Newsroom

CORVALLIS - Negative portrayals of women by early modern philosophers may be related more closely to theological influences of the time than anything inherent within the philosophies, says a prominent historian from the University of Calgary.

Margaret J. Osler will argue her case in a lecture at Oregon State University on Thursday, June 5. Her talk, "The Nature of Gender and the Gender of Nature in Early Modern Natural Philosophy" begins at 4 p.m. in Memorial Union Room 206. It is free and open to the public.

OSU's Horning Endowment in the Humanities, the OSU History Department, the Environmental Sciences program, and the Department of Women Studies are sponsoring Osler's appearance.

Osler says that influential early texts, especially Robert Boyle's "Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature" (1686), suggest that theology was the primary concern of early modern natural philosophers - and governed their understanding of nature and their assumptions about gender. The clerical origins of many universities and scientific societies were thus influenced by that relationship, leading to gender bias and exclusion of women from science.

Osler is a professor of history at the University of Calgary, where she studies scientific revolution, 17th-century science, and mechanical philosophy.