Sarah Hutton
Honorary Visiting Professor

Profile

Biography

I studied at New Hall, University of Cambridge, one of only three colleges which then admitted women at that university. After doctoral research at the Warburg Institute, University of London, I taught at University of Hertfordshire (formerly Hatfield Polytechnic), Middlesex University, and Aberystwyth University in Wales. I was Belle van Zuylen Visiting Professor at Utrecht University, and Gildersleeve Visiting Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University. Most recently, I was visiting professor at the University of Paris, Diderot, and at Paderborn University in Germany. I have held fellowships at the Huntington Library, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Wolfson College, Cambridge, and the Institute for Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews.

Research

Overview

My research focuses on the history of early modern philosophy, especially seventeenth-century British philosophy, with special interests in the Cambridge Platonists and women philosophers. I am also interested in early modern intellectual history more generally.

I have also edited early modern texts, among them a re-edition of Marjorie Nicolson’s Conway Letters (OUP 1992) and an edition of Cudworth’s Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (CUP 1996). I am currently preparing an edition of Thomas Traherne’s Christian Ethicks.

Publications

Selected publications

Monographs

• British Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century. Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Anne Conway, a Woman Philosopher. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Edited collections

• Platonism at the Origins of Modernity. Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, edited with Douglas Hedley. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2008.
• Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries and Legacy, edited with Paul Schuurman. Springer, 2008.
• Benjamin Furly (1646-1714): a Quaker Merchant and his Milieu. Florence: Olschki: 2007.
• Newton and Newtonianism, edited with James E. Force, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004.

Articles/chapters

• “Blue-eyed Philosophers Born on Wednesdays”: An Essay on Women and the History of Philosophy’. The Monist 98 (2015): 7–20
• ‘From Cudworth to Hume: Cambridge Platonism and the Scottish Enlightenment’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 42 (2014): 1-19
•  ‘Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy’, History of European Ideas (2014): 925-937
• ‘Women, Freedom and Equality’. In Peter Anstey (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Seventeenth Century Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013,  501–8.
• ‘The Cambridge Platonists and Averroes’, in Renaissance Averroism and its Aftermath, ed. A. Akasoy and G. Giglioni. Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2013.
• ‘Religion, Philosophy and Women’s Letters: Anne Conway and DamarisMasham’, Debating the Faith Religion and Letter-Writing in Great Britain, 1550-1800, edited by Anne Dunan-Page and Clotilde Prunier. Dordrecht, Springer, 2013.
•  ‘Between Newton and Leibniz: Emilie du Châtelet and Samuel Clarke’, in Madame Du Châtelet, zum 300 Geburtstag, ed. Ruth Hagengruber. Dordrecht: Springer, 2011. pp. 77-95.
• ‘The Persona of the Woman Philosopher in Eighteenth-Century  England: Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays and Elizabeth Hamilton’, Intellectual History Review. 18:3 (2008), pp. 403 – 412
• ‘Virtue, God and Stoicism in the Thought of Elizabeth Carter and Catharine Macaulay’ in J. Broad and K. Green (eds), Virtue, Liberty and Toleration. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007. pp. 137-48.
• ‘Eine Cambridge-Konstellation? Perspektiven für eine Konstellationsforschung zu den Platonikern von Cambridge’ , in M. Mulsow and M.  Stamm (eds), Konstellationsforschung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005. pp. 349-58. Translated by Martin Mulsow.
• ‘Descartes’ Earliest Women Readers’ in Receptions of Descartes, ed. Tad Schmalz. London: Routledge,  2005.
• ‘Emilie du Châtelet’s Institutions de physique as a document in the history of French Newtonianism’. Cambridge Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, special issue, ed. Scott Mandelbrote, 35 (2004), pp. 515-31. 

External activities

Memberships

• I am director of the book series International Archives of the History of Ideas.
• I serve on the board of management of The Journal of the History of Philosophy, having previously been a member of the JHP editorial board.
• I have been a member of the editorial board of The British Journal of the History of Philosophy since its founding.
• I was chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy from 1996-2004.
• I am a member of the AHRC peer review panel and moderating panels, and a member of panel of assessors for the Australian Research Council.
• I am consultant to the Newton Project and a member of the advisory board of Projectvox and Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy.
• From 2013–14 I served as foreign member of the History of Philosophy panel for the Italian Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (ASN).
• From 2006-2010 I was a Member of the Council of the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.

Invited talks and conferences

• July 2015: keynote and masterclass at ‘Controversies in Early Modern Psychology’ The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam.
• June 2015: ‘“Context” and “Fortuna” in the History of Women Philosophers: a Diachronic Perspective’, at conference ‘Women in the History of Philosophy’, Collegium of Advanced Studies, Helsinki.
• February 2015: ‘Émilie du Châtelet’s Newton’, at conference, ‘Voltaire and the Newtonian Revolution’, St Cross College, Oxford.
• February 2015: ‘Women and Intellectual History’, Intellectual History Seminar, Institute for Intellectual History, University of St Andrews.
• December 2015: ‘Henry More and Renaissance Philosophy: More’s Response to Girolamo Cardano in his Of the Immortality of the Soul’, at conference to mark the 4^th centenary of the birth of Henry More.
• November 2015: ‘Some Reflections on Women in the History of Philosophy’, at workshop ‘Rewriting the History of Philosophy: The Women Chapters’, University of Paderborn.
• October 2014: ‘Newton, Metaphysics and the Cambridge Context’, at conference ‘All in Pieces? New Insights into the Structure of Newton’s Thought’, The Huntington Library, San Marino.
• September 2014: ‘Henry More and Self-Determination’, at symposium on More’s Enchiridion Ethicum, Fribourg.
• July 2014: ‘Women, Freedom and the History of Philosophy’. Invited symposium on Women and Liberty, 1600-1800. Monash University Centre, Prato.
• June 2014: ‘Bringing in Women: Reflections on the practice of Intellectual History’. Keynote speaker at conference of International Society for Intellectual History, ‘Intellectual Hinterlands’. Toronto.
• May 2014: ‘Making Sense of Pain: Thinking and Health in the Correspondence of Anne Conway and her Circle’. Paper at conference, ‘Witnesses: States of Mind and States of Body’. California Institute of Technology.
• May 2014. ‘Demystifying Renaissance Platonism: the Cambridge Platonists Revisited’. Keynote paper at symposium, ‘Classical Philosophers in Seventeenth Century English Thought’, Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, University of York.
• January 2014: ‘Negotiating Social Order: Women and Philosophy in the Early Enlightenment’. Seminar on Literature, Learning, and the Social Orders in Early Modern Europe. All Souls College, Oxford.