Wollstonecraft: Truth is the same for man and woman

"I...deny the existence of sexual virtues," Wollstonecraft wrote. "For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same..." By "sexual virtues," she means any virtues assigned primarily to one sex or the other. She would be happy to learn that, in the United States today, there is general agreement that we should not have "double standards" of virtue for men and women, especially in areas such as education, career, athletics, sexual behavior, and child rearing.

,p>But on another point of Wollstonecraft's, there is less agreement. She continued: "I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society..." Many people, including feminists, do not want to promote androgyny for everyone or the erasure of differences between the sexes and genders. Some believe that there are biological differences between males and females, the importance of which should not be discounted; others simply feel that differences in gender performance make the world a more interesting place.

Yet it is hard to see how these two claims can be separated from each other. How can one make the former claim that men and women are alike in all morally relevant respects without also making the latter claim that there should be no social distinction between them?

Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (1792) Chapter 3: The Same Subject Continued, and Chapter 4: Observations on the State of Degradation to Which Woman Is Reduced by Various Causes.

"Mary had furiously written Rights of Men in 1790 to defend the French Revolution from the conservative gripes of philosopher Edmund Burke, who described working people as a 'swinish multitude' unworthy of the vote. Men was an instant bestseller. Paine's 1791 Rights of Man, which was similarly sympathetic to the Revolution, was an even bigger hit; it sold as many as a million copies."
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Mary followed up Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792; it was an influential work of early feminism, calling for drastic upgrades in gender equality and asserting the importance of eduation for girls.
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, if you pay for a membership, you can read my essays on Medium.

You may be interested in The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man (2020), by Frances A. Chiu, who is also on Medium.

Wollstonecraft: The formation of the human heart

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote: "Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness." "Innocent" comes from the Latin for non-harmful. Wollstonecraft used it in the sense of ignorant, pointing out that ignorance entails weakness. She defended the right of women to have access to education so that they are not forced into intellectual subservience to men. She believed that "every being may become virtuous by the exercise of its own reason; for if but one being was created with vicious inclinations, that is positively bad, what can save us from atheism? or if we worship a God, is not that God a devil?" This view assumes that God creates humans with the desire to be virtuous so that they may perfect themselves. Education must be a central part of a social program "to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason." But isn't this contradictory? It attempts to take both sides of the question of whether we are shaped by nature or nurture. If God forms our hearts, why should we need education to do it for us? What types of virtues or inclinations, we might ask, must be implanted in us by God (if we are to maintain a theism worth its salt, in Wollstonecraft's opinion) and what types may be acquired through education?

Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (1792) Chapter 2: The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, if you become a member of Medium, you can read my essays there.

Hobbes: "Essence" is a useless concept

Not all languages join subject and predicate by the verb is. Speakers of such languages will say "man a living creature" rather than "man is a living creature"; those who use the former construction make just as much sense and are just as rational as those who use the latter. Hobbes concludes "it is evident that philosophy has no need of those words essence, entity, and other the like barbarous terms."

Some philosophers incorrectly believe that qualities can be separated or "abstracted" from their bodies or subjects, and unfortunately "from hence proceed the gross errors of writers of metaphysics; for, because they can consider thought without the consideration of body, they infer there is no need of a thinking-body..." Hobbes's statement in favor of the mind's necessary grounding in the body was unusual for his day and remains controversial today, even given recent revolutions in cognitive science.

We human individuals have no essence? Really? Another round of drinks, please.

Source: Thomas Hobbes. Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body. (1655, Latin; 1656, English.) Part 1: Computation or Logic. Chapter 3: of Proposition.

Bodies

“Our bodies are with us, though we have always had trouble saying exactly how. We are, in various conceptions or metaphors, in our body, or having a body, or at one with our body, or alienated from it. The body is both ourselves and other, and as such the object of emotions from love to disgust.”
— Peter Brooks. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. p. 1.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

See my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses Thomas Hobbes. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. You can also pay for a membership to read future articles.

Hobbes: Bullshit artists make "nothing but words"

Image by prabha karan from Pixabay

Some people's writing has "increased science" while that of others has "increased nothing but words." Why? Because "the former were written by men that knew, and the latter by such as knew not, the doctrine they taught..." — Hobbes

Apart from what we may think of Hobbes —

Wouldn't most people prefer to belong to "those" people who contribute to human knowledge, rather than to "these" people who clutter the Internet and waste pages?

Source:
Thomas Hobbes. Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body. Part 1: Computation or Logic. Chapter 1: Of Philosophy. (1655, Latin; 1656, English.)

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You might be interested to read my post on this blog about Harry G. Frankfurt's The Importance of What We Care About.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

See my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses Thomas Hobbes. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. If you buy a paid membership, you don't have to worry about the paywall.

Hobbes: You Can't Ratiocinate God

Philosophy, Hobbes says, "excludes Theology, I mean the doctrine of God, eternal, ingenerable, incomprehensible...It excludes the doctrine of angels, and all such things as are thought to be neither bodies nor properties of bodies; there being in them...no place for ratiocination [reason]."

The world indeed would be a better place if we did not pretend to engage in rational debates about incomprehensible subjects! The assumption of God's existence should not masquerade behind a cloak of philosophical or scientific words.

On the other hand, some types of theology are well-suited to rational discussion. Faced with a Biblical passage that promotes invading a neighboring village and smashing their sacred statues, believers in the moral authority of the Bible might debate whether that particular directive should be followed today, and in what manner it should be followed. The ethical concern is comprehensible and can be assessed rationally. To pretend that the ethical concern cannot be discussed, simply because the issue is ultimately faith-based, is to hide behind the cloak of the incomprehensibility of God.

Philosophy is a smokescreen for beliefs that do not require it. Avoidance of philosophy is a smokescreen for beliefs that do require it.

Source:

Thomas Hobbes. Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body. Part 1: Computation or Logic. Chapter 1: Of Philosophy. (1655, Latin; 1656, English.)

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"For Hobbes, RELIGION is the fear of invisible powers in stories that are publicly allowed, whereas SUPERSTITION is the fear of invisible powers in stories that aren't publicly allowed.
So the only difference (at least in Part I of Leviathan) is public acceptance"
— Helen De Cruz, Bluesky, March 2, 2024

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, see my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses Thomas Hobbes. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. You can become a member of Medium, where I publish many other essays.