Shepherd vol 2: Appendix 1

Appendix 1: 

Transcripts of Philosophy Fluency Podcast Season 6 Episodes on Mary Shepherd

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Season 6 Episode 1:

'Things to Bear in Mind about Mary Shepherd and my Interpretation of Her'

Published on Spotify: 3rd October 2023 

Available at:

https://anchor.fm/philosophyfluency/episodes/6-1-Things-to-Bear-in-Mind-about-Mary-Shepherd-and-my-Interpretation-of-Her-e2a32i7

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Fluency's first episode of Season 6! I'm recording this in my sukkah. So let's settle in, make ourselves comfortable with our Oktoberfest themed coffee mugs at the ready, and I'll begin this season's topic of exploring the 18th-19th century philosopher, Lady Mary Shepherd. 

Here's a few things to bear in mind about Shepherd and my interpretation of her:

I research women philosophers in the past because this is an historical feminist pursuit. This interest dates back to when I studied women in history as part of my education as a tweenager. For example, I chose to do a research project on a 16th-17th century woman who walked about in male attire, and broke boundaries for what a woman was allowed to do, such as acting in plays using language not fit for polite company and smoking a pipe, which used to be considered a strictly male preserve. She is now best known as Moll Cutpurse, although she was born Mary Frith (c. 1584 – 26 July 1659) but also used a male name: Tom Faconer. 

Researching women wasn't a new fad that I suddenly picked up at university. I've been taking an interest in researching historical women and women's issues in every discipline, from science, politics, sociology, psychology to art, music and literature (both English and European), and of course in history. 

So, when it came to Mary Shepherd I wasn't drawn to researching a Christian woman philosopher per se, I merely already had a research interest in women philosophers and it just so happens that the vast majority of them are Christians, especially prior to the 19th century and certainly during the Early Modern period. I'm not sure there are any Jewish or atheist women philosophers at all in that era, except for Sophie de Grouchy (1764-1822) who I included in my final year dissertation on Hume and Empathy to show how I think she found room to improve Hume's ethical theory. However, apart from her Letters on Sympathy and some collaborative work, the rest of her body of work, ranging from moral philosophy and philosophical novels are thought to have been destroyed. 

If anyone knows of any other atheist and/or Jewish women philosophers in the 17th and 18th century, leave a message via the Spotify podcast platform and let me know! I'll sharpen my pencil and happily look into it. Even Margaret Cavendish, bold and innovative as she was (and who also dressed in male attire), was nonetheless a Christian, albeit an open-minded, non-dogmatic one. 

Nevertheless, although researching Christian women philosophers is unavoidable, I'll still select the least religious ones when it comes down to taking a research interest in them, as opposed to just researching them indiscriminately. 

For instance, I have no interest in Mary Astell (1666 – 1731) because she's too focused on Christianity. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Astell tells us that: 

 

"Astell is steeped in Christian theology and the traditions of monasticism. (See Webb 2020 for a reading of Astell as a “care of the self” philosopher; see Kendrick 2018 for a reading of Astell as informed by Christian theology.)"

Quoted from Stanford Encyclopedia 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/astell/

Furthermore, despite her feminist ideas on female education and gender equality concerning the intellect, she was a hardliner High Tory, which is an extreme form of Conservatism that advocates Patriarchy, hierarchy, paternalism and protectionism).

So both her right wing politics and her religiousness are a right turn off for me. 

However, in Shepherd's case, as I argue in my Volume 1 book, her philosophical arguments stand irrespective of whether or not we accept any Christian beliefs. Indeed, she doesn't refer to religion very much at all in her treatises. Shepherd manages to discuss the topic of the afterlife without even bothering with the soul, heaven, hell or anything else in religious doctrine. Her biggest concern is whether life and consciousness after death is a physical possibility in some scientific way. She is not trying to convince us of any religious claims about it. Hence, I argue that she is a Christian, but not in any zealous way but rather in a balanced way within which she uses a huge amount of rationality. This is clearly in her text so to argue otherwise wouldn't make sense. 

