Margaret Matthews

This book promotes entirely new insights into women’s contributions to the history of philosophy and boasts papers spanning the centuries from Antigone until twentieth century phenomenology, covering fields from logic to mysticism, stretching from Brazil to Early Modern Europe. The book is of interest for all scholars and students of the history of philosophy, but especially for those who are interested in women philosophers and in new narratives in the history of philosophy. The book is representative of the immense scope of academic discussion women were involved in over the centuries as well as their varying styles and methods. It features papers in logic and in mysticism, presents papers on female authors in Antiquity and in the twenty-first century and it includes papers on phenomenology and analytic philosophy. The chapters consider philosophical positions in literature and drama, in letters and in classical philosophical treatises, ensuring this book contributes significantly to research on the individual women authors, who are all to date still understudied figures.

The concept of knowledge (science) plays a central role in the work of early modern proto-feminist philosopher Gabrielle Suchon. Nevertheless, there has been no comprehensive treatment of her epistemology. This article offers the first extended analysis of Suchon’s theory of knowledge and describes the role of that theory in her arguments for the equality of men and women. I argue that Suchon combines an Aristotelian theory of knowledge and its place in the best life of contemplation with an Augustinian narrative of the Fall to conclude that women's happiness is unjustly compromised as a result of their exclusion from the very institutions that would allow them to accomplish an essentially human task: the reparative labor of learning. I argue further that Suchon’s theory of knowledge deserves greater attention as a distinctive contribution to early modern epistemology. Suchon’s melding of Aristotelian epistemology with an Augustinian narrative of the epistemic consequences of original sin allows her to construe intellectual labor as key to the rectification of the fallen human mind. Through this emphasis on the moral value of intellectual labor, Suchon’s epistemology offers distinctive social and political implications, namely the reform of institutions that exclude women from the process of learning.

This chapter offers a new interpretation of Marie de Gournay’s use of skeptical strategies in The Equality of Men and Women in light of her discussion of prejudice in The Ladies’ Complaint. Readers of The Equality of Men and Women have often been puzzled by an apparent tension in Gournay’s methodology. On the one hand, she suggests that she will prove the equality of men and women by means of arguments; on the other hand, she suggests that she can only establish her conclusion through appeal to theological authority. Eileen O’Neill offers one influential solution to this puzzle, interpreting Gournay as a Pyrrhonian skeptic and a Catholic fideist. In this interpretation, Gournay’s arguments are equipollent arguments aimed at showing the inability of reason to settle the equality question, and her appeals to theological authority are based on a fideistic understanding of the relation between faith and reason. In this chapter, I will argue instead that Gournay is not a skeptic regarding the power of reason, and that her appeals to theological authority are not a response to the fideistic conclusion that the equality thesis is accessible through faith alone. Instead, I will show that Gournay’s adoption of skeptical strategies can be better understood in light of her analysis of prejudice in her other feminist work, The Ladies’ Complaint. Concretely, I will show that the problem to which Gournay’s skeptical arguments respond is not a problem with reason itself, but with the social situation in which philosophical conversation occurs.