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Introduction
In the seventeenth century and early 1700s, several women thinkers discuss the concept of liberty in its various metaphysical, moral, and political guises. Among these women are Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Gabrielle Suchon, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Sarah Chapone, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Emilie Du Châtelet. Some of these writers touch on issues to do with freedom and determinism, such as the problem of reconciling the existence of human free will with a purely materialist theory of causation. Some raise problems for free will based on the fact that the mind is frequently incapable of overcoming the influence of the passions and other antecedent causes. Others extend their views about human agency to moral and political issues concerning liberty, with a specific focus on the freedom of women as a socio-political group (for overviews, see Broad and Detlefsen 2017; Broad 2014a).
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References
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Broad, J. (2020). Liberty, Women on. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_424-1
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