Women, Philosophy and Science

This book sheds light on the originality and historical significance of women’s philosophical, moral, political and scientific ideas in Italy and early modern Europe. Divided into three sections, it starts by discussing the women philosophers’ engagement with the classical inheritance with regard to the works of Moderata Fonte, Tullia d'Aragona and Anne Conway. The next section examines the relationship between women philosophers and the new philosophy of nature, focusing on the connections between female thought and the new seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science, and discussing the work of Camilla Erculiani, Margherita Sarocchi, Margaret Cavendish, Mariangela Ardinghelli, Teresa Ciceri, Candida Lena Perpenti, and Alessandro Volta. The final section presents male philosophers’ perspectives on the role of women, discussing the place of women in the work of Giordano Bruno, Poulain de la Barre and the theories of Hobbes and Rawls. By exploring these women philosophers, writers and translators, the book offers a re-examination of the early modern thinking of and about women in Italy. 

“A critical stance on the methodologies deployed in the different chapters and the ways in which they interrelate would not only have illuminated the conceptual foundations of the collection, but might also have pleaded for the volume’s coherence as a whole. … this volume provides rich historical and cultural context pertaining to a variety of women’s output.” (Iulia Z Mihai, Early Science and Medicine, Vol. 26, 2021)

Sabrina Ebbersmeyer is an Associate Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Working primarily on Renaissance and early modern philosophy, her research focuses on debates in moral psychology and philosophy of mind on humanism and gender in the historiography of philosophy. She has published work on numerous Renaissance and early modern philosophers, including Isotta Nogarola, Bernardino Telesio, Elisabeth of Bohemia and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. She is author of Homo agens (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 2010), has edited the volume Emotional Minds (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 2012) and translated the correspondence between Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes into German (München: Fink 2015).   Gianni Paganini (Università del Piemonte Orientale), fellow of the Research Center of the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome), edited the first atheist clandestine manuscript: Theophrastus redivivus (1659), 2 vols, Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1981–1982. He is also the author of Skepsis. Le Débat des modernes sur le scepticisme, Paris, Vrin, 2008, published by the Académie Française. In 2010, he won a prize for his work in philosophy, awarded by the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome). His current research focuses on 17th century philosophy (Hobbes, clandestine philosophy, history of early modern skepticism) and the Enlightenment (the connections between Hume and Diderot). He has edited works by Voltaire (Zadig), Hume (Dialog Concerning Natural Religion) and Hobbes (De motu, loco et tempore).