Julia Borcherding

This paper argues that the vitalist monisms of Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish. Even though Conway is often cited as a proponent of a thoroughgoing ‘spiritualist’ ontology and Cavendish as the advocate of a similarly thoroughgoing materialism, their views turn out to be much closer than they may initially seem. Apart from highlighting the more radical nature of Conway’s position, such a reframing also has the added advantage of bringing the similarities between her own ‘spiritual’ monism and the vitalist ‘materialisms’ of her time into sharper relief. As F. Wunderlich emphasizes, the notion of subtle matter pervaded the natural sciences of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Cavendish’s ‘materialism’ and compares it to Conway’s view of created substance, drawing out a number of relevant similarities. It asks what may have motivated Conway and Cavendish to move beyond the materialism-immaterialism divide by ‘spiritualizing’ matter in this way.

Perceived by many of her contemporaries as preferring theories spun from her own “fantastical” brain to the hard facts of science, Cavendish indeed accords a central role to the workings of the imagining mind. However, as I argue in this paper, Cavendish’s appeal to the imagination is by no means methodologically naïve. Through an exploration of Cavendish’s analogy between the poetic imagination and the productive, ordering activity of nature, I show how Cavendish poses her poetic depictions of nature both as a counterpoint to gendered critiques of the imagination – instead casting the imagination as a means for female thinkers to enter the male intellectual domain – as well as as a means for critiquing the conception of nature put forwarded by experimental philosophers inspired by the Baconian programme.

This chapter examines Anne Conway’s ‘argument from love’ in her 'Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy'. This argument, supported by a further argument, the ‘argument from pain’, undermines the dualist dichotomy between mind and matter by appealing to a vitalist similarity principle. The goal is two-fold: first, to contribute to a close systematic reconstruction and analysis of Conway’s arguments, which so far is largely lacking in the literature; second, to establish that these arguments are richer and more compelling than commentators have thought. The chapter shows that Conway’s case against the dualist poses a considerable challenge to the dualisms of Henry More and Descartes.

The 1695 publication of the “New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication, and of the Union which Exists between the Soul and the Body” in the June 27 and July 4 issues of the Parisian _Journal des sçavans_ marks an important milestone in Leibniz’s philosophical trajectory. It presented the first comprehensive public presentation of his metaphysics as it had matured over the preceding decades, and it would spark many lively exchanges and debates between Leibniz and his philosophical contemporaries in the decades to come. This chapter provides background regarding the text’s genesis and reception, and introduces its main philosophical themes. After highlighting some interpretative challenges raised by both the “New System’s” form and philosophical content, I go on to explore two key elements of the metaphysical picture it advances: Leibniz’s account of individual substances, and his theory of the pre-established harmony between them.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current shape. To start, while there is a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of...

This paper examines the surprisingly central role of sympathetic love within Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. It shows that such love fulfils a range of metaphysical functions, and highlight an important shift in Cavendish’s account vis-a-vis earlier conceptions: sympathetic love is no longer given an emanative or mechanistic explanation, but is naturalized as an active emotion. It furthers investigate to what extent Cavendish’s account reveals a rift between the realm of nature and the realm of human sociability, and whether this rift really prompts an inward turn, as some interpreters have suggested.

Leibniz’s claim that it is possible for us to gain metaphysical knowledge through reflection on the self has intrigued many commentators, but it has also often been criticized as flawed or unintelligible. A similar fate has beset Leibniz’s arguments against materialism. In this paper, I explore one of Leibniz’s lesser-known arguments against materialism from his reply to Bayle’s new note L, and argue that it provides us with an instance of a Leibnizian “argument from reflection”. This argument, I further show, does not constitute a flawed appeal to mere introspection, but is in fact securely grounded in an important corollary of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Leibniz’s Principle of Intelligibility.

The 1695 publication of the “New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication, and of the Union which Exists between the Soul and the Body” in the June 27 and July 4 issues of the Parisian Journal des sçavans marks an important milestone in Leibniz’s philosophical trajectory. It presented the first comprehensive public presentation of his metaphysics as it had matured over the preceding decades, and it would spark many lively exchanges and debates between Leibniz and his philosophical contemporaries in the decades to come. This chapter provides background regarding the text’s genesis and reception, and introduces its main philosophical themes. After highlighting some interpretative challenges raised by both the “New System’s” form and philosophical content, it goes on to explore two key elements of the metaphysical picture it advances: Leibniz’s account of individual substances, and his theory of the pre-established harmony between them.

In this paper, I examine Anne Conway’s ‘argument from love’ in her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. This argument, supported by a further argument, the ‘argument from pain’, undermines the dualist dichotomy between mind and matter by appealing to a vitalist similarity principle. My goal is two-fold: first, to contribute to a close systematic reconstruction and analysis of Conway’s arguments, which so far is largely lacking in the literature; second, to show that these arguments are richer and more compelling than commentators have thought.