Bridging the gender gap through time: how women philosophers of the past contributed to today's thought
King’s College London
Thursday 22 and Friday 23 February 2018
Convenors: Sandrine Bergès (Bilkent), Alan Coffee (King’s)
Keynote Speakers: Eileen Hunt Botting (Notre Dame) Marguerite Deslauries (McGill), Penny Weiss (Saint Louis University.
We invite abstracts of between 300 and 500 words. Talks will be 20 minutes long with a further 10 minutes for discussion and questions.
Please send abstracts prepared for anonymous review or any enquiries to [email protected] by 30 September 2017. We aim to notify participants by 30 October. Registration for all other attendees will open in due course.
Women have had a far deeper and more extensive influence on the history than is commonly realised. Far from confining their interests to questions of gender and domestic matters, women have been writing on all aspects of philosophy for as long as such a discipline can be identified. Indeed, it is often surprising just how much high quality philosophical and political thought women have produced throughout history given that so few of the writers are known outside of a few specialist departments.
Across history, women’s writing is now being recovered not as marginal but as theoretically important in its own right. Amongst the many names one could list, we might think of Hildegard von Bingen and Christine de Pizan from the Middle Ages; Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Mary Astell in the Early Modern Period; Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as Olympe de Gouges and Sophie de Grouchy, in the revolutionary period of the Enlightenment; to say nothing of Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth amongst the numerous slave and abolitionist writings of the nineteenth century.
In spite of the many difficulties women have had in making their voices heard philosophically – women did not have access to the highest levels of education, they often had to confine themselves to safe subjects to avoid social censure, they frequently found it necessary to write anonymously or to destroy one’s work, and they were in any case not normally taken seriously – their work far was more influential in their own time than we often realise today, and it still has the potential to speak to us in our own time through its influence on contemporary debates and issues.
The purpose of this conference is both to raise awareness of the rich historical tradition of women’s philosophy as well as to help make the connection with current social, moral, political and philosophical debate by bringing neglected women writers, past and present, into dialogue with today’s discourses.
We invite submissions for papers on any related theme, including but not limited to those named above. We are also interested in papers focused on women writing from a non-Western tradition, or under conditions of social or political oppression today. Presentations may address any area of philosophy, or of social, moral and political thinking more widely conceived. Some suggested topics include women philosophers on education, social reform, or revolution.
King’s College London
Thursday 22 and Friday 23 February 2018
Convenors: Sandrine Bergès (Bilkent), Alan Coffee (King’s)
Keynote Speakers: Eileen Hunt Botting (Notre Dame) Marguerite Deslauries (McGill), Penny Weiss (Saint Louis University.
We invite abstracts of between 300 and 500 words. Talks will be 20 minutes long with a further 10 minutes for discussion and questions.
Please send abstracts prepared for anonymous review or any enquiries to [email protected] by 30 September 2017. We aim to notify participants by 30 October. Registration for all other attendees will open in due course.
Women have had a far deeper and more extensive influence on the history than is commonly realised. Far from confining their interests to questions of gender and domestic matters, women have been writing on all aspects of philosophy for as long as such a discipline can be identified. Indeed, it is often surprising just how much high quality philosophical and political thought women have produced throughout history given that so few of the writers are known outside of a few specialist departments.
Across history, women’s writing is now being recovered not as marginal but as theoretically important in its own right. Amongst the many names one could list, we might think of Hildegard von Bingen and Christine de Pizan from the Middle Ages; Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Mary Astell in the Early Modern Period; Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as Olympe de Gouges and Sophie de Grouchy, in the revolutionary period of the Enlightenment; to say nothing of Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth amongst the numerous slave and abolitionist writings of the nineteenth century.
In spite of the many difficulties women have had in making their voices heard philosophically – women did not have access to the highest levels of education, they often had to confine themselves to safe subjects to avoid social censure, they frequently found it necessary to write anonymously or to destroy one’s work, and they were in any case not normally taken seriously – their work far was more influential in their own time than we often realise today, and it still has the potential to speak to us in our own time through its influence on contemporary debates and issues.
The purpose of this conference is both to raise awareness of the rich historical tradition of women’s philosophy as well as to help make the connection with current social, moral, political and philosophical debate by bringing neglected women writers, past and present, into dialogue with today’s discourses.
We invite submissions for papers on any related theme, including but not limited to those named above. We are also interested in papers focused on women writing from a non-Western tradition, or under conditions of social or political oppression today. Presentations may address any area of philosophy, or of social, moral and political thinking more widely conceived. Some suggested topics include women philosophers on education, social reform, or revolution.
