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213Margaret Cavendish on Perception, Self‐Knowledge, and Probable OpinionPhilosophy Compass 10 (7): 438-450. 2015.Scholarly interest in Margaret Cavendish's philosophical views has steadily increased over the past decade, but her epistemology has received little attention, and no consensus has emerged; Cavendish has been characterized as a skeptic, as a rationalist, as presenting an alternative epistemology to both rationalism and empiricism, and even as presenting no clear theory of knowledge at all. This paper concludes that Cavendish was only a modest skeptic, for she believed that humans can achieve kno…Read more
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184Hume on Animal ReasonHume Studies 29 (1): 3-28. 2003.In both the _Treatise and the first _Enquiry, Hume offers an argument from analogy comparing how humans and animals make causal inferences. Yet in these and other texts, he suggests that there are certain differences between human and animal reasoning. This paper discusses Hume's argument from analogy, and examines how Hume can argue for differences in human and animal reasoning without having to attribute to either a special capacity that the other lacks. Hume's empiricism and his claims about …Read more
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153Margaret Cavendish on Gender, Nature, and FreedomHypatia 28 (3): 516-532. 2013.Some scholars have argued that Margaret Cavendish was ambivalent about women's roles and capabilities, for she seems sometimes to hold that women are naturally inferior to men, but sometimes that this inferiority is due to inferior education. I argue that attention to Cavendish's natural philosophy can illuminate her views on gender. In section II I consider the implications of Cavendish's natural philosophy for her views on male and female nature, arguing that Cavendish thought that such nature…Read more
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140The Senses and the History of Philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2019.The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into …Read more
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126Mary Shepherd on Mind, Soul, and SelfJournal of the History of Philosophy 58 (1): 93-112. 2020.the philosophical writings ofx Lady Mary Shepherd were apparently well regarded in her own time, but dropped out of view in the mid-nineteenth century.1 Some historians of philosophy have recently begun attending to the distinctive arguments in Shepherd's two books, but the secondary literature that exists so far has largely focused on her critiques of Hume and Berkeley. However, many other themes and arguments in Shepherd's writings have not yet been explored. This paper takes up one such issue…Read more
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107Descartes' Natural Light ReconsideredJournal of the History of Philosophy 37 (4): 601-612. 1999.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes’ Natural Light ReconsideredDeborah Boyle1. INTRODUCTIONThe “natural light” occupies an important position in Descartes’ Third Meditation, where the meditator invokes it to provide the premises needed for his proof for the existence of a non-deceiving God. Descartes also refers to the natural light throughout his Replies to the Objections to the Meditations and in the Principles of Philosophy. Yet he says almost nothing abou…Read more
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98Expanding the Canon of Scottish Philosophy: The Case for Adding Lady Mary ShepherdJournal of Scottish Philosophy 15 (3): 275-293. 2017.Lady Mary Shepherd argued for distinctive accounts of causation, perception, and knowledge of an external world and God. However, her work, engaging with Berkeley and Hume but written after Kant, does not fit the standard periodisation of early modern philosophy presupposed by many philosophy courses, textbooks, and conferences. This paper argues that Shepherd should be added to the canon as a Scottish philosopher. The practical reason for doing so is that it would give Shepherd a disciplinary h…Read more
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94Fame, Virtue, and Government: Margaret Cavendish on Ethics and PoliticsJournal of the History of Ideas 67 (2): 251-289. 2006.This paper offers an account of Margaret Cavendish's moral and political philosophy. In some respects Cavendish's theoury echoes Hobbes. However, although Cavendish agrees with Hobbes that morality is based on self-interest, she holds that morality derives from our natural desire for public recognition, not the desire for self-preservation. Via the desire for fame, self-love can motivate people to pursue virtue, which, for Cavendish, means establishing and maintaining a good government (in parti…Read more
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75Mary Shepherd and the Meaning of ‘Life’British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (2): 208-225. 2021.In the final chapters of her 1824 Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect, Lady Mary Shepherd considers what it means for an organism to be alive. The physician William Lawrence had...
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68The Ways of the Wise: Hume’s Rules of Causal ReasoningHume Studies 38 (2): 157-182. 2012.In Hume’s own day, and for nearly two hundred years after that, readers interested in his account of causal reasoning tended to focus on the skeptical implications of that account. For example, in his 1757 View of the Principal Deistical Writers of the Last and Present Century, John Leland characterized Hume as “endeavouring to destroy all reasoning, from causes to effects, or from effects to causes.”1 According to this sort of reading, as Louis Loeb describes it, “there is equal justification f…Read more
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66A Mistaken Attribution to Lady Mary ShepherdJournal of Modern Philosophy 2 (1): 5. 2020.In addition to the 1824 and 1827 books known to have been written by Lady Mary Shepherd, another philosophical treatise, published in 1819, has sometimes been attributed to her. While evidence for this attribution has so far been inconclusive, this paper provides reasons for thinking that Shepherd was not, in fact, the author of this book. New external evidence is provided to show that the author was James Milne, an Edinburgh architect and engineer.
