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Alison Stone, "Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking to Dr. Allison Stone. Dr. Allison Stone is a professor of philosophy at Lancaster University. Her interests span the history of philosophy, post Kantian European philosophy, feminist philosophy and aesthetics. To today, she's here to talk with us about a wonderful book she published with Oxford University Press just a couple of months ago called Women's philosophers in the 19th century Britain. Alison, welcome to New Books Network.
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Dr. Allison Stone
Hi. Hi. Thank you for inviting me.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Before we talk about the book, can you tell us a little about yourself, how you became interested in philosophy and especially women philosophers?
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Dr. Allison Stone
Well, they're quite different things. So when I first got interested in philosophy, that was back when I was doing the A levels, which is the 16 to 17 year old bit of British education. And I got interested in philosophy really because I was doing one of my A levels was in classics, so we read Plato and Greek tragedies. It was partly that. And then separately, quite at random, in the library at the college, I picked up Camus the Outsider, which to me was absolutely amazing. And you know, I still love it despite all of its problems. And I would say if any single thing can be said to have got me into philosophy. It was that book, really. So as you can see from that, there were not many women philosophers amongst the things that drew me to philosophy. But I also, as an undergraduate student, I got really into feminism. And from there I became aware of feminist philosophy. And of course, most feminist philosophers are female. So I liked the fact that it meant I could read lots of women philosophers. And actually one of the first people I got really into was the French feminist philosopher Louisa Rigor. But then gradually I became aware of studies of women in, particularly in early modern philosophy, which is where most of the work has been done. And I think, for me, a really important article was this article, Disappearing ink, by Eileen O', Neill, which is from the late 1990s. But she made the point that it's not that philosophy is somehow inherently masculine. There have always been women philosophers, but they were written out of the narratives. And until then there'd been an awful lot of discussion about, is philosophy somehow inherently masculine? In what way? And so for me, it was sort of a total paradigm shift. Sort of think, oh, actually there always have been women philosophers. It's just that they've been forgotten and we need to rediscover them.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
You actually raised a couple of points which I will bring up again throughout the interview. I'm kind of interested to know how this book came about and why you decided to particularly focus on 19th century Britain.
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Dr. Allison Stone
Yeah, well, one of the other things I'd been interested in for a long time was 19th century philosophy. And I actually started off as a Hegel scholar, so I'd been interested in the 19th century for a long time without ever actually asking the question, what about the women? And it was partly a friend of mine, Kristin Gesdahl, asking me about this. That was one of the things that pushed me to begin to think about who the women philosophers of this time were. Because it seems oddly to have often been assumed there were lots of women in the early modern period, and then that we get to 1800 and suddenly they all stopped doing philosophy. And it must be because it was the rise of patriarchy and women were driven into the home. I think that's been quite a pervasive assumption, but I don't think it's true. I think it's just that people have assumed it because we haven't yet investigated women of the 19th century. And because they've not been investigated, nobody knows about them. So they don't know that there's anyone to know about. And it all kind of just reinforces itself anyway. So I started. I started out just thinking I'd write about the 19th century as a whole. But I soon realized that was just going to be unmanageable. So then I decided to narrow it down to Britain. And I started off looking at Studies of 19th century Feminism in Britain as providing a way in. And then that quite quickly led me to discovery one of the women I've got really interested in, Frances Power Cobb, because she was an important feminist. And I soon realized that she'd actually written loads of things about all sorts of areas of philosophy, pretty much every area of philosophy. So she hadn't just written about feminism. But then because of that, I came to discover where she'd been publishing, which was in Victorian periodicals. And then once I became aware that there was this thing, Victorian periodicals. That was when, you know, I began to discover lots of women who'd been publishing in this particular context, such as some of the people I talked about in the book, like Julia Wedgwood and Constance Naden, Arabella Buckley Stone. So it was really sort of, once I'd found out that that was the publishing culture then and sort of found out about the nature of how it worked and some of its peculiarities, that was then what enabled me to sort of find lots of the women philosophers.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
I really, really love the structure of the book. So you come up, you have the introduction, first chapter, which provides some background to print culture, which we'll talk about. And what I particularly like about this book is that it's kind of organized by themes. So chapter two is about naturalism, chapter three about philosophy of mind, four, meaning of evolution, then religion and morality, and finally progress in history. It's quite interesting, such a diverse range of topics for which maybe the male philosophers are famous. But then you come to understand that there has been a lot of serious discussions and thoughts also by women, which unfortunately had kind of been neglected. And like I told you before this, before we started recording, we've been reading a couple of books on women philosophers. And it's just amazing, the depth of thought. And it's just so. Also so sad that unfortunately they haven't really received the attention that they should have. But it's great that there has been this new trend to this new academic, let's say, focus on women's philosophers.
