A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 1664

The modern period of philosophy is usually said to have started with Descartes. Other great names in philosophy, the rationalist philosophers Leibniz and Spinoza, and the empiricists, Hobbes and Locke, also date from that period. What we seldom hear, though, are the names of those women philosophers who, against all the conventional assumptions of their time, developed their own philosophical positions, often joining the debate about mind and matter, faith and reason, that the Cartesian philosophy had inspired. 

The women writers discussed by Jacqueline Broad - Elizabeth of Bohemia, Mary Astell, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway and Damaris Masham - like their contemporary successors, varied in their assessments of Cartesian philosophy. While they found inspiration in Descartes, they were also critical of his doctrines and several advanced a monistic position.

Jacqueline Broad's book seeks to re-establish the names of these early women metaphysicians in philosophical memory and in doing so, she provides not only a keen insight into their ideas, but also a glimpse of their time and context. This was a period when women 'blue-stockings' were satirised by the French dramatist Moliere in his play Les Femmes Savantes - the greatest joke being that they had actually mastered ancient Greek. 

Elizabeth of Bohemia had done this so well, thanks to an unusually enlightened education, that she was nicknamed 'La Grecque.' Her views were taken seriously enough by Descartes, however, for him to have remarked, writing to another philosophical correspondent, Alphonse Pollot:

'I attach more weight to her judgement than to those messieurs the Doctors, who take for a rule of truth the opinions of Aristotle rather than the evidence of reason.'

It is, then, the responses of these women philosophers to Cartesian philosophy and its English sequel that provides the focus of Broad's account. While the contemporary philosopher Genevieve Lloyd has seen in Cartesianism the origins of the male domination of philosophy, with body linked to female and mind to the male and to reason, Broad points out that Descartes' dualism - the separation of mind and body - is in fact a favourable doctrine as far as women are concerned, since the mind, on this account, is genderless. 

So Broad's book is not simply an exercise in the history of ideas. On the contrary, she ably demonstrates the continuity between the early critique of Cartesian dualism by women philosophers and the new anti-dualism  of some contemporary feminist theorists.

The claim on the book's jacket is that this is 'a more gender-balanced account of early modern thought' and this claim is well borne out by its content.

But to what Study shall we apply ourselves? Some Men say that Heraldry is a pretty Study for a Woman, for this reason, I suppose, that she may know how to Blazon her Lord and Master's great Achievements! They allow us Poetry, Plays and Romances, to divert us and themselves, and when they would express a particular Esteem for Women's Sense, the recommend History, tho' with Submission, History can only serve us for Amusement and a Subject of Discourse. For tho' it may be of Use to the Men who govern Affairs to know how their Fore-Fathers Acted, yet what is this to us, who have nothing to do with such Business?

... Since the Men being the Historians, they seldom condescend to record the great and good Actions of Women; and when they take notice of them, tis with this wise Remark, that such Women acted above their sex. By which one must suppose they would have their Readers understand, that they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that were Men in Petticoats.

Mary Astell, The Christian Religion (1705).