Abstract
In 1694, Mary Astell (1666–1731) published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, in which she advocates establishing a “Monastery” or “Religious Retirement” for women to provide them with a “convenient and blissful recess from the noise and hurry of the World” (73).1 In 1697, she published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, subtitled, “Wherein a Method is offer’d for the improvement of their Minds.” As various scholars have noted, this “method” has much in common with the method advocated by Descartes, as well as by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole in their 1693 Logic or the Art of Thinking, which itself follows a Cartesian path.2 And it is not just in her epistemology that Astell seems Cartesian; she also endorses Descartes’ dualism of mind and body. Like Descartes, Astell links this dualistic ontology with a conception of method in which a thinker seeks certain knowledge by eschewing the information provided by the senses (what Descartes calls “adventitious ideas”), focusing instead on the deliverances of reason alone. Descartes calls this absolutely certain knowledge “scientia,” while Astell calls it “science.”3
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Notes
Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 73.
Margaret Atherton points out that Astell’s rules for reasoning resemble those of Descartes. See Margaret Atherton, “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason,” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 24.
Patricia Springborg points out the influence of Arnauld and Nicole on Astell. See Springborg, “Introduction,” in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies by Mary Astell, ed. Patricia Springborg (Broadview: Peterborough, Ontario, 2002), 31.
René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12. For the Latin, see Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. 7, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin/C.N.R.S., 1957–76; reprint, Paris: Vrin, 1996), 17.
See also Mary Astell, The Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (London: Printed by S.H. by R. Wilkin, 1705), 14.
The characterization of Cartesian scientia as a “rarefied exercise” comes from Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 46.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 536–8.
For a clear discussion of Locke’s account of knowledge, see David Owen, “Locke on Reasoning,” Chapter 3, in Hume’s Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Joan Kinnaird, “Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism,” Journal of British Studies 19.1 (Autumn 1979): 62.
René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 207–8.
Springborg gets this backward in her Introduction to A Serious Proposal and in her recent book on Astell. See Springborg, “Introduction,” 8 and Springborg, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 109.
For further discussion of Cartesian clarity and distinctness, the natural light and innate ideas, see Deborah Boyle, Descartes on Innate Ideas (London: Continuum, 2009).
Lisa Shapiro, “Volume Editor’s Introduction,” in The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 30.
Cynthia Bryson, “Mary Astell: Defender of the ‘Disembodied Mind,’” Hypatia 13.4 (Fall 1998): 42.
Alice Sowaal emphasizes this point. See Alice Sowaal, “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom,” Philosophy Compass 2.2 (2007): 230.
Mary Astell and John Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, ed. E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 87.
Damaris Masham, Occasional Thoughts In Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (London: Printed for A. and J. Churchil, 1705), 190.
Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (Oxford: Printed at the Theatre, 1673). anglican-history.org/women/calling/wives.html. See section 47. Accessed June 25, 2008.
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© 2011 Judy A. Hayden
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Boyle, D. (2011). Astell and Cartesian “Scientia”. In: Hayden, J.A. (eds) The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118430_7
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