ABSTRACT
This essay, which embraces all of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works, shows that, though Wollstonecraft’s epistemology is unsystematic and sometimes inconsistent, her oeuvre evinces a dialectical movement from a eulogy of sensibility in her early novel Mary, A Fiction, to a critique of it in A Vindication of the Rights of Men and the earlier part of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, swiftly followed by a reinstatement based on a broadening of the concept; it becomes linked to Hartley’s association of ideas, in the later part of the same work as well as in the unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria. God remains the cornerstone of Wollstonecraft’s epistemology, while the place of reason and the passions evolves. There is a tension between empiricism and innatism, as well as between ontogeny and phylogeny, the latter being linked to a stadial theory of the progress of civilisation. This concern with theories of historical development, in the Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, as well as in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, highlights the part played by external circumstances in the shaping of the human mind and of moral behaviour. Ultimately, the upheaval of the French Revolution, alongside her tactical use of arguments and concepts, shaped the development of Wollstonecraft’s epistemology.