Point being: you will misunderstand my interpretation of Shepherd if you expect a Christian approach or if you look for standard approaches you may be used to in the Philosophy of Religion or Theology. For instance, you might wonder where some argument for the existence of God has gone, or talk of the soul or heaven and hell. As far far as I'm concerned, if it's not explicitly in the text I'm dealing with I won't see it as relevant. 

I'm an agnostic, Humanistic Jewish philosopher myself (although I'm a hard atheist about Christianity), so I don't have any interest in Christianity and I know next to nothing about it anyway. So when it appears in my research, it's simply part of what's in the philosophical text, it has no personal relevance to me, and Shepherd is a good example of this. I'm being completely objective and logical about the text so there's no point trying to read into what I'm saying about a past philosopher's text to figure out what my personal views might be - I discuss my personal stance when I do my own contemporary philosophy, such as the topics of empathy and human rights, I don't superimpose my own views onto other philosophers. I merely present their views in an unbiased way. 

As Russell pointed out. Philosophically one can only be an agnostic because one must not close down academic, philosophical debate. However, to all intents and purposes, a philosophical agnostic is an atheist in a non-academic context. So there's no point in Christians running after me trying to convert me into Christianity because they see an agnostic open door. I'm not interested. In day-to-day living I'm an atheist, a Jewish, one. Which means, I still observe Shabbat, festivals, holy days, not mixing dairy and meat and so on. I'm therefore asking people to respect my Judaism as well as my lesbian, non-binary identity. I consider conversion attempts of any kind a human rights abuse against the individual. I do not, have never and never will consent that anyone should harass me out of Judaism and into Christianity or out of being gay and having gay relationships. Respect that.

Have a good week. More Philosophy Fluency next week. Do join me then.

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Season 6 Episode 4:

'Mary Shepherd: How it all Began and her Concept of God'

Published on Spotify: 31st October 2023

Available at:

https://anchor.fm/philosophyfluency/episodes/6-4-Mary-Shepherd-How-it-all-began-and-her-concept-of-God-e2b9t5q

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Fluency, Season 6 episode 4! Today, I'm going to pause my political philosophy discussion of Israel and revisit and discuss an abstract I wrote and submitted in October 2015 to a conference due to take place the following year in 2016, called: Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Religion and Science. So, let's settle in with a cup of coffee, and, in this episode, I'll return to this season's topic of the 18th-19th century philosopher, Lady Mary Shepherd. 

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Abstract: Lady Mary Shepherd on Religion and Metaphysics 

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 uninterruptible 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. 

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I think an important thing to bear in mind is that many past philosophers had a slightly different approach to religion than most people do today. Freethinking past philosophers often have more in common with each other than with the views perpetuated nowadays. For instance, Shepherd discusses God in very Spinozistic ways, which may not be familiar to contemporary readers, for instance: 

1 using phrases such as the 'God of Nature'; 

2 emphasising that God has no body; 

3 highlighting the importance of rational understanding, not faith, for grasping the notion of God; 

4 discussing God's mind in very metaphysical, abstract ways, not personalising God;

5 arguing that God acts through the laws of nature in quite an impersonal, almost scientific way, not describing God anthropomorphically, as though God is a man who wills, intervenes and disrupts the laws of nature, for example, to perform miracles.  

Indeed, Shepherd and Hume have more in common than it appears - they are both very scholarly so they comb through minute details and differences and debate small logical steps in arguments. So the slightest difference is perhaps exaggerated in the mind of contemporary readers making many believe they are on very opposing sides with nothing in common. Most probably seeing Shepherd as a pious woman defending the Christian faith against Hume the atheist. Whereas, in fact, Hume is not the hard atheist he is mostly believed to be and Shepherd is not the hard Christian some might assume her to be and I find that there can be some surprising similarities between them. 

