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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Pauline Phemister
Publisher's Note: Spinoza is a key figure in modern philosophy. Ethics is his most studied and well known work. Being both up-to-date and clear, this Guidebook is designed to lead the reader through this complex seminal text. Spinoza's Ethics introduces and assess Spinoza's life, and its connection with his thought.MacCumhaill, Clare, Rachael Wiseman. A Female School of Analytic Philosophy? Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch2018, Women in Parenthesis website-
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Added by: Anne-Marie McCallion
Introduction: The history of Analytic Philosophy we are familiar with is a story about men. It begins with Frege, Russell, Moore. Wittgenstein appears twice, once as the author of the Tractatus and then again later as the author of the Philosophical Investigations. Between Wittgenstein’s first and second appearance are Carnap and Ayer and the all-male Vienna Circle. Then come the post-second-world war Ordinary Language Philosophers – Ryle, and Austin. After that Strawson and Grice, Quine and Davidson.
The male dominance is not just in the names of the ‘star’ players. Michael Beaney’s 2013 Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy begins by listing the 150 most important analytic philosophers. 146 of them are men. For women who wish to join in this conversation, the odds seem formidably against one.
Today we will be speaking about two of the four women who warrant an entry in Beaney’s list – Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. We will be talking about them alongside two other women Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley. We think they should also be in the top 150, but our broader aims are more ambitious than increasing the proportion of important women from 2.7% to 4%.
Comment: This text offers a very accessible introduction to the work of the Wartime Quartet as well as a biographical and historical overview of their philosophical school status. It would be suitable for history of philosophy courses – especially those which emphasise or centre upon 20th century analytic philosophy. This text will also be essential for students who wish to set-up an In Parenthesis reading group, please see here for more information: http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/curated-resources/for-students/new-undergraduate-reading-list/#intro
Broad, Jacqueline. Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century2002, Cambridge University Press.-
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Added by: Alison Stone, Contributed by: Karen Green
Publisher's Note: In this rich and detailed study of early modern women's thought, Jacqueline Broad explores the complexity of women's responses to Cartesian philosophy and its intellectual legacy in England and Europe. She examines the work of thinkers such as Mary Astell, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway and Damaris Masham, who were active participants in the intellectual life of their time and were also the respected colleagues of philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz and Locke. She also illuminates the continuities between early modern women's thought and the anti-dualism of more recent feminist thinkers. The result is a more gender-balanced account of early modern thought than has hitherto been available. Broad's clear and accessible exploration of this still-unfamiliar area will have a strong appeal to both students and scholars in the history of philosophy, women's studies and the history of ideas.Comment: The book is organised around six authors: Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catherine Trotter Cockburn. The book focuses on their relations to Cartesianism and this means the book can be readily used on a history of modern philosophy course. It can be treated as introducing the ideas of all the women philosophers just mentioned and, e.g., a chapter could be further reading each week accompanying primary texts by the women philosophers in question.
Boyle, Deborah. Expanding the Canon of Scottish Philosophy: The Case for Adding Lady Mary Shepherd2017, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 15(3), pp.275-293.-
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Added by: Benny Goldberg
Abstract: Lady Mary Shepherd (1777-1847) argued for distinctive accounts of causation, perception, and knowledge of an external world and God. However, her work, engaging with Berkeley and Hume but written after Kant, does not fit the standard periodisation of early modern philosophy presupposed by many philosophy courses, textbooks, and conferences. This paper argues that Shepherd should be added to the canon as a Scottish philosopher. The practical reason for doing so is that it would give Shepherd a disciplinary home, opening up additional possibilities for research and teaching. The philosophical reason is that her views share certain features characteristic of canonical Scottish philosophers.Comment: A good paper for any classes on how to teach philosophy, on early modern philosophy, the philosophy of history, or feminism
Berges, Sandrine. On the Outskirts of the Canon: The Myth of the Lone Female Philosopher, and What to Do about It2015, Metaphilosophy, 46(3), pp.380-397.-
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Added by: Benny Goldberg
Abstract: Women philosophers of the past, because they tended not to engage with each other much, are often perceived as isolated from ongoing philosophical dialogues. This has led - directly and indirectly - to their exclusion from courses in the history of philosophy. This article explores three ways in which we could solve this problem. The first is to create a course in early modern philosophy that focuses solely or mostly on female philosophers, using conceptual and thematic ties such as a concern for education and a focus on ethics and politics. The second is to introduce women authors as dialoguing with the usual canonical suspects: Cavendish with Hobbes, Elisabeth of Bohemia with Descartes, Masham and Astell with Locke, Conway with Leibniz, and so on. The article argues that both methods have significant shortcomings, and it suggests a third, consisting in widening the traditional approach to structuring courses in early modern philosophy.Comment: A good paper for any classes on how to teach philosophy, on early modern philosophy, the philosophy of history, or feminism.
Kongzi (Confucius). Analects (Selections)2005, In: Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Second Edition). Edited by Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden. Hackett.-
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner
Summary: Selections from the Analects of Kongzi (Confucius), a foundational text in Chinese philosophy. It is split into twenty books recounting things that the Master (Kongzi) and his disciples said and did. Much of the rest of Chinese philosophy owes a debt, more or less explicit, to this work. Kongzi seeks the cultivation of virtue through ritual, so that worthy persons will occupy positions of power and influence. Society will thereby return to some of the splendor of the bygone ages of the legendary Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, as well as the more recent Xia, Shang, and Western Zhou dynasties.Comment: The selections are best read in their entirety, as the work is holistic and difficult to interpret piecemeal. (So reading the whole text is better still!) It's helpful to stress Kongzi's particularism, as this makes sense of seemingly contradictory pronouncements he makes in different contexts. But if you're looking to incorporate some Classical Chinese philosophy in a course without space for the whole thing, the selections from Book One include many key Confucian themes: ritual, the ideal of a junzi or gentleman, virtue, filial piety, and the appeal to tradition. Either way, it's probably wise to give students some historical context to help understand the appeal of harking back to older traditions.
