ABSTRACT
Rediscovering eclipsed texts written by women philosophers should not just lead us to add their texts to the existing canon, and then to interpret their works in its terms, but rather it should lead to the evolution of the canon itself. But do the problems we consider the proper problems of philosophy make space for women’s voices to enter? Let’s shift the predominant epistemic model by centering other texts and other figures. A consideration of Margaret Cavendish’s and Émilie Du Châtelet’s methods and forms of explanation helps us do just that. My concern is to show how, within the canon, the practice of these women philosophers anticipates, subverts, displaces, and invents another relation to experience. These women philosophers’ texts lead to the elaboration of concepts that can make experience intelligible, through clarifying and refining the concepts of early modern science. Cavendish not only challenged certain natural-scientific methods; she challenged the search for ultimate methods. And Du Châtelet proposed a vast palette of uses of hypotheses in interaction with experience.
