Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women

Bibliographic Data

ID16004288
AuthorsRuth Perry (corresponding author)
Year1985
Volume18
Issue4
Pages472-472
Publication date1985-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEighteenth-Century Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-2586 • E-ISSN: 1086-315X
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2739005
OpenAlexW2321630502
LanguageEN
Citations received12

THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT had far-reaching ideological effects on definitions of rationality and feeling, and social construction of gender. But ultimate meaning of cultural revisions of that period is still being debated. That it became intellectually possible, in course of seventeenth century, to imagine a radical split between knowing subject and object to be known, a dislocation T. S. Eliot has called the dissociation of sensibility when describing its effects on English poetry, has implications for development of our modern science, and for a definition of gender that pivots on this very categorization of thought.' The mind of England changed, Eliot says, such that serious thought was compartmentalized away from rest of life, purified of contact noise of typewriter or smell of cooking. By middle of eighteenth century, poets no longer felt their thoughts with immediacy of the odour of a rose.2 This apparent separation between cognitive and emotional-sensual functions coincided historically with development of societies of learning in Europe (the Royal Society in England, Academie francaise and Academie royal des Sciences in France, and K'oniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in

Liberation · Political science · Chemistry · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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