5 research outputs found
Sophie Mousset: Women's Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2014. Pp. vii, 104.)
Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville. Edited by Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. 384p. 35.00 paper. - Canon Fodder: Historical Women Political Writers. By Penny Weiss. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 232p. $55.00.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft on the imagination
The article compares Rousseau’s and Wollstonecraft’s views on the imagination.
It is argued that though Wollstonecraft was evidently influenced by Rousseau,
there are significant differences between their views. These differences are
grounded in their different views on the faculty of reason and its relation to
the passions. Whereas Rousseau characterizes reason as a derivative faculty,
grounded in the more primary faculty of perfectibility, Wollstonecraft
perceives reason as the faculty defining human nature. It is argued that
contrary to what is often assumed, Wollstonecraft’s conception of the
imagination is not primarily characterized by its Romantic features, but rather
by the close affinity she posits between reason and the imagination. This
close affinity has several consequences. One consequence is that she is less
worried than Rousseau about the imagination wandering without external
constrains, because she believes in reason’s ability to guide the imagination
by choosing its objects. Ultimately the difference between Rousseau’s and
Wollstonecraft’s views on the imagination helps us understand why she was a
passionate philosopher of the Enlightenment while he was one of its first,
perceptive and most articulate critics.peerReviewe