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Dr. Allison Stone
So just to comment on that, I mean, at the very. At this very moment, on the course that I'm teaching at Lancaster, which is on 19th century philosophy, we do Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Francis Power Cobb, Annie Bessant and Nietzsche. And it's tying in with what you say. The students find it really amazing how they're, you know, here's Hegel, it's Marx, there's tons and tons of literature about everything they've said and they turn to Francis Parocob and Annie Bessant and it's just this total silence. Even though both Cobb and Bessant had published loads. And so. Yeah, anyway.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Let'S talk about the first chapter. That's where you talk about the 19th century print culture, periodicals, letters, and how they actually enabled women to write philosophy for the general public. And I think it's one of the main features of women philosophy is that they use mainstream media. Let's say they wrote for the general public, which to me at least it's a way more accessible way of reading philosophy. So can you talk about the influence of the 19th century print culture, women's writing philosophy?
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Dr. Allison Stone
Yes, absolutely. So like I say as well, it was really discovering about the print culture that enabled me to understand where the women were publishing and what kind of philosophy they were doing. Really. People used to have absolutely no idea about the scale of British print culture and it was kind of almost entirely lost sight of the 19th century print culture in the 20th century. And then it was just rediscovered towards the end of the century. And at first people really underestimated the scale of it. So it's now estimated that there was at least 110,000 journals cum newspapers come magazines which all shaded into one another. It was all made possible obviously by the Industrial Revolution. And so the thing about these journals is that they weren't like specialist academic journals, but they were still scholarly. So in the case of some of them, like the Westminster Review and Contemporary Review, Macmillan's magazine, it would be articles that were 10,000 plus words. It was often reviewing books that had come out because there was also a massive increase in the amount of books that were being published over the course of the century. So it would often be that articles were kind of reviewed, but they were kind of essays as well, a bit of a hybrid form. And so one of the things that's really important to know about it is just the extent to which women were part of it. So back in 1990, it was estimated that 13% of authors in the journals were female. And it's probably more, I mean that's nearly 25 years ago now, so at least 13%. And one of the things that made this possible was that up until the 1860s it was normal for nonfiction articles in journals to be anonymous. And once then it began to be more normal for them to be signed. It was still really common for loads of people to use pseudonyms or, or initials. So there was no reason to exclude someone because they were a woman, since nobody was going to know that the article was by a woman anyway.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And towards the end of this first chapter, you talk about the importance of, let's say, some strategies. Oh, sorry, let me correct myself. That's a question I should have asked kind of later. Some strategies that, say, you employ to get around these patriarchal assumptions about the 19th century print culture. And you have some examples. You talk about Martino, George Eliot, Francis Power Cop. So can you talk about them, please?
