Women Philosophers

Catherine Villanueva Gardner is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

* Acknowledgments * 1. Introduction * Preliminaries * The Exclusion * The Dominant Model of Moral Philosophy * Philosophical Genre and the Dominant Model * Five Forms, Five Philosophers * 2. Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education: What Constitutes a Philosophical System? * Biography * Letters on Education, * The Problems of the Epistolary Form * Macaulay's Work * The Argument for Women * The Second and Third Parts of Letters on Education, * The Argument of Letters on Education, * Conclusion * 3. Allegory and Moral Philosophy in Christine de Pisan's The Book of the City of Ladies * Christine de Pisan * The Book of the City of Ladies, * The Situation of Women * Women and Moral Agency * The Question of Marriage * The Prudent Woman * The Problem * The Allegorical City * The Need for Allegory * Problems with the City * Conclusion * 4. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Separation of Poetry and Politics * Wollstonecraft's Corpus * The Second Vindication as an Enlightenment Treatise * The Second Vindication Is Not a Work of Enlightenment Philosophy * Principles of Form and Expression * Form and Sensibility * True Sensibility * The Philosophical Role of Sensibility * Conclusion * 5. George Eliot and How to Read Novels as Philosophy * Eliot's Work * Comte, Spinoza, and Eliot * How to Read Eliot * The Centrality of Sympathy in Eliot's Novels * Philosophy * Conclusion * 6. Knowing and Speaking of Divine Love: Mechthild of Magdeburg * Biography * Women and Writing * The Problem of Authority * The Authorship of God * Morality and Experience * The Forms in the Flowing Light * Conclusion: Contingencies * 7. Conclusion * Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy * A Few Comments on Content * References * Index