My only academic concern is whose argument is objectively better about a very narrow and specific issue, not whose belief system is better. And I certainly never intended to imply that Christianity is somehow better than atheism and agnosticism! Indeed, in my BA dissertation, I came down on the side of the atheist Sophie de Grouchy, more than Hume, who I read as the softer agnostic. 

I usually prefer philosophers who discuss social and political questions or women's issues rather than epistemology and metaphysics but I needed a woman philosopher who fitted the description of a philosophy conference I was submitting an abstract for, so combed through lists of women philosophers once again. The call for papers specified the topics of religion, metaphysics and science discussed by a woman philosopher, so that discounted all the Early Modern women who didn't write about these fields. I felt Shepherd, however, fitted the conference brief best, as well as being a neglected philosopher who is under-researched, or at least, despite some initial research on her decades ago, she had started to be almost completely forgotten about, bar a couple of exceptions, until about 2017. So this is how I chose Shepherd as a research area, despite her emphasis on metaphysics. 

I stuck with her as a research interest even though that particular abstract was not accepted for the conference because I discovered that Shepherd fitted other things I look for in a past philosopher: 

one: she has a feminist approach and breaks gender barriers in that she takes on male philosophers and rationally argues contras against them, something some women philosophers say they struggle with even today; 

two, her philosophical texts do not promote Christianity or religion or indeed even contain many references to God or doctrines. She isn't concerned with proving the existence of God or doing theology or philosophy of religion. 

Do join me soon for more Philosophy Fluency. 

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Season 6 Episode 5:

'Shepherd's Materialism'

Published on Spotify: 8th November 2023

Available at:

https://anchor.fm/philosophyfluency/episodes/6-5-Shepherds-Materialism-e2bkmd8

Hello and welcome to Season 6 Episode 5. Today I'm following on from my last episode on Shepherd in which I argued that she is not promoting Christianity in her treatises or expounding philosophy of religion. So let's settle in with some hot coffees on this chilly day and I'll discuss my latest research on Shepherd's similarity to the mild theist and soft materialist philosopher, Joseph Priestley. 

In the opening of chapter 3 of my Volume 2: Research Thoughts on…. Lady Mary Shepherd, I argue that Boyle has overlooked Shepherd's most important reference to the 18th century philosopher, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). Why is this particularly relevant or of interest? Because it's the footnote in which Shepherd says her views, unknowingly, naturally run along the same lines as Priestley. The importance of this, is that he is a theist materialist who was very sympathetic and supportive of the first British person to explicitly argue for atheism and declare himself to be an atheist in writing and for it to be published. So Priestley shows that a philosopher during Shepherd's lifetime could be a materialist, without being a hard materialist or an atheist, so I'd like to explore the possibility of Shepherd being a type of materialist, without stereotypically also being a hard materialist or avowed hard atheist. I shall examine passages of her treatises for signs of textual evidence to support my hypothesis that Shepherd was a theist, soft materialist.

Nevertheless, although this is my stronger claim, I qualify this by also making the subsidiary claim that there is an outside possibility that Shepherd may have been a harder materialist and or less theist (perhaps agnostic) than she presents herself in her writings. Why? Because there were blasphemy laws to contend with and early modern authors were acutely aware of the possible consequences of falling foul of them. We gain an insight into the fears of male atheists attempting to publish their non-religious views when we look at Priestley's correspondence with his atheist friend who asked him for protection if action were taken against him and his book, for being the first British publication of the atheistic perspective. Interestingly, this book did not particularly run into hot water as the atheist author expected, possibly partly due the fact that he used a loophole in the regulations of blasphemy: it was deemed more blasphemous to reject Jesus and the Trinity than to generally be a non-believer about God. So the first published atheist avoided this blaspheming of Jesus and the Trinity.

