Philosophy of mind has for at least the past several decades been understood to be focused on two core questions: (a) the nature of consciousness and (b) the nature of mental representation. There are, however, other sets of question about the mind that concern how we can improve or emend our understanding, rightly reason. Discussions of these questions appreciate that the agency of reasoning subsists alongside habit formation, and that cultivating both reason and proper habits or virtues is important not only for each of us as individuals but also for the well-functioning of human society. In this talk, I will propose a course module on 17th century philosophy of mind understood through a concern with education or the improvement of human understanding. This course module will include familiar canonical figures such as Descartes, Spinoza and Locke, and situate them alongside Marie le Jars de Gournay, François Poulain de la Barre, Madame de Maintenon, and Mary Astell.

A great number of women were active in early analytic philosophy. However, there is still a lack of attention paid to their contributions in research and teaching. In order to change this situation, this talk sets out practical ways to incorporate women’s works into a core philosophy syllabus. One challenge in so doing is our sense of familiarity with works by, e.g., Russell, Carnap and Quine that comes from the fact that these are the texts almost all philosophy students are set as undergraduates. Pedagogically, it will thus be important to explain early analytic women philosophers’ style and context, i.e., state how their ideas diverge from that of their male teachers, mentors etc. For they often have different ideas and arguments, some of which pre-figure later moves that are more celebrated when written by men. For example, Constance Jones’s 1890 signification-denotation distinction is equivalent to Frege’s sense-reference distinction while dispensing with the third realm and explicitly making room for signification (sense) without denotation (reference). Susan Stebbing’s 1932 distinction between same-level and directional analysis made an advance on her mentor Moore and solved the paradox of analysis 10 years before it was formulated. Ruth Barcan’s 1946-47 quantified modal logic was not only the first such logic, but forced Quine to re-examine his anti-modal arguments and replace them with a more interesting and principled anti-essentialism. Stebbing, Alice Ambrose and Margaret MacDonald wrote compellingly about the nature and function of philosophy, in an original manner, distinct from Russell, Wittgenstein or Ryle, and still very much relevant to philosophers today. After briefly discussing some of these examples, this talk will focus on practical suggestions about how to integrate early analytic women’s work in teaching, such as interrogating ‘great man’ narratives by designing courses that are not person- but topic-based, examining women’s influence on others and their exchanges with others instead of presenting their ideas as a ‘critique’ of men’s, including women’s names in essay and exam questions, discussing the discrimination or disadvantages they faced as a result of their gender (and/or race, religion, disability) and how it shaped their lives and careers and, if applicable, their thought.