the late eighteenth century onwards. This is a pre-history that emphasizes women’s moral equality, or the idea that women are morally on a par with men in so far as they possess all the necessary psychological traits to be considered moral agents, as well as the necessary psychology to be considered morally educable.

Christine de Pizan’s economic thought matured and developed over the fourteen years of her career, during which she turned from allegory, poetry, and the citation of authorities toward realistic description, prose, and original theorizing. Her earliest representations of wealth pit the evils of greed and riches against the higher values of wisdom and virtue. In writing the biography of Charles V, she came to recognize that the circulation of money is an important means for fostering the health of the body politic. As a result, in subsequent writings, she insisted that economic management and good public administration should strive to ensure that money’s circulation does not encourage vice but instead fosters and rewards virtue.

This paper argues that the widespread Hegelian legacy that feminism has inherited from Beauvoir is highly problematic and that feminists, in particular, should be suspicious of philosophies of history and histories of philosophy that take Hegel too seriously. Any such history or philosophy will fail to take into account the deep roots of women’s comparatively equal status in the West in the long history of women’s political, ethical, theological, and philosophical theorizing since the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, in a reformulation of Beauvoir’s Hegelianism, this paper proposes a new historical dialectic understood as a conversation in which female and male voices are equally represented and the unfolding of spirit is transformed into a dialectic of sex.

The moral problem, as articulated by Smith, arises out of the attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects, developed by Hume. This paper returns to Locke’s earlier attempt to provide an empirically adequate account of morality and the debate his attempt generated. It argues that the seeds of a more adequate, naturalistic account of the metaphysics and epistemology of morals than that developed by either Locke or Hume can already be found in aspects of Locke’s Essay and in the defence of his views published by Catharine Trotter Cockburn. Locke and Cockburn find a natural, intrinsically moral, human disposition in our tendency to judge the moral good or evil of persons or actions in the light of their conformity with a moral law. It is constitutive of our nature as social beings that we are endowed ‘with a moral sense or conscience, that approves of virtuous actions, and disapproves the contrary.’ Moral laws are those prohibitions and obligations that benefit others and society as a whole. Thus, the question of natural, moral motivation is seen to be independent of the question of the objective grounds of moral truth. In virtue of our nature as social beings we are motivated to do what is approved of by other members of our society. Whether what is approved of by a society genuinely fosters the welfare of its members is an independent, a posteriori question that can only be answered through reasoned, empirically informed debate.

This paper argues that modern virtue ethics provides a useful background against which to read the philosophical import of Christine de Pizan’s works. By recognizing the origins of much of her thought in the Medieval tradition of virtue ethics, the paper brings out the continuity between her writing and a rich stream of contemporary ethical debate. It shows how Christine’s strand of feminism was deeply indebted to Medieval virtue ethics; both as found in Boethius and in contemporary compilations on the virtues, on which Christine drew. At the same time, this tradition was subtly transformed by Christine, in order to elevate the status of women, as well as the traditional practical and worldly activities of women. Indeed, Christine’s feminism can be read as a direct application of her meditation on virtue and the good life. The paper concludes with a brief sketch of the way in which, during the three centuries subsequent to Christine, the nature of virtue and the virtues continued to provide a central focus in women’s philosophical writings

It is argued that we should distinguish ontic truth––the True––that Frege claimed is sui generis and indefinable, from the semantic concept, for which Tarski provided a definition. Frege’s argument that truth is not definable is clarified and Wittgenstein’s introduction of the distinction between saying and showing is interpreted as an attempted response to Frege’s rejection of the correspondence theory. It is argued that conflicts between realism and Dummettian anti-realism result from their proponents not thoroughly distinguishing between the two closely connected ways of thinking about truth. Last, the distinction is used to clarify and endorse the Fregean claim that all true sentences indicate the True, identified as ontic truth.

