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19Recent Work in Early Modern Women’s Philosophy: Some Implications for the CanonMind 132 (528): 1126-1141. 2021.In this article, I critically examine a number of recent editions of philosophical works by early modern women. I argue that the proliferation of such texts is likely to have positive implications for the study of early modern philosophy. By taking a historical-contextualist approach to women’s writings, these editions contribute to the goal of a thorough, unbiased, and impartial account of early modern thought. Their accessibility and teachability also draw attention to historical-philosophical…Read more
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7Women Philosophers of Eighteenth-Century England: Selected Correspondence (edited book)New York. 2019.This is the second of two collections of correspondence written by early modern English women philosophers. In this volume, Jacqueline Broad presents letters from three influential thinkers of the eighteenth century: Mary Astell, Elizabeth Thomas, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. Broad provides introductory essays for each figure and explanatory annotations to clarify unfamiliar language, content, and historical context for the modern reader. Her selections make available many letters that have n…Read more
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9Hobbes and Astell on War and PeaceIn Marcus P. Adams (ed.), A Companion to Hobbes, Wiley-blackwell. 2021.In this chapter, the author interprets Mary Astell's critique of these principles as engagements with the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Scholars have examined Astell's writings in relation to the Hobbesian concept of the state of nature and Hobbes's theory of the social contract. While Astell explicitly vilifies Hobbes as a proponent of just cause theory, in the political pamphlets of 1704, she implicitly adopts salient aspects of his views concerning the maintenance of peace. Her writi…Read more
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5Mary Astell: liberty of judgment for womenIn Sabine Doyé & Marion Heinz (eds.), Geschlechterordnung Und Staat: Legitimationsfiguren der Politischen Philosophie, Akademie Verlag. pp. 139-149. 2012.
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72 Mary Astell and the VirtuesIn Penny Weiss & Alice Sowaal (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 16-34. 2016.
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25Women and Stoic ethics in early modern EnglandPhilosophy Compass 18 (6). 2023.This paper provides an overview of women's engagement with Stoic ethics in early modern England (c. 1600–1700). It builds on recent literature in the field by demonstrating that there is a positive gender‐inclusive narrative to be told about Stoic philosophy in this time—one that incorporates women's specific concerns and responds to women's lived experiences. To support this claim, we take an interdisciplinary approach and examine several different genres of women's writing in the period, inclu…Read more
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Mary Astell's Malebranchean concept of the selfIn Emily Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press. 2018.
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15The Social Dimension of Generosity in Descartes and AstellJournal of the History of Philosophy 60 (3): 409-427. 2022.ARRAY
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12Petticoat Power? Mary Astell's Appropriation of Heroic Virtue for WomenJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1-20. forthcoming.Several recent studies devote themselves to Mary Astell's feminist theory of virtue—her ‘serious proposal to the ladies’ to help women obtain wisdom, equality, and happiness, despite the prejudices of seventeenth-century custom. But there has been little scholarship on Astell's conception of heroic virtues, those exceptional character traits that raise their bearers above the ordinary course of nature. Astell's appropriation of heroic virtue poses a number of philosophical difficulties for her f…Read more
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17From Nobility and Excellence to Generosity and Rights: Sophia's Defenses of WomenHypatia 37 (1): 43-59. 2022.This article examines two early modern feminist works, Woman Not Inferior to Man and Woman's Superior Excellence Over Man, written by “Sophia, A Person of Quality.” Scholars once dismissed these texts as plagiarisms or semi-translations of François Poulain de la Barre's De l’égalité des deux sexes. More recently, however, Guyonne Leduc has drawn attention to the original aspects of these treatises by highlighting Sophia's significant variations on Poulain's vocabulary. In this article, I take Le…Read more
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329Women and Republicanism in the Eighteenth Century: Completing the Historical RecordAustralasian Philosophical Review 3 (4): 347-350. 2019.
