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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The crucial premise (italicized above) purports to reveal a contradiction that follows from the assumption that something exists without a sufficient reason. Since “nothing” cannot both be something and nothing at the same time (according to PC), the conclusion (or PSR) is claimed to follow. This proof was the subject of an incisive critique by Wolff’s contemporary and critic, Christian August Crusius (1715–75), who (among other things) accuses Wolff of an equivocation with the term “nothing”, and once the two different meanings of this term are identified (viz. nothing as the opposite of something, on one hand, and nothing as a non-being, on the other), the supposed contradiction, purported to follow from the assumption, cannot be established (Crusius 1741). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | In any case, for Wolff, the expression “to provide the reason of something” can be taken in two different ways. On the one hand, if the something for which a reason is provided is regarded solely as a possible thing, then “reason” stands to account for why that thing (as a possible thing) is the possible thing that it is. According to Wolff, every being is endowed with an essential nature. Possible things have natures insofar as they as are comprised of a number of non-contradictory determinations or predicates. Different sets of determinations, and the relationships among these determinations, serve as the principle of individualization within the realm of possible things. Hence, to provide the reason for a possible thing is simply to enumerate the determinations that make that thing the kind of possible thing that it is. A reason, in this sense, is regarded by Wolff as ratio essendi or the “reason of being”. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | If, on the other hand, the something to which a reason is provided is an actual (i.e., existing) thing, then “reason” stands to explain why that thing as an actual thing comes into existence. Reason, in this sense, is regarded as ratio fiendi or the “reason of becoming”. Recall that for Wolff existence is simply a predicate or determination of possible things. A familiar expression appearing in Wolff’s writings is that existence is “the complement of possibility” (Ont. §174). The basic idea here is that existence, as a predicate, perfects a possible thing by making it actual and a “real individual”. Real individuals differ from nominal beings insofar as the former are “complete and determinate”. To be “complete and determinate”, in Wolff’s sense of the expression, means that every aspect or determination of a thing can be specified and that its determinations are sufficient to individuate it from all other things. Nominal beings, although “complete”, are indeterminate (cf. GL: c. 1, §15). That is to say, although there is a certain set of specifiable determinations that is sufficient to pick out a given possible thing among all possible things, the total set of its determinations is not specifiable. A being, in the most general sense, is comprised of three different types of determinations: essentialia, attributes, and modes. Essential determinations define the essential nature of a being and a being’s attributes follow from, or are determined by, its essentialia. Whereas essentialia and attributes are both necessary properties of a thing, modes are contingent or accidental properties. Thus to say a nominal being is indeterminate is to say that there are modes of it that may or may not be present. In the weakest sense, since existence is a mode, and nominal beings do not exist (as such) but are able to come into existence under certain conditions, all nominal beings are indeterminate. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Discerning the difference between the “reason of being” and the “reason of becoming” is important for understanding the different ways Wolff employs PSR in his exposition of metaphysics. Depending on how exactly “reason” is interpreted, the principle, “nothing is without a sufficient reason for why it is rather than not” may apply either to the realm of possibility or to the realm of actual reality. Toward the end of his Ontologia, Wolff makes an attempt to recognize formally two different versions of PSR as “the Principle of Being” and “the Principle of Becoming” respectively (Ont. §866). As a Principle of Being, PSR stands as a definition of a thing’s essential nature. Yet as a Principle of Becoming, PSR serves to furnish the causes, or grounds, for why a real individual comes into actuality. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | It is on the basis of PC and PSR that Wolff proceeds to explicate the fundamental concepts of his ontology. Recall that for Wolff a being in the most general sense is any possible thing. Possible things have essential natures insofar as they are composed of a number of non-contradictory determinations or predicates. The essence of any given possible thing is its principle of being, or principle of individualization. Whereas the essence of a simple being is defined by its essential properties, the essence of a composite being is defined by the manner in which its parts are combined together. In §532 of his Ontologia, Wolff explains: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | A being is called composed which is made up of many parts distinct from each other. The parts of which a composite being is composed constitute a composite through the link which makes the many parts taken together a unit of a definite kind. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | In one respect, simple beings and composite beings are not simply two different species of beings. It is not the case, for example, that within the realm of all possible things simple beings exist separate from, and in addition to, composite beings. More accurately, at the nominal level of reality simples and composites result from an epistemological distinction imposed by a perceiving mind in its analysis of what “exists” (i.e., exists in a nominal sense). Strictly speaking, the only substantial things to exist at any level of reality are simple substances. Simples are defined by their essentialia, and to borrow an expression from Gilson, essentialia are both “compatible and prime” (Gilson 1952: 114). That is to say, the essential properties that define a given simple substance do not contradict one another, or cancel each other out, and they are (themselves) not determined by any other thing and/or property. In this light, Wolff’s notion of substance is perhaps best regarded as a notion of essence, where each simple substance is a different set of compatible and prime essential properties (see Burns 1966: 26 and Gilson, 1952: 115). Furthermore, essential properties should not be viewed as the accidents of substance because, according to Wolff, they are the substance itself. In Wolff’s system, the accidents of substance are the properties that exist by virtue of a thing’s essentialia. And according to Wolff, there are three basic classes of accidents: proper attributes, common attributes, and modes (Ont. §148). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Proper and common attributes of substance follow from and are determined by a thing’s essentialia. Proper attributes are the properties of a thing that are determined by all the essentialia taken together, and common attributes are the properties of a thing that are determined by only some, but not all, its essentialia. Attributes (as such) are perhaps best understood as necessary accidents, since they are determined by and necessarily follow from a thing’s essentialia. Modes, in contrast, are only contingent accidents of substance. They are the properties of a thing that may or may not be present, and if actually present, they are causally the result of some contingent state of affairs. More precisely, the possible presence of any given mode follows from a substance’s essentialia, but the actual presence of a given mode is the result of something outside the substance’s essence that is causally responsible for its presence in a being. At the nominal level of reality, composite beings exist insofar as the accidents of a certain simple substance, or set of simple substances, are linked and/or arranged together in a certain sort of way. In §789 of his Ontologia, Wolff writes: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | [t]he essence of a composite being consists only in mere accidents for the essence of a composite consists in the manner in which its parts are combined with one another. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The notion of “extended-composite” lies at the heart of Wolff’s doctrine of the world-whole. Cosmology, as a special metaphysical science, is the study of the world-whole in general. The world, as such, is an extended composite of extended composites. In §544 of his German Metaphysics, Wolff explains: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The world is a collection of mutable things that are next to each other, follow upon one another, but which are overall connected with one another. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | In precise terms, Wolff believes the world is an extended whole that is composed of a finite number of interacting physical bodies. To better understand the types of cosmological claims that Wolff defends about the universe, it is perhaps helpful to consider first his conception of physical bodies. Ultimately, the conclusions that Wolff draws at the macroscopic level about the world-whole are simply extrapolated from his analysis of physical bodies. After considering Wolff’s analysis of body, this section will conclude with an overview of Wolff’s view of space, time and material extension. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Wolff’s analysis of physical bodies is given from two different perspectives. First is the “bottom-up” metaphysical account of bodies, where bodies are defined as aggregates of simple substances, and second is the “top-down” mechanistic description, where the reality of bodies, given by the testimony of the senses, is explained in terms of interacting primitive corpusula (or corpuscles). To facilitate our discussion, we should identify the three levels of description that Wolff employs when giving his two perspective account. Identifying these three different levels is helpful in understanding at what respective point the mechanical and metaphysical accounts each terminate or bottom out. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The ground floor (so to speak) is the atomic level that is occupied by a “multitude” of simple substances. Unlike simple substances at the nominal level of reality that lack the “mode of existence”, simples at the atomic level are real individuals (i.e., complete and determinate, actually existing beings). In addition to the term “simples”, Wolff also refers to these occupants of the atomic level as “elements” and “atoms of nature” (atomi naturae). Atomic elements (as such) are conceived by Wolff to be “unextended points of force” that lack internal motion (motus intestinus) but yet remain in a constant state of change. Each atomic element is defined, or individuated, by its own distinctive internal state and each is considered to be indivisible in-itself. Although later Wolffians, such as Baumeister, would eventually refer to Wolff’s atomic elements as “monads”, there is at least one important respect in which Wolff’s atomic elements are different from Leibniz’s monads (Baumeister 1747: 226). Leibniz conceives monads as simple unextended substances, and hence Leibnizian monads are “windowless” substances that do not interact or influence one another. Wolff’s atomic elements, in contrast, do interact and have real dynamic influence over each other.