From its inception, philosophy has represented itself as a dialogue, or conversation, among those who are lovers of wisdom. It has also been largely a conversation among men. Diotima, the absent female presence, who teaches Socrates about love and philosophy, consigns the lovers of women to bodily reproduction, and associates men with the polis and invention of law. But the polis is composed of both women and men, and a truly progressive philosophy would be a conversation between them. Since at least the fifteenth century, women in Europe have dreamed of a philosophy that would be a conversation that included them. This chapter looks back at the history of women's attempts to refashion philosophy as a dialogue between the sexes, and their dreams for the progress of the polis. Contemporary academic philosophy largely excludes these attempts from the history of philosophy, and distorts and represses an important aspect of the reality of our philosophic past. This chapter argues that the progress in civilization that has taken place in Europe cannot be disentangled from the contributions already made by women to our shared political assumptions. Progress in moral and political philosophy, if it is possible, will involve retrieving, extending, and deepening that contribution, so that the polis, along with the philosophy that sustains it, becomes fully conscious of itself as the outcome of a negotiation between humans who are embodied and sexually diverse.

While agreeing with Bergès on the importance for philosophy of reading the works of women such as Roland, Gouges, and Grouchy, her account of them as committed to the concept of liberty as non-domination, articulated by Philip Pettit, is questioned. It is argued that their views are more accurately described as involving a commitment to the tradition of positive liberty, that was criticised by Berlin in his famous essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. The republican writings of Catharine Macaulay are shown to be part of the context in which these women wrote, and similarities between her philosophical outlook, which involves a clear commitment to positive liberty, and the positions developed by the French authors are explored. It is argued that, in general, it is methodologically problematic to uncritically apply concepts that were developed by intellectual historians who failed to include works written by women in their histories, in order to understand the philosophical commitments of neglected works by such women.

Abstract:This article contributes to the re-evaluation of narratives in the history of ideas that have failed to consider women's writings. The laudatory assessment of Kant as a philosophical innovator promoted by Germaine de Staël is questioned and his moral epistemology examined in relation to that of Elise Reimarus, Catharine Cockburn, Catharine Macaulay, and Isabelle de Charrière. The moral and political philosophies of the first three, grounded in natural law, are used to undermine Staël's claim that Kant's moral philosophy offers a significant advance over Locke's, a conclusion reinforced through a reading Charrière's critique of Kant.

E.E.C. Jones’s early logical writings have recently been rescued from obscurity and it has been claimed that, in her works dating from the 1890s, she anticipated Frege’s distinction between sense and reference. This claim is challenged on the ground that it is based on a common but inadequate reading of Frege, which runs together his concept/object and sense/reference distinctions. It is admitted that a case can be made for Jones having anticipated something very like Frege’s analysis of categorical propositions, and that she offered a sound rebuttal of Russell’s objection to Frege’s account of the informativeness of identity statements. However, these significant achievements should not be misrepresented as an anticipation of Frege on sense and reference, a claim that encourages a defective reading of both philosophers.

Contributing to the debate between referentialist and predicativist accounts of the semantics of proper names, this paper partly endorses a recent trend to reject unitary accounts of their semantics. It does so by restoring a Fregean version of the variety of use account. It criticizes alternative variety of use accounts for not clearly distinguishing pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic issues and argues that, once these are distinguished, the necessity of accepting that names have a variety of uses, and are sometimes logical singular terms and at others logical predicates shows that Frege’s claim, that we should recognize that names have both reference and sense, is vindicated.

Tracing her intellectual development from her university years, when she was trained in a Cartesian and neo-Kantian philosophical tradition, to her final decade, during which she was recognised as having inspired the emerging strands of late twentieth-century feminism, Beauvoir is shown to have been among the most influential philosophical voices of the mid twentieth century. Countering the recent trend to read her in isolation from Sartre, she is shown to have both adopted, adapted, and influenced his philosophy, most importantly through encouraging him to engage with Hegel and to consider our relations with others. The Second Sex is read in the light of her existentialist humanism and ultimately faulted for having succumbed too uncritically to the masculine myth that it is men who are solely responsible for society's intellectual and cultural history.

There is a disconnect between the central place that Hobbes now occupies in the presumed history of democratic republicanism, and the fortunes of his political philosophy during the period leading up to the American and French revolutions. Given the central place that Hobbes’s political ideas are now accorded in the history of liberal democracy, this is a surprising fact. One of the few eighteenth-century works to engage with Hobbes was Catharine Macaulay’s critical, Loose Remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr Hobbes’s “Philosophical rudiments of government and society, first published in 1767. This chapter locates Macaulay’s polemic in the context of critiques and editions of Hobbes’s political philosophy, published earlier in the century, in particular the English edition of his works and the translation of Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae disquisition philosophica, which both appeared in 1750. It compares Macaulay’s critique with Cumberland’s and suggests that there are features of Macaulay’s treatment of Hobbes’s ideas which help explain how it has been possible for them to have come to occupy the central place they now enjoy in the history of democratic thought, as it is now taught, despite the fact that his philosophy was almost universally rejected by democratic republicans during the eighteenth century and thus had little to do with the actual genesis of Western democratic institutions.

Louise Keralio-Robert began publishing translations, novels, history, and a collection of women’s works in the decade prior to the French Revolution. She was a republican journalist during its initial stages and then, after a period of obscurity, returned to publishing translations and novels at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century. This article offers an overview of the works produced during these three periods of her literary endeavour and defends her against the charge of having been ‘une pionnière du républicanisme sexiste’. It argues that Keralio-Robert sees certain traditional feminine characteristics as valuable antidotes to pre- and post-revolutionary fanaticism and that she proposes that an ideally virtuous character will combine ‘masculine’ greatness of heart and firmness of spirit with ‘feminine’ sweetness, modesty, and charity.

Can Catharine Macaulay’s enlightenment, democratic, republicanism be justified from the point of view of contemporary naturalism? Naturalist accounts of political authority tend to be realist and pessimistic, foreclosing the possibility of enlightenment. Macaulay’s utopian political philosophy relies on belief in a good God, whose existence underpins the possibility of moral and political progress. This paper attempts a restoration of her optimistic utopianism, in a reconciliation, grounded in a revision of natural law, of naturalist and utopian attitudes to political theory. It is proposed that the co-evolution of language, moral law, and conscience (the disposition to judge one’s own actions in the light of moral principles) can be explained as solutions to the kinds of tragedy of the commons situations facing our ancestors. Moral dispositions evolved, but, in the light of its function, law is subject to rational critique. Liberal democracy plausibly offers the best prospect for developing rationally justifiable law.

Christine de Pizan, one of the earliest known women authors, wrote the Livre de paix (Book of Peace) between 1412 and 1414, a period of severe corruption and civil unrest in her native France. The book offered Pizan a platform from which to expound her views on contemporary politics and to put forth a strict moral code to which she believed all governments should aspire. The text's intended recipient was the dauphin, Louis of Guyenne; Christine felt that Louis had the political and social influence to fill a void left by years of incompetent leadership. Drawing in equal parts from the Bible and from classical ethical theory, the Livre de paix was revolutionary in its timing, viewpoint, and content. This volume, edited by Karen Green, Constant J. Mews, and Janice Pinder, boasts the first full English translation of Pizan's work along with the original French text. The editors also place the Livre de paix in historical context, provide a brief biography of Pizan, and offer insight into the translation process.

The essays in this collection focus on Christine as a political writer and provide an important resource for those wishing to understand her political thought. They locate her political writing in the late medieval tradition, discussing her indebtedness to Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine as well as her transformations of their thought. They also illuminate Christines political epistemology her understanding of political wisdom as a part of theology, the knowledge of God. New light is thrown on the circumstances which prompted Christine to write on political issues and on her attitude to Isabeau of Bavaria. These essays show that Christines originality consisted in her capacity to modify and feminise the tradition of Christian Aristotelianism through the use of elements of Christian imagery, in particular Mariology, in order to construct an image of the virtuous and prudent monarch which had lost the explicitly manly and warlike character of the Aristotelian phronimos.

This volume offers new perspectives on some better known authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as neglected figures from the British Isles and continental Europe. The collection advances discussion of how best to understand women’s political contributions during the period, the place of salon sociability in the political development of Europe, and the interaction between discourses on slavery and those on women’s rights. It will interest scholars and researchers working in women’s intellectual history and Enlightenment thought and serve as a useful adjunct to courses in political theory, women’s studies, the history of feminism, and European history.