Karen Green

The ‘celebrated’ Catharine Macaulay was both lauded and execrated during the eighteenth century for her republican politics and her unconventional life. This comprehensive biography in the “life and letters” tradition situates her works in their political and social context and offers an unprecedented, detailed account of the content and influence of her writing, the arguments she developed in her eight volume history of England, and her other political, ethical, and educational works. Her disagreements with conservative opponents, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson are developed in detail, as is her influence on more progressive admirers such as Thomas Jefferson, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Mercy Otis Warren, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Macaulay emerges as a coherent and influential political voice, whose attitudes and aspirations were typical of those enlightenment republicans who based their progressive politics in rational religion. She looked back to the seventeenth century levelers and parliamentarians as important precursors of the struggles for liberty and political rights that she advocated for Great Britain, America, and France. Her defence of republican liberty and the equal rights of men offers an important corrective to certain misleading contemporary accounts of the origins of democratic republicanism during this crucial period.

This volume challenges the view that women have not contributed to the historical development of political ideas, and highlights the depth and complexity of women’s political thought in the centuries prior to the French Revolution. From the late medieval period to the enlightenment, a significant number of European women wrote works dealing with themes of political significance. The essays in this collection examine their writings with particular reference to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and toleration. The figures discussed include Christine de Pizan, Catherine d’Amboise, Isabella d’Este, Elizabeth I, Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Poole, Margaret Cavendish, Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Elizabeth Carter, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Cornélie Wouters. These women actively contributed to the political practice and discourse of their times. Some of the women question their exclusion from political power and argue in favour of women’s virtue, prudence, and capacity to govern. Others aim to demonstrate women’s spiritual equality with men, to defend liberty of conscience, and to highlight the importance of education as a means to moral development. And some women explore the notion of female citizenship or attempt to come to terms with issues of religious freedom and religious toleration. Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration serves as an introduction to a rich and as yet under-explored period in the history of women’s ideas.

SummaryDummett has offered an argument which begins with certain criteria of adequacy for any account of the way in which communication functions and which ends with normative and revisionary conclusions concerning our logical practice. This argument, which hinges on Dummett's criticisms of holism, is inadequate as it stands, for the holist can give an adequate description of the functioning of communication. There is a plausible defence of intuitionism to be extracted from Dummett's writing, but it should be recognised that it has a normative starting point and does not follow from the criteria of adequacy with which Dummett apparently begins

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

In this paper I explore the connection between Catharine Macaulay’s views on freedom of the will and her promotion of the cause of political liberty and show that the position she develops has its origins in Locke’s philosophy. I argue for the existence of a distinctive ‘Lockean’ conception of political liberty, which is grounded in an account of moral agency, and which does not fit very well into contemporary characterizations of negative, republican, or positive liberty. I demonstrate that this concept of political liberty was widely disseminated during the eighteenth century and can be found in the writing of many of Macaulay’s female contemporaries, both in Great Britain and on the Continent. Recognizing this ‘Lockean’ conception of political liberty is important for understanding the connection between the idea of enlightenment and radical movements promoting political reform. Furthermore, acknowledging its widespread influence throws doubt on Jonathan Israel’s recent attempt to overthrow standard histories—according to which Locke’s rational religion is foundational for radical politics during the period—as well as Israel’s attempt to replace such standard histories with an account that locates the impetus for political reform in metaphysical monism and religious skepticism.

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.