[4] | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The second level of description that Wolff employs when giving his account of bodies is the microphysical level. The occupants of this level are the primitive parts of bodies which Wolff calls corpuscles or material atoms. In §186 of his Cosmologia, Wolff provides a helpful contrast between atoms of nature, on one hand, and material atoms, on the other: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | That is called an atom of nature which is indivisible in itself because it is devoid of parts into which it can be divided. That is called a material atom which in itself is able to be divided, but for actually dividing it, existing causes in rerum natura are not adequate.[5] | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Material atoms or corpuscles are indivisible in the sense that there is nothing within the world that is capable of reducing them into further parts. Corpuscles represent the lowest level of explanation that is possible within a mechanical account of bodies. Similar to the atomic level, the microphysical level lies beyond the boundaries of human perception. Wolff believes that although corpuscles are extended, fill space, and are endowed with the “force of inertia”, a precise statement of their size, magnitude, and shape cannot be empirically determined. It is unclear, for example, whether all corpuscles retain homogeneity with respect to their magnitude and shape. Yet because corpuscles are a species of composite beings, Wolff is confident that the essence of a corpuscle consists in the manner in which its parts are joined together. A corpuscle is an aggregate of atomic elements. Its component parts are simply the unextended points of force that occupy the atomic level. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The third level of description that Wolff employs when giving his account of bodies is the level of appearance or sensible reality. It is at this level that bodies and their phenomenal properties, such as extension, the force of inertia, and motor force (vis motrix), are described in mechanistic terms. In §793 of his Ontologia, Wolff writes: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | I prefer that aggregates of simple substances, namely, those compound beings of which the material world is composed, be called bodies rather than simple substances… | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | In a strict sense, a body is considered by Wolff to be a composite of composites. The interacting atomic elements (conceived as unextended points of force) give rise to primitive corpuscles and from the cohesion of corpuscles, a body is thereby constituted at the level of appearance. Wolff writes, “ … each body has its origin in that which is not extended, although it is itself extended” (Cosmologia, §223). At the level of appearance, bodies display a number of determinate properties. Each body has a specifiable size or magnitude (i.e., it can be measured), it occupies a fixed space or place (insofar as it is extended), it displays a certain shape, and it is divisible to the primitive corpuscles from which it is composed. Yet, according to Wolff, the properties of bodies should not be considered as the accidents of anything substantial because bodies are merely phenomenal manifestations of real, interacting, atomic elements. Even the principal properties of bodies used in the analysis of bodily change and motion (i.e., the properties used in mechanics), such as extension, the force of inertia, and motor force, are deemed by Wolff to be phenomenal properties. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Now according to Wolff all sensible properties of bodies should be considered as secondary (or mind-dependent) qualities. In §144 of his Cosmologia, Wolff writes: “…extension is a phenomenon in the same sense in which color is accustomed to be called a phenomenon…”. And somewhat later in this same work, he states in §298: “[t]he force of inertia is called a phenomenon in the same sense in which all sensible qualities are called phenomena”. Perhaps the best way to understand Wolff’s view of sensible properties is to consider a quick comparison with Locke’s corpuscularian view of bodies. For Locke, the primary qualities of bodies, such as extension, solidity, shape, size and texture give rise to the secondary qualities that we perceive in bodies, such as color, sound, taste, smell and temperature. According to Locke, secondary qualities are nothing in the objects themselves but are the result of certain “powers” inherent in the primary qualities of things which effect various sensations in us, such as the sensation of a certain color or temperature. Thus it is by virtue of a body’s micro-structure that we are able to perceive its secondary qualities. Wolff, for the most part, accepts this causal-corpuscularian theory of secondary qualities. However, unlike Locke, Wolff believes that all sensible properties are secondary qualities that result from a body’s atomic structure. In very simplistic terms, sensible properties are for Wolff what color, sound, taste, smell and temperature are for Locke. For both philosophers, secondary qualities are phenomenal and mind-dependent properties having their causal origin in some objective (i.e., mind-independent) reality. For Locke, this reality is the independently existing corpuscles that comprise the material world; and for Wolff, this reality is the unextended points of force, or simple substances, that occupy his atomic level cf. Cosm. §191). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Before explaining Wolff’s view of how extended composites come into being (i.e., the causal process that allows us to form our ideas of extended objects), it is necessary to say a few prefatory words about his view of space and time. The notions of “place” and “space”, on one hand, and the notion of “time”, on the other, figure in at different stages of Wolff’s exposition of extended reality. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | First and foremost, there is an important distinction in Wolff’s cosmology between “general space” and “particular space”. Particular space (or a given place) is what an extended body “fills” or “occupies” by virtue of its corpuscular parts (Cosm. §§122–4). Its reality is derivative of the interacting atomic elements that give rise to individual corpuscles. For Wolff, a corpuscle’s place simply results from a corpuscle’s extension. A given place is conceived as an imaginary immobile container that has the same dimensions as the extended thing that occupies it (Ont. §§676–9). General space, in contrast, is conceived as the perceived order of coexisting bodies. As explained above, the existence of bodies is established by Wolff experientially and amounts to an instance of historical cognition. In §45 and §46 of his German Metaphysics, Wolff explains: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | If we pay attention to ourselves [as thinking things], we will find that we are conscious of many things outside ourselves. However, we set them apart from us in that we recognize that they are distinguishable from us, just in the same way as they are set beside each other, we recognize they are distinguishable from each other…. In that there are many things now which exist at the same time and which are presented apart (and yet at the same time different) from each other, such things come into being under a certain order. And as soon as we perceive this order we perceive space. Therefore, if we do not want to examine the matter differently than we recognize it, we must assume space is the order of such things which are simultaneous. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Wolff’s derivation of general space essentially involves three steps. First, knowledge of the self, as a thinking thing, affords a distinction between consciousness, on one hand, and consciousness of external things, on the other. Second, since that which is conscious (viz. the self) is different from that of which it is conscious (viz. the world), the self can recognize the historical and mathematical fact that it is conscious of many external things at one time (i.e., the world as a plurality). And third, since this empirical fact affords knowledge of real existences, the order or way the self represents these things is what becomes known as space. To borrow Kant’s terminology, Wolffian space lacks “objective reality” because it is simply abstracted from the coexistence of things in the world, and therefore takes on purely a subjective character (cf. Beck 1969: 270). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | In contrast to his theories of place and general space, Wolff holds a much more realistic theory of time. In a strict sense, place and space serve an explanatory role for Wolff at two distinct levels of description (viz. the micro-physical level and the level of appearance). Since atomic elements are unextended, the concepts of place and space are considered by Wolff to be extraneous at the atomic level. Time, however, is not. Atomic elements are in time insofar as each element is in a constant state of change. In his most general description of time, Wolff writes: “[t]ime is the order of successive things in a continuous series” (Ont. §572). Since each atomic element produces in-itself a constant and continuous series of changes, time is regarded by Wolff as the objective measure of such changes. One clear statement of the Wolffian view of the relationship between time and change can be found in a letter to Kant (dated 13 October 1770) from Johann Heinrich Lambert. Lambert (1728–77) writes: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | All changes are bound to time and are inconceivable without time. If changes are real, then time is real, whatever it may be. If time is unreal, then no change can be real. I think, though, that even an idealist must grant at least that changes really exist and occur in his representations, for example, their beginning and ending. Thus time cannot be regarded as something unreal. It is not a substance, and so on, but a finite determination of duration, and like duration, it is somehow real in whatever this reality may consists (AA 10:107***AA?*). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | For Wolff, Lambert, and Moses Mendelssohn, time is real insofar as it is an objective measure of change (cf. Falkenstein 1991 for discussion). Change is a constant feature of existing reality in that real individuals are finite and created beings with a determinate duration. Real individuals come into and go out of existence. Time, therefore, is applicable to the series of changes that occur within a given individual and, in the same respect, it is applicable to the totality of all the individuals that compose the world-whole. Thus for Wolff there is a meaningful sense in which real individuals and the world-whole (itself) are “in time”. This is not to say, however, that time is granted its own ontological existence. In Lambert’s words, time is not a substance (i.e., something real in-and-of itself). More precisely, time is the measure of the objective order of change that real things undergo. