1.2 Philosophy with Karen Detlefsen

This week’s episode is based on an interview we conducted with Karen Detlefsen, professor of Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Karen takes us through the so-called ‘standard narrative’ of early modern philosophy and illustrates how it serves to exclude very many important thinkers from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Resources

  • Châtelet Gabrielle-Emilie Du, and Judith P. Zinsser. *Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings*. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

    O’Neill, Eileen. “Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy.” *Hypatia* 20, no. 3, 2005.

    Sloan, Philip R. “Émilie Du Châtelet, and the Origins of French Vitalism,” in Charles Wolfe (ed.) *Philosophy of Biology Before Biology*. Routledge, 2018.

  • Anderson, Wilda C., and Pierre Joseph Macquer. *Between the Library and the Laboratory: the Language of Chemistry in Eighteenth-Century France*. Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

    Brading, Katherine. *Émilie Du Châtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science*. New York, NY: Routledge, 2019.

    Broad, Jacqueline, and Karen Detlefsen. *Women and Liberty, 1600-1800: Philosophical Essays*. Oxford University Press, 2017.

    Buchenau, Stefanie, and Roberto Lo Presti. *Human & Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy & Medicine*. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.

    Châtelet, Emilie-Gabrielle Du. *Les lettres de la Marquise du Châtelet*, (ed.) by Theodore Besterman, Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1958.

    Clucas, Stephen. ‘Joanna Stephens's Medicine and the Experimental Philosophy,’ in Zinsser, *Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science*, 141–58; Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.

    Conway, Alison. *The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England*, 1680-1750, University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2010.

    Detlefsen, Karen and Janiak, Andrew. *Émilie Du Châtelet*, forthcoming.

    Hutton, Sarah. ‘Emilie Du Châtelet’s Institutions de physique as a document in the history of French Newtonianism,’ *Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science*, 2004.

    Hutton, Sarah. *Anne Conway: a Woman Philosopher*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

    Mandeville, Bernard. *The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits*. Düsseldorf: Wirtschaft und Finanzen, 1990.

    Newton, Isaac. *The Correspondence of Isaac Newton*, edited by H.W. Turnbull, J.F.Scott, A.R. Hall, and L. Tilling, Cambridge University Press, 1959-77.

    Park, Peter K. J. *Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830*. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.

    Shapiro, Lisa. “Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical Canon.” *Journal of the American Philosophical Association* 2, no. 3. 2016.

    Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. *Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus*. Mineola, NY: Calla Edition, an imprint of Dover Publications, Inc., 2016.

    Smith, Justin E. H. *The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

    Wollstonecraft, Mary. *Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman*. Outlook Verlag, 2018.

    Zinsser, Judith P., and Julie Candler Hayes. *Emilie Du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science*. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2006.