Abstract

The writings of Anne-Therese de Lambert echo her wide reading in moral philosophy from Plato to Montesquieu. But Lambert also engaged philosophically with the topics and arguments of her forerunners. Her will to fullness of being becomes clear when we retrace her steps of critical self-distancing from her sources' conceptual reliance on sexual difference. ;Chapter One shows how the concept of imagination is discussed in Avis d'une mere a sa fille and Reflexions nouvelles sur les femmes with reference to a neo-Cartesian setting of male reason over and against female imagination. Rather than choose between rehabilitating imagination and laying claim to reason, Lambert does both, with the aim of restoring the full range of faculties to both sexes. ;If impure reasoning could debar women from philosophy, inferior taste might restrict their influence as literary critics. Chapter Two considers Lambert's reproduction in Reflexions nouvelles sur les femmes of her Reflexions sur le gout. Whereas the free-standing treatise understands taste as a faculty of both mind and feeling, insertion into the Reflexions nouvelles rekindles sensitivity to feeling's female connotations. ;Chapters Three and Four chart Lambert's venturing to reflect on arts of living---friendship and aging---that her sources had partially derived from the impossibility of female exemplars. Working through received ideas of friendship's superiority to passion, Traite de l'amitie predicates a universal of friendship on the two ideals of social equality and voluntaristic renunciation of individual power. In turn, Traite de la viellesse rescues the figure of the old woman from dehumanizing stereotypes and death-like invisibility, opening the full life span to untold possibilities. For real change, however, little hope emerges intact from Discours sur le sentiment d'une dame qui croyait que l'amour convenait aux femmes alors meme qu'elles n'etaient plus jeunes . ;Contrary to first impressions of unoriginal or parochial thought, Lambert's method of echoing and self-echoing with a critical edge thus serves both to keep her writing as a woman in the vanguard of humanistic aspirations and to sustain signature tensions between realism and idealism, propriety and possibility, social life and the life of the mind