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
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