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Dr. Allison Stone
Absolutely. Well, anonymity itself was. Pseudonymity was a strategy. In fact, quite a lot of George Eliot's journal articles were anonymous. And obviously then George Eliot is itself a pseudonym for Marian Evans. So that was one thing. And with Harriet Martineau as well, she often, well, she often published things under her name, but she also quite often used pseudonyms and she had some anonymous things. So sometimes she used the pseudonym V for lots of her earlier philosophical articles. And there's other things I found by her with the pseudonym from the mountain. So there was all sorts. So that was one strategy. Another thing was to claim to be popularizing, because if you portrayed yourself as merely popularizing something that a man had thought, then you couldn't really be criticized in the same way for sort of getting ideas above your station. So Martineau, she wrote, she expected she was going to die of illness, which turned out to be false, but she wrote an obituary for herself in advance where she said she could popularize while she could neither discover nor invent. So you get lots of these sorts of disclaimers. And just another thing I'm going to mention, and this is a very different strategy, but there was quite a widespread belief that although women were intellectually inferior to men, that they were morally superior to men. And so women would make use of this to. If they, if they did philosophy in almost quite a moralistic way, it meant that they could claim to have this feminine authority about morality from which they were speaking. So it does mean that some of women's philosophizing from this time can now strike us as being quite moralistic. But it is because it was something that they could use to say that they needed to be speaking out about philosophy because of their moral expertise, as it were.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Why were, let's say, women philosophers contribution forgotten and erased from history. What were some of the reasons behind that? You mentioned two important reasons. One of them is. And you have professionalization and specialization of British philosophy from mid-1870s. And then you also talk about two very important cases, case studies, let's say, about cop and also something called Coulomb Affair and Hudson Reports. It would be great if you could talk about them, please.
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Dr. Allison Stone
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that professionalization was really important in why these women got forgotten. So this periodical culture that we've been talking about, it wasn't specialist. So these journals such as Westminster Review and Contemporary Review, there would be contributions from lots of what we now see as different disciplines altogether. It was non specialist. And then from about the 1870s onwards, specialization began to come in and the idea that you must have expertise in some kind of local area in order to be able to say anything serious and make any kind of serious headway on a topic. And so you began at this period to get specialist journals like the first specialist philosophy journal, the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. You also had the Aristotelian Society itself. But in all the disciplines, these specialist institutions began to form and basically the bowl started rolling towards a situation where in order to be able to speak credibly on topic, you needed to be an academic. But because for most of the preceding period, women hadn't been able to go to university. They could go to university to a limited extent by the end of the century, but still it meant there were very few women who could become professional academics. So nearly all of the professional academics were men. And at the same time they saw the philosophy that had been occurring in these journals basically as amateur. So I think it was those two things, the fact that the academics were nearly all men, and it was that they were defining themselves against this earlier culture that they saw as amateur. So then I also, with these two case studies. So one of them concerned Frances Power Cobb, because in the 19th century, in 19th century Britain, her standing was quite high. But the thing that I think really helped to ensure that she was left out of the history of philosophy was the fact that she was also the leader of the move against animal experimentation, or vivisection, as it was then called. And so there was Cobb on one side, but there was the mainstream of science which more and more was using animal experimentation on the other. And she began to be attacked for being hysterical and sentimental. And so she came to be seen as sort of the wrong sort, you know, as this over emotional woman who was sort of holding back progress. And it wasn't the sort of figure with which someone who wanted to make themselves out as a credible expert. You Wouldn't want to associate yourself with her. And something related in a diplomatic, very different way happened to Elena Blavatsky, who was the founder of Theosophy, the first alternative religion. And at the time, loads of philosophers and people from all kinds of fields that they discussed Blavatsky's ideas. I mean, she was always controversial, but people were really interested in her ideas. But basically the problem in her case was that there was one controversy about her that was called the Coulomb Affair. And then there was also this Hodgson Report, which was put together by the Society for Psychical Research, which was quite recently formed at the time. And they basically concluded that lots of things Blavatsky had been doing were fraudulent. And so although this related to sort of other parts of her work rather than her writings, it obviously kind of undermined her authority in terms of her philosophical writings as well. And what I found really interesting is that in both cases with Cobb and Blavatsky, they were both accused of being frauds. The same language. In both cases, they were accused of being frauds and impostors who didn't really know about the things that they claimed to talk about. So it's sort of the beginnings of why women in philosophy might suffer from imposter syndrome. I guess.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Towards the end of this chapter.
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Dr. Allison Stone
You.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Kind of ask for restoring 19th century British philosophers into Freeman philosophers, into the narratives of history philosophy, and you have some recommendations. How can that be achieved?
