19 found
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  1. Catharine Trotter Cockburn on the virtue of atheists.Jacqueline Broad - 2021 - Intellectual History Review 31 (1):111-128.
    In her Remarks Upon Some Writers (1743), Catharine Trotter Cockburn takes a seemingly radical stance by asserting that it is possible for atheists to be virtuous. In this paper, I examine whether or not Cockburn’s views concerning atheism commit her to a naturalistic ethics and a so-called radical enlightenment position on the independence of morality and religion. First, I examine her response to William Warburton’s critique of Pierre Bayle’s arguments concerning the possibility of a society of virtuous atheists. I argue (...)
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  2. Mary Astell on Marriage and Lockean Slavery.Jacqueline Broad - 2014 - History of Political Thought 35 (4):717–38.
    In the 1706 third edition of her Reflections upon Marriage, Mary Astell alludes to John Locke’s definition of slavery in her descriptions of marriage. She describes the state of married women as being ‘subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man’ (Locke, Two Treatises, II.22). Recent scholars maintain that Astell does not seriously regard marriage as a form of slavery in the Lockean sense. In this paper, I defend the contrary position: I argue that Astell does seriously (...)
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  3. Selfhood and Self-government in Women’s Religious Writings of the Early Modern Period.Jacqueline Broad - 2019 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (5):713-730.
    Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue that the (...)
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  4. Margaret Cavendish and Joseph Glanvill: science, religion, and witchcraft.Jacqueline Broad - 2007 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 38 (3):493-505.
    Many scholars point to the close association between early modern science and the rise of rational arguments in favour of the existence of witches. For some commentators, it is a poor reflection on science that its methods so easily lent themselves to the unjust persecution of innocent men and women. In this paper, I examine a debate about witches between a woman philosopher, Margaret Cavendish , and a fellow of the Royal Society, Joseph Glanvill . I argue that Cavendish is (...)
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  5. Mary Astell on Virtuous Friendship.Jacqueline Broad - 2009 - Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26 (2):65-86.
    According to some scholars, Mary Astell’s feminist programme is severely limited by its focus on self-improvement rather than wider social change. In response, I highlight the role of ‘virtuous friendship’ in Astell’s 1694 work, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Building on classical ideals and traditional Christian principles, Astell promotes the morally transformative power of virtuous friendship among women. By examining the significance of such friendship to Astell’s feminism, we can see that she did in fact aim to bring about (...)
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  6. Impressions in the Brain: Malebranche on Women, and Women on Malebranche.Jacqueline Broad - 2012 - Intellectual History Review 22 (3):373-389.
    In his De la recherche de la vérité (The Search after Truth) of 1674-75, Nicolas Malebranche makes a number of apparently contradictory remarks about women and their capacity for pure intellectual thought. On the one hand, he seems to espouse a negative biological determinism about women’s minds, and on the other, he suggests that women have the free capacity to attain truth and happiness, regardless of their physiology. In the early eighteenth-century, four English women thinkers – Anne Docwra (c. 1624-1710), (...)
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  7. Women on Liberty in Early Modern England.Jacqueline Broad - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (2):112-122.
    Our modern ideals about liberty were forged in the great political and philosophical debates of the 17th and 18th centuries, but we seldom hear about women's contributions to those debates. This paper examines the ideas of early modern English women – namely Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Mary Overton, ‘Eugenia’, Sarah Chapone and the civil war women petitioners – with respect to the classic political concepts of negative, positive and republican liberty. The author suggests that these writers' woman-centred concerns provide a (...)
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  8. Astell, Cartesian Ethics, and the Critique of Custom.Jacqueline Broad - 2007 - In William Kolbrener & Michal Michelson (eds.), Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith. Ashgate. pp. 165-79.
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  9. A Woman's Influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on Moral Accountability.Jacqueline Broad - 2006 - Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (3):489-510.
    Some scholars suggest that John Locke’s revisions to the chapter “Of Power” for the 1694 second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding may be indebted to the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. Their claims rest on evidence that Locke may have had access to Cudworth’s unpublished manuscript treatises on free will. In this paper, I examine an alternative suggestion – the claim that Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and not Cudworth himself, may have exerted an influence on Locke’s revisions. I (...)
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  10. Adversaries or allies? Occasional thoughts on the Masham-Astell exchange.Jacqueline Broad - 2003 - Eighteenth-Century Thought 1:123-49.