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59Reply to Manuel Fasko’s discussion of Mary Shepherd: a guideBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (1): 189-194. 2024.Volume 33, Issue 1, January 2025, Page 189-194.
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53The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue, by Jacqueline Broad: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. vi + 205, US$70 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (3): 606-609. 2017.
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40Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination - by Patricia Springborg (review)Philosophical Books 48 (4): 359-360. 2007.
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39The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, 2nd ed.: edited by Alexander Broadie and Craig Smith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. xvi + 375, £18.00 (pb), ISBN: 9781108430784 (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (1): 188-191. 2021.The second edition of The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment has the same goal as the first edition : to describe “the historical circumstances”, the “leading idea...
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35Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers as a Philosophical TextBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (6): 1072-1098. 2021.Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) has not so far been considered a philosopher, probably because she wrote novels and tracts on education rather than philosophical treatises. This paper argues that Hamilton’s novel Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) should be read as a philosophical text, both for its close engagement with William Godwin’s moral theory and for what it suggests about Hamilton’s own moral theory and moral psychology. Studies of Memoirs have so far either characterized it as merely…Read more
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33Mary Shepherd: a guideOxford University Press. 2023.This guide leads readers systematically through the arguments of Mary Shepherd's two books. Chapters 1-4 cover the arguments in the Essay Upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824), where Shepherd argues that causal principles can be known by reason to be necessary truths and that causal inferences can be rationally justified. Shepherd's primary target in this work is Hume, but she also addresses the views of Thomas Brown and William Lawrence. Shepherd considered her second book, Essays on the…Read more
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28The Essential Leviathan: A Modernized Edition (review)Teaching Philosophy 42 (3): 300-304. 2019.
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27Mary Shepherd (Elements on women in the history of philosophy) (review)History of European Ideas 50 (4): 700-702. 2024.Mary Shepherd’s Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824) and Essays on the Perception of an External World (1827) were, until quite recently, utterly neglected in the history of philosoph...
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25Elizabeth Hamilton on Sympathy and the Selfish PrincipleJournal of Scottish Philosophy 19 (3): 219-241. 2021.In A Series of Popular Essays, Scottish philosopher Elizabeth Hamilton identifies two ‘principles’ in the human mind: sympathy and the selfish principle. While sharing Adam Smith's understanding of sympathy as a capacity for fellow-feeling, Hamilton also criticizes Smith's account of sympathy as involving the imagination. Even more important for Hamilton is the selfish principle, a ‘propensity to expand or enlarge the idea of self’ that she distinguishes from both selfishness and self-love. Coun…Read more
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25Joanna Baillie on Sympathetic Curiosity and Elizabeth Hamilton's CritiqueJournal of the American Philosophical Association 2024 1-22. 2024.Scholars working on recovering forgotten historical women philosophers have noted the importance of looking beyond traditional philosophical genres. This strategy is particularly important for finding Scottish women philosophers. By considering non-canonical genres, we can see the philosophical interest of the works of Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), who presents an account of “sympathetic curiosity” as one of the basic principles of the human mind. Baillie's work is als…Read more
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24The Well-Ordered Universe argues that Cavendish's natural philosophy, social and political philosophy, and medical theory share an underlying concern with order. This reveals interesting connections among Cavendish's natural philosophy and her views on gender, animals and the environment, and human health, and explains her commitment to monarchy and social hierarchy.
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23The Rise and Fall of Scottish Common Sense Realism by Douglas McDermid (review)Hume Studies 43 (2): 107-109. 2021.This rich and interesting book tells the story of the development and ultimate disappearance over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a central theme in Scottish philosophy: common sense realism. Taking Thomas Reid's version of common sense realism as the paradigmatic form, McDermid shows how Reid's views had their roots in Lord Kames's account of perceptual realism, how Dugald Stewart and Sir William Hamilton defended and modified Reid's view, and how James Ferrier systemat…Read more
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22Scottish Philosophy after the Enlightenment by Gordon Graham (review)Review of Metaphysics 76 (3): 551-553. 2023.Histories of Scottish philosophy typically focus on the school of "common sense" from the eighteenth century, beginning with Francis Hutcheson and ending with Dugald Stewart. As Gordon Graham notes in the preface to this volume, nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy is "an area of the history of philosophy that has generally gone almost entirely unexplored." His collection of eleven standalone essays (only one of which has been previously published) argues that something recognizable as "Scotti…Read more
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