Later Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers on Mind and Its Place in the World

In this paper, I advance our knowledge about women’s contributions to nineteenth-century British philosophy by setting out the views of mind of Frances Power Cobbe, Constance Naden, and the theosophists Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Cobbe espoused dualism, Naden materialism, and Blavatsky and Besant a form of panpsychism. Each woman’s view was bound up with her position on religion and immortality, and each has problems as well as interesting features and understandable intellectual motivations. My aim is to help to restore these women to the historical record by reconstructing their views of the mind clearly and by exploring the relations between them.