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Dr. Allison Stone
Right. Well, so I suggested that when we look back and try to find the women philosophers from this time, that we shouldn't be expecting them to look like professional philosophers as we have come to know it. I mean, some of them can. Some of them can look relatively like that. So Mary shepherd, who was earlier ON in the 19th century, in a way, she can look relatively like that, but we shouldn't require that everyone be doing that. And I suggested that we should be open to various different forms of writing that women used in order to philosophize, so letters, but also in some cases, writing fiction. I mean, both Harriet Martineau and George Eliot made philosophical use of writing fiction, or women may have done editing and translating. So Ada Lovelace, her thoughts about artificial intelligence are contained within her notes, which are contained within her translation of an article about Babbage's sort of prototypical computers. So she kind of, you know, embedded her own thoughts within what purported to be just a translation of someone else's work. And I suppose as an overarching thing, I would say that to discover these women philosophers, we need to Familiarize ourselves with this particular print culture in the journals of the time and understand these particular conventions around anonymity and pseudonymity. I mean, in a sense, those may seem like part of the. They may seem just part of cultural background rather than shaping the kind of philosophy that was done. I mean, but they do shape it to a certain extent. But it's just also that unless we understand this culture a bit, we won't know how to find the writings by women. We'll be reliant upon what has already been plucked out of this culture and sort of packaged into kind of self contained books. And of course, women have almost entirely been left out of that.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Now let's talk about some of the main philosophical themes. Your second chapter is about naturalism. So I'm kind of curious to know what was the main debate about naturalism and anti naturalism. I know it's a very difficult and broad question, but if you can, you know, broadly discuss this and then say what are. And it's a chance to name some of these women philosophers that you have included in the book. What was the main contribution to this debate in the 19th century?
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Dr. Allison Stone
Yeah, so by naturalism, to simplify, I understand it to be the view that natural science can tell us about everything and that natural science relies on an empirical method. And so therefore I was taking anti naturalism to be the idea that there are other sources of knowledge besides empirical natural science. Now, in terms of what women philosophers contributed to this. So there was a book that came out in 1851, so absolutely at the middle of the century. And this book was, it was just at the center of this huge storm of controversy. So this is Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, which was partly by Harriet Martineau. Well, she, she published it, but it drew on letters that she had exchanged with Henry George Atkinson. So it's. Yeah, I guess it counts as jointly authored. And basically they, they took a naturalist view. Everything can be understood using empirical science, empirical natural science. And so consequently they said that all there is to the mind is the brain and there's no supernatural forces or powers, including that there's no free will, all of our actions are determined and there's no reason to believe that there's a God or that he's created the world or that human beings are at the center of creation in any way. So all of this was, I mean, it was just immensely controversial. It was really this huge storm. But there were also other women who argued against naturalism. So Frances Para Cobb argued that you couldn't make sense of moral requirements on this basis that moral moral requirements presuppose a moral law which presupposes a divine legislator to have laid down the moral law so that we have to have religion to have morality for her and in a very different way at the very end of the century. Victoria Welby she argued that we can't make sense of meaning within naturalist terms because we only investigate empirical facts in the first place, because we have some sense of what their wider significance is. So rather than empirical facts being what gives give rise to meaning, she thought, you've got to have meaning and significance first in order to even be examining any facts.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
One of my favorite chapters of the book was Evolution and discussions about whether Darwin was compatible with religion, whether Darwin wasn't compatible with religion. And you talk about Julia Wedgwood's engagement with her ideology ideas and how with Darwin's ideas and how her ideas about evolution sort of evolved. Can you talk about that one please? And tell us who was Julia Wedgwood in general for? Because that's a name I hadn't to be honest, I hadn't heard that name before reading your book.
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Dr. Allison Stone
And actually there's just last year as well, a great biography of her came out by Brown. So Julia Wedgwood is probably the most forgotten of all the people that I've talked about in this book. Amongst other things she was Darwin's niece. But she also I mean she was just another of these people who published a huge amount of things in the journals. Some of it was anonymous, some of it was signed and she wrote across loads of areas of philosophy, but in terms of evolution. So she brought out. She started off with a dialogue that she brought out in 1860, where she argued that Darwinism and religion were compatible along the lines that God has set the evolutionary process going. And she also thought that he'd planned out the basic forms of the different species, including the human species, and that he'd intended for us to have the ability to be moral agents. And so he'd planned this out. But then the course of evolution is how the plan becomes realized or implemented and how we acquire the sorts of bodies that enable us to have the powers that God had always planned for us. Now, it might sound like she was avoiding the challenge of Darwinism because I guess we've come quite often to think of it as this sort of radical challenge to religion and all kinds of religiously based ideas. But from her perspective, she was defending Darwinism by saying Christians don't need to reject it, they don't need to be afraid of it. But anyway, that was how she started off. But basically, her views underwent quite a lot of change over time. And so by the end of the century, she was taking a more, I suppose we could call it a more conservative view that she said Darwinism had undermined morality because it had shown that everything changes and evolves, everything is in flux, so there can't be any kind of fixed morality, moral standards. And then her response to that was to say that you can't question everything. If you question everything, you won't have any kind of ground left to stand on from which to kind of direct your questions, as it were. She thought, you know, certainly that you can't question everything all at once. There has to be something unquestioned. And for her, that had to include religious faith and moral convictions. So she changed towards a more conservative view.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Another philosopher you discuss in this chapter is Arabella Buckley's, who argued that Darwin's position in his book Descent of Man is compatible with both religion and morality. So that sounds like a very fascinating argument. Can you talk about that one? But what was your main argument about Darwin's position?
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Dr. Allison Stone
Yeah, so I suppose I should start off by saying what Darwin's view was. So Darwin, he had argued that because we are group animals, that over a long period of time, selection has favored those who are more social and cooperative, and those traits have been passed on. So he thought that you didn't need to invoke religion to have a cooperative morality, that you could get it on an evolutionary basis. But he also was opposing those who thought that evolution entailed aggression and competition. He was saying it had a more, a more optimistic outcome. And Buckley's response to this was to follow this idea of cooperative morality, but she thought you still really needed to bring in Christianity to get it. So she again said that God has set evolution in motion and he's established the laws that regulate the evolutionary process. And she also thought that he had planted the seeds of social cooperativeness within us, which evolution then has developed further. But I think what's interesting is that the reason why she wanted to bring God back in was that she thought plausibly evolution on its own would suggest that really it's all about the survival of the fittest or the survival of the strongest and might makes right and so on. And so she thought in order to get the cooperativeness that Darwin wanted, it had to be backed up with a religious element as well.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
You also talk about Kabul in this chapter, who viewed evolution to be an account of nature and not ethics, which is again a fascinating argument that we need to kind of separate evolution from discussions of ethics. So what was her argument in that regard?
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Dr. Allison Stone
Well, so she took in a way a quite different view from Wedgwood and Buckley because she thought that evolutionary pressures did or had selected for aggression and competition and the survival of the fittest, in Herbert Spencer's phrase. So she didn't think that you could get this kind of cooperative ethics out of evolution at all. She thought the real implications of evolution were really quite nasty. And Darwin had mentioned this imaginary example of the cultivated hive bee that thinks it's its sacred duty to kill off the unproductive members of the hive during winter. And Cobb thought that this showed what evolutionary morality really boiled down to basically kill off the weak members of the social group if you need to, and justify yourself saying that this was your sacred duty. So she did accept that we are evolved as natural creatures, but she thought that you had to get morality from a different place, that you couldn't get it from evolution, it had to come. So she saw us as these, as kind of two sided beings. On the one hand we're physical and we're evolved, but on the other hand we're also spiritual and in relation to God's moral commandments. But that was, I mean, not many people I suppose, would agree with that now. But I think that again, the reasons why she wanted to say that are quite interesting because she thought that was the only way that you could avoid a position where sort of might makes right. That the only way you could have obligations to those who are weak or infirm or struggling was not on an evolutionary basis. It had to come from religion.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
One of the philosophers, including this book that I was really amazed by was Georgia Elliot. So I studied English literature myself. So I tend to think of her as a novelist. And it was only last year that I realized that she was very much engaged with philosophical ideas. She translated, I think, Feuerbach's book from. From German into English and translation. That was kind of forgotten, but it was great to know that. I think it was last year, a couple of years ago it was published by university publisher. Again, that translation, I don't remember.
