Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction; Preliminaries; The Exclusion; The Dominant Model of Moral Philosophy; Philosophical Genre and the Dominant Model; Five Forms, Five Philosophers; 2. Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education : What Constitutes a Philosophical System?; Biography; Letters on Education,; The Problems of the Epistolary Form; Macaulay's Work; The Argument for Women; The Second and Third Parts of Letters on Education,; The Argument of Letters on Education,; Conclusion; 3. Allegory and Moral Philosophy in Christine de Pisan's The Book of the City of Ladies; Christine de Pisan; The Book of the City of Ladies,; The Situation of Women; Women and Moral Agency; The Question of Marriage; The Prudent Woman; The Problem; The Allegorical City; The Need for Allegory; Problems with the City; Conclusion; 4. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Separation of Poetry and Politics; Wollstonecraft's Corpus; The Second Vindication as an Enlightenment Treatise; The Second Vindication Is Not a Work of Enlightenment Philosophy; Principles of Form and Expression; Form and Sensibility; True Sensibility; The Philosophical Role of Sensibility; Conclusion; 5. George Eliot and How to Read Novels as Philosophy; Eliot's Work; Comte, Spinoza, and Eliot; How to Read Eliot; The Centrality of Sympathy in Eliot's Novels; Philosophy; Conclusion; 6. Knowing and Speaking of Divine Love: Mechthild of Magdeburg; Biography; Women and Writing; The Problem of Authority; The Authorship of God; Morality and Experience; The Forms in the Flowing Light; Conclusion: Contingencies; 7. Conclusion; Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy; A Few Comments on Content; References; Index

About the Author

Catherine Villanueva Gardner is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan at Flint.