The I International Conference Women in the History of Philosophy will take place from June 17 to 20 at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, a UERJ. Dr. Lisa Shapiro, one of the keynote speakers, in preparation to her visit to Rio, talked about her work and the field at large with Katarina Peixoto, who is also Early Modern Researcher and one of the organizers of the event (with Dr. Pedro Pricladnitzky). They discussed what the recovery of female philosophers into the mainstream narrative of History of Philosophy has meant in the last decade and what are the implications of this process for contemporary philosophy.
Scholars from eight countries and nineteen cities, most of them women, will present their studies on Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Wollstonecraft, Oliva Sabuco, Sophie Charlotte, as well as on Brazilian female philosophers and writers, such as Gilda Mello e Souza, Clarice Lispector, Nísia Floresta and Rosa Egipcíaca.
Lisa Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean at Simon Fraser University and PI of the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant New Narratives in the History of Philosophy. She is the editor and translator of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (Chicago, 2007), as well as co-editor of Emotions and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 2013) and editor of Pleasure: A History (Oxford, 2018) in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series.
Katarina Peixoto: Your studies on the philosopher Elisabeth of Bohemia are praised for having brought her work again to light in the English-speaking world, and contributed to the new narratives in the history of philosophy. Indeed, you were one of the first to drawn attention to the philosophical, conceptual and historical importance of the recovery of characters that have been erased from history or who are unknown to what is conventionally called the canon or the authorial repertoire of the history of philosophy. What is the state of the art of this literature today, in your view, more than ten years after your first publications on Elisabeth of Bohemia and on the role of women in Early Modern Philosophy?
Lisa Shapiro: Things are SO much better today than when I was working on the edition of the correspondence between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes. I started the project in 1996, and I had a very hard time finding a press interested in pursuing it. People asked me whether Descartes wasn’t just in love with Elisabeth. The assumption was she didn’t have much of her own to say. Because of work of others the ground started shifting. Eileen O’Neill played a huge role, first with her groundbreaking conference in 1997, and then with her edition of Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon the Experimental Philosophy (Cambridge 2001). Karen Green and Jacqueline Broad have also done amazing work, as have Sarah Hutton, Susan James, Ruth Hagengruber and many others. Today, there is so much momentum to move the history of philosophy forward. We are really building a body of scholarship, the excitement of early career scholars and current students, both graduate and undergraduate, will keep the discussion interesting
How do you see this intellectual experience, this lifting the veil to the presence of women in the history of modern philosophy? What would you highlight as the most relevant aspect on this reconstruction trajectory?
I find it very exciting to read the works of women who have been neglected, but it is also hard work. In the history of philosophy, we are used to responding to centuries of secondary literature. To work on women you need to read these texts with open mind, to work to figure out what they might be trying to say, to think about a range of styles of writing and genres, and to learn a bit about the historical context. Doing this also makes you go back and read more familiar figures differently too. I think also that the work is more collaborative, as it really helps to read these new texts as a group, to present work in progress and get others to ask questions that you might not see for yourself.
You are part of the New Narratives project. Could you tell us a bit about what this project consists of and what its purpose and achievements?
The New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, aimed to bring together the scholars who had been working on early modern women, to form a network, so that we could together build more resources, draw attention to women philosophers, and most importantly, inspire students to continue the work we started. You can find a record of all the activities at the website: http://www.newnarrativesinphilosophy.net. Partner Project Vox, led by Andrew Janiak at Duke has built an amazing website at http://projectvox.org/ that provides great resources to learn about a growing number of women philosophers. Marguerite Deslauriers at McGill has built a great resource at querelle.ca that makes accessible a range of works on the development of the concept of equality in the 16th and 17th century. At Simon Fraser we’ve started a Digital Collection (https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/newnarratives-collection/new-narratives-history-philosophy) that includes images of the only extant manuscript of Elisabeth’s letters to Descartes, a transcription of Gabrielle Suchon’s Du Celibat Volontaire, and podcasts. We have also started a bibliographic database of philosophical works by women — there are already over 900 entries but there is still a lot of work to be done (https://dhil.lib.sfu.ca/newn). We’ve also hosted workshops and conferences at Penn, Duke, Columbia, McGill and SFU. And most importantly, we’ve provided opportunities for students to work on the project — to learn archival and digital methods as they learn first hand about women thinkers.
What are the main challenges to build bridges between the research activity of reconstruction of the canon and the pedagogical conceptions directed to the teaching of philosophy? And the main advantages, if any?
I am fortunate that the curriculum where I teach is very flexible, so I can incorporate women into history of philosophy courses easily. But there are still challenges — texts need to be available, either digitally, or in print, and more critically in translation. The last is the biggest challenge right now, as many in the English speaking world are focused on women who wrote in English. But there are also women writing in French, German, Spanish and no doubt also Portuguese to be read. There is also a challenge for thematizing the work of these women writers so that they can be introduced into more traditional classes seamlessly. Are you interested in substance? You can read Descartes, Spinoza, but also Conway. Are you interested in causation? Try to work in Cavendish.
Here in Brazil, discussions on the rewriting of the canon and on the recognition of women in the history of philosophy go hand in hand with two others: 1) our colonial and slave-holding history, and 2) the spirit of political conflagration (against misogyny, against racism) inside universities. In this scenario, compromises with the history of philosophy and with the rewriting of the canon may sound even more counter-intuitive or distant from the daily lives of undergraduate students. Have you deal with that kind of tension at your university? Should the history of philosophy respond in some new way to these questions?
One thing that is interesting to me is that women in the history of philosophy are very interested in social issues. They develop accounts of mind, say, while arguing for women’s equality. I am particularly interested in Gabrielle Suchon’s critique of social institutions as constraining human nature, and her development of positive alternatives. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first to really theorize women’s rights. Women were also very active in theorizing the American abolitionist movement. So teaching women in the history of philosophy can help to inform contemporary discussions. I think many people are surprised by how contemporary some 17th century works by women seem.
How do you see the relationship between the way the history of philosophy is made and the state of contemporary democracies? Do you see any special connection? Do philosophy and its history have a role to play in our societies, and, most particularly, in our universities?
I am going to take these two questions together. I am not sure that there is any special connection between the way history of philosophy is written and the state of contemporary democracies, but I do think that philosophy and its history are especially important at this moment in time, especially the philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries. Many of us take the societies we have grown up in for granted, and we look at philosophy as a set of abstract problems. But the 17th and 18th centuries were tumultuous times — there were scientific changes, wars, social upheaval. The philosophy of the period was not built as an abstraction but rather as a way of understanding their world, of thinking about what needed to happen to make their world a better place, and about providing the arguments to support those claims and to persuade others to share their view. To do all that they looked to historical texts: Plutarch’s The Lives of the Philosophers is cited a lot. In looking to history we can gain perspectives on the world we live in, to help us to understand our times, to see our way clear to what needs to change to make things better, and most importantly to develop arguments to support our views. I believe very strongly that a good education is one that helps to develop capacities to think for oneself — that is, to listen to what other’s say, to evaluate the claims they make, to raise objections, develop positive arguments, and to be able to clearly articulate what one values and why. Philosophy and its history has an important role to play in that education.
Katarina Peixoto
Katarina Peixoto posdoctoral fellow at the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (project:The problem of singular terms in The Port-Royal Logic). She leads a research project on Elisabeth of Bohemia's Thought (Intentionality and responsibility in Elisabeth of Bohemia's Thought). Both projects funded by The National Council for Research and Development - CNPq). She is one of the organizers of the I International Conference Women in The History of Philosophy. (Facebook Page for the event)
