Here’s a perverse thought experiment. Let’s suppose that we set ourselves the task of writing a history of philosophy that reflects and represents human thought in the period from, say, 1600 to 1800. But let’s suppose that we make our task a little lighter by narrowing the focus to the thoughts of one sex, one race, perhaps even one religion, one language, and one specific region of the planet. To lighten our task even further, we might also restrict ourselves to those philosophical thoughts expressed only in the form of published treatises—and treatises that were considered important and influential in their lifetime. Then let’s suppose that we proceed to teach this history as “the history of early modern thought” throughout North American and European universities for the next two hundred years or so.
Now we might ask our cunning thought-experiment question: what would the advantages and disadvantages of this history be?
The most obvious advantages are to do with simplicity and communicability. Students of philosophy would be immersed in this potted history, they would take roughly the same survey courses during their degrees, and, as a result, professional philosophers would all share the same background and training in early modern thought. When they met at conferences, there would be no awkward silences and blank stares; no-one would say “I haven’t read that author”, because usually they would have read that author, and often against their will. Perhaps, as an unfortunate consequence, those philosophers might end up having the same conversations over and over again—but then again, perhaps not: there’s no safeguard against someone’s willingness to find a philosophical text fascinating. There’s always someone prepared to delve into the microscopic minutiae and pull out a concept no one has ever heard of before. And, in any case, once they’d finished with the published works, scholars could always build their careers out of analyzing mysterious remarks in the margins of manuscripts—remarks about forgotten umbrellas and large mathematical proofs, perhaps. On the whole, the advantages would be numerous: there would be no unwieldy survey courses, no shortage of shared knowledge, no foreign texts or ideas, and no terrifyingly awkward conversations.
But the disadvantages also loom large—and these, too, are to do with simplicity and communicability. There is a danger that with this condensed history, students would get a rather distorted conception of the nature and function of philosophy in the early modern period. Their idea of philosophy would not be informed by the varied thoughts and lived experiences of different genders, races, religions, cultures, and sub-cultures. In an effort to communicate core ideas to students, some themes would come to be emphasized over others, while many themes would be completely ignored, perhaps even deemed “not sufficiently philosophical” to warrant attention. Needless to say, this history would also neglect philosophical ideas that were not expressed in the standard treatise format—those ideas in letters, diaries, magazine articles, and literary works such as poems and plays.
At this point, I could continue to speculate about what such a partial, incomplete account of early modern philosophy would look like. But of course, there’s no need: that history is our history.
Until the twenty-first century, standard accounts of early modern philosophy—and standard survey courses in Anglophone universities—presented histories dominated by figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. The ideas of these men were long regarded as crystallizing the thoughts of an era. Today, however, we see them as more representative of a privileged minority—white educated gentlemen of Britain and western Europe, typically writing within the Jewish and Christian traditions. That their works are important and influential was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: as they were discussed, dissected, and disseminated in their day, so they came to be even more discussed, dissected, and disseminated over the years, so much so that, eventually, no early modern course could be without them.
To be fair, this is no longer always the case. In recent times, early modern survey courses have broadened their focus, and anthologies such as Marshall and Sreedhar’s New Modern Philosophy and syllabi from Project Vox have helped to achieve this broadening. There are also several research projects currently under way, designed to recover women philosophers of the period and to address both an explicit and implicit male bias in the history of philosophy (the Extending New Narratives project, Querelle, the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, and the Archaeology of the Female Intellectual Identity, among others). Within and without these projects, scholars have been engaged in a reverse thought experiment—a reverse perverse experiment, if you like. They have been investigating the thoughts of early modern women, to examine their distinctive conceptions of philosophy. They have been uncovering neglected female philosophical figures, themes, and issues, and questioning their exclusion from the canon (not to mention, the idea of the canon itself). They have also been looking beyond standard treatises, to non-standard genres of philosophical writing that were popular in the day, such as letters and marginalia.
My recent publications—Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England: Selected Correspondence (2019) and Women Philosophers of Eighteenth-Century England: Selected Correspondence (2020) for the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy series—contribute to this experiment, albeit on a modest scale, by reproducing the philosophical letters of several early modern women. My authors include Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet, Mary Astell, Elizabeth Thomas, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. Some of their letters could already be found in the collected works of male philosophers such as Locke and Leibniz; other letters could be found only in rare books and manuscript archives. You had to go hunting for them and that required a lot of effort—being painstaking can be painful. So I have brought the correspondences together into two handy volumes, and I have provided commentaries and annotations, to make these women’s ideas accessible to modern readers.
