Recovering Early Modern Women Writers: Some Tensions

Jessica Gordon-Roth; Nancy Kendrick

doi:10.1111/meta.12357

Recovering Early Modern Women Writers: Some Tensions

Jessica Gordon-Roth, Nancy Kendrick

Philosophy (Twin Cities)

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Feminist work in the history of philosophy has been going on for several decades. Some scholars have focused on the ways philosophical concepts are themselves gendered. Others have recovered women writers who were well known in their own time but forgotten in ours, while still others have firmly placed into a philosophical context the works of women writers long celebrated within other disciplines in the humanities. The recovery of women writers has challenged the myth that there are no women in the history of philosophy, but it has not eradicated it. What, we may ask, is impeding our progress? This paper argues that so often we treat early modern women philosophers’ texts in ways that are different from, or inconsistent with, the explicit commitments of the analytic tradition, and in so doing, we may be triggering our audiences to reject these women as philosophers, and their texts as philosophical. Moreover, this is the case despite our intention to achieve precisely the opposite effect.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	268-285
Number of pages	18
Journal	Metaphilosophy
Volume	50
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12357
State	Published - Apr 2019

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
What, we may ask, is impeding our progress in eradicating the myth that there are no women in the history of philosophy, despite decades-long attempts to do just this? This is a timely question. There has been a recent surge in funding, and interest, in expanding the canon.1 Two examples that easily come to mind are Project Vox, at Duke University, and New Narratives in the History of Philosophy, at Simon Fraser University. Both of these projects receive funding via major granting institutions. Project Vox is funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation, among other sources, and New Narratives is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).2 Their aim is to bring the works of early modern women philos-

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Keywords

Astell
Cavendish
Cockburn
Conway
analytic tradition
canon expansion
early modern women
feminist history of philosophy
implicit bias
philosophical authority

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Recovering Early Modern Women Writers: Some Tensions

Abstract

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Keywords

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