A. Web Resources

See KJW's web page at: http:/www.macalester/edu/~warren/courses//Phil50-03/LectureNotes/index.htm

B. Brief Biography

1. (Therese Dykeman) She was born on November 5, 1607 in Antwerp. (Mary Ellen Waithe: She was born in Cologne, Germany, of Dutch parents.) Religious persecution forced her family to move to Utrecht in 1615.

2. Anna Maria van Schurman (Kersey's spelling) is variously known as "the star of the Utrecht," "the tenth muse," and "the Minerva of Holland," Schurman won reknown by her contemporaries throughout Europe as a scholar; she was an exceptional 17th century woman. (Kersey, Women Philosophers: A Bio-Critical Source Book, 188) Nevertheless, "her work was not mentioned in the traditional canon." (Therese Boose Dykeman, ed., The Neglected Canon: Nine Women Philosophers: First to the Twentieth Century, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999: 115)

3. She received her early education at home: She was tutored with her brothers in languages and the classics, possessed innate but undirected artistic talent, and was strongly motivated to self-study; she learned seven or eight different languages, including (allegedly) Ethiopian, for which she composed a grammar. (Kersey, 188)

4. At an early age (age eleven) she was taught Seneca by her father. (At the time, Seneca was popular with Dutch scholars). (Kersey, 188) She was knowledgeable in mathematics, calculus, and astronomy. She also was "versed in poetry, rhetoric, dialectics, mathematics, and philosophy, even in the problems of metaphysics... She knew Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas, but did not care to know anything of the new philosophy" of the 17th century (Kuno Fisher, History of Modern Philosophy: Descartes and His School (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887), quoted in Kersey, 188).

5. Van Schurman (Dykeman's spelling) lived during a time when Dutch (The Netherlands) political identity was heightened by independence, trade, and artistic achievement. The "geniuses living in the Netherlands" included artists Rembrandt and Rubens and philosophers Spinoza and Descartes (Dykeman, 115).

6. Throughout her life she was involved with philosophers of her time, as well as scholars artists, theologians.

i. She was acknowledged as "a rare woman of learning, and consulted by many people of international authority and scholarship. (For a historical survey of her reception since the 17th century, see M. de Baar et al, eds. Choosing the Better Part: Anna Maria van Schulman (1607-1678): Dordrecht Kluwer.)

ii. "Although her fame diminished in time, she was included in The History of Women Philosophers by Gilles Menage (1613-1692), trans. Beatrice H. Zedler (Lanham, MD: The University Press of America, 1984).

iii. As an adult, her friends and colleagues included Princess Elizabeth, Descartes, and Marie de Gourney.

7. Van Schulman was a prolific writer. Her main works:

a) According to her biographer, Una Birch (known as Pope-Hennessy), van Schulman wrote An Ethiopian Grammar (1637?).

b) She wrote: De Vitae Humanae Termino (a medical ethics textbook, 1639), Opuscula (correspondence, 1642), the Eukleria (her autobiography, 1673), and The Learned Maid (or, Whether a Maid May Be a Scholar? or, Whether the Study of Letters is Fit for a Christian Woman?, 1641 in Dutch), the only work translated from Latin to English translated in 1659).

c) Kersey describes The Learned Maid as "a feminist treatise on the advisability of educating women" (188). Both its structure and content "illustrate Schurmann's expertise in logic, for she proves her theory with a number of syllogisms preceded by definition of terms" (188).

8. Toward the end of her life, she disavowed her learning as "idolatry and turned from feminism to fanaticism, becoming a follower of the Labadie sect. She sought refuge from religious persecution with an old admirer and correspondent, Elizabeth, Princess of Palatine" (Kersey, 188).

C. Van Schurmann as Philosopher: Ethel M. Kersey (Women Philosophers: A Bio-Critical Source Book, New York: Greenwood Press, 1989)

1. "It is difficult to assess the extend and depth of her philosophical knowledge" (188).

2. Her teacher/mentor in Utrecht was the philosopher/theologian Voetius, an opponent of Cartesianism.

3. Her close acquaintanceship with Descartes himself "suggests that she had more than a superficial knowledge of philosophical matters, but she was to abjure Cartesianism on religious grounds shortly after his Discourse on Method was published in 1637" (188). Their friendship ruptured "when Descartes suggested that the Bible contained no "clear" and "distinct" ideas--to Anna's incipient fanatical piety such a notion was anathema" (188).

D. Van Schurmann as Philosopher: Therese Boose Dykeman (ed., The Neglected Canon, ibid.)

1. Although, as a woman, she was not allowed to attend a university, she presented "her feminist epistemology in the form of an academic dissertation;" her works were read by such highly regarded academics as Descartes and Gassendi (Dykeman, 115).

2. Margaret Alic describes her as "one of the first feminists to speak out for women's scientific education" (Hypatia's Heritage: A History of Women in Science: Boston, Beacon, 1987): 78. In a letter to Marie de Gournay, van Schurmann writes that women should study science ("to the skies")

3. She was friends with Queen Kristine of Sweden who "collected mathematical and scientific manuscripts.

4. Some (e.g., Mirjam de Baar, ibid.) claim that her autobiography, Eukleria, was a "theological and philosophical treatise" that parallels Augustine's Confessions. In this book she offered theological views; some (Angela Roothan) believe that it was through her theological treatises that her most original philosophical views were developed.

