Deborah Boyle

Professor

My research focuses on women philosophers in the history of early modern and modern philosophy. I am the author of Mary Shepherd: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2023), The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Descartes on Innate Ideas (Continuum, 2009), as well as the editor of Lady Mary Shepherd: Selected Writings (Imprint, 2018) and of Margaret Cavendish's Philosophical Letters, Abridged (Hackett, 2021). I have also published articles and book chapters on Cavendish, Shepherd, Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Conway, and Mary Astell. I am currently researching the work of Scottish women novelists and playwrights who have not previously been characterized as philosophers but whose works contain significant philosophical content: Jean Marischall, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Joanna Baillie.

I also do research on the work of David Hume, particularly on his views regarding human and animal reasoning and animal ethics.

I have been the editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy since July 2020.

In 2022, I was awarded the College of Charleston's Distinguished Research Award.

Education

• 1999 - Ph.D., Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh
• 1993 - M.A., Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh
• 1989 - B.A., Philosophy, Wellesley College
• 1987-88 - Oxford University, Somerville College (junior year abroad)

Publications

• "Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Philophers as a Philosophical Text." British Journal for the History of Philosophy (2021), https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09608788.2021.1917337 
• "Mary Shepherd on the Meaning of 'Life'." British Journal for the History of Philosophy, special issue on Women Philosophers of the Nineteeth Century (2020), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09608788.2020.1771271
• "A Mistaken Attribution to Lady Mary Shepherd." Journal of Modern Philosophy 2, no.1 (June 2020), http:doi.org/10.32881/jomp.100.
• "Mary Shepherd on Mind, Soul, and Self." Journal of the History of Philosophy 58, no. 1 (January 2020): 93-112.
• "Feminism and Early Modern Philosophy." Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy, ed. Ásta Sveinsdottir and Kim Q. Hall.
• "Informed by ‘Sense and Reason’: Margaret Cavendish's Theorizing about Perception." The Senses and the History of Philosophy, ed. Brian R. Glenney and Filipe Pereira da Silva. Routledge, 2019.
• "Hume and Animal Ethics." The Humean Mind, ed. Angela Coventry and Alex Sager, pp. 470-480. London: Routledge, 2019.
• "Margaret Cavendish." Oxford Bibliographies Online. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/  (September 2018).
• Mary Shepherd: Selected Writings (Library of Scottish Philosophy Series). Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2018.
• "Expanding the Canon of Scottish Philosophy: The Case for Adding Mary Shepherd." The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 15 no. 3 (2017): 275-93.
• "Margaret Cavendish on the Eternity of Created Matter." In Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, ed. Emily Thomas, pp. 111-130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• "Freedom and Necessity in the Work of Margaret Cavendish." In Women and Liberty 1600-1800, ed. Jacqueline Broad and Karen Detlefsen, pp. 141-162. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• "Margaret Cavendish on Perception, Self-Knowledge, and Probable Opinion." Philosophy Compass 10, no. 7 (July 2015): 438-450.
• The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish. New York: Oxford Univeristy Press. (2018)
• "Margaret Cavendish on Gender, Nature, and Freedom." Hypatia 28, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 516-32.
• "The Ways of the Wise: Hume’s Rules of Causal Reasoning." Hume Studies 38, no. 2 (April 2012).
• "Mary Astell and Cartesian 'Scientia.'" In The New Science and Women's Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein, ed. Judy Hayden (Palgrave Press).
• Descartes on Innate Ideas. London: Continuum, 2009.
• "Spontaneous and Sexual Generation in Conway's Principles." In The Problem of Animal Generation in Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin E. H. Smith, 175-193. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• "Fame, Virtue, and Government: Margaret Cavendish on Ethics and Politics." Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 (April 2006).
• "Margaret Cavendish's Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy." Configurations 12 (2004): 195-227.
• "Hume on Animal Reason." Hume Studies 29, no.1 (April 2003): 3-28.
• "Decartes on Innate Ideas." The Modern Schoolman 78 (November 2000): 35-50.
• "Descartes' Natural Light Reconsidered." Journal of the History of Philosophy 37, no. 4 (October 1999).