Impressions in the Brain: Malebranche on Women, and Women on Malebranche
Intellectual History Review 22 (3):373-389 (2012)
Abstract
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), Mary Astell (1666-1731), Damaris Masham (1659-1708), and Mary Chudleigh (1656-1710) – engaged with Malebranche’s ideas. Their writings reveal how we might dispel the apparent contradictions in Malebranche’s thinking about women, and reaffirm the liberating potential of Cartesian philosophy for women in the early modern period.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1080/17496977.2012.695187
My notes
Similar books and articles
Occasionalism and general will in Malebranche.Steven M. Nadler - 1993 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1):31-47.
Emotional sensations and the moral imagination in Malebranche.Jordan Taylor - 2013 - In H. Martyn Lloyd (ed.), The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment. Springer.
Malebranche's natural theodicy and the incompleteness of God's volitions.Andrew Pessin - 2000 - Religious Studies 36 (1):47-63.
Hume, Malebranche, and the Self-Justification of the Passions.Éléonore Le Jallé - 2012 - Hume Studies 38 (2):201-220.
Causality and Human Freedom in Malebranche.Fred Ablondi - 1996 - Philosophy and Theology 9 (3-4):321-331.
Malebranche and Ideas.Treatise on Nature and Grace.Steven M. Nadler - 1992 - Oxford University Press.
Malebranche and occasionalism: A reply to Steven Nadler.Desmond M. Clarke - 1995 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (3):499-504.
Malebranche: Divinity, Responsibility, and Control of the Passions.Nathaniel Bowditch - 2010 - International Philosophical Quarterly 50 (3):363-382.
11 Malebranche's Life and Legacy.Andre Robinet - 2000 - In Steven M. Nadler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche. Cambridge University Press. pp. 288.
Analytics
Added to PP
2013-11-24
Downloads
326 (#36,221)
6 months
55 (#23,526)
2013-11-24
Downloads
326 (#36,221)
6 months
55 (#23,526)
Historical graph of downloads
Author's Profile
Citations of this work
Self-Love or Diffidence? Malebranche and Hume on the Love of Fame.Alison McIntyre & Julie Walsh - 2022 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 4 (1):2.
The Superiority of Women in the Seventeenth Century.Marguerite Deslauriers - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (1):1-19.