TEMPO 2025

A Modern Conference

April 25-26th, 2025 in Washington, D.C.

 

 
 

Margaret Matthews
Gabrielle Suchon on Women's Right to the Pursuit of Knowledge

 

Abstract: This paper contributes to the recovery of early modern women philosophers by offering the first extended analysis of Gabrielle Suchon's arguments for women's entitlement to the pursuit of knowledge, focusing primarily on Part II of the Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693). It explores how Suchon's arguments for women's equal right to knowledge are grounded in her general theory of human nature, human flourishing, and the role of knowledge therein and it highlights the ways that her arguments are distinctive within her philosophical context. My central claim is that Suchon combines an Aristotelian and Thomistic account of the human being's teleological orientation toward truth with an Augustinian account of the epistemic consequences of original sin to ground her feminist arguments for women's right to the pursuit of knowledge. Through her appropriation of an Aristotelian teleological conception of human nature, Suchon concludes that women possess a right to the pursuit of knowledge insofar as they are naturally ordered to contemplation as their highest end. Through her adoption of an Augustinian narrative of original sin, she concludes that the male control of epistemic resources such as books, schools, and academies, is a symptom of fallen humanity's lust for domination, thus underscoring the moral and spiritual stakes of its rectification. I argue further that within her 17th-century context, Suchon offers a distinctive philosophical contribution in at least two main ways: First, the Neo-Aristotelian metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical anthropology that underlies her feminist arguments distinguishes her project from that of many other 17th-century feminists, such as François Poulain de la Barre and Mary Astell, both of whom were indebted to Cartesianism. Second, Suchon's extension of an Augustinian analysis of fallen human psychology to a critique of patriarchal power renders her distinctive within the revival of Augustinianism in 17th-century France among thinkers such as Pascal and Malebranche. For all of these reasons, I contend that Suchon's feminism—as well as the systematic philosophy that underlies it—are worthy of greater attention among historians of early modern philosophy.