New Histories of British Moral Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (c. 1690–1800)

Ziel

Women continue to be excluded and marginalized in histories of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. BMoral addresses this by advancing a novel transdisciplinary methodology that brings together philosophical methods of close reading and interpretation with recent computational methods used by digital humanities researchers. Research on women philosophers has often focused on individual figures. BMoral’s new approach moves beyond the study of individual women philosophers and analyses intellectual networks with the goal of gaining a deeper understanding of how male and female philosophers interacted and influenced each other’s writings. Further, it offers unprecedented opportunities to analyse and assess the extent of women’s distinct contributions to moral philosophy and to recover neglected themes in the corpus of 18th-century moral writings.

The overall research question is: How can women and their philosophical contributions as well as unduly neglected male philosophers be better integrated into histories of 18th-century British moral philosophy? To address this question, BMoral pursues three objectives, which aim to analyse and assess (1) how male and female philosophers approach not only theoretical moral issues, which have been the main focus of recent scholarship, but also practical moral issues; (2) women’s unique contributions and their role in 18th-century intellectual networks; (3) what themes have been neglected or understudied.

BMoral will deliver ground-breaking results by (i) conceptually shifting the focus of 18th-century British moral philosophy towards practical lived experience; (ii) recovering and reassessing 18th-century intellectual networks; (iii) analysing a large corpus. These results have the potential to achieve lasting breakthroughs, first, by changing the focus of the study of 18th-century British moral philosophy and, second, by advancing a novel transdisciplinary methodology that can help diversify philosophy.