Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women.

This book advances the rediscovery of forgotten women philosophers in the nineteenth century who have been unjustly left out of the philosophical canon and omitted from narratives about the history of philosophy. Women often did philosophy in a public setting in this period, engaging with practical issues of social concern and using philosophy to make the world a better place. This book highlights some of women’s interventions against slavery, for women’s rights, and on morality, moral agency, and the conditions of a flourishing life. The chapters are on: Mary Shepherd’s idea of life; the collaborative authorships and feminist perspectives of Anna Doyle Wheeler and Harriet Taylor Mill; the roles of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in the American women’s rights movement; the influence of classical German philosophy on Lydia Maria Child’s abolitionism; George Eliot’s understanding of agency; the views of agency and resistance developed by Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth from within the abolitionist tradition; Annie Besant’s search for a metaphysical basis for ethics, which she ultimately found in Hinduism; E. E. Constance Jones on the dualism of practical reason; Marietta Kies on altruism and positive rights; and Anna Julia Cooper’s black feminist conception of the right to growth. The book unearths an important and neglected chapter in the history of women philosophers, showing the variety and vitality of nineteenth-century women’s intellectual lives. Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America will be of great use to students and researchers interested in Philosophy, Women’s Studies, and the politics of gender at the heart of British and American societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

This is the first book to provide comprehensive coverage of the full range of philosophical writing in Britain in the nineteenth century. A team of experts provide new accounts of both major and lesser-known thinkers, and explores the diverse approaches in the period to logic and metaphysics, the passions, morality, criticism, and politics.--

Helen Macfarlane, a young British woman, was living in Vienna when she was radicalized by the 1848 Revolution. On returning to England in 1850, she became a journalist for the radical wing of the Chartist movement. The Chartists received support from such luminaries as Karl Marx and Fredrich Engles; the latter had written on the movement's political significance. It was Marx who described Macfarlane as the most original writer in the Chartist press. Macfarlane was the first English translator of The Communist Manifesto. Her original translation is included in this edition. She is also the first of the British to comment, critically and extensively, on the revolutionary implications of Hegel's philosophy. After having been hidden for a century her stature as a revolutionary, writer, and feminist emerges in David Black's seminal work. With diligent research into her life and work, Black, in Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid 19th Century England, recreates her intellectual and political world at a key turning point in European history. This work also includes Macfarlane's original translation of The Communist Manifesto.

This Oxford Handbook celebrates the work of trailblazing women in the history of modern philosophy. Through thirty-one original chapters, it engages with the work of women philosophers spanning the long nineteenth century in the German tradition, and covers women's contribution to major philosophical movements, including romanticism and idealism, socialism, and Marxism, Nietzscheanism, feminism, phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism. It opens with a section on figures, offering essays focused on fifteen thinkers in this tradition, before moving on to sections of essays on movement and topics. Across the volume's chapters, essays examine women's contributions to key philosophical areas such as epistemology and metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, ecology, education, and the philosophy of nature.

W. J. Mander presents a history of metaphysics in nineteenth-century Britain. He traces the story of the development and interplay of three great schools of thought, the agnostics, the empiricists, and the idealists, and their different responses to the idea of an ultimate but unknowable way that things really are in themselves.

Women on Philosophy of Art is the first study of women's philosophies of art in long nineteenth-century Britain. It looks at seven women spanning the time from the Enlightenment to the beginning of modernism. They are Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, Emilia Dilke, and Vernon Lee. The central issue that concerned them was how art related to morality and religion. Baillie and Martineau treated art as an agency of moral instruction, whereas Dilke and Lee argued that art must be made for beauty's sake. Barbauld, Jameson, and Cobbe thought that beauty and religion were linked, while other women believed that art and religion must be decoupled. Other topics explored are gender and genius, tragedy, literary realism, why we enjoy the sufferings of fictional characters, the hierarchy of the art-forms, whether art can transcend its historical circumstances, and critical issues around the artistic canon. Examining the print culture that made these women's interventions possible, this book shows that these women were doing a particular kind of philosophy of art, which was interdisciplinary and closely tied to artistic criticism and practice. The book traces how these seven women influenced one another, as well as engaging with their male contemporaries. But unlike their male interlocutors, these women have been unjustly left out of narratives about the history of aesthetics. By including these women, we can enrich and broaden our understanding of the history of philosophy of art.