A compelling portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft that shows the intimate connections between her life and work Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, is a work of enduring relevance in women's rights advocacy. However, as Sylvana Tomaselli shows, a full understanding of Wollstonecraft’s thought is possible only through a more comprehensive appreciation of Wollstonecraft herself, as a philosopher and moralist who deftly tackled major social and political issues and the arguments of such figures as (...) Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. Reading Wollstonecraft through the lens of the politics and culture of her own time, this book restores her to her rightful place as a major eighteenth-century thinker, reminding us why her work still resonates today. The book’s format echoes one that Wollstonecraft favored in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: short essays paired with concise headings. Under titles such as “Painting,” “Music,” “Memory,” “Property and Appearance,” and “Rank and Luxury,” Tomaselli explores not only what Wollstonecraft enjoyed and valued, but also her views on society, knowledge and the mind, human nature, and the problem of evil—and how a society based on mutual respect could fight it. The resulting picture of Wollstonecraft reveals her as a particularly engaging author and an eloquent participant in enduring social and political concerns. Drawing us into Wollstonecraft’s approach to the human condition and the debates of her day, Wollstonecraft ultimately invites us to consider timeless issues with her, so that we can become better attuned to the world as she saw it then, and as we might wish to see it now. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers some reflections on the importance Adam Smith accorded to luck in The Wealth of Nations. While the place of moral luck in The Theory of Moral Sentiments has been the subject of some scholarly attention, this has not been the case for luck in his best-known work. It focuses on what Smith thought particularly striking about our estimation of our own good fortune and argues that it accentuated the need for trustworthiness and trusted friends.

Together with David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft thought modern commercial society exacerbated the psychological need of most of their members to seek the approbation of others. Like them, she thought the better part of her contemporaries were caught in a hall of mirrors and sought to be esteemed for their appearance. In her view the contrivances this entailed distorted individual characters, relationships, and society as a whole. Though she partook of a European wide philosophical debate, she (...) came to it from the very unique perspective of a largely self-taught English woman and in a large part from what might be meaningfully conceived as a Platonist perspective. In examining how this might be so, this chapter does not seek to make Wollstonecraft a Platonist as opposed to, say, an Aristotelian, much less a Christian. Her moral and political critique made her eclectic in her use of ideas and argument. She seems however to have been inspired by conceptions of the soul, love, truth and virtue that have their origins in Platonism. Considering her in this light provides greater insights into her philosophy of mind as well as her social and political views and provides a greater understanding of the continued importance of Platonism in the latter part of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The long eighteenth century was a good time for history and historians. This article considers one of its most original genres, conjectural history, and of one of conjectural history’s most interesting subjects, woman. What made the conjectural history of woman most interesting was not only that it brought together all the elements that were themselves the subjects of theoretical histories, such as language, the arts and sciences, society, religion, and man, but continued to matter politically well into the nineteenth century. (...) Indeed, one might argue that it continues to shape understandings of what it means to be civilized to this day. Following some observations on some of the challenges such a history presented to its practitioners, the essay turns to Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan and his contestation of the eighteenth-century view of the history of woman. It ends with some reflections on the importance of revisiting such histories. (shrink)

David A. Bell and Hugo Drochon’s foreword prepares us well for Gauchet’s Robespierre. We are not to expect a biography, any form of preamble, nor footnotes, archival discoveries, nor wrestling with...

Essays on philosophy and intellectual history, focusing in particular on John Locke.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 20, Issue 4, Page 847-849, July 2012.

Review of Nancy Hirschmann's Gender, Class and Freedom in Modern Political Theory.

It is particularly fitting for this philosophical journal to carry a review of Moses Mendelssohn's Philosophical Writings, since Mendelssohn himself made use of dialogues to discuss a number of subjects, most notably the sublime and the naive. Indeed, this volume's second essay is simply entitled "Dialogues," while the first, "On Sentiments," takes the form of an exchange of letters. The two essays which constitute Part I of the Philosophical Writings were first published in 1755 within a few months of each (...) other. "Rhapsody or Additions to the Letters on Sentiments", "On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences", "On the Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine Sciences", and "On Probability" constitute Part II of the work, which was first published as a whole in 1761, and in a revised edition in 1771. Thus, apart from "Rhapsody" which was newly written, Philosophische Schriften brought together works already known to the public. The present translation contains two further essays, "On the Ability to Know, the Ability to Feel, and the Ability to Desire" and "On the Question: What Does to Enlighten Mean?". These are preceded by "On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences", on which the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences bestowed a prize, making Kant's entry, Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Fundamental Principles of Natural Theology and Morals, a close runner-up. (shrink)