Rogers, Dorothy. The Other Philosophy Club: America’s First Academic Women Philosophers2009, Hypatia 24(2): 164-185.-
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Added by: Alison Stone
Abstract: Recent research on women philosophers has led to more discussion of the merits of many previously forgotten women in the past several years. Yet due to the fact that a thinker’s significance and influence are historical phenomena, women remain relatively absent in 'mainstream' discussions of philosophy. This paper focuses on several successful academic women in American philosophy and takes notice of how they succeeded in their own era. Special attention is given to three important academic women philosophers: Mary Whiton Calkins, Ellen Bliss Talbot, and Marietta Kies.Comment: Focusing on three nineteenth-century women philosophers, Mary Whiton Calkins, Ellen Bliss Talbot, and Marietta Kies. Could be used as supplementary reading on a history of philosophy course if it covers the nineteenth century.
Rogers, Dorothy. America’s First Women Philosophers2005, Bloomsbury.-
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Added by: Alison Stone
Publisher's Note: The American idealist movement started in St. Louis, Missouri in 1858, becoming more influential as women joined and influenced its development. Susan Elizabeth Blow was well known as an educator and pedagogical theorist who founded the first public kindergarten program in America (1873-1884). Anna C. Brackett was a feminist and pedagogical theorist and the first female principal of a secondary school (St. Louis Normal School, 1863-72). Grace C. Bibb was a feminist literary critic and the first female dean at the University of Missouri, Columbia (1878-84). American idealism took on a new form in the 1880s with the founding of the Concord School of Philosophy in Massachusetts. Ellen M. Mitchell participated in the movement in both St. Louis and Concord. She was one of the first women to teach philosophy at a co-educational college (University of Denver, 1890-92). Lucia Ames Mead, Marietta Kies, and Eliza Sunderland joined the movement in Concord. Lucia Ames Mead became a chief pacifist theorist in the early twentieth century. Kies and Sunderland were among the first women to earn the Ph.D. in philosophy (University of Michigan, 1891, 1892). Kies wrote on political altruism and shared with Mitchell the distinction of teaching at a coeducational institution (Butler College, 1896-99). These were the first American women as a group to plunge into philosophy proper, bridging those years between the amateur, paraprofessional and professional academic philosopher. Dorothy Rogers's new book at last gives them the attention they deserve.Comment: A book covering many US 19th-century women philosophers, mostly influenced by Hegel to some extent. Could be used as supplementary reading on a history of philosophy course if it covers the nineteenth century, so that students are aware there were women active in philosophy then.
Broad, Jacqueline, Karen Detlefsen. (eds.) Women and Liberty, 1600-1800: Philosophical Essays2017, Oxford University Press.-
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Added by: Francesca Bruno
Publisher's Note: This book addresses the theme of liberty as it is found in the writing of women philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or as it is theorized with respect to women and their lives. It covers both theoretical and practical philosophy, with chapters grappling with problems in the metaphysics of free will (both human and God's), the liberty (or lack thereof) of women in their moral, personal lives as well as their social-political, public lives, and the interactions between the metaphysical and normative issues. The chapters draw upon writing of both women and men, and notably, upon a wide range of genres, including more standard philosophical treatises as well as polemical texts, poetry, plays, and other forms of fiction. As such, this book alerts the reader to the wide range of conceptions of what counts as a philosophical text in the early modern period. Several chapters also grapple with the relation between early modern and contemporary ways of thinking about the theme of women and liberty, thus urging the reader to appreciate the continuing importance of these earlier philosophers in the history of philosophy and of feminism. Ultimately, the chapters in this text show how crucial it is to recover the too-long forgotten views of female and women-friendly male philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for in the process of recovering these voices, our understanding of philosophy in the early modern period is not only expanded, but also significantly altered toward a more accurate history of our discipline.Comment: This volume covers ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious notions of liberty, including chapters on women's ideas about the metaphysics of free will and chapters examining the topic of women's freedom (or lack thereof) in their moral and personal lives. Some of the papers in this collection could be assigned individually in an undergraduate early modern survey course; or it could be one of the main texts for a more advanced (undergraduate or graduate) course on the topic of liberty/freedom, from a variety of philosophical perspectives (ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious).
Author(s) Unknown. Yue Ji 樂記—Record of Music: Introduction, Translation, Notes, and Commentary1995, Asian Music 26(2): 1-96.-
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Added by: Meilin Chinn
Summary: The earliest extant Chinese treatise on music. The Yue Ji presents largely Confucian ideas on the connections between music, self-cultivation, proper governance, and the realization of natural patterns. Human character is described as a musical progression with ties to the transformation of sound into a kind of music that is distinguished by its relationship to virtue. The exact identity of the author(s) is debated, and it is believed to have been compiled from various sources no later than the middle of the Western Han dynasty (206BCE-24CE).Comment: This text is appropriate for an aesthetics (especially philosophy of music) and/or Chinese philosophy course. It is best accessed by a reader with a basic understanding of early Chinese philosophy (especially Confucianism).
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Lloyd, Genevieve Mary. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and the Ethics
2002, Routledge.
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