ABSTRACT
Susan Bordo makes far-reaching claims about the importance of Cartesianism, which she supports with a detailed examination of Descartes's writing, most particularly the Meditations- Her work is very much influenced by Evelyn Fox Keller. Bordo's argument requires her to lay heavy stress on the anxiety that she claims to find in the skeptical arguments of the First Meditation. Bordo proposes that this skepticism can best be understood when we consider the background from which the seventeenth-century view of science and the scientific world developed. Genevieve Lloyd shares Bordo's views about the consequences of Descartes's account of reason, although Lloyd argues for these consequences on very different grounds. Both Bordo and Lloyd have drawn on Descartes's texts to argue that a Cartesian account of: reason can be identified with masculinity and so serve as a gatekeeper to deny rationality to women. Mary Astell gives expression to the explicitly gender-neutral concept of reason that Lloyd found in Descartes.
