Education, Equality, and Proto-Feminism in Maria Gaetana Agnesi

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, I analyse the works of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, an Italian mathematician of the eighteenth century. I specifically focus on the themes of proto-feminism, equality, and educational rights as persistent threads of her philosophical and scientific production. I emphasize her continuous efforts to highlight the place of women in the history of philosophy, presenting three chief texts in which these efforts are expressed. In her first work, the Academic oration, in which it is demonstrated that the studies of the liberal arts by the female sex are by no means inappropriate, I show how she articulates a rhetoric defence of women's educational rights. In her second work, the Philosophical propositions, I highlight how she combines Cartesian metaphysics and philosophy of mind to justify women's belonging to the history of philosophy. In analysing her final masterpiece, the Analytical institutions, I interpret the dedication to the Austrian empress Maria Theresa as a proto-feminist text, vindicating the leading role of women in history and society.