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| Émilie Du Châtelet, an influential French mathematician, physicist, and author during the Age of Enlightenment who's omitted from today's academic texts. Wikimedia |
In his
first work, published in 1747, Immanuel Kant cites the ideas of another
philosopher: a scholar of Newton, religion, science, and mathematics.
The philosopher, whose work had been translated into several languages,
is Émilie Du Châtelet.
Yet despite her powerhouse
accomplishments—and the shout-out from no less a luminary than Kant—her
work won’t be found in the 1,000-plus pages of the new edition of The Norton Introduction to Philosophy.
In the anthology, which claims to trace 2,400 years of philosophy, the
first female philosopher doesn’t appear until the section on writing
from the mid-20th century. Or in any of the other leading anthologies used in university classrooms, scholars say.
Also absent are these 17th-century
English thinkers: Margaret Cavendish, a prolific writer and natural
philosopher; Anne Conway, who discusses the philosophy of Descartes,
Hobbes, and Spinoza in The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy
(which is influenced by the Kabbalah); and “Lady” Damaris Masham—the
daughter of a Cambridge Platonist and a close friend of John Locke who
published several works and debated ideas in letters she exchanged with
the German mathematician and philosopher G.W. Leibniz.
Despite the spread of feminism and
multiculturalism, and their impact on fields from literature to
anthropology, it is possible to major in philosophy without hearing
anything about the historical contributions of women philosophers. The
canon remains dominated by white males—the discipline that some say
still hews to the myth that genius is tied to gender.
Andrew Janiak, an associate professor
of philosophy at Duke University, was a graduate student in the 1990s
when he came across Kant’s startling reference to Madame Du Châtelet. “I
remember thinking: Did he really mean Madame?” Janiak said. “It was the only time I’d seen a philosopher refer to the ideas of a woman.”
Now, Janiak and a team of Duke
students and researchers, along with colleagues at Columbia and the
University of Pennsylvania, have launched a site that features the
forgotten voices of women philosophers, giving academics and students a
rare opportunity to study and promote their work. Project Vox, as the site is called, posts texts and translations of 17th-century women philosophers' work, as
well as suggested syllabi for college courses featuring that work. The
site is open-source, meaning that faculty and students from around the
world can contribute and use materials, and has a 10-member
international advisory board. According to Janiak, “a long list of
folks” has already contributed or requested syllabi from the project,
which went live in March.
Project Vox aims to address the lack
of easy-to-find resources for faculty and students who have been eager
to add women to their courses but have had few sources on which to draw.
While Margaret Atherton’s 1994 collection, Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period,
does focus on these women, it only features essays about the work of
several individuals. A comprehensive critical edition or anthology of
women’s contributions to that era doesn’t appear to exist. (Janiak is
now co-editing a series with Christia Mercer of Columbia and Eileen
O’Neill of the University of Massachusetts.)
Source: The Atlantic