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Understanding the sense in which atomic elements are “in time” is important for grasping the manner in which Wolff’s atomic elements interact. Since atomic elements lack extension, the nature of atomic interaction is not spatial. It is not the case, for example, that Wolff’s simple substances influence one another by physical contact and repulsion. Instead, atomic elements as unextended points of force affect, and are responsive to, degrees of change by communicating with each other in time. The series of changes internal to a given atomic element are the result of its own power (or motor force) as well as the motor forces of other elements to which it is connected. Ultimately Wolff believes that it is the interacting forces of a multitude of simple substances that gives rise to our idea of an extended object. In particular, we perceive extended objects at the level of appearance insofar as there are unextended points of force interacting in time at the atomic level. Our confused perception of this temporal interaction results in the idea of an extended object. Similarly to Locke, Wolff believes that it is the primitive qualities of a composite that produce, or effect in us, the various ideas we have of its secondary qualities. Since all sensible properties are considered by Wolff to be secondary qualities, extension, or a composite’s extendedness, results from the primitive forces of a composite at the atomic level. The analogy that Wolff presents to help explain the phenomenal manifestation of extension involves a rapidly ringing bell (Cosm. §789; cf. Burns 1966: 52). According to Wolff, just as the impression we gain from a rapidly ringing bell is the sound of one prolonged peal, where the successive strikes of a bell’s clacker are perceived as one monomial sound, our impression of extension is likewise the result of many successively acting atomic forces that give rise to our confused perception of one continuous extended object. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The notion of “extended-composite”, as already mentioned, is what ultimately stands at the heart of Wolff’s doctrine of the world-whole. Insofar as the world is a composite being, it follows from the principles of Wolff’s ontology that the world’s essence consists in the manner in which its parts are linked together. The world’s parts, as described from the standpoint of appearance, are simply the multitude of interacting physical bodies that are perceived in everyday life. And, if described from a metaphysical standpoint, the world’s parts are conceived by Wolff to be the interacting unextended points of force that occupy his atomic level. Yet regardless of what standpoint or level of description is employed, it is clear that a necessary condition of the world’s existence is that its parts need to be interconnected. According to Wolff, the world is conceived as a substantial whole (totum substantiale) by virtue of the fact that all of its parts form real reciprocal connections with one another. On the basis of this “interconnection-thesis” the world is defined formally by Wolff as “a whole which is not also a part”. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | While the soul, as a simple substance, is understood to be a part of the world, and so is implicated in the treatment of cosmology, this does not exhaust what can be known of it, a fact that leads Wolff to treat it as a separate topic of metaphysics. Indeed, Wolff’s psychology constitutes one of his signal and most historically influential innovations. Most generally, insofar as Wolff seeks to offer a scientific account of the human soul specifically, and indeed with a focus on its cognitive and conative functions, his psychology represents a significant, and distinctly modern, departure from both the treatment of the soul in the context of a generic science of living things, still prevalent among Aristotelian natural philosophers in seventeenth century Germany, and from the metaphysical treatment of the soul in the context of a pneumatology, or doctrine of finite and infinite spirit (Stiening 2003, Vidal 2011). More narrowly, Wolff’s principal, and best-known innovation in psychology consists in his clear separation between two distinct investigations of the soul, the first based on the observation of one’s own mind, identified as empirical psychology, and the second which seeks to use reasoning to uncover truths about the soul that are not readily disclosed by experience, identified as rational psychology. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Wolff’s distinction between empirical and rational psychology proved to be enormously consequential, but no less important (if less well attended to) is the fact that these disciplines remain intrinsically connected. For Wolff, the observations catalogued in the course of empirical psychology serve as principles for the inferences of rational psychology, and the resulting findings on the part of rational psychology serve to guide our empirical observation in search of confirmation. Thus, Wolff writes, that which everyone can experience of themselves will serve “as a principle for deriving something else that not everyone can immediately see for themselves” (GM: §191), and that which is known of the soul from experience “is the touchstone [Probier-Stein] of that which is taught [in rational psychology] of its nature and essence” (GM: §727). Rather than constituting distinct disciplines, empirical and rational psychology amount to complementary parts of a single science, working together in the same way in which observation and theory co-operate in astronomy (EP: §5). Consequently, Wolff’s rational psychology is not to be identified as a narrowly rationalistic psychology, insofar as the latter is taken to intend a science of the soul that proceeds completely independently of experience. Nor is this interdependence of the two parts of psychology an aberration as Wolff takes their union as exemplifying his ideal for science of a connubium rationis et experientiae (EP: §497; cf., Dyck 2014, Rumore 2018). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Turning first to empirical psychology, Wolff’s treatment can be divided into four parts: (1) the initial consideration of the human soul in an attempt to arrive at an initial definition; the consideration of the soul’s (2) cognitive faculty and (3) appetitive faculty; and (4) a consideration of what can be known of the soul’s relation to the body through experience. In the first part, Wolff begins, in Cartesian fashion, by first considering the grounds for our certainty in the existence of the soul (EP: §11–14). Wolff begins by asserting that we are conscious of ourselves and other things, which he takes to be confirmed by our own indubitable experience (for to doubt it would presuppose such consciousness), and inasmuch as anything that is so conscious must exist, a claim Wolff identifies as an identical proposition or axiom (cf. GL: c. 3, §13), it follows that we can be certain that we exist. Wolff conveniently reconstructs this as a syllogism: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | In addition to assuring ourselves of the indubitability of the knowledge of our own existence (cf. Euler 2003), this initial consideration supplies a touchstone for what will count as demonstratively certain, but also provides the elements for a nominal definition of the soul. Thus, the soul is identified just as “that being in us which is conscious of itself and other things outside of it” (EP: §20) which, as an existing thing, can serve as the object of empirical psychology. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The next task for empirical psychology consists in cataloguing the various capacities that the soul has, which Wolff brings under two general headings: the cognitive faculty (facultas cognoscendi) and the appetitive faculty (facultas appetendi). Relevant to the distinction between (sub-)faculties in both cases is the distinction, borrowed from Leibniz, between obscure and clear perception (where the latter but not the former suffices for recognition of the perceived thing), and (clear but) confused and (clear and) distinct perception (where the latter but not the former involves the ability to explicate what serves to distinguish the perceived thing from others). Accordingly, both the cognitive and appetitive faculty are distinguished into lower and higher parts, where the lower includes capacities relating to ideas and notions that are obscure or clear but confused, and the higher those relating to ideas and notions that are distinct (EP: §§54–5, 584). (It bears noting that Wolff also distinguishes between obscure and clear perceptions inasmuch as the former are not apperceived but the latter are; cf. EP: §§25, 35; RP: §20, and for discussion see Wunderlich 2005 and Thiel 2011). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Among the faculties Wolff considers within the lower cognitive faculty are the faculty of sense, imagination, the fictive faculty, and memory. Sense, which includes the five sensory modalities, is understood as the capacity for sensations, where these are perceptions the reason for which is contained in the organs of our bodies, given the presence of an external thing (EP: §§67, 65). Imagination, by contrast, is the faculty for producing perceptions in the absence of sensible things. Wolff further claims that the imagination’s activity is guided by a general (associative) law that, when we have perceived things together (as parts of a whole, for instance, or as contiguous in space), if the perception of one is produced, then the imagination supplies the perception of the other (EP: §117). It is the imagination that is likewise responsible for the order of ideas in dreams. The fictive faculty (facultas fingendi) is our capacity to combine or divide the products of the imagination to create new representations (§144), and memory is defined as the faculty through which we recognize reproduced ideas as previously had (§175). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Where the lower cognitive faculty handles the generation and (re)production of obscure and confused ideas, the higher cognitive faculty encompasses the capacities and operations through which we introduce clarity and distinctness into those ideas. Accordingly, Wolff first considers the faculties of attention, whereby we introduce more clarity into a part of a composite perception (EP: §237), and reflection, through which we successively direct attention to what we perceive (as well as, in a Lockian vein, to the soul and its operations—§261) and thereby make distinct perception possible (§266). The capacity for distinct representation in general is identified as the understanding, which can be pure or non-pure depending on whether it admits confused representations, though since these are unavoidable in the case of the human being, our understanding is never pure (EP: §§313–4; for general discussion see Chance 2018). With an eye to his discussion of logic, Wolff further distinguishes three operations of the intellect with respect to its cognitions: simple apprehension (through which notions or representations of what is common to multiple things are formed), judgment (through which agreement or disagreement between representations is asserted), and discursion or reasoning (where judgments are formed on the basis of previous judgments) (EP: §§325, 366–7; cf. Dyck 2016, Rumore 2018). This latter operation informs Wolff’s definition of the faculty of reason as the capacity to perceive the interconnection among universal truths (§483), though Wolff again emphasizes that our reason is never pure but is always to some extent reliant upon experience (§§495–7). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Where the discussion of the cognitive faculty is relevant to Wolff’s aims in logic and metaphysics, the treatment of the appetitive faculty in empirical psychology is significant for Wolff’s practical philosophy. Wolff likewise distinguishes the appetitive faculty into lower and higher parts, where the distinction turns on whether there is an obscure or confused cognition of the good or evil (grounding a sensory desire or aversion), or a distinct cognition of the good or evil (grounding our act of willing or not willing). In connection with the latter, Wolff takes up the issue of freedom. He rejects the conception of freedom in terms of a capacity to act contrary to determining motives as counter to our experience and to the principle of sufficient reason (EP: §944), and instead defends a (Leibnizian) compatibilist conception, in accordance with which a freely willed act involves a distinct cognition of the perfection of some thing (which generates a motive to act in its favor); is spontaneous, or has its reason within the agent (insofar as the agent chooses it because it is pleasing); and is contingent, or the agent is not determined to choose it through its essence (EP: §§933–41; cf. Kawamura 1996; Dyck forthcoming[a]). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Lastly, but importantly, empirical psychology takes up the distinctively early modern problem of what can be experienced of the soul’s relation to the body. Here Wolff notes that we experience that some states of the soul depend upon the body (such as sensations), and some states of the body depend upon the soul (such as voluntary actions), such that the body and soul stand in a union or commercium. Nonetheless, Wolff contends (following Malebranche and in anticipation of Hume) that we have no experience of the causal power through which the soul influences the body and vice versa, but rather that our experience only confirms the general agreement between the states of each without penetrating to its ground (EP: §§961–2). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | In turning to the rational consideration of the soul, Wolff’s aim is not to determine what can be known completely independently of experience but rather to employ what has been discerned in empirical psychology as principles from which its demonstrations proceed and as cognitions for which reasons are to be given (RP: §§3–4; Richards 1980). Conforming to this, the topics of rational psychology proceed from those which are closest to and draw most heavily from empirical psychology, such as the account of our soul’s nature and essence, to the increasingly more speculative topics, such as the defense of the pre-established harmony to the demonstration of the soul’s immortality and consideration of its state after death. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The determination of the soul’s nature and essence sets out from the definition of the soul given in empirical psychology as that in us which is conscious of itself and other things. Wolff argues that this consciousness is the result of a complex activity that involves reflection on and comparison of parts of a given perception as well as attention and memory (RP: §§22–3, 25). Given this, Wolff contends, the soul must be distinct from body since such an act cannot be explained in terms of a change in figure, magnitude, or the location of parts, through which alone changes in body are possible. Similar considerations serve to show that no composite can think, and thus that the soul, as conscious, must not be composite and is therefore simple, and indeed, a simple substance, since it perdures through changes in its thoughts (RP: §§44, 47–8). That the soul is a substance further implies for Wolff (as it did for Leibniz) that it is endowed with a power, understood as a sufficient reason for the actuality of the states that are possible for it through its faculties (RP: §§54–5; cf. Blackwell 1961, Heßbrüggen-Walter 2004). Wolff proceeds to determine the character of this power (which must be a single one given the soul’s simplicity), and he concludes that, because sensations are representations of the world in accordance with the position of the organic body, and because all of the representations the soul is capable of are derived from sensations, it follows that the soul’s power is just a power of representing the world in accordance with the position of the body, which power Wolff finally identifies as the essence and nature of the soul (RP: §§64–9). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Rational psychology also takes up the question of what best explains the agreement between the states of the soul and the body. Wolff considers three possible systems that purport to explain this agreement: (i) the system of physical influx, according to which one substance produces a state in another directly through its own activity (RP: §§558–60), (ii) the (Cartesian) system of occasional causes, according to which God modifies one substance on the occasion of some state arising in another (§§589–91); and (iii) the (Leibnizian) system of pre-established harmony, where the agreement between states of substances is the result of God’s initial activity in actualizing this world of substances (§§612–13). Wolff provides a number of familiar objections to the first two systems, claiming for instance, that physical influx conflicts with the laws of physics (cf. §§578–9), and that occasionalism relies on what amounts to a perpetual miracle (cf. §603), while defending the pre-established harmony from similar criticisms (cf. Watkins 2005: 45–51). Even so, given that any possible explanation cannot be confirmed or rejected by experience (as was disclosed at the conclusion of empirical psychology), each of these systems amounts to a mere hypothesis, and Wolff’s conclusion is only that the pre-established harmony is a more probable hypothesis than the other two (RP: §§503, 685; cf. Dyck 2014: 34–6), though he thinks that nothing significant turns on settling this contentious issue. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The last major topic Wolff turns to is the most speculative, namely, the demonstration of the soul’s immortality of the soul and its state after death. Immortality is taken to presuppose the incorruptibility of the soul, that is, that the soul does not naturally pass away after the death of the body, but (contrary to the Cartesians) Wolff does not think that this is all that is involved as any immortality worth having (and that would be consistent with Scripture) must also extend to the preservation of the soul’s capacity for distinct perception (that is, its spirituality) and its consciousness that it is the same being in the afterlife as it was before the body’s death (or its personality). The soul’s incorruptibility follows straightforwardly from the fact that it is simple (and so incapable of decomposition); inductive grounds are offered in favor of the soul’s preservation of its spirituality (namely, that the clarity of the soul’s perceptions is enhanced in all “great changes”—RP: §745); and the soul’s maintenance of its personality is shown by reference to the law of imagination in accordance with which its subsequent perceptions will lead it to recall previous ones. The relative merits of these arguments were hotly debated, with especially notable contributions by Wolff’s colleague in Halle, G. F. Meier, and later by Mendelssohn (in his famous Phaedo), and ultimately Kant (for discussion, see Sassen 2008; Dyck 2014: 141–72). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Wolff’s treatment of metaphysics concludes with a consideration of natural theology defined as “the science of those things that are possible through God” (NT: I, §1, see Corr 1973). Yet, at the same time, natural theology also provides a bottom-up justification for metaphysics insofar as metaphysics is concerned with actual existing beings of a contingent, and so created, reality. Wolff indicates that natural theology has two principle aims: (1) to prove the existence of God and (2) to determine what pertains to the essence and attributes of God, and what follows from these. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Concerning the demonstration of God’s existence, Wolff had offered criticisms (much to the chagrin of his Pietist opponents) of a variety of traditional proofs early in his career (cf. Theis 2018: 221–3). In his Natural Theology, however, Wolff presents and defends two proofs: an a posteriori proof presented at the outset of the first volume, and an a priori proof provided at the beginning of the second. Wolff’s a posteriori proof sets out from the fact (elaborated at the outset of empirical psychology) that we exist, and proceeds to argue that the reason for our existence must be found in a necessary being: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The human soul exists or we exist. Since nothing is without a sufficient reason why it is rather than is not, a sufficient reason must be given why our soul exists, or why we exist. Now this reason is contained in ourselves or in some other being diverse from us. But if you maintain that we have the reason of our existence in a being which, in turn, has the reason of its existence in another, you will not arrive at the sufficient reason unless you come to a halt at some being which does have the sufficient reason of its own existence in itself. Therefore, either we ourselves are the necessary being, or there is given a necessary being other and diverse from us. Consequently, a necessary being exists (NT: I, §24). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | From there, Wolff argues that the necessary being must also be independent, or have its sufficient reason in itself, and cannot have a beginning or end in time or is eternal. As such, the necessary being cannot be identified with the world (which is composite) or anything within it (since these have a beginning and end); moreover, it cannot be identified with the soul since unlike the soul it does not depend on the world. Therefore, the necessary being is identified as God, understood as an independent being in which the reason for the actuality of the world and the soul is found (NT: I, §67, see Corr 1973). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | By contrast, Wolff’s a priori proof for God’s existence proceeds from the identification of God as the most perfect being (ens perfectissimum): | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | God contains all compossible realities in the absolutely highest degree. But He is possible. Wherefore, since the possible can exist, existence can belong to it. Consequently, since existence is a reality, and since realities are compossible which can belong to a being, existence is in the class of compossible realities. Moreover, necessary existence is the absolutely highest degree. Therefore, necessary existence belongs to God or, what is the same, God necessarily exists (NT: II, §21, see Corr 1973). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | From the notion of a most perfect being, Wolff purports to prove God is an ens realissimum (or most real existing being). However, like Leibniz before him commenting on the Cartesian ontological proof, Wolff believes God must first be shown to be possible in order to be shown to exist. According to Wolff, arriving at the knowledge of God as an ens perfectissimum involves first contemplating the attributes that are present in the human soul, to a limited degree, and then extrapolating those attributes as unlimited qualities to God. Things are compossible insofar as they can coexist in the same subject. Since existence is a mode or reality for Wolff, existence is considered to fall within the class of compossible realities. And just as it is better to exist than not to exist, it is better to exist necessarily than just to exist contingently, therefore Wolff concludes that God’s existence is necessary. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | With God’s existence assured, Wolff considers what can be known of Him. God is taken to have an understanding, consisting in His distinct representation of all possible worlds and which representation itself originates from the divine essence (NT: II, §§81, 84). God is also shown to have a will, through which He chooses one possible world to make actual, and since God’s choice in doing so finds its sufficient reason in his distinct cognition of the supreme perfection of that world, Wolff identifies God’s will as free (in the same sense of freedom presented in the empirical psychology, albeit in the highest possible degree—NT: II, §277). Wolff additionally considers God’s wisdom, which consists in His choice of the appropriate means to realize His end in creation, namely, the manifestation of His own glory and perfection (NT: I, §629), and goodness, which consists in His conferring of as much goodness on creatures as is consistent with His wisdom (NT: I, §§697–9). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | While these discussions conclude the proper subject matter of natural theology, in the second half of the second volume Wolff additionally turns to critically examining various systems of atheism and radical thought. Significantly, among the views discussed is Spinozism, and indeed his treatment is considerably detailed (spanning §§671–716 of the second volume), likely reflecting the fact that Wolff had himself faced a persistent accusation of supporting Spinoza on the part of his Pietist critics. In contrast, however, with other discussions of Spinoza by philosophers of this period, Wolff’s does not trade in convenient caricatures or speculation concerning the real (immoral) motives behind Spinoza’s thought but hews closely, if critically, to the text of the Ethics. Wolff scrutinizes Spinoza’s definitions, particularly of God, substance, attribute, mode, and finite thing (which he contrasts with their proper definitions in the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy), and proceeds to show how these figure into Spinoza’s account of extension (NT: II, §§688–93), doctrine of bodies (§§694–6), claims of the uniqueness and necessary existence of substance (§§697–706), and his faulty account of infinite thought as composed of an infinite number of finite thinking things (§§707–8). Wolff’s discussion proved rather influential, with Mendelssohn echoing and developing it, and the accuracy of Wolff’s characterization of Spinoza was also a point of discussion in the famous Pantheismusstreit (cf. Beiser 1987: 103). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The subject matter of Wolff’s practical philosophy is restricted to those things that have to do with human action. In Wolff’s Latin texts, practical philosophy is divided into four main disciplines: universal practical philosophy, natural law, politics, and moral philosophy. And just as ontology purportedly provides the foundational underpinnings for the disciplines of “special metaphysics” in the theoretical realm, universal practical philosophy plays an analogous role for the disciplines of natural law, politics, and moral philosophy in the practical realm. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | A central and perhaps unifying concept in Wolff’s practical writings is the concept of “perfection”. In an early letter to Leibniz, dated 4 May 1715, Wolff explains the importance that the concept serves in his ethics: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | I need the notion of perfection for dealing with morals. For, when I see that some actions tend toward our perfection and that of others, while others tend toward our imperfection and that of others, the sensation of perfection excites a certain pleasure [voluptas] and the sensation of imperfection a certain displeasure [nausea]. And the emotions [affectus], by virtue of which the mind is, in the end, inclined or disinclined, are modifications of this pleasure and displeasure; I explain the origin of natural obligation in this way… From this also comes the general rule or law of nature that our actions ought to be directed toward the highest perfection of ourselves and others. (Leibniz 1989a: 231–232) | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | According to Wolff, the ultimate goal of human action is to attain, or at least approximate, the highest degree of perfection that is possible. Humans, as individuals or groups, should strive for perfection insofar as moral worth and goodness reside in the objective essence of humankind. In a strict sense, each person is obligated by the law of nature to instantiate perfection in his/her own life. Actions that tend toward perfection produce pleasure and actions that tend toward imperfection produce displeasure (or pain). In many respects, this consequentialist feature of Wolff’s ethical theory resembles various forms of utilitarianism that were emerging in England during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Also central to Wolff’s practical philosophy is its autonomy from theological doctrine. Although maintaining that a universal ethics is certainly compatible with the teachings of Sacred Scripture, Wolff is adamant that morality does not depend on revelation or God’s divine commands. Advocating the separation of philosophy and religion is a theme that Wolff developed and defended throughout his entire career and it is a feature of his thought that secures him a place among other philosophers of Europe’s Enlightenment. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Wolff’s prominence in eighteenth-century Germany, and his wide-ranging interests, have meant that he is an important figure in the history of a number of established fields in the eighteenth century, including mathematics, physics, political theory, and even economics. Wolff also made notable, even pioneering contributions to disciplines that were not as yet recognized as distinct areas of philosophical inquiry. Wolff had, for instance, an early interest in the philosophy of language, having devoted a dissertation to the topic in 1703 (Disquisitio philosophica de loquela), an interest he continued to pursue in subsequent discussions in his logical writings, relating to semiotics and hermeneutics, and in his psychological texts, concerning the relation between mental and linguistic entities (see Favaretti Camposampiero 2018 for details). Wolff is also widely recognized as a founding figure in the discipline of aesthetics—while his only text devoted to the topic is a treatise on civil architecture (a volume in a mathematical textbook), Wolff’s account of aesthetic pleasure in terms of the intuitive cognition of perfection (EP: §511), and identification of that perfection as consisting in a unity in multiplicity, were taken up and discussed by later aesthetic theorists, including A. G. Baumgarten (the father of modern aesthetics), J. C. Gottsched, J. G. Sulzer (1720–79), and Mendelssohn (see Beiser 2009; Buchenau 2013). | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | For a complete listing of Wolff’s works, see Theis & Aichele (2018: 20–27). Editions of all of Wolff’s works have been reprinted in the series: | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | In the case of the German Logic and German Metaphysics, both of which saw numerous editions and significant changes throughout Wolff’s lifetime, references in this entry are to the later, reprinted editions. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | In the above entry, all translations are by the authors unless otherwise indicated. | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | aesthetics: German, in the 18th century | Continental Rationalism | German Philosophy: in the 18th century, prior to Kant | intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties | Kant, Immanuel: and Leibniz | Kant, Immanuel: critique of metaphysics | Kant, Immanuel: philosophy of science | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: ethics | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: on causation | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: on the problem of evil | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: philosophy of mind | mathematics: inconsistent | Mendelssohn, Moses | rationalism vs. empiricism | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Copyright © 2019 by Matt Hettche <[email protected]> Corey Dyck <[email protected]> | wolff-christian |
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2021 by The Metaphysics Research Lab, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/ | Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054 | wolff-christian |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a moral and political philosopher whose analysis of the condition of women in modern society retains much of its original radicalism. One of the reasons her pronouncements on the subject remain challenging is that her reflections on the status of the female sex were part of an attempt to come to a comprehensive understanding of human relations within a civilization increasingly governed by acquisitiveness and consumption. Her first publication was on the education of daughters; she went on to write about politics, history and various aspects of philosophy in a number of different genres that included critical reviews, translations, pamphlets, and novels. Best known for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her influence went beyond the substantial contribution to feminism for which she is mostly remembered and extended to shaping the art of travel writing as a literary genre; through her account of her journey through Scandinavia as well as her writings on women and thoughts on the imagination, she had an impact on the Romantic movement. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | The second of seven children, Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759, in a house on Primrose Street. Her paternal grandfather was a successful master weaver who left a sizeable legacy, but her father, Edward John, mismanaged his share of the inheritance. He tried to establish himself as a gentleman farmer in Epping. This was the first of the family’s several moves, each of which marked its financial and social decline. Only Mary’s brother, Edward (Ned), was to receive a formal education; he became a lawyer. He had also inherited directly from his grandfather a substantial part of the latter’s legacy. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Wollstonecraft’s own somewhat haphazard education was, however, not entirely unusual for someone of her sex and position, nor was it particularly deficient. Her published writings show her to have acquired a true command of the Bible and a good knowledge of the works of several of the most famous Ancient philosophers. The latter is partly explained through her personal acquaintance with Thomas Taylor, famed for his translations of Plato (Tomaselli 2019). She also drew on a variety of early modern sources, such as Shakespeare and Milton’s works. Through her own writing for the Analytical Review she was to become widely read in the literature of her period. Initially, the nature and extent of her reading was partly owed to the friendship shown to her in her youth by a retired clergyman and his wife. Nevertheless, as a woman from an impecunious family, her prospects were very limited. In relatively rapid succession, she was to enter the most likely occupations for someone of her sex and circumstances: a lady’s companion, a schoolteacher, and a governess. