Mary astell philosophy
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Mary Astell
*November 12, 1666 (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom)
†May 11, 1731 (London, United Kingdom)
Mary Astell was an English feminist writer, philosopher, and rhetorician. Her feminist reputation rests largely on her plea to establish an all-female college in England, an idea from her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694). She is also remembered for her harsh but witty statement on early modern marriage in her Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700). Underlying Astell’s feminist ideas are strong philosophical foundations in the form of Cartesian epistemological and metaphysical principles. Today she is best known for her theories on the education of women and her critiques of Norris and John Locke.
Mary Astell encourages women to regard their souls as thinking substances distinct from their bodies and as capable of attaining mastery over bodily sensations and passions. These philosophical themes are so frequent in all her major writings that Astell can be regarded as one of the earliest feminist philosophers of the modern age. In 1693, she began a corresp
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Mary ASTELL 1666-1731
Biographical Note
Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the daughter of Peter Astell, coal merchant, and Mary Astell (née Errington). Mary Astell received an education from her uncle Ralph Astell, a Cambridge graduate, clergyman and published poet. Ralph Astell immersed his neice in the teachings of the Cambridge Platonists, having himself been taught by members of this circle.
In around 1688, likely due to the turmoil of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, Astell moved to Chelsea, London, and successfully petitioned William Sancroft to finance her early writing career. In 1694, her landmark work ‘A Serious Proposal to the Ladies’, her argument for establishing communities of learning for women, was published. During this period she had also formed an intellectual pairing with John Norris, philosopher and clergyman; he published the pair’s correspondence under the title ‘Letters Concerning the Love of God’ in 1695.
Astell was concerned with the education of women and girls, and after her successful career writing about philosophical, theological and political subjects, s
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Mary Astell
1. Metaphysics
Mary Astell designed her metaphysics around an account of God and God’s creation. She was a dualist, maintaining that the two kinds of beings—minds and bodies—come in various degrees of finitude and corruptibility: God is the infinite and incorruptible mind; human minds and corporeal particles are finite, naturally incorruptible beings; and human bodies and physical objects are finite, naturally corruptible beings.
1.1 God
According to Astell, God is the “First Intelligence,” the being whose nature is to be infinite in all perfections. When writing about God’s perfections, Astell often lists wisdom, goodness, justice, holiness, intelligence, presence, power, and self-existence. In keeping with rationalist views of the period, Astell maintains that the correct understanding of metaphysics turns on the correct understanding of God. For this reason, much of her work is dedicated to demonstrating not only what God is, but also how a correct understanding of God can be attained.
Her earliest such account is in A Se
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