Provisional Program - please consult this page closer to the date of the event for the final program.
Thursday 22 Room K3.11 (Third floor, King’s Building)
9:00 Registration – Strand Reception
9:30 Welcome and introductory remarks
9:45 Alan Coffee (KCL) and Sandrine Bergès (Bilkent): "'Cocks on Dunghills': the Women's Revolution"
Respondent: Bensu Arican
11:00: Tea & Coffee for speakers (Old Committee Room)
11:30 Panel 1 - Minority and Philosophers of Colour
11:30 Valeria Stabile (Bologna) - " This is not a love poem. The contribution of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to the philosophical debate about love"
12:00 Serena Vantin (Pisa) "From moral equality to legal equality. Sarah Moore Grimké's 'Letters on the Equality of Sexes'.
12:30 Tess Payongayong (U of the Philippines) " Filipino Women’s Philosophy throughout History"
13:00 Lunch for speakers – Old Committee Room
14:00 Panel 2 - Wollstonecraft and Friends
14:00 Martina Reuter (Jyvaskyla) "Did Women Contribute to the Invention of Autonomy?"
[14:30 Spyridon Tegos (Crete) "Petrifying Sympathy; Wollstonecraft and Adam Smith"]
14:30 Arman T. Niknam (Aarhus) ‘Extreme Credulity’ and Open Eyes: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Sense of Distrust and Trust'
15:00 Break – Tea & Coffee for speakers (Old Committee Room)
15:30 Helen McCabe (Nottingham) "Harriet Taylor Mill and On Liberty"
16:00 Ross Caroll (Exeter) " “I’m More Political Than Alexis Himself”: Mary Mottley, Madame de Tocquevil"
16:30 Serena Mocci (Bologna)"Education as a social reform in Margaret Fuller’s thought"
17:00 Short break
17:15 Penny Weiss (St Louis) (respondent İkrime Yıldırım (Canakkale 18 Mart): " Toward a History of Feminist Epistemology"
18:30 Wine Reception
19:45 Dinner (offsite)
Friday 23 River Room (Second floor, King’s Building & S3.05)
9.15 Breakfast (River Room)
9:45 Eileen Hunt Botting (Notre Dame) "Portraits of Wollstonecraft, 1787-2017"
11:15 Coffee Break (River Room)
11:45 Parallel sessions
Panel 1: Premoderns (River room)
11:45 Julia Lerius (Paderborn)“The soul in the body is like sap in a tree” – reconsidering Hildegard of Bingen’s philosophical perspective on the body and soul relation. Some impulses for future discussions”
12:15 Mary Anne Case (Chicago Law) " Medieval Women’s Contributions to Ongoing Debates in Theological Anthropology"
12: 45 Hadley Cooney (Wisconsin-Madison) "Christine de Pizan and the Possibility of Virtue".
Panel 3: Logic, Science and Metaphysics (S3.05)
11:45 Olivia Brown (Husserl Archives) "Sense and Sensibility: Mary Shepherd on Sensible Objects"
12:15 Tricia Van Dyk (Lithuania) " Inside/Outside the (Philosophy of) Sciences"
12:45 John Hanson (Notre Dame) "Du Châtelet on Divisibility"
13:15 Lunch for speakers (Old Committee Room)
14:15 Parallel sessions
Panel 2: Early modern (River room)
14:15 Allauren Forbes (Penn) " Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice"
14:45 Simone Webb (UCL) " Philosophy as a Way of Life : Damaris Masham, Mary Astell and the Art of Living for Women across Time"
15:15 Manjeet Ramgotra (SOAS) " The critical voice of women in eighteenth-century western political thought"
Panel 4: Early Analytic (S3.o5)
14:15 Frederique Janssen-Lauret (Manchester) "Founding Mothers of Analytic Philosophy: The Early Influence of Female Logicians and Metaphysicians"
14:45 Sophia Connell (Birkbeck) " Alice Ambrose and early analytic Philosophy"
15:15 Rafal Kur (Jagiellonian University, Krakow)" Women’s contributions to the achievements of the Lviv-Warsaw School."
15:45 Coffee Break (River Room)
16:15 Marguerite Deslauriers (McGill) "The Conceptualization of Masculine Power as Unjust: Tyranny in 17th C Venice"
17:15 Event to close. External dinner for speakers.
The conference is free, and anyone can attend. But for reasons of space (and planning) we ask people to register in advance via Eventbrite. You can do this by clicking on the button below or visiting the official KCL page here.
Header image: The Nine LIving Muses of Great Britain by after Richard Samuel (http://needled.wordpress.com/2008/04/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