I think it's also important to note what Shepherd doesn't write in her treatises, as well as what she does write and publish. Hence, I argue, we may need to take account of the fact that Shepherd does not mention Jesus or the Trinity once in either of her published treatises that she puts her name to. 

Why would Shepherd feel the need to avoid blasphemy laws and regulations if she was devoutly Christian? The answer may well be that she was either a type of agnostic or atheist, or she was only very mildly Christian, in which case her views were less than pious concerning Jesus and the Trinity so it was best to omit them in her publications, on pain of blasphemy. 

Since Shepherd was an excellent logician, she ensures her arguments are logically consistent and cohere with each other as well as her professed acceptance of the existence of God. 

Now I'll read you an extract from one of Shepherd's treatise: Essays on the Perception of an External Universe and Other Subjects Connected with the Doctrine of Causation, published 1827, to give you a flavour of her humorous yet astute and bold authorial voice as she argues for her own stance while putting forward her philosophical contras against top male philosophers, including the religious philosopher, Bishop Berkeley. 

In this passage, she is analysing a section in Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge to refute Berkeley and Idealism: the school of thought that things in the world are ideas in the mind (our minds and God's mind), not material objects in an external world, independent of us and God. Why does she choose to examine this aspect of Berkeley's philosophy? Because, as Shepherd rather amusingly puts it: 

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(Essay VI.

That Sensible Qualities Cannot Be Causes.)

"It is on this point, where Berkeley being puzzled by his own doctrine, runs into a gross contradiction with himself." (p300) 

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"But who is there of the smallest capacity for analytical philosophy, who could agree with him, that we eat, drink, and are clad, with those sensible qualities which can only exist in the mind? Do they come out thence again,

to be tacked on our bodies, or poured down our throats? Do we eat the sensible colour white, and swallow the consistency which appears to the touch of the hand? Does truly any sensation of the colour, figure, and extension of white drapery, which exists in one man's mind, cover the lifeless insentient

body of another? This is surely a doctrine which has justly provoked the ridicule of mankind.

But Berkeley here pushed himself to a notable dilemma, for he was either obliged to admit the very doctrine he combated, namely, that ideas exist, exterior to mind and body, and in that state perform the various operations of nature; or, secondly, that parts of the mind, that is, the ideas of the mind; that is, mental things performed them; in other words, all things being sensible qualites, "ideas in the mind;" some ideas, clothe or feed other ideas ; i.e. some parts of the mind clothe other parts of the mind ; some parts of the mind swallow other parts of the mind ; but all these propositions mean no more than that the actions of some

parts of the mind interact with other parts of the mind. A notion so confused that nothing can be made of it, and moreover, contrary to what he elsewhere asserts, namely, " that the

mind is simple and indivisible" — "that ideas are inert beings, having no power or activity, and cannot be causes."

There was but one way left in which, with any consistency, he could get out of the difficulty, namely, by saying, we eat, and drank, and were clothed with God, the only being external to ideas, which he admits; —a strange and monstrous thought! I cannot reflect that this sentence is in his book without pain ; whoever shall study it, as it deserves, for the sake of unravelling the paradox, may, peradventure, find the clue to a better theory, and may come to perceive, that in nature there must necessarily be exterior qualities corresponding to, and as various as those ideas with which the mind is impressed; and to which exterior qualities, sensation is not necessary. God is not found by regarding him, as an active spirit to raise ideas in us, at our board, at our toilet table, by the side of our hearths. To imagine that he is swallowed in gluttony, or drunk for satisfaction of thirst or intemperance, is not the happiest way to demonstrate his being."

(p301-4)

(Quoted from: Mary Shepherd, External Universe and Other Subjects Connected with the Doctrine of Causation, published by John hatchard and Son., Piccadilly, London, United Kingdom: 1827.)

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I'll leave you to think about this extract. In the meantime, you can follow and ask philosophical questions on the Philosophy Fluency Instagram account. Do join me next week when I'll be furthering my discussion of this passage and her materialism. Have a good week.

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