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Margaret Cavendish is a vitalist, materialist, and monist. She holds that human beings and other natural kinds are parts of the one material entity, “nature.” While human beings may not be superior to other animals in many ways, Cavendish does think that human beings have a type of knowledge and perception that is unique to their kind, that they strive for the continuance of their being, and that they join together into societies in order to achieve a more peaceful existence. This essay considers the formation of human beings, how their perception and knowledge differ from other nonhuman animals, how human beings are individuated, and in what sense they can be immortal. Finally, the essay argues that Cavendish’s views about the social nature of human beings mirror her views about the metaphysical structure of nature. The essay shows that Cavendish embraces natural and social hierarchy alongside a form of sexual equality that the essay dubs “Platonic feminism.”

This paper explains Sophie de Grouchy’s philosophical debts to Adam Smith. I have three main reasons for this: first, it should explain why eighteenth-century philosophical feminists (De Grouchy, James Millar, and Mary Wollstonecraft) found Smith, who has—to put it mildly—not been a focus of much recent feminist admiration, a congenial starting point for their own thinking; second, it illuminates De Grouchy’s considerable philosophical originality, especially her important, overlooked contributions to political theory; third, it is designed to remove some unfortunate misconceptions that have found their way into Karin Brown’s ‘Introduction’ to the recent and much-to-be-welcomed translation of Sophie de Grouchy’s Lettres Sur La Sympathie (Letters on Sympathy). While Brown claims that there are major ‘differences’ in their programs of ‘social reform’, I argue there are important commonalities between Smith and De Grouchy. In particular, I highlight how they share a common understanding of how human sensibilities are shaped by social institutions and I show that De Grouchy’s path-breaking analysis of negative and positive liberty is grounded in her extension of Smith’s political theory and moral psychology.

Paradigmatic as Beauvoir’s thinking is for contemporary Western feminism, in the light of global developments, it is important to note that her feminist ideals surpass the dominant forms of Western liberalism in substantial ways. Her positive concept of ‘ethical’ freedom does not correspond to Western liberalism’s negative concept of freedom as the absence of constraints. Nor does her gender egalitarian concept of society resemble Western liberalism’s model of society with its dichotomous organization of labor and care. It is argued that Western feminism, as it was conceived by Beauvoir, can be elaborated substantially, as well as strategically, into an inclusive feminism for a globalizing, yet culturally plural world.