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355Catharine Trotter Cockburn on the virtue of atheistsIntellectual History Review 31 (1): 111-128. 2021.In her Remarks Upon Some Writers (1743), Catharine Trotter Cockburn takes a seemingly radical stance by asserting that it is possible for atheists to be virtuous. In this paper, I examine whether or not Cockburn’s views concerning atheism commit her to a naturalistic ethics and a so-called radical enlightenment position on the independence of morality and religion. First, I examine her response to William Warburton’s critique of Pierre Bayle’s arguments concerning the possibility of a society of…Read more
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553Damaris Masham on Women and Liberty of ConscienceIn Eileen O’Neill & Marcy P. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Springer. pp. 319-336. 2019.In his correspondence, John Locke described his close friend Damaris Masham as ‘a determined foe to ecclesiastical tyranny’ and someone who had ‘the greatest aversion to all persecution on account of religious matters.’ In her short biography of Locke, Masham returned the compliment by commending Locke for convincing others that ‘Liberty of Conscience is the unquestionable Right of Mankind.’ These comments attest to Masham’s personal commitment to the cause of religious liberty. Thus far, howeve…Read more
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14Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England: Selected Correspondence (edited book)Oup Usa. 2019.This work is a collection of the philosophical correspondences of English women thinkers of the late seventeenth century. It includes letters to and from some of the most famous philosophers of the age, including Locke and Leibniz. Their letters range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from religion and ethics to knowledge and metaphysics. The introductory essays and annotations to this work make these women's ideas accessible and comprehensible to modern readers. Taken as a whole, t…Read more
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485Selfhood and Self-government in Women’s Religious Writings of the Early Modern PeriodInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (5): 713-730. 2019.Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue…Read more
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376Conway and Charleton on the Intimate Presence of Souls in BodiesJournal of the History of Ideas 79 (4): 571-591. 0035.Little is known about the shaping and development of Anne Conway’s thought in relation to her early modern contemporaries. In one part of her only surviving treatise, The Principles, Conway criticises “those doctors” who uphold a dualist theory of soul and body, a mechanist conception of body (as dead and inert), and the view that the soul is “intimate present” in the body. In this paper, I argue that here she targets Walter Charleton, a well-known defender of Epicurean atomism in mid-seventeent…Read more
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476Mary Astell’s critique of Pierre Bayle: atheism and intellectual integrity in the PenséesBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (4): 806-823. 2019.This paper focuses on the English philosopher Mary Astell’s marginalia in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s personal copy of the 1704 edition of Pierre Bayle’s Pensées diverses sur le comète (first published in 1682). I argue that Astell’s annotations provide good reasons for thinking that Bayle is biased toward atheism in this work. Recent scholars maintain that Bayle can be interpreted as an Academic Sceptic: as someone who honestly and impartially follows a dialectical method of argument in order t…Read more
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43Astell, MaryInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2017.Mary Astell The English writer Mary Astell is widely known today as an early feminist pioneer, but not so well known as a philosophical thinker. Her feminist reputation rests largely on her impassioned plea to establish an all-female college in England, an idea first put forward in her Serious Proposal to the Ladies. … Continue reading Astell, Mary →
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7Emasculating metaphor : whither the maleness of reason?In Lynda Burns (ed.), Feminist Alliances, Brill. pp. 91-108. 2006.
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1567Mary Astell on Virtuous FriendshipParergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26 (2): 65-86. 2009.According to some scholars, Mary Astell’s feminist programme is severely limited by its focus on self-improvement rather than wider social change. In response, I highlight the role of ‘virtuous friendship’ in Astell’s 1694 work, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Building on classical ideals and traditional Christian principles, Astell promotes the morally transformative power of virtuous friendship among women. By examining the significance of such friendship to Astell’s feminism, we can see tha…Read more
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622Liberty and the Right of Resistance: Women's Political Writings of the English Civil War EraIn Jacqueline Broad & Karen Green (eds.), Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women, 1400-1800, Springer. pp. 77-94. 2007.
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857Adversaries or allies? Occasional thoughts on the Masham-Astell exchangeEighteenth-Century Thought 1 123-49. 2003.Against the backdrop of the English reception of Locke’s Essay, stands a little-known philosophical dispute between two seventeenth-century women writers: Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659-1708). On the basis of their brief but heated exchange, Astell and Masham are typically regarded as philosophical adversaries: Astell a disciple of the occasionalist John Norris, and Masham a devout Lockean. In this paper, I argue that although there are many respects in which Astell an…Read more
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27[REVIEW] The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth CenturyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (3): 617-19. 2014.The seventeenth century witnessed the first publications that argued for the equality of men and women. Desmond M. Clarke presents new translations of the three most important ones, with excerpts from the authors' related writings, together with an extensive introduction to the religious and philosophical context within which they argued.
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88The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of VirtueOxford University Press. 2015.Mary Astell is best known today as one of the earliest English feminists. This book sheds new light on her writings by interpreting her first and foremost as a moral philosopher—as someone committed to providing guidance on how best to live. The central claim of this work is that all the different strands of Astell’s thought—her epistemology, her metaphysics, her philosophy of the passions, her feminist vision, and her conservative political views—are best understood in light of her ethical obje…Read more
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671Women on Liberty in Early Modern EnglandPhilosophy Compass 9 (2): 112-122. 2014.Our modern ideals about liberty were forged in the great political and philosophical debates of the 17th and 18th centuries, but we seldom hear about women's contributions to those debates. This paper examines the ideas of early modern English women – namely Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Mary Overton, ‘Eugenia’, Sarah Chapone and the civil war women petitioners – with respect to the classic political concepts of negative, positive and republican liberty. The author suggests that these writers…Read more
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533Mary Astell's Machiavellian moment? Politics and feminism in Moderation truly StatedIn Jo Wallwork & Paul Salzman (eds.), Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, Ashgate. pp. 9-23. 2011.In The Women of Grub Street (1998), Paula McDowell highlighted the fact that the overwhelming majority of women’s texts in early modern England were polemical or religio-political in nature rather than literary in content. Since that time, the study of early modern women’s political ideas has dramatically increased, and there have been a number of recent anthologies, modern editions, and critical analyses of female political writings. As a result of Patricia Springborg’s research, Mary Astell (…Read more
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |