Dr Ruth Boeker
American Philosophical Association Fellow, May 2022 - July 2022
Home Institution: University College Dublin
Ruth Boeker is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at University College Dublin and a member of the UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life. Most of her research focuses on early modern philosophy and lies at the intersection of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and ethics. She is author of Locke on Persons and Personal Identity (OUP, 2021) and guest editor of a special issue on New Perspectives on Agency in Early Modern Philosophy (IJPS, 2019). She is currently preparing a short online and print book on Catharine Trotter Cockburn for the Cambridge Elements series on Women in the History of Philosophy. Additionally, she examines women’s role in correspondence and social networks in early modern Britain as part of her research project “Early Modern Women Philosophers: Pioneering New Methods”, which is supported by a UCD Career Development Award.
Project Title: Women’s Role in Scottish Enlightenment Philosophy
This project aims to advance scholarship on women’s role in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and challenges existing narratives that portray the history of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy as predominantly male. Recent scholarship has helped to recover Mary Shepherd’s philosophical writings. My research aims to establish that there are other women philosophers besides Shepherd who made important contributions to Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. I will pay particular attention to Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s philosophical writings and her correspondence with her niece Ann Hepburn Arbuthnot. Since Cockburn and Arbuthnot read, discuss and comment on the same philosophical works as their male contemporaries, who are recognized as Scottish philosophers, it is timely to acknowledge their contributions to Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. Catharine Macaulay’s philosophical writings and her contribution to Scottish Enlightenment philosophy also deserve more attention. This project plans to use not only traditional methods in the history of philosophy to analyse and interpret writings by women philosophers, but also methods developed by digital humanities researchers such as computational methods for correspondence and social network analysis.