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | In 1778, she was engaged as a companion to a Mrs Dawson and lived at Bath. She returned home to nurse her ailing mother in the latter part of 1781. After Mrs Wollstonecraft’s death, in the spring of 1782, Mary lived with the Bloods, the impoverished family of her dearest friend, Fanny. In the winter of 1783, Mary left them in order to attend to her sister Eliza and her newly born daughter. There followed the first of the emotionally very difficult episodes in Mary’s life. What prompted Mary to intervene as decisively as she did in her sister’s marriage remains somewhat of a mystery; but in the course of January 1784, Mary took her sister away, and the two women went into hiding, leaving Eliza’s infant daughter behind; the baby died the following August. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | By February of that year, the two sisters had already been planning to establish a school with Fanny Blood. Mary’s other sister, Everina, joined in the project a little later. They first set their sights on Islington, then moved to Newington Green, where Mary met the moral and political thinker, the Reverend Richard Price, head of Newington’s thriving Dissenting community, and heard him preach. This was a crucial encounter for Mary. Several years later, she was to rise to his defence in a Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and it was through her connections to members of this community that she was to gain an introduction to her future publisher, friend, and one might even say, patron, Joseph Johnson. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | In November 1785, Wollstonecraft set off on a trip to Lisbon, where her friend Fanny, who had married that February, was expecting her first child. On board the ship, Mary met a man suffering from consumption; she nursed him for a fortnight, the length of the journey. This experience is related in her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788). She gained a very unfavourable opinion of Portuguese life and society, which seemed to her ruled by irrationality and superstitions. Mary’s brief stay in Portugal was, furthermore, to be a profoundly unhappy one, for both Fanny and her baby died shortly after the delivery. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | On her return to England, Wollstonecraft found her school in a dire state. Far from providing her with a reliable income and some stability, it was to be a source of endless worries and a financial drain. Only Joseph Johnson’s advance on her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life (1787) helped ease her considerable financial difficulties. It consists of brief discussions on such topics as ‘Moral Discipline’, ‘Artificial Manners’, ‘Boardings-Schools’, ‘The Benefits Which Arise From Disappointments’, ‘The Observance of Sunday’, and ‘On the Treatment of Servants’. Although it might seem somewhat cursory, this book served as the groundwork for many of the topics to which she would return in her more famous works of the 1790s. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Following the collapse of her school, Wollstonecraft became a governess to the family of Lord Kingsborough for a brief and unsatisfactory period. The position took her to Ireland, where she completed Mary, A Fiction. On her return to London, Joseph Johnson came to the rescue once again by giving her some literary employment. In 1787, she also began, but never completed, The Cave of Fancy. A Tale. The same year, she wrote Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788); it appeared in two other London editions in her life time (1791 and 1796), the last of which illustrated by William Blake. Wollstonecraft’s anthology, The Female Reader; Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best Writers and Disposed under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women (1789), was compiled in the same period and published under the name of ‘Mr. Cresswick, teacher of Elocution’; it pursues themes to be found in her previous works and contains excerpts mostly from the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays, as well as many by various eighteenth-century authors, such as Voltaire, Hume, Steele, Charlotte Smith, and Madame de Genlis. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | To understand the extent to which Wollstonecraft made up for the lack of a formal education, it is essential to appreciate fully that her talents were to extend to translating and reviewing, and that these two activities, quite apart from her own intellectual curiosity, acquainted her with a great many authors, including Leibniz and Kant. She translated into English Jacques Necker’s Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788) from French, Rev. C. G. Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; with an Introductory Address to Parents (1790) from German, and Madame de Cambon’s Young Grandison (1790) from Dutch. In each case, the texts she produced were almost as if her own, not just because she was in agreement with their original authors, but because she more or less re-wrote them. The Reverend Salzmann is unlikely to have resented her for this, as he was to translate into German both A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Throughout the period covered by these translations Wollstonecraft wrote for the Analytical Review, which her publisher, Joseph Johnson, together with Thomas Christie, started in May 1788. She was involved with this publication either as a reviewer or as editorial assistant for most of its relatively short life. Despite her own practice of the genre, her many reviews reveal the degree to which, she, like many other moralists in the eighteenth century, feared the moral consequences of reading novels. She believed that even those of a relatively superior quality encouraged vanity and selfishness. She was to concede, however, that reading such works might nonetheless be better than not reading at all. Besides novels, Wollstonecraft reviewed poetry, travel accounts, educational works, collected sermons, biographies, natural histories, and essays and treatises on subjects such as Shakespeare, happiness, theology, music, architecture and the awfulness of solitary confinement; the authors whose works she commented on included Madame de Staël, Emanuel Swedenborg, Lord Kames, Rousseau, and William Smellie. Until the end of 1789, her articles were mostly of a moral and aesthetic nature. However, in December 1789, she reviewed a speech by her old friend, Richard Price, entitled A Discourse on the Love of our Country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution of Great Britain. With an Appendix, containing the report of the Committee of the Society; and Account of the Population of France; and the Declarations of the Rights by the National Assembly of France (1789). This address to the Revolution Society in commemoration of the events of 1688 partly prompted Burke to compose his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (1790). | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Burke’s attack on Price in that work in turn led Wollstonecraft, egged on by her publisher, Johnson, to take up her pen in the aged Reverend’s defence. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) was almost certainly the first of many responses Burke’s Reflections elicited. Initially published anonymously at the end of November, the second edition that quickly followed in mid-December bore its author’s name and marked a turning point in her career; it established her as a political writer. In September 1791, Wollstonecraft began A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, which elaborated a number of points made in the previous Vindication, namely, that in most cases, marriage was nothing but a property relation, and that the education women received ensured that they could not meet the expectations society had of them and almost certainly guaranteed them an unhappy life. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Following the publication of her second Vindication, Wollstonecraft was introduced to the French statesman and diplomat, Charles Talleyrand, on his mission to London on the part of the Constituent Assembly in February 1792. She dedicated the second edition of the A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to him. In December 1792, she travelled to France where she met Gilbert Imlay, an American merchant and author of A Topographical Descriptions of the Western Territory of North America (1792) and The Emigrants (1793). As British subjects were increasingly at risk under the Terror, Wollstonecraft passed as Imlay’s wife so as to benefit from the security enjoyed at the time by American citizens. They never married. Imlay was probably the source of Wollstonecraft’s greatest unhappiness, first through his lack of ardour for her, then because of his infidelity, and finally because of his complete rejection of her. Most of all, her love of Imlay brought Wollstonecraft to the realisation that the passions are not so easily brought to heel by reason. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Wollstonecraft had a girl by Imlay. She was born at Le Havre in May 1794 and named Fanny, after Wollstonecraft’s friend, Fanny Blood. A year after Fanny’s birth, Wollstonecraft twice attempted suicide, first in May, then in October 1795. She broke with Imlay finally in March 1796. In April of the same year, she renewed her acquaintance with William Godwin and they became lovers that summer. They were married at St Pancras church in March 1797. On the 30th August, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, future author of Frankenstein and wife of Shelley, was born. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Apart from Mary, a Fiction and The Cave of Fancy Wollstonecraft’s early writings were of a pedagogical nature (Jones 2020). These reveal the profound influence John Locke had on Wollstonecraft’s thought, and several of the arguments of his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) are echoed in Wollstonecraft’s conception of morality and the best manner to inculcate it in individuals at the earliest possible age. The opening paragraph of her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters speaks of the duty parents have to ensure that ‘reason should cultivate and govern those instincts which are implanted in us to render the path of duty pleasant—for if they are not governed they will run wild; and strengthen the passions which are ever endeavouring to obtain dominion—I mean vanity and self-love.’ Similarly, the beginning of her Original Stories from Real Life stated its author’s intent, namely to seek ‘to cure those faults by reason, which ought never to have taken root in the infant mind. Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are however far preferable to the precepts of reason; but as this task requires more judgement than generally falls to the lot of parents, substitutes must be sought for, and medicines given, when regimen would have answered the purpose better’. Wollstonecraft’s prescriptions to counter the deplorable education she thought her contemporaries were inflicting on their children takes the form of a tale about two girls, Mary and Caroline. At the beginning of the story, the reader finds the girls left to the management of ignorant servants (one of Locke’s great bugbears), but they are eventually placed under the tuition of a woman of tenderness and discernment. The book shows how the latter succeeds in teaching contemptuous Mary and vain Caroline to avoid anger, exercise compassion, love truth and virtue, and respect the whole of God’s creation. It is important to note however that whilst Locke advocated home education to shield boys from the bad influences to which they might be subject at school, Wollstonecraft was mostly inclined to think the opposite on the grounds that children needed to be with persons of their own age. In an ideal world, boys and girls would be educated together in schools. Many of these concerns would appear again in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): indeed Sandrine Bergès reads this work primarily as a treatise on education (Bergès 2013). | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | That reason must rule supreme could easily appear to be a running theme of Wollstonecraft’s works written prior to her sojourn in Revolutionary France and, all the more, prior to her travels through Scandinavia. It is stressed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Other continuities between her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and the Vindication include her insistence that girls and young women be made to acquire ‘inner resources’ so as to make them as psychologically independent as possible. The Thoughts also reveals Wollstonecraft’s conviction that universal benevolence is the first virtue, as well as her faith in a providentially ordained universe. She enjoined her readers to prepare their children for ‘the main business of our lives’, that is, the acquisition of virtue, and, unsurprisingly given her own history, she urged parents to strengthen their children’s characters so as to enhance their capacity to survive personal tragedies. Self-mastery was thus the aim of education and it was the duty of parents to ensure that their children received it. However, she insisted that there was a time for everything, including for the development of each of the mind’s faculties, not least the imagination. Ultimately, she wanted children and young people to educated in such a way as to have well balanced minds in strong and healthy bodies. That mind and body needed to be exercised and prepared to face the inevitable hardships of life is the fundamental point of her of her pedagogical works (Tomaselli 2020). | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | When Wollstonecraft began to engage in political commentary in reviewing Price’s A Discourse on the Love of our Country, she praised him for his account of true patriotism as ‘the result of reason, not the undirected impulse of nature, ever tending to selfish extremes’ as well as his defence of Christianity’s prescription of universal benevolence against those who argued that such sentiments were incompatible with the love of one’s country. She endorsed his view of liberty of conscience as a sacred right and wrote sympathetically about his plea for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which imposed civil disabilities on Dissenters. She also seemed to support his claim that the political Settlement of 1689 was wanting in that it did not make for full representation of the people and hence made only for partial liberty. Finally, Wollstonecraft reproduced the passage in which Price linked the American and French revolutions and clamoured for the end of despotism throughout Europe. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | When not so long thereafter she came to write her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft attacked Edmund Burke for having set upon an harmless elderly preacher in his Reflections; yet her own review justifies Burke’s depiction of Price’s sermon as inflammatory. Far from thinking that the events taking place in France gave grounds for rejoicing, Burke feared their consequences from the very start. The National Assembly’s confiscation of the Church’s property, he predicted, would lead to further confiscations, undermine the fundamental right to property, and result in anarchy, which only the rise of a charismatic, authoritarian figure could bring to an end. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Of the disagreements between Price and Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, and Burke, on the other, one of the deepest was over their respective view of the nature of civil society and of political power in general. The two friends believed that government, the rule of law, and all human relations could be simplified, explicated, and rendered transparent, and both were convinced that this was the task ahead for all lovers of liberty. For Burke, on the contrary, civil society consisted of countless ineffable links between individuals. The latter’s relationship to authority was for the most part no less ineffable; moreover, he believed sound political judgement to be the product of experience, and he cautioned prudence. To sweep away established practices and institutions and think of politics as a mere matter of administrating in accordance with a set of abstract rules or rights uninformed by the customs and culture, and hence the national character, of a people was, in his view, to demonstrate a crass disregard for the most obvious facts of human nature and history (Conniff 1999). Burke’s argument led him to dwell on France’s financial position in some detail, and he defended its royal family and its Church; he insisted, moreover, that it was already benefiting from a policy of gradual reform. The overall effect Burke sought to achieve was to depict his opponent as theoretically confused, politically naive, generally misinformed; and to show, most damnably of all, that Price’s sermon on the Love of our Country, with all its affirmation of feelings for humanity, proved him to be unpatriotic. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Wollstonecraft’s Vindication was the first of many replies. Amongst those that followed was one by Catharine Macaulay, who had influenced Wollstonecraft’s pedagogy and was much admired by her (Gunther-Canada 1998; Coffee, 2019). Wollstonecraft’s riposte is an interesting and rhetorically powerful work in its own right as well as a necessary introduction to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It consists mostly of a sustained attack on Burke rather than a defence of the rights of man. This is partly because Wollstonecraft took for granted a Lockean conception of God-given rights discoverable by reason, except when the latter was warped by self-love. Wollstonecraft further believed that God made all things right and that the cause of all evil was man. In her view, Burke’s Reflections showed its author to be blind to man-made poverty and injustice; this she attributed to his infatuation with rank, Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the English Constitution. Demonstrating her familiarity with Burke’s other works and speeches, especially A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and the Speech on Conciliation with America (1775), she also argued that he was inconsistent, if only because of the impossibility, as she saw it, of reconciling his sympathy for the American cause with his reaction to events in France. In this, Wollstonecraft was far from alone and many who had followed Burke’s parliamentary career and heard his Speeches to the House of Commons were astonished by what they thought was a radical and inexplicable change of position. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | As she was to do in her next and more famous Vindication, Wollstonecraft did not simply clamour for rights, but emphasised that these entail duties; but she also insisted that none could be expected to perform duties whose natural rights were not respected. Furthermore she used David Hume’s History of England (1754–62) to contend that England’s laws were the product of historical contingency and insisted that only those institutions that could withstand the scrutiny of reason and be shown to be in conformity with natural rights and God’s justice merited respect and obedience. There was no question of blanket reverence for the past and its juridical legacy. As for civilization, she thought its progress very uneven and dismissed the culture of politeness and polish as nothing but a screen behind which hypocrisy, egotism and greed festered unchecked. Finally, opposing nature and reason to artifice and politeness, she made herself the true patriot and Burke the fickle Francophile. She was the clear-headed independent thinker, he the emotive creature of a system of patronage. She exhibited manly virtues, he effeminacy; although Mary Fairclough argues that, in truth, there was much in common between each thinker’s treatment of feelings and instincts (Fairclough 2020). | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | In the midst of her tirade she turned, rather unexpectedly, to the subject of family life and the limits of parental authority, especially in relation to arranged marriages (Tomaselli 2001). She condemned marriages of convenience together with late marriages: both fostered immorality in her view. Indeed, from her perspective, nearly every aspect of the prevailing culture had that consequence, for, in bringing girls up to be nothing but empty headed playthings, parents made for a morally bankrupt society. Such beings could never make dutiful mothers, as they took the horizon to be the eyes of the men they flirted with. The moral depravity of a society devoted to the acquisition of property and its conspicuous display rather than to the pursuit of reason and the protection of natural rights found the means of its reproduction in the family, she contended. Here her dispute was not just with Burke, but implicitly also with Price (Jones, 2005). In his sermon, he had deplored the sexual depravity of the times that he saw embodied even in those he considered patriots. But to seek only to vindicate the rights of men, as Price had done, was insufficient and misconceived, according to Wollstonecraft. If one sought a truly moral society, the family had to change, and this, in turn, required a complete transformation in the nature of the relationship between men and women before, and within, marriage (Botting 2006). Only a sound upbringing of both the sexes could secure that. This was the nub of her attack on political theorists and educationalists alike. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | When Wollstonecraft came to write The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she did within a matter of months following the publication of her first overtly political work, the moral rejuvenation of society and the happiness of individual women were woven together. Women were ill-prepared for their duties as social beings and imprisoned in a web of false expectations that would inevitably make them miserable. She wanted women to become rational and independent beings whose sense of worth came, not from their appearance, but from their inner perception of self-command and knowledge. Women had to be educated; their minds and bodies had to be trained. This would make them good companions, wives, mothers and citizens (Brace 2000). Above all it would make them fully human, that is, beings ruled by reason and characterised by self-command. Besides criticisms of existing pedagogical practices and theories, most notably Rousseau’s Emile (1762), the Vindication contains many social and political proposals which range from a detailed outline of necessary changes in school curriculum to the suggestion that women be granted not only civil and political rights, but have elected representatives of their own. It argues that women should be taught skills so as to be able to support themselves and their children in widowhood, and never have to marry or remarry out of financial necessity. It seeks to reclaim midwifery for women, against the encroachment of men into this profession, and contends that women could be physicians just as well as nurses. It urges women to extend their interests to encompass politics and the concerns of the whole of humanity. It also contains advice on how to make marriages last. In Wollstonecraft’s view, marriages ought to have friendship rather than physical attraction as their basis (Kendrick 2019). Husbands and wives ought not, moreover, to be overly intimate and should maintain a degree of reserve towards each other. This said, she thought sex should be based on genuine mutual physical desire. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Wollstonecraft wanted women to aspire to full citizenship, to be worthy of it, and this necessitated the development of reason. Rational women would perceive their real duties. They would forgo the world of mere appearances, the world of insatiable needs on which eighteenth-century society was based, as Adam Smith had explained more lucidly than anyone, and of which France was the embodiment, in Wollstonecraft’s conception (Leddy 2016). | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | That she embraced the social and economic consequences of her vision of happy marriages, based on friendship and producing the next moral generation was spelled out further in her subsequent work, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794). In that work, she endeavoured, amongst other things, to assess the merits and demerits of the progress of humanity and establish the causes of French despotism. The picture she drew of ancien régime France was of a country ruled by superstition, and morally and politically degenerate. Borrowing from Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) she had drawn on previously, she sketched a possible future society in which the division of labour would be kept to a minimum and the sexes would be not only educated together but encouraged to work in family units. Single sex institutions and, for instance, all-male workshops encouraged lasciviousness in her view. She thus looked forward to a society in which small businesses and farms would provide basic, instead of superfluous, needs. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | The combination of her experience of her unrequited love for Imlay, the dictates of her own emotions, and the tribulations of a trip in Northern Europe led her to reconsider her view of the power of reason. Indeed, she was also to review her opinion of France, polite culture and manners, even Catholicism which she had abhorred, a loathing that her stay in Portugal had done much to strengthen. The Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), whose influence on travel literature as well as the Romantic movement is by no means negligible, show Wollstonecraft to have begun to espouse an increasingly nuanced view of the world, and to have sought to develop an even more fluid account of the relationship between reason, the imagination, and the passions, as well as of modernity. Thus she grew a little closer to Burke in that she came to think that the tyranny of commercial wealth might be worse than that of rank and privilege. Whilst in France, she had already begun to write less critically of the English system of government. She had witnessed the Terror, fallen in love, born a child out of wedlock, been rejected, and attempted suicide. A second suicide attempt lay ahead. So did the prospect of happiness with William Godwin, a prospect cut short by her death in childbirth. Posthumous notoriety was to follow as Wollstonecraft became identified only with the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and that work was ironically, in turn, equated with a flouting of social conventions, principally in relation to marriage. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Although she was very much encouraged by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, she received little support from fellow intellectuals in her lifetime. Even Godwin did not take to her on their first meeting. Relatively few of the foremost women writers gave Wollstonecraft their wholehearted support in the eighteenth century. She received some encouragement for her first publications from Catharine Macaulay, but the latter unfortunately died in 1791, before Wollstonecraft’s career reached its peak. Some mocked her, but rarely were her ideas genuinely assessed in the way they have come to be since the second half of the twentieth century. The leading poet, Anna Barbauld (1743–1825) was one of the few members of the radical intelligentsia of the time whose opposition to Wollstonecraft was the product of a real engagement with her views on women. By the end of the 1790s and for most of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft was derided by many, if only because of what was deemed to have been a scandalous personal life. There were, to be sure, important exceptions, especially in America (Botting and Carey 2004). But such praise as she did receive on both sides of the Atlantic came from arguably limited acquaintance with her ideas or her intellectual persona. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Thus it seemed that from the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the next, she, who had endeavoured to place marriage on a solid foundation by providing an account of the education that would prepare spouses for it, would be thought of as someone who had sought to pass as married when she wasn’t and as the mother of an illegitimate child. Much of this reputation was owed to Godwin’s frank, arguably unnecessarily frank, account of Wollstonecraft’s life, in Memoirs of the Author of a ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1798). It revealed, amongst other personal details, her relationship with Imlay and thereby cast a deep shadow over her reputation. In any event, John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women (1869) was to eclipse most other contributions to feminist debates of the period. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | In the twentieth century, and especially following the growth of feminism in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1960s, scholars disregarded the vicissitudes of Wollstonecraft’s private life and heralded her as the first English feminist. She came to be read principally within the context of the history of the women’s movement. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, however, a growing number of commentators have looked at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in its historical and intellectual context rather than in isolation or in relation to subsequent feminist theories. This has led to renewed interest in her other political writings, including her Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Wollstonecraft has now long ceased to be seen as just a scandalous literary figure, or just the embodiment of a nascent feminism which only reached maturity two hundred years later, but as an Enlightenment moral and political thinker whose works present a self-contained argument about the kind of change society would need to undergo for men and women to be virtuous in both the private and the public sphere and thereby secure the chance of a measure of happiness. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | What is more, with growing interest in reception history, the extent of her influence in Europe and beyond as been the subject of reassessments. It is becoming increasingly evident that Wollstonecraft was widely read and respected as a pioneer of woman’s rights around the world, especially in America, continental Europe, and Brazil (Botting 2013). She was translated into several languages, in the 1790s and throughout the nineteenth century (Johns 2020). | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Efforts to place Wollstonecraft’s thought within an international, and specifically an imperial, context have focused on her use of abolitionist discourses, or what Laura Brace (2016) calls the ‘social imaginary’ of anti-slavery, to criticize British society. Moira Ferguson (1994) places Wollstonecraft in dialogue with nineteenth-century representations of sexual exploitation within the colonial context by such women authors as Jane Austen and Jamaica Kincaid. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Wollstonecraft’s reference to slavery and the slave trade as “an atrocious insult to humanity” in Vindication of the Rights of Men, and her call for social justice more generally, has been noted by Amartya Sen in his The Idea of Justice (2009). Often seen as a proponent of liberal values (Sapiro 1992), Wollstonecraft continues also to placed within a republican tradition, most recently by Sandrine Bergès (2013), Alan Coffee (2014), and Lena Halldenius (2015), who have analysed her view of freedom in terms of independence and the absence of subordination to the arbitrary power of others. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | In recent years, scholars have also made use of Wollstonecraft to inform modern feminist discussions, especially those regarding autonomy, education, and nature. Catriona Mackenzie (2016) argues that Wollstonecraft’s understanding of freedom as independence is a forebear to feminist theories that emphasise female autonomy. Sandrine Bergès has compared Wollstonecraft’s model of education to modern ‘capabilities’ approaches that favour grassroots educational programmes. Barbara Seeber (2016) places Wollstonecraft within the tradition of ecofeminism: she argues that Wollstonecraft linked social hierarchies with the domination of nature by human beings. Sandrine Bergès (2016) identifies a contradiction in her position on feminist motherhood that remains relevant for feminism today. | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Twenty-first century studies have displayed new interest in the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Wollstonecraft’s work. Isabelle Bour (2019) has charted her engagement with competing epistemological models in the 1790s, while Sylvana Tomaselli (2016; 2019) asserts that Wollstonecraft engaged closely with the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, as well as Plato’s theory of knowledge, Emily Dumler-Winckler (2019) argues that Wollstonecraft appropriated and sometimes subverted a set of conceptual tools from theology in order to make her arguments for women’s equality. Wollstonecraft’s complex relationship with the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been investigated by Christopher Brooke (2019). | wollstonecraft |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ | Whether Wollstonecraft is best seen as belonging to one tradition or any other will remain a matter of dispute. What is important to remember is that she responded to a fast changing political situation and that she continued to engage critically with public opinion, the leading intellectual and political figures of her age, and most remarkably, her own views in the light of her experiences in France, Northern Europe and Great Britain. Her critique of Burke, the English political system, even the aristocracy, became more muted as she found the continued expansion of commerce and growth of the luxury economy to lead to even greater inequities than the world it was replacing. | wollstonecraft |