Many of you who responded to our recent teaching page survey remarked that you would like access to more texts by the women philosophers on our website. We would like to point you to our transcription and translation of Émilie Du Châtelet‘s Essai sur l’Optique. Bryce Gessell, Fritz Nagel, and Andrew Janiak edited the transcription in 2017 and Bryce translated the Essai in 2019. You can read more about the work of translation and transcription in an article by Duke Today. We look forward to sharing more details with you about our revised teaching page later this year.
We also can recommend other free translations, transcriptions, and digitized texts. This is not an exhaustive list, but it does suggest many places that one can look for free resources. Please let us know about other examples that we can add to our teaching page.
- Astell’s 1697 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, available on Project Gutenberg
- Cavendish’s works available on Digital Cavendish
- Conway’s The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy published anonymously in the 1690 Opuscula Philosophica Quibus Continentur Principia Philosophiæ Antiquissimæ & Recentissimæ ac Philosophia Vulgaris Refutata Quibus Subjuncta Sunt CC. Problemata de Revolutione Animarum Humanarum, available on Google Books
- Du Chatelet’s On Freedom, translated in 2021 by Julia Jorati, available on Project Vox
- Sor Juana’s sonnets, available by Alix Ingber at Sweet Briar College
- Masham’s 1705 Occasional Thoughts, available on Project Gutenberg
- Shepherd’s 1827 Essays on the Perception of an External Universe, and other Subjects Connected with the Doctrine of Causation, available on the Internet Archive
- Van Schurman’s 1652 Opuscula Hebraea Graeca Latina et Gallica, Prosaica et Matrica, available from the University of Mannheim, Germany
