Allauren Samantha Forbes

This article analyses Gabrielle Suchon’s arguments for women’s entitlement to the pursuit of knowledge in her Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693). I argue that Suchon combines an Aristotelian and Thomistic account of the human being’s teleological orientation toward truth with an Augustinian account of the epistemic consequences of original sin to advance a distinctive argument for the fundamental human entitlement to pursue knowledge, and a critique of the social forces that exclude women in particular from that pursuit. Through her Christianized appropriation of Aristotelian teleology, Suchon concludes that women are entitled to pursue knowledge insofar as they are naturally ordered to contemplation as their highest end. Through her adoption of an Augustinian narrative of original sin, she concludes that the male control of epistemic resources is a symptom of the psychological disorder resulting from the Fall, thus emphasizing the moral and spiritual stakes of its rectification. I argue further that Suchon’s philosophical contribution is distinctive within her seventeenth-century context: the Christianized natural teleology underlying her feminist arguments distinguishes her project from Cartesian feminisms, and her extension of an Augustinian analysis of fallen human psychology to a critique of patriarchy renders her project distinctive within the revival of Augustinianism.