About

​Project Overview 

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Despite growing interest in women philosophers of the early modern period, studies on eighteenth-century British moral philosophy continue to  focus predominantly or exclusively on male philosophers. Excluding women philosophers  from this discussion is problematic not just because they actively contributed to the moral debates  of their day, but also because narratives shift if more consideration is given to moral questions and  practical concerns that feature centrally in writings by women such as Mary Astell, Sarah Chapone,  Mary Lee Chudleigh, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Catharine Macaulay, Damaris Masham, Susanna  Newcome, and Mary Wollstonecraft. For instance, many women emphasize the importance of  education for moral development and offer concrete practical advice for improving intellectual  capacities and for cultivating habits and a moral character. Women’s capacity to reason and to be  educated feature centrally in arguments for women’s rights and the equality of men and women.  Women also make important contributions to philosophical debates about love and mastery of  emotions. For instance, mastering grief or fear of death is a concern for many women due to high  mortality rates during pregnancy, childbirth, and childhood. 

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BMoral is the first detailed and systematic study of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy that  is inclusive of writings by both male and female philosophers. It is worth noting that female  philosophers interacted not only with each other and with male philosophers who are well known  today but also with other male philosophers who tend to be neglected in current scholarship. 

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BMoral’s overall research question is: How can women and their philosophical  contributions as well as neglected male philosophers who have been unduly forgotten,  ignored, or written out of histories be better integrated into histories of 18th-century British  moral philosophy? This overall question can be divided into the following core research  questions: 

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(Q1) How do male and female philosophers approach theoretical and practical moral issues in  18th-century Britain? What previously overlooked semantic patterns does digital text analysis help  reveal? 

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(Q2) What unique contributions do women make to eighteenth-century British moral philosophy? How  distinct is their perspective? What role do they play in the intellectual networks of their day?

 

(Q3) What themes have been neglected or have not received sufficient attention in existing narratives? 

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Each set of questions Q1–Q3 will be addressed in a corresponding work package.

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Since moral views commonly consider relations to ourselves, to others, and to God and the  world, BMoral will pay special attention to how 18th-century British moral philosophers understand  relations to ourselves, others, and to God and the world and will tackle questions such as the  following: 

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SELF: Who am I? What duties do I have towards myself? How can I improve as a self or person?  How can I become a moral agent? How can I master my passions? How can I develop personally  and morally? What practical obstacles can hinder personal and moral development (e.g. lack of  access to education)?

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OTHERS: In what relation do I stand to others? What duties do I have towards others? Is it  permissible to be partial towards family members and friends? In what ways can and should we  love others? What is friendship and how can we best cultivate it? In what, if any, circumstances is  slavery permissible? If so, what are the rights and duties of slaves and masters? Do animals have  moral status and what is our relation to them? 

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GOD AND WORLD: In what relations do I stand towards God and the world? What duties do I have towards God? Can humans be moral, even if God does not exist? Should humans devote their life towards God? In what, if any, sense does love of God exclude the love of other human beings? What is the place of humans in the world and is this morally significant? Are humans part of a larger whole such as a structured universe? 

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BMoral will prioritise questions and themes in relation to self, others, and God and the world that have been neglected or understudied so far. Thereby we expect to recover further new themes.  In addressing the core research questions, the project aims (i) to change the focus of current  histories of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy not only by taking seriously contributions by  female and neglected male eighteenth-century British philosophers, but also by showing how they  participated in eighteenth-century intellectual networks, and by foregrounding philosophical themes that  have received insufficient attention; and (ii) to advance a novel transdisciplinary methodology for the study of women and other neglected philosophers in the history of philosophy that builds on recent digital humanities (DH) research. Computational methods for semantic text analysis make it possible to identify a subset of relevant texts in a large corpus and to analyse how  semantically similar different texts in the corpus are. Additionally, we will use quantitative methods  for analysing intellectual and social networks. We expect to discover so far overlooked networks  of semantic influence and social and intellectual interaction. These discoveries offer new insights into the philosophical debates, influences, and legacies, and make it possible to revise and correct existing narratives. 

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METHODOLOGY 

The project is divided into four work packages (short ‘WP’).  