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Dr. Allison Stone
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
So can you talk about her significance in the history of women's philosophy or the main ideas that she engaged with? What was her contribution to philosophy?
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Dr. Allison Stone
I mean, her contribution was really quite big, so there's so many things that you could pick out. So in the 1850s, she anonymously was the co editor of this journal, the Westminster Review. And this was one of the. The big journals, the most prestigious ones. So in a way, through that role, she had a huge influence. There were the translations like you've mentioned, and those translations, the translation of Feuerbach and of Strauss, they were really important for bringing German religious criticism into Britain. So both of those things were quite huge. And then there's also the fact that her novels themselves have a philosophical basis, because she thought that the central thing that the novel can do is expand what we now call our empathy for others, our imaginative sympathy with others. And she thought that then leads into sort of emotional sympathy, of feeling the things that others feel, and then that would translate practically into us treating others around us better. So she saw literature as having this big moral role that it could motivate us to treat other people better. And that was connected with her translations of religious criticism as well, because Eliot became a secularist. So she thought religion couldn't continue to play this moral role that it had used to do, and something else was needed to play that role instead. And that something was literature for her. So those are just a few things. Yeah, I mean, there would be another set of things you could pick out as well, because she was in this long partnership with George Henry Lewis, who wrote a number of philosophical books. He wrote this biographical history of philosophy that was a bestseller for most of the century. So he himself was pretty influential as a philosopher. But their ideas came out of a dialogue with one another. So she had quite a big influence, even if some of it has been a Bit hidden from view until now.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Well, to me, the idea of this podcast is to introduce our listeners to wide range of topics that women philosophers have talked about and also different their works, their names. So unfortunately we can't really delve deep into their discussions and that's why I do encourage our listeners to read the book. It's a very accessible book, as a matter of fact, a very accessible book, and it just gives you an amazing idea of how deep their thinking was. And so I just said that because in the next couple of questions that I'm going to ask will be brought. And as I said, the intention is simply to introduce the audience to the range of topics that women philosophers engaged with. So you have a chapter on the question of religion, atheism, secularism. Can you just briefly tell us who were the main philosophers in this, who engaged with these ideas and what was their contribution to the questions of atheism or religion?
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Dr. Allison Stone
Yeah, well, I mean, this was. It was just a huge. It was a huge topic. So there were quite a few women who were secularist or agnostic or atheist. These all blended together somewhat at the time. So Harriet Martineau, I mentioned earlier her letters on the laws of man's nature and development. Martineau had actually started up a devout member of this particular Christian sect, Unitarianism, but she gradually abandoned her faith and became. It's open to debate what to call her, whether a secularist or an atheist or an agnostic, but certainly she'd abandoned religion. And some of the others in that chapter that I talked about were George Eliot came in here as a secularist and also Annie Besant, who was one of the leaders for a while of the National Secular Society. And I also brought in Vernon Lee, who was again a secularist, and then on the other hand, for the defender of religion in the chapter, I focused on Cobb. So, as I've mentioned, she thought that you can't have morality without religion and that the highest level of morality specifically needs the Christian religion, particularly because of the need for there to be a divine legislator to establish a moral law, but also because she thought that suffering will seem overwhelmingly terrible to us unless we can believe in an afterlife where things are going to be better, better. And interestingly, there were some real debates amongst these women about these issues. So Cobb had heard Bessant talk in defence of a secular morality and she was horrified. And then later Bessant wrote a critique of one of Cobb's articles defending Christianity. And Vernon Lee also did a critique of Cobb in the form of a dialogue. And Cobb replied to it. So they really debated one another on this issue. And, I mean, I think there's so many interesting things that come out of that, such as? One of the points that Cobb makes is that she thinks people believe they can just sort of easily stride into secularism and nothing will be lost. And she thinks that Christian ideas remain much more influential upon us and upon secularists and atheists than they realize. And she also thinks, however, that if over centuries, people genuinely were to escape from the Christian inheritance, then she thought they would be left kind of with no moral compass at all and with a completely meaningless existence, which is quite bleak. But. So there's loads of issues entangled in it that are still quite relevant, I think.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And the final chapter, that was actually one of my favorite one as well. You talk about the engagement with the idea of progress in history, and some of the ideas could these days be considered to be Eurocentric, or some of them might have justified colonialism in the name of progress. So can you talk about that aspect of history of women's philosophy?
