ABSTRACT
The chapter challenges the exclusion of women thinkers from J. B. Schneewind’s important study The Invention of Autonomy (1998). Reuter asks how the inclusion of Mary Wollstonecraft’s contribution to moral philosophy would affect Schneewind’s account. The first section presents the outline of Schneewind’s interpretation and discusses how Wollstonecraft fits in. The second section examines Rousseau’s and Wollstonecraft’s views on how one can teach someone to think for her- or himself. The third section discusses Wollstonecraft’s views on knowledge in relation to the divide between empiricism and epistemologies dependent on innate principles. Reuter focuses particularly on the role of generalization, which is intimately connected to Wollstonecraft’s criticism of Rousseau’s distinction between male and female knowledge. The final section returns to Schneewind’s interpretation and Reuter argues that there is a connection between the exclusion of women and the exclusion of the topic of education. The chapter concludes by briefly comparing Wollstonecraft’s position with some recent feminist criticisms of Kant’s concept of autonomy.
