[SydPhil] Seminar This Wednesday USYD

[David Braddon-Mitchell]

Wed 26 August
3.30 PM
Main Quad N494

Elena Gordon (University College Dublin)

Catharine Macaulay: Sympathy, Himpathy, and Contemporary Feminism

It is sometimes thought that the insights of early modern women philosophers cannot be considered genuinely feminist, or that they advance merely proto-feminist insights that do not resonate with the challenges facing women today. My aim in this paper is to challenge this impression by showing that Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791) advanced a moral position that remains as valuable to contemporary feminist philosophy as it is to the history of philosophy. More specifically, by focusing on Macaulay’s analysis of the role of natural sympathy in sustaining oppressive social and political arrangements, I show that she anticipates Kate Manne’s (2017) account of “himpathy” and its role in maintaining and reinforcing misogynistic power structures that systematically harm women. I further argue that Macaulay helps us address important questions left underexplored by Manne concerning precisely how sympathetic identification works to sustain and reproduce misogynistic social hierarchies. As we shall see, for Macaulay, natural sympathy leads us to identify most strongly with those whom we take to be most like ourselves, and this tendency can be easily manipulated to encourage us to adopt the perspectives of the powerful in ways that foster our participation in the structures of our own oppression. By bringing Macaulay into dialogue with Manne, I show both the contemporary relevance of her moral philosophy and the value of her insights for contemporary feminist thought.