This chapter discusses Wollstonecraft’s attitude to the body and to ways in which physical upbringing can harm or improve all aspects of life. Women’s lack of physical education, she argues, means that they grow up to become less healthy, in their bodies and in their minds. I compare Wollstonecraft’s arguments to two recent ones. The first, by philosopher of science Sharyn Clough, suggests that Wollstonecraft was quite right to attribute women’s poor heath to misguided views of femininity. The second, from Iris Marion Young, revisits Wollstonecraft’s view that women’s bodies are trained in such a way that their minds also become confined. Lastly, I turn to Wollstonecraft’s thoughts on the maternal body and on abortion.

The conclusion explores that place of men and masculinity in Wollstonecraft’s thought and the new world she hoped would rise. Unlike feminist science-fiction writers such as Sandra Newman, she never envisaged a world without men, but always hoped that men and women could learn to live and work together. In order for this to happen, social mores needed to be reformed, as they contained too many prejudices about sex and gender that kept men and women separate. How close have we come to realizing Wollstonecraft’s vision?

This chapter introduces the breadth of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works, and explains why the book will focus on her feminist thought. It begins with a general introduction to her life and work, then explores the extent to which she is a philosopher of human rights, and how, in turns, it is correct to describe her as a feminist philosopher despite the anachronism involved. The chapter concludes with a short description of the chapters to follow.

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of Pascal’s legacy, his renown and neglect throughout the centuries, and his profound influence on philosophy, science, religion, and much else. The metholodgy of this book is then addressed: the aim is not primarily exegesis, though there will be plenty of that too. Rather, the aim of the book is to argue that there is much in Pascal’s work that is philosophically relevant to us today. Our cultural, social, political, and technological moment requires a deep look at our natures and aims, and this is what Pascal’s philosophy can offer, if we can get past the sometimes obscure theological disputes he was engaged in and the fragmentary nature of his writings. An overview of the book’s chapters is then provided.

The question “Why read X today?” can legitimately be raised with respect to any premodern thinker, major or minor, in the history of philosophy, and many modern ones as well. Why, one might ask, should we continue to be interested in what philosophers who are so distant from us in time and circumstance had to say? The question is especially acute with respect to those who were writing out of very different concerns and for very different audiences, and whose ideas are uninformed by any philosophical developments (whether new solutions to old questions or new questions altogether) that may have occurred after their time. Indeed, it is not difficult to find contemporary philosophers suggesting that a knowledge of the history of philosophy is irrelevant, and perhaps a genuine hindrance, to doing philosophy – much as scientists might argue that a knowledge of the history of science is irrelevant to doing science – and that perhaps the only reason to learn what earlier thinkers had to say is either to avoid reinventing the wheel or out of purely antiquarian interest.

This chapter looks at the role of parents and schools in children’s education with a particular emphasis on the domination that adults inevitably exert on children. The first section explores the way adults may exercise tyranny over children and whether sharing the responsibility of care may help mitigate this. In the second section, we look at how teaching children how to use their own reason – while it does not mean domination plays no part in the adult–child relationship – can mitigate its effects by shortening it. The third section looks at how gendering parental roles makes parenting harder and less effective, and that Wollstonecraft’s anti-essentialist views are reflected are very much part of her discussion of motherhood. Finally, I ask why Wollstonecraft could not simply have modeled her account of parenting onto the first parts of Rousseau’s Emile, and I argue that this would have amounted to a very ineffective pink-washing of Rousseau’s essentially sexist views.

This chapter explores Pascal’s skeptical outlook, highlighting his innovations as well as his reliance on older, more familiar arguments. To begin with, Pascal thought that reason itself could not provide the foundations or first principles of geometry or our knowledge of space. These first principles are not only unsupportable by any proof, so that reason itself provides them no certainty, but they in turn provide materials for further uncertainty given potential infinities in space – both the largeness and smallness of space seems to have no bounds. The result is that we cannot, by appeal to reason alone, find our place within the physical universe. Similarly, and contra Descartes, no proof of God can guarantee that life is not one long dream, so belief in the external world itself cannot be supported by reason. Nor can our experience of the world prove the existence of God in any useful way. The result is that our reason and experience, operating on their own, are insufficient to establish much of anything foundational. The appeal to proofs and evidence cannot resolve other controversies of our day, either, as anyone who has tried to convince a conspiracy theorist by such methods will know.