Karen Green

The woman of reason : feminism, humanism and political thought

Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Against Feminist Anti-Humanism. 2. Women of Virtue. 3. Hobbes, Amazons and Sabine Women. 4. Virtuous Women and the Citizen of Geneva. 5. The Female Citizen. 6. Socialism, Sex and Savage Society. 7. Flight from the Other. 8. Reason, Femininity, Love and Morality. Index.

A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700

Preface Introduction 1. Christine de Pizan 2. Women of the Italian Renaissance 3. From Anne de Beaujeu to Marguerite de Navarre 4. Queen Elizabeth I of England 5. From the Reformation to Marie le Jars de Gournay 6. Women of the English Civil War era 7. Quaker women 8. The Fronde and Madeleine de Scudery 9. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 10. Women of the Glorious Revolution 11. Women of late seventeenth-century France 12. Mary Astell Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Prostitution, Exploitation and Taboo

It is so generally accepted that prostitution is immoral, that this is one of the least discussed of all ethical issues. Few serious philosophical treatments of the subject have been published. Of these, at least one, Lars Ericssons, ‘Charges against Prostitution’, throws into stark relief the apparent inconsistency of our community attitudes. For it demonstrates that, from the point of view of the simple free market liberalism, to which many subscribe, there is nothing immoral about prostitution. The prostitute is a free agent who sells his or her services on the market at the going price. Why should the exchange of sexual services for money be more unsavoury than other exchanges of fee for service? The desire for sexual gratification is natural, as is the desire for food. So prostitution must be morally on a par with catering. Yet it is hemmed about by restrictions. Prostitutes are social outcasts, they may be pitied but are more often vilified and despised. From the liberal point of view, the moral disgust aroused by prostitution can only be the expression of an archaic and irrational taboo.

Does science persecute women? The case of the 16th–17th century witch-Hunts

I. Logic, rationality and ideology Herbert Marcuse once claimed that the ‘“rational” is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.’ He echoed a widespread folk belief that a world in which people were rational would be a better world. This could be taken as an optimistic empirical conjecture: if people were more rational then probably the world would be a better place (a trust that ‘virtue will be rewarded’, so to speak). However, it is also worth considering a stronger hypothesis: that if something did not reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression then it would not constitute rationality. On this view there is no mere correlation between rationality and a propensity toward reduction in ignorance and the rest, it is the propensity to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality and oppression which in part constitutes rationality. Call this a broad conception of rationality, because it expands beyond the epistemic goal of reducing ignorance, and reaches out to moral concerns like oppression.

Liberty and Virtue in Catherine Macaulay's Enlightenment Philosophy

After many years of lapsing into unjustified obscurity, Catharine Macaulay Graham (1731–1791) is slowly beginning to attract the attention that she deserves. While her works were influential and controversial in her time, her subsequent disappearance from intellectual history attests markedly to the fate, noted by Eileen O’Neill, of women writers, who have written in what comes to be ‘invisible ink’. While Macaulay was once celebrated as one of Britain’s living muses, while her histories were then widely acclaimed, and while both her representation of the English Civil War and her pamphlets influenced the fathers and mothers of the American Revolution, by the twentieth century she had become a marginal figure, and was little read. Unlike Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Astell, whose reissued A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Serious Proposal to

A PINCH OF SALT FOR FREGE

Michael Dummett has argued that a formal semantics for our language is inadequate unless it can be shown to illuminate to our actual practice of speaking and understanding. This paper argues that Frege’s account of the semantics of predicate expressions according to which the reference of a predicate is a concept (a function from objects to truth values) has exactly the required characteristics. The first part of the paper develops a model for understanding the distinction between objects and concepts as an ontological distinction. It argues that, ontologically, we can take a Fregean function to be generated by a property detection device that can register for any object the presence or absence of that property. This provides a direct connection between the semantics of sentences and the structure of perceptual judgment. The second part of the paper deals with arguments that have been mounted against the coherence of Frege’s semantics. It argues that some of these are question begging, while others are correct in so far as Frege’s claim is untenable if we assume that the syntactic categories singular term and predicate are primary, and the ontological categories are simply projections of these syntactic categories. However, the objections dissipate once we recognize that an independent ontological characterization of the distinction is available.

Was Wittgenstein Frege’s Heir

Dummett has claimed that Wittgenstein’s views, as expressed in The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations, build on the attack on psychologism initiated by Frege. Frege’s rejection of psychologism led him to the view that the meanings of sentences are thoughts which objectively exist in a third realm. It was Wittgenstein, according to Dummett, who, inheriting Frege’s insights, provided a genuinely anti-psychologistic account of understanding by insisting that we explain understanding a sentence in terms of the use that is made of it. I challenge this interpretation of the relationship between Wittgenstein and Frege. I argue that the analysis does not sufficiently distinguish anti-psychologism and anti-mentalism. In the light of this distinction we can see that Wittgenstein misrepresents Frege’s views, and confuses concepts with ideas. By being more faithful to Frege’s actual views concerning the objectivity of concepts we can give a robustly realist account of mathematical truth which does not involve any objectionable psychologism or mentalism. email : Karen.Green@arts.monash.edu.au

The Passions and the Imagination in Wollstonecraft's Theory of Moral Judgement

According to Wollstonecraft ‘every being may become virtuous by the exercise of its own reason’. This suggests that for her ethical judgement is based on reason, and so she is an ethical cognitivist. This impression is upheld by the fact that she clearly believes in the existence of ethical truth and has little sympathy with subjectivism. At the same time, she places a great deal of importance on the role of the emotions in ethical judgement. This raises the question how the emotions can be relevant if ethics consists in a realm of truths, discoverable by reason. The paper answers this question and clarifies Wollstonecrafts model of the interaction of emotion and reason by comparing it with those of Rousseau, Godwin, Price and Adam Smith. It argues that the originality of Wollstonecrafts position resides in the way she understands the role of the imagination in ethical reasoning.

Philosophy and Metaphor: The Significance of Christine's 'Blunders'

Three cases where Christine de Pizan seems to have transformed her sources are discussed. The first involves a fusion of the Tiburtine and Cumean sibyls, the second Christines treatment of the poetic muses, and the third the image of felicité humaine introduced at the beginning of Le Livre du corps de policie. It is argued that where Christine transforms her sources she is making a distinct philosophical point. In the third of these transformations she shows a subtle appreciation of the sexism of a traditional philosophical metaphor, which she cleverly undermines and subverts.

Catharine Macaulay on the Will

Summary Catharine Macaulays discussion of freedom of the will in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth has received little attention, and what discussion there is attributes a number of different, incompatible views to her. In this paper the account of the nature of freedom of the will that she develops is related to her political aspirations, and the metaphysical position that she adopts is compared to those of John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, and others. It is argued that although Macaulays position is ultimately ambiguous, she is most plausibly interpreted as following Lockes discussion of free will in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and of inheriting, from him, the ambiguity that we find in her account.