Abstract

Damaris Cudworth Masham was a woman philosopher of seventeenth-century England. To those familiar with her today, she is foremost remembered as either the daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth or as the long-time friend and biographer of John Locke. Some also remember her as the intellectual adversary of Mary Astell, also a British woman philosopher of the seventeenth century and whose name is more familiar to us today than Masham’s. Regarding the nature of her philosophy, scholars have been eager to discuss her metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, not to mention her feminist philosophy. There is, nonetheless, a dimension of her thought that remains to be discussed—her social and political philosophy. This is striking as her social and political thought is one of the major themes that runs throughout her two and only short treatises: A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705). This essay is an attempt to introduce her social and political ideas and in doing so to reveal the centrality of them to her overall philosophical work. In this way, I am suggesting that without understanding the social and political aspects of her thought, we cannot appreciate her philosophical thought as a whole