I found that when we bring these letters together, something interesting emerges. Taken as a whole, the collection enhances our appreciation of women’s involvement in the shaping and development of philosophy from 1650 to 1750. From the content of their letters, we also get different notions of the purpose of philosophy (many focus on the practical and therapeutic benefits, for example), we see different philosophical themes arise (such as friendship and benevolence toward others), and we also find a different language and vocabulary for expressing philosophical thoughts. Of course, it must be said, this collection still narrows in on a small subset of the human population: it’s confined to women of the same privileged class (mostly gentlewomen), the same race (they’re all white), the same religion (Church of England), from the same small region of the world (England). The resulting impression of philosophy is still a distortion—but it’s a distortion that differs from the common all-male distortion.
Here’s a small but telling example to illustrate my case: the classic straw man fallacy. This fallacy occurs when an opponent’s argument is misrepresented in such a way that it is easily knocked down or refuted. In the texts of early modern men, the fallacy features as a macho military metaphor, in which the hapless strawman is a soldier’s training tool, a target to be used in mock combat. In his History of the Reformation, Gilbert Burnet says of his opponent, “having set up this Man of Straw, he runs unmercifully at him, he stabs him at the heart, he shoots him through the head, and then to make sure work of him, he cuts him all to pieces that he shall never live nor speak again”. There are similar adorable sentiments in the work of Robert Barclay, who writes of that man who “battereth against this Man of Straw of his own making”, and in John Brine, who writes of a “Man of Straw” which his opponent is “pleased to make up, unmercifully to beat and kick about, for his Diversion”. Their emphasis is on fighting and combat—assaulting the straw man, running him through, ripping him to pieces.
But a woman philosopher of the same period provides us with a different man of straw. In a library in Sandon Hall, in a book by Pierre Bayle, in the margins of the opening page, Mary Astell writes that here “He [Bayle] sets up a Jack Straw that he may throw stones at him”. (You see, it can be useful to examine the forgotten minutiae in the margins.) The straw man is still a target for aggression, but the example and its connotations are different. At the time, “Jack Straw” was a generic name for a rebel leader, an epithet derived from the original Jack Straw of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. An effigy of Jack Straw in the form of a head on a pike was a common feature of pageant processions at the annual Lord Mayor’s Show of London. Tellingly, Astell places her opponent as a spectator on the sidelines, throwing pebbles at a passing parade. Gone is the violence of a military-style assault on a combat target; in its place, an impotent volley at a reviled socialist. The difference in metaphor is unsurprising when one considers that Astell’s lived experience as an early modern woman was on the sidelines, not as a soldier in the thick of things. She likely attended the London parade herself when it passed through her neighborhood of Chelsea in 1700.
Of course, the example is not so fascinating that someone could build a career out of discussing it (though, for further details, see here and here). Nevertheless, it indicates that had there been a different experiment, there might have been different metaphors. Philosophy might not have been built on the metaphorical exclusion of women; philosophical texts might not have featured recurring associations between men and reason, on the one hand, and women and the non-rational (the body, the senses, and the emotions), on the other. The subtle differences in women’s philosophical thought and language suggest that a new experiment is worth the undertaking—to flip our perception of philosophy as an inherently male-biased discipline. It really didn’t—it really doesn’t—have to be that way.
Let me conclude with one final reflection. A few years ago, Karen Green and myself published a book, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700. When the paperback version appeared in 2014, we discovered an unfortunate typo on the cover: the title had been misprinted as A History of Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, omitting the word Women’s. At first, as a former newspaper sub-editor by training, I was tempted to call for the head of the copywriter on a pike (only metaphorically, of course). But then I laughed quite a bit (only metaphorically, of course) because it was amusing that our all-female account had been marketed as representative of all political thought in the period. We had already been careful to make sure the original title signaled that this was only A History rather than The History, because our history was just one among many that could have been told. Eventually the press corrected the error. Perhaps, to avoid being misleading, they felt that they couldn’t market the views of one social group as representative of all the rest. … After all, that would be perverse.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.
Jacqueline Broad
Jacqueline Broadis an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She is the Series Editor of Cambridge University Press’s new Elements series on Women in the History of Philosophy. Her current research project is on the philosophical foundations of women’s rights in the early modern period.