5. Her metaphysical views: Reality resides in the world of experience, not in the world of innate ideas or Platonic Ideas (Forms).

6. Johan Beverwyck, a Dutch physician, writes an introduction to The Learned Maid. After meeting van Schulman, he was inspired to become a feminist and wrote a work praising women.

7. Her feminist philosophy appears in her treatise or "dissertatio"The Learned Maid:

a) This work prefigures Mary Astell's proposal for a place of retreat for women; van Schulman argues that to be a scholar a woman must be free and have time to study and develop her abilities. Her view is like that of Princess Elizabeth, who wrote in a letter to Descartes that "The life I am constrained to live does not allow me enough free time to acquire a habit of meditation in accordance with your rules."

b) The dissertation style--the one used in universities at the time--employs a Scholastic method (a form of deductive syllogistic reasoning) in which a concise argument is given in the form of a proposition according to its terms, its subject, and its predicate. She uses syllogistic reasoning because she believes it is scientific, approaching mathematical, and is thereby suitable for the climate of "godless" scientific advancement in which she wrote.

c) Through syllogistic reasoning, she defends the main thesis that "a maid may be a scholar" and to disprove its contrary.

i. It examines the proposition first by definition of the terms both as words and as things, and second "by prescribing their limitations or qualifications of the subject followed by those of the predicate.

ii. It then initiates the fourteen part (of a fifteen part) argument by beginning with the questions, does the subject have the property of scholarly ability? and is scholarship conducive to the subject?"

iii. The main principle she uses is that all humans (men and women) have the equal capacity to reason and, consequently, have the right for perfection of that capacity through learning (i.e., study and scholarship) (120). The end of philosophy is the fulfillment or perfection (i.e., wisdom or understanding) of this capacity of mind, "the desire for which is inherent in every capacity."

iv. She defines "maid" as "a Christian maid" because "her argument involves essentially the perfection of a Christian rather than an atheist materialist" (120). The Christian maid sees the world as God's creation and is thereby drawn to love God.

v. Throughout her argument, van Schulman supports the logical development of her argument with references to such authorities as Pliny, Plutarch, Plato, Aristotle, Erases, and scripture" (120).

d) Within the course of the argument, van Schurmann outlines what knowledge a woman should have, and makes a distinction between what is suitable for a woman in theory and in practice (119).

e) Unlike de Gournay (who does not make the theory vs. practice distinction), van Schulman argues that women should have the knowledge necessary for public life in the arenas of the court (or law), the church, and the battlefield, but not actually enter the public sphere (119).

f) The reasons van Schurmann gives for writing The Learned Maid is given in the conclusion (the "consectary to its argument"): the "best and strongest reasons" are to encourage and excite young women to be educated, and parents to educate their children (119).

g) While Descartes' Meditations was published in the same year, van Schurmann's conclusion reasons backwards from Descartes' cogito" "I am" of reasonable nature; "therefore, I have the capacity to think" and "scholarship is good for the perfection of my capacity to think" (121).

h) "What van Schulman adds to the canon in the very least is a feminist epistemology that emphasizes logic and science and is proved with scholastic reason" (119).

i. This epistemology is written with women and parents (the caretakers of learning) in mind. With logic reigning supreme, can Schulman outlines the arts and sciences necessary for certain disciplines and practices and to be contemplated as the works of God.

Ii Knowledge is acquired within the historical and political realities of one's--her--situation and truth is arrived at through the experiential evidence of the premises and the conclusions arrived at necessarily through logical deduction.

iii. "The epistemology also has an ethical corollary: To learn is a good act; it is a duty; hence, feminist ethics demands that it be immoral to deprive women of learning" (121).

E. Van Schurmann as Philosopher: Mary Ellen Waithe (The History of Women Philosophers, Vol. 3, 210)

1. Waithe singles out as of philosophical interest The Learned Maid, a pamphlet that "presents in classical rhetorical style an argument supporting the scholarly education of single women" (210).

2. Waithe (210-211) quotes Angeline Goreau's The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writes in Seventeenth Century England, who notes that Van Schulman uses arguments which are

"...often derived from some of those traditionally restrictive attitudes or negative "received opinions" about women's nature. She argues, for example, that because of their "imbecility and inconstancy of disposition or temper," women are more in need of the "solid and continual employment" that learning can supply. Furthermore, she does not question the assumption that women's "proper sphere: is in the home...but uses it as an argument to demonstrate that "the study of letters is more convenient for them [women]."

3. Unlike Goreau, Waithe suggests that van Schurmann's comments about the natural intellectual inferiority of women may be just another "version of the standard humility formula through which men;s own assumptions about the natural inequality of women are used ironically in formal philosophical arguments by women to defeat those sane unwarranted assumptions" (211).

3. The Learned Maid was distributed widely throughout Europe and "her influence may be seen in the writings of later women from Bathsua Makin and "Sophia" to Juliette Lambert Adam and Mary Wollstonecraft" (211).