Overlooked abstracts

Although abstracts can often be overlooked they are, nonetheless, an important underpinning to and description of research ideas that one is working on and should be recognized as such.

For this post, I have transferred my abstract in full from my academia page¹ where it’s been available to read for the best part of this year. Researched and written back in 2015 I focus on the religion and metaphysics of Shepherd and attempt to show that she does not fall into the trap of a circular argument. Although there is some controversy about this, nevertheless, I think there are good grounds for believing Shepherd when she states she has avoided circularity. Quite apart from the fact that she was a highly educated woman who was keen on abstract thinking and was, in my opinion, the first analytic philosopher, she also had a sister and a female friend both of whom were excellent mathematicians. This, amongst other reasons, makes it highly unlikely that she would make a logical error! I shall be exploring this further in future posts.

Title: Lady Mary Shepherd on Religion and Metaphysics

Liba Kaucky Abstract

In this paper, I shall explore the under-researched, lesser-known Early-Modern woman philosopher, Lady Mary Shepherd. Research to date has tended to focus on comparing Shepherd’s arguments with other philosophers (Atherton 1996, Bolton 2012) or her causality in relation to events and induction (Bolton 2010). However, the focus of my paper will be on her religious and metaphysical arguments in her ‘Essays on the Perception of an External Universe’. This is because I wish to put forward the thesis that many, if not all, of Shepherd’s metaphysical arguments are rooted in and derivable from her concept of God. Shepherd states that she is careful not to construct circular arguments. Hence, when she also conversely derives arguments for her concept of and belief in God from her metaphysical arguments, I suggest she is attempting to expand on and clarify her linear argument founded on God in a way that avoids circularity. I hope to show this by reconstructing and analysing the logic and methodology behind her metaphysical explanations of personal identity, mind-body and her definition of God. I would argue that in stating her logical approach, she avoids creating logically fallacious arguments which, I think, makes her an important philosopher to research.

First, I wish to focus on and unpack how and why Shepherd argues from her definition and concept of God to her metaphysics of mind, body and personal identity. For instance, from her definition of God as an intelligent, incessantly existent cause, she concludes that our continuous sense of our personal identity and existence can be best explained by deducing that only such a God could produce our continued existence. Thus, we exist irrespective of whether we are capable of perceiving our existence or not, for example, when we are asleep, we do not cease to exist simply because we are not currently perceiving our existence. Hence, this shows that God, defined as an uninterruptable original cause, sustains our life and is the cause of our unceasing memory and sense of our personal identity. I will then go on to show how her concept of God also impacts on her account of sensation, empty space, motion and matter.

Second, I wish to demonstrate and flesh out how her religious and metaphysical theories work the other way round without becoming circular. That is to say, through Shepherd’s metaphysical arguments, we can deepen our knowledge of and find further supporting premises for her concept of God. An example of this is her philosophy of mind. She seems to claim that our relations of ideas, and so our every thought, would be rendered logically inconsistent without the existence of God, that is, a being who is distinguishable from ourselves in existence and qualities but, nevertheless, is capable of gaining our sympathy. In this way, Shepherd uniquely combines metaphysics and philosophy of emotion. She both examines emotions about God as well as refutes that our sense of our continuous, unbroken personal identity relates to any change in particles. Her stance on particles influences mind-body topics, leading her to consider the possibility of bodily resurrection of a deceased person who may well be capable of moving through limitless space in a future life. Moreover, through these topics, her explanation of the immateriality of the human mind also contains her suggested concept of the essence of God who has an universal mind that, although known to us through reason, remains obscure to us because the universal mind is not a limited body and cannot be known via the senses.

To conclude. In this paper, I try to go somewhat towards appreciating and uncovering Shepherd’s unique style of methodology and argumentation as well as the scale of her overall system of thought. I have done this by looking at how her overall philosophy is rooted in her concept of God. So, I argue, in order to understand any topic within her overall system of thought, one must first take account of her concept of God.

References in abstract:

Atherton, M., (1996) ‘Lady Mary Shepherd’s case against George Berkeley’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 4 (2):347 – 366

Bolton, M., (2010) ‘Causality and Causal Induction: The Necessitarian Theory of Lady Mary Shepherd’ in Causation and Modern Philosophy, eds. Keith Allen and Tom Stoneham, (Routledge, 2010), 242-62.

Bolton, M., (cited as forthcoming 2012) ‘Lady Mary Shepherd and David Hume on Cause and Effect’ in Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, eds. Eileen O’Neill and Marcy Lascano, (Springer)

(Bolton bibliographic references cited in accordance with her profile available at: http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/faculty-174/183-publications/580-list-of-publications)

Liba Kaucky: ‘Lady Mary Shepherd on Religion and Metaphysics’ written 2015. This abstract was submitted 16th Oct. 2015 by email to Dr Emily Thomas for the conference: ‘Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Religion and Science’ to take place 21/03/16 at the University of Groningen. This abstract was written prior to any comments and this abstract can only be cited or quoted with the author’s permission. Copyright © by Liba Kaucky

ResearcherID:P-2484-2016, URL: http://www.researcherid.com/rid/P-2484-2016

ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1598-0833

¹ available at:

http://www.academia.edu/31312846/Lady_Mary_Shepherd_on_Religion_and_Metaphysics_abstract_2015