SUBLIME REASON AND BEAUTIFUL RHETORIC: WOLLSTONECRAFT AND BURKE ON THE NATURAL RIGHTS OF MAN

• Authors: Antal Éva
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Mary Wollstonecraft in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in response to a lengthy letter by Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), expresses her radical and proto-feminist views. Wollstonecraft provides an enlightened criticism of Burke’s conservative writing, referring to such key notions of the long eighteenth century as common sense, sensibility, wit, and judgment. While taking the author’s earlier political ideas into account, the text’s allusions and digressions echo Burke’s early “revolutionary” writing on the aesthetic (and sexist) approach to the sublime and the beautiful (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757). In my article, I follow this thread running through Wollstonecraft’s critique, and I also focus on the way how she responsibly confronts Burke with his own thought and rhetorical (mis)demeanours in the discussion of man’s natural rights. In contrast to Burke’s beautiful rhetoric, Wollstonecraft defends sublime reason, and she also presents her humanist view, discussing the importance of proper manners and education.

Keywords

EN

ENLIGHTENMENT; EDMUND BURKE; MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT; NATURAL RIGHTS

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Filozofia (Philosophy)
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 79
• Issue: 7
• Pages: 722 – 736

Contributors

author

Antal Éva

• Institute of English, American and German Studies, Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eszterházy tér 1, 3300 Eger, Hungary

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5245-6470

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/filozofia.2024.79.7.2