MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 3--UPDATED
I'm very sorry to report the untimely passing of Professor O'Neill, a leading scholar of early modern philosophy at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, where she was Professor of Philosophy. Her husband Gary Ostertag, a philosopher at CUNY, kindly shared the following information about her work and career:
Eileen’s main interests were in 17th Century metaphysics, specifically causation, and the history of women philosophers of that period. Her 1983 Princeton dissertation on Descartes, Mind and Mechanism, still widely cited, was written under Margaret Wilson.
The first product of her research on women in the history of philosophy was an invited talk at the Eastern APA in 1990. The following year, she taught graduate seminars on women philosophers of the early modern period at The Graduate Center, CUNY and at Harvard. The course packet for these seminars consisted in hundreds of pages of photocopies of books published in the 17th century by figures such as Mary Astell, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Anna Maria Van Schurman, Marie de Gourney and others. If these names are not obscure any longer, it is due to Eileen’s work. The first fruits of her research were published in “Disappearing Ink” 1998 in J. Kourany, ed., Philosophy in a Feminist Voice (Princeton UP.) and included discussion of literally hundreds of forgotten figures. By that time she was regularly teaching courses and seminars on women philosophers at UMass-Amherst, her academic home since 1995.
It should be added that Eileen was instrumental not simply in unearthing texts, but also in providing readings that made sense of them. Her edition of Cavendish’s Observations on Experimental Philosophy (CUP, 2001) is a case in point: here she made sense of a rather bewildering and idiosyncratic text, showing its importance to a full understanding of 17th century thought. It is through this interpretive work that Cavendish, a figure once dismissed by Virgina Woolf as “hare-brained, fantastical,” has quietly assumed a place in the canon. (Cavendish is now the subject of an volume, by David Cunning, in Routledge’s Arguments of the Philosophers series.)
At the time of her death, she was a section editor for SEP (History of Feminism), and co-editor (with Christia Mercer) of Oxford University Press’s New Histories of Philosophy series.
Professor Ostertag also shared this nice Washington Post article by Andrew Janiak (Duke) that discusses her pioneering work on bringing women into the philosophical canon. And here is a lecture Professor O'Neill gave at Barnard College, back in 2009, at a conference in her honor. (She is introduced by Columbia's Christia Mercer.)
I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.
REMEMBRANCES FROM PHILOSOPHERS: Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser), Christia Mercer (Columbia) and Louise Antony (U Mass/Amherst), Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam). Plus a brief memorial notice from the U Mass department.
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