TY  - GEN
TY  - GEN
T1  - Sensitive witnesses : feminist materialism in the British Enlightenment
A1  - Girten, Kristin M., kirjoittaja
LA  - eng
PP  - Stanford, California
PB  - Stanford University Press
YR  - 2024
UL  - https://kansalliskirjasto.finna.fi/kansalliskirjastofikka/Record/fikka.5692748
AB  - "Kristin M. Girten tells a new story of feminist knowledge-making in the Enlightenment era by exploring the British female philosophers who asserted their authority through the celebration of profoundly embodied observations, experiences, and experiments. This book explores the feminist materialist practice of sensitive witnessing, establishing an alternate history of the emergence of the scientific method in the eighteenth century. Francis Bacon and other male natural philosophers regularly downplayed the embodied nature of their observations. They presented themselves as modest witnesses, detached from their environment and entitled to the domination and exploitation of it. In contrast, the philosopher-authors that Girten takes up asserted themselves as intimately entangled with matter - boldly embracing their perceived close association with the material world as women. Girten shows how Lucy Hutchison, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Smith took inspiration from materialist principles to challenge widely accepted "modest" conventions for practicing and communicating philosophy. Forerunners of the feminist materialism of today, these thinkers recognized the kinship of human and nonhuman nature and suggested a more accessible, inclusive version of science. Girten persuasively argues that our understanding of Enlightenment thought must take into account these sensitive witnesses' visions of an alternative scientific method informed by profound closeness with the natural world"--
SN  - 9781503633032 cloth
KW  - English literature : Women authors : History and criticism.
KW  - Philosophy of nature in literature.
KW  - Materialism in literature.
KW  - Philosophy and science : Great Britain : History.
KW  - Authors, English : Philosophy : History.
KW  - Enlightenment : Great Britain.
ER  -