Copenhagen Summer School in Women’s History of Philosophy

Sabrina Ebbersmeyer

Title: The Future is Feminist: Methodological Reflections on Women’s Marginalisation in the Historiography of Philosophy and the Future of Philosophy.

Abstract: In my talk, I will examine some of the shortcomings of traditional narratives in the history of philosophy, particularly those that have disadvantaged women. I will then address the challenges we face in developing new, more inclusive narratives. I will argue that what is needed is a rigorous and critical rethinking - not just of narrative patterns, but also of the analytical and historiographical tools we use, as well as of the very concept of philosophy itself. 

Kristin Gjesdal

Title: Art and Politics: Germaine de Staël and Other Unruly Women.

Abstract: During the period that Kant, based in Königsberg, developed his notion of the pure judgment of taste, an alternative approach to art and taste was emerging in Paris. Writing literature as well as philosophy of art, Germaine de Staël – with her reputation as a political superpower – insisted on the need for an engaged and philosophically responsive literature.

Staël was no stranger to philosophy: At the time, she had already published a study of Rousseau’s thought. She would proceed to publish an important work on the passions and, in the 1800s, went on to author magisterial studies of literature, German thought, and the principles and progress of the French revolution.

In this presentation, I analyze Staël’s approach, in her early work, to political art. I argue that Staël’s early discussion of literature sheds light on her moral psychology, especially her early discussions of the passions (greed) and the possibility of human edification. Her contribution to philosophy of art, I suggest, should lead us to reconsider both the history and the systematic possibilities of modern aesthetics.

Christian Benne

Title: From ‘lady philosophy’ to philosophizing ladies.

Abstract: This talk presents a reading of Friedrich Schlegel’s famous letter “On philosophy”, addressed to his later wife, Dorothea. It is not only a culmination of the early romantics’ revolution in gender perspectives, but presents a commentary on older, enlightenment views of women’s relationship to philosophy.

Irina Hron

Title: Reading Philosophical Texts.

Abstract: This keynote lecture takes the practice of reading philosophical texts as its subject and method. Focusing on arguments for women’s intellectual equality in early modern Europe and the Nordic Enlightenment, it will closely engage with foundational texts that shaped Enlightenment debates on reason, education, and gender. These texts must be read carefully and cautiously, with attention to their rhetorical structures and genre. What does it mean to read a philosophical text – and how have gendered assumptions about who is entitled to think and write philosophically shaped the practice of reading itself? Special attention will be given to how women philosophers defended their intellectual capacities and how they used reading and writing as scholarly and learned practices. By presenting their ideas in letters, poems, dedications, and other non-academic genres, women philosophers often focused on genres distinct from the traditional philosophical treatise. What consequences did this have for how these texts were and still are read? This section of the summer school invites participants to critically reflect on reading practices in general, including their own practice of reading: What kinds of texts do we recognize as philosophical? What kinds of arguments grant philosophical authority? How might close reading, attentive to genre and rhetorical strategy, challenge the conventional boundaries of the philosophical canon? During the workshop that follows the lecture, participants will have the opportunity to engage with and discuss selected passages through close reading in small groups.

Martin Fog Arndal

Title: Mary Wollstonecraft, Karoline von Günderrode, and the Revolutions of Nature.

Abstract: The years around 1800 witnessed profound transformations not only in political philosophy but also in conceptions of nature. In both Britain and Germany, new organic - later termed “Romantic” - visions of the natural world emerged, portraying nature as a self-organizing, material-spiritual organism. In this presentation, I will examine how women contributed to these intellectual shifts by focusing on two often-overlooked philosophical essays: Mary Wollstonecraft’s On Poetry and our Relish for the Beauties of Nature (1797) and Karoline von Günderrode’s Jdee der Erde (Idea of the Earth) (1806). In these texts, Wollstonecraft and Günderrode articulate reflections on the dynamics of the natural world, the earth’s own purposes, and the human capacity to aesthetically sense this living, self-organizing environment—one increasingly imperiled by the forces of industrialization.

Martin Fog Arndal

Title: Women and Scandinavia: From Early Modern to Revolutionary Gender Equality.

Abstract: As women writers in Europe began to make their presence known during the querelle des femmes, similar developments were underway in the Nordic countries. Within the context of Protestant and Lutheran traditions, Scandinavian women writers of the 17th and 18th centuries challenged prevailing misogynistic views that framed them as inherently inferior and less rational. They voiced their arguments across a wide array of genres, including poetry, dedications, letters, prefaces, and religious texts. In this presentation, I will offer a historical overview of the Scandinavian movement toward gender equality, focusing on its philosophical and religious underpinnings. Specifically, I will explore: (i) how women articulated arguments for the equality of the sexes, and (ii) how these arguments evolved over time. 

Lucie Duggan

Title: Spaces of Reading, Acts of Writing: Women’s Libraries and the Labour of Literature.

Abstract: This talk explores the intellectual and literary labours of early modern Danish noblewomen through the private library of Karen Brahe (1657–1736), a uniquely preserved archive rich in women’s writing. Handwritten notes accompanying several of the texts contained within the library record the collective circumstances of their production, offering a rare glimpse into how women undertook “bookwork” - the reading, writing, translating, and preserving of texts - not only as devotional or educational activity but as a form of intellectual authorship and historical memory. The library emerges as an active site of knowledge-making, where literary labour and familial preservation intersected in powerful, enduring ways.

Nicolai von Eggers Mariegaard

Title: Republican Feminism: The Political Ideas of French Revolutionary Women. 

Abtract: While republicanism – with its focus on virility and active, weapon-carrying citizenship – is sometimes seen as an antithesis to feminism, French revolutionary women appropriated republican discourse to serve their own ambitions for freedom and equality. In this talk, I discuss the political ideas of French revolutionary women such as Louise de Keralio, Pauline Léon, Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Jeanne Roland, and Etta Palm d’Aelders. Situating the French revolutionary ideas concerning female citizenship, virtue, and power relations within the context of 18th century republican discourse as well as the institutions of French revolutionary politics, this talk will discuss the ways in which a republican language intersected with proto-feminist ideas concerning gender relations and the social basis of just political orders.

Cecilia Rosengreen

Title: On intellectual equality in eighteenth century Sweden – Sirenia, Nordenflycht and Thorild.

Abstract: When the Swedish Gender Equality Agency addresses milestones in Swedish equality history, the year of 1842 is mentioned as the first step. That is, when elementary school was made mandatory for both boys and girls. The right to higher education, to work, to vote, to hold office and other rights were however not granted women in until the twentieth century. In this lecture I would like to make some references to 18th century Sweden, before the concrete political struggle for women's rights started. Sweden was then un unequal country in many senses and women were generally legally incapacitated. The debate about the intellectual capacity of women and their right to develop it, was nevertheless present in the growing press as well as the literary world at large. Both women and men raised their voices on the matter, as an enlightened form of la querelle des femmes. I will give three examples of these voices, two still well known (Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht and Thomas Thorild) and one forgotten (Hedvig Sirenia). In different ways, they were all part of the Enlightenment spirit. I will read their poetic interventions as pieces of moral and political philosophy.