Disappearing Ink: Essays in Early Modern Philosophy [Hardcover]

When Eileen O'Neill (1953-2017) published her ground-breaking essay, Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy in 1998, women philosophers were virtually absent from encyclopedias of philosophy and the numerous histories and anthologies of early modern thought. This essay would come to have an enormous impact, signaling the beginning of the movement to introduce early modern women philosophers into the canon. This volume republishes that essay and presents it in the context of O'Neill's subsequent work, some of it well-known and influential, alongside other pieces that are harder to locate. Combined, these works trace the complete arc of O'Neill's thought, from painstaking studies of individual themes and figures to a sweeping vision of how feminism should inform our approach to the history of early modern thought--indeed, to the history of philosophy more generally.When Eileen O'Neill (1953-2017) published her ground-breaking essay, Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy in 1998, women philosophers were virtually absent from encyclopedias of philosophy and the numerous histories and anthologies of early modern thought. This essay would come to have an enormous impact, signaling the beginning of the movement to introduce early modern women philosophers into the canon. In its densely-packed 46 pages, Disappearing Ink presented the names, major works, and principal theses of literally dozens of forgotten women, whose works were published during the early modern period and who had engaged in correspondence with central male figures but whose names and works had since been erased.Disappearing Inkreprints this now-canonical piece together with subsequent essays, some widely read, some harder to locate, and one, on Cartesianism and the Gendered Mind , written in 2013 and published here for the first time. The essays in Part I develop O'Neill's views on feminist history of philosló2