English Women Philosophers and the Origins

In his recent book on the rise of modernity, Jonathan Israel argues that philosophers and philosophical ideas played a significant role in the transformation of opinions and attitudes across early modern Europe. In the seventeenth century, Cartesian philosophy in particular was at the forefront of the formation of modern concepts and institutions. Many aspects of Cartesianism are now seen as typical of the ‘modern project’, including its challenge to ancient authority, the questioning of past prejudices and assumptions, its egalitarian conception of reason, and the privileging of the intellect over the passions. The rise of Cartesianism also marked the advent of the new mechanistic conception of the natural world, the rise of scientific objectivity, the separation of theology and philosophy, and a radical division between human beings and the rest of nature, including animals. To this list of ‘modern innovations’, we might also add that Cartesian philosophy played a modest role in promoting intellectual equality between the sexes. In 1673, a Frenchman named Francois Poulain de la Barre employed Cartesian ideas to argue that common opinions about the innate intellectual deficiency of women are based on unexamined prejudices rather than clear and distinct ideas. He maintained that there is no essential difference between the rational abilities of men and women (the soul itself, he says, ‘has no sex’); and therefore any defect in women’s reasoning capacities must be due to custom, rather than natural inferiority. But what role, we might ask, did women themselves play in the general intellectual shift of the times? Did women thinkers make their own distinctive contribution to the origins of modernity, or were they mere passive spectators to the historical and intellectual upheavals of their time? Over the past few decades, scholars have demonstrated that women philosophers did in fact play an active role in intellectual debates leading up to the Enlightenment. Some