    Against the backdrop of the English reception of Locke’s Essay, stands a little-known philosophical dispute between two seventeenth-century women writers: Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659-1708). On the basis of their brief but heated exchange, Astell and Masham are typically regarded as philosophical adversaries: Astell a disciple of the occasionalist John Norris, and Masham a devout Lockean. In this paper, I argue that although there are many respects in which Astell and Masham are radically opposed, the two women (...)
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  11. "A great championess for her sex": Sarah Chapone on liberty as nondomination and self-mastery.Jacqueline Broad - 2015 - The Monist 98 (1):77-88.
    This paper examines the concept of liberty at the heart of Sarah Chapone’s 1735 work, The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives. In this work, Chapone (1699-1764) advocates an ideal of freedom from domination that closely resembles the republican ideal in seventeenth and eighteenth- century England. This is the idea that an agent is free provided that no-one else has the power to dispose of that agent’s property—her “life, liberty, and limb” and her material possessions—according to his (...)
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  12. Conway and Charleton on the Intimate Presence of Souls in Bodies.Jacqueline Broad - 0035 - Journal of the History of Ideas 79 (4):571-591.
    Little is known about the shaping and development of Anne Conway’s thought in relation to her early modern contemporaries. In one part of her only surviving treatise, The Principles, Conway criticises “those doctors” who uphold a dualist theory of soul and body, a mechanist conception of body (as dead and inert), and the view that the soul is “intimate present” in the body. In this paper, I argue that here she targets Walter Charleton, a well-known defender of Epicurean atomism in (...)
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  13. Damaris Masham on Women and Liberty of Conscience.Jacqueline Broad - 2019 - In Eileen O’Neill & Marcy P. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought. Springer, NM 87747, USA: Springer. pp. 319-336.
    In his correspondence, John Locke described his close friend Damaris Masham as ‘a determined foe to ecclesiastical tyranny’ and someone who had ‘the greatest aversion to all persecution on account of religious matters.’ In her short biography of Locke, Masham returned the compliment by commending Locke for convincing others that ‘Liberty of Conscience is the unquestionable Right of Mankind.’ These comments attest to Masham’s personal commitment to the cause of religious liberty. Thus far, however, there has been no scholarly discussion (...)
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  14. Is Margaret Cavendish worthy of study today?Jacqueline Broad - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (3):457-461.
    Before her death in 1673, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, expressed a wish that her philosophical work would experience a ‘glorious resurrection’ in future ages. During her lifetime, and for almost three centuries afterwards, her writings were destined to ‘lye still in the soft and easie Bed of Oblivion’. But more recently, Cavendish has received a measure of the fame she so desired. She is celebrated by feminists, literary theorists, and historians. There are regular conferences organised by the International (...)
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  15. Women and Republicanism in the Eighteenth Century: Completing the Historical Record.Jacqueline Broad - 2019 - Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (4):347-350.
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  16. Mary Astell’s critique of Pierre Bayle: atheism and intellectual integrity in the Pensées.Jacqueline Broad - 2019 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (4):806-823.
    This paper focuses on the English philosopher Mary Astell’s marginalia in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s personal copy of the 1704 edition of Pierre Bayle’s Pensées diverses sur le comète (first published in 1682). I argue that Astell’s annotations provide good reasons for thinking that Bayle is biased toward atheism in this work. Recent scholars maintain that Bayle can be interpreted as an Academic Sceptic: as someone who honestly and impartially follows a dialectical method of argument in order to obtain the (...)
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  17. Liberty and the Right of Resistance: Women's Political Writings of the English Civil War Era.Jacqueline Broad - 2007 - In Jacqueline Broad & Karen Green (eds.), Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women, 1400-1800. Springer. pp. 77-94.
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  18. Cavendish, van Helmont, and the mad raging womb.Jacqueline Broad - 2011 - In Judy A. Hayden (ed.), The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 47-63.
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  19. Mary Astell's Machiavellian moment? Politics and feminism in Moderation truly Stated.Jacqueline Broad - 2011 - In Jo Wallwork & Paul Salzman (eds.), Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas. Ashgate. pp. 9-23.
    In The Women of Grub Street (1998), Paula McDowell highlighted the fact that the overwhelming majority of women’s texts in early modern England were polemical or religio-political in nature rather than literary in content. Since that time, the study of early modern women’s political ideas has dramatically increased, and there have been a number of recent anthologies, modern editions, and critical analyses of female political writings. As a result of Patricia Springborg’s research, Mary Astell (1668-1731) has risen to prominence as (...)
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