- [49:30]
Dr. Allison Stone
Yeah, absolutely. So I looked in this chapter at Harriet Martineau and Cobb and Wedgwood and Blavatsky, and they've all got these grand narratives about progress and Martineau and Cobb and Wedgwood, they all think in terms of a progression of different world religions leading up to Europe, starting either in ancient India or in Egypt, for Martino, and then leading up to modern Europe. Whereas, I mean, Blavatsky has got quite a different view. So she's still got a sequence of worldviews that, for her, it begins in ancient India and then it goes through to modern Europe. But the difference is that she doesn't see modern Europe as being unequivocally the most advanced. So she thinks it's intellectually the most advanced, but it is spiritually bankrupt and cut off from ancient spiritual wisdom. And she thought that to regain that wisdom, Europeans needed to learn from the traditions of ancient India. So, I mean, you can see how she's kind of one of the originators of the new age, really, and of sort of alternative spirituality. And because she's got that more ambiguous view, Her views didn't necessarily justify or rationalize colonialism, whereas this is something of a feature for the other three. Wedgwood was fairly explicit about supporting the British Empire, and so was Cobb. Martineau did, but it was with more limitations that she certainly thought if it was about economic exploitation, that that was unacceptable, so that it was only justifiable on moral grounds. And then that once colonized peoples had reached majority, that they should become independent. But still, you know, that still meant that. That she was basically supportive of the empire. Whereas in the case of Blavatsky, because she saw Eastern religious traditions as being more advanced, that was something that Indian nationalists began to use. So they drew on Theosophy, amongst many other things, but they drew on it to support the case for Indian national independence on the grounds that, well, if. If Indian religious traditions are more advanced spiritually than European ones, then in dominating India and colonizing it, the British are kind of dragging it down to a lower spiritual level than it would be at if India was independent. So, I mean, but I should say people have still criticized Blavatsky and quite understandably for having a version of Orientalism, and she has her own sort of particular version of the race discourse that had become such a feature of British culture by that time. So although her ideas were more ambiguous than those of the other women, they can still certainly be criticized.
- [53:42]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Before ending this conversation, is there any other project that you're currently working on, any other monograph or book that is about to come out soon?
- [53:53]
Dr. Allison Stone
I don't think anything will come out very soon, but what I'm working on is a study of women's thought on aesthetics in this period, 19th century Britain, because this was one of the many areas of philosophy that I had to leave out. And you've mentioned that, you know, that I do cover quite a range of areas of philosophy in this book. And in fact, it may be worth me saying here that I deliberately chose not to have any social and political philosophy in it because I thought that. That people will often think that that's the main thing that women of this time would have written about, partly because they were oppressed as women. So they would have had plenty of social and political problems to write about. But because I wanted to show that they actually talked about lots of things, I left that out. But one of the other things that I left out was aesthetic. So I've been. Yeah, so I'm working away on what women thought about aesthetics at this time.
- [55:07]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Cool. So hopefully soon we'll see your new book about that, and hopefully we'll be able to talk to you about that book. Professor Alison Stone, thank you very much for talking to us about women philosophers of the 19th century England.
- [55:22]
Dr. Allison Stone
Thank you. You.
- [55:34]
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- [56:04]
Dr. Allison Stone
Com.