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WP0 Corpus 

A core Corpus1, which focuses on selected texts from the first half of the eighteenth-century and  includes writings by both male and female authors, has already been identified. We will kick-start  and fine-tune the workflow of WP1–WP3 with Corpus1, before repeating the tasks with a  significantly larger Corpus2 that extends until the end of the eighteenth century. The tasks of this  work package include refining Corpus2 by identifying potentially relevant authors and texts;  transcribing previously unpublished manuscripts; and converting texts that are presently only  accessible as facsimile document images into machine-readable texts using Optical Character  Recognition (OCR).  

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WP1 Moral theories and practices 

This WP will analyse, classify, and assess how eighteenth-century male and female British  philosophers approach theoretical and practical moral issues. All existing studies of 18th-century  moral writings have focused on smaller corpora and often focused predominantly on male authors.  BMoral’s larger and more inclusive corpus calls for a reassessment of existing narratives. As part  of this WP we will computationally analyse the texts in the corpus. We expect to identify semantic  patterns, as well as semantic similarities and differences and examine conceptual changes over time.  The results of the computational text analysis will be used to select relevant subsets of the corpus  for close reading and philosophical interpretation and for testing hypotheses about eighteenth-century  British moral philosophy. We expect to recover writings that have received insufficient attention  in current scholarship. This will enable us to assess in what ways existing narratives about eighteenth-century British moral philosophy need to be supplemented, revised, or corrected. 

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WP2 Women’s contributions 

This WP will analyse and assess women’s contributions to eighteenth-century British moral philosophy, the extent to which they have a distinct perspective, and their role in eighteenth-century intellectual networks. One goal of this WP is to construct, analyse, and visualise correspondence, social and  intellectual networks of philosophers in eighteenth-century Britain paying special attention to women’s  role and centrality in them. Another goal is to computationally analyse and compare moral writings by women and men and to assess the extent to which they differ. On this basis, we will assess whether women have a distinct perspective about moral issues generally or only about specific  themes. As part of this work, we will examine whether women philosophers fit into overall moral  frameworks that have been identified in studies that focus predominantly on male authors. Further, we will consider  whether and how their approaches to learning, education, and personal and moral development differ from the views of their male contemporaries that were prominent in university settings.  Additionally, we will identify and evaluate important contributions by women philosophers to eighteenth-century British moral philosophy, paying special attention to practical concerns and core themes  in their writings.  

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WP3 Recovering and interpreting new themes 

This WP focuses on recovering, analysing, and interpreting themes in the corpus of eighteenth-century British moral writings by male and female philosophers that have not received sufficient scholarly attention. The work will begin with already identified themes (such as self-improvement, self government, mastery of passions, self-love, education, friendship, family, marriage, upbringing of  children, love of neighbours/others, servitude, slavery, and moral relations to/moral status of  animals, love of God, the role of religious practices (e.g. prayer, worship)) and will be supplemented by the results of WP1 & WP2. We will examine how selected authors understand each theme, whether their views change over time, whether the authors understand the theme in  similar or different ways, and explain these similarities or differences.  

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Synthesis 

As we synthesise the results of WP1–WP3, we aim to change the focus of existing histories of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy by correcting and supplementing them. BMoral moves beyond  the study of individual neglected authors by taking seriously the intellectual networks in which  female and male philosophers collaborated and developed their moral views. Combining results  about newly recovered networks of interaction (WP2) with results from the theoretical and  practical moral questions that concerned 18th-century British philosophers (WP1) and previously  neglected or understudied themes (WP3) allows for a fundamental reorientation of current scholarship. This will likely shift the focus of histories of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. BMoral’s transdisciplinary methodology brings together digital humanities research with traditional philosophical methods and has potential for wide application in other projects that focus, for example, on the study of women in other periods of the history of philosophy or regions.  We will evaluate how the project’s methodology helps overcome challenges with diversifying  philosophy. Special attention will be paid to how computational methods can be used effectively to reassess and shift the focus of existing narratives in the history of philosophy and other related  fields, not only in terms of authors and writings that are otherwise at risk of being ignored, but also in terms of content and themes that have been neglected or understudied. 

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Host Institution 

The project is hosted by the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin. The UCD School of Philosophy offers a lively and collaborative research environment and is the largest teaching and research centre for philosophy in Ireland.