February 2024
Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2024. 'Epistolary Becomings', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/february-2024
In February 2024, I was invited at the University of Limerick to give the keynote address for the Sociological Association Ireland 2024 Postgraduate Conference. The theme of the conference was 'Reshaping Boundaries: Sociological Perspectives on Globalization and Cultural Dynamics' and the organizers in their invitation mentioned that the idea of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies was great in the challenge of 'reshaping boundaries' in sociology and beyond. I accepted of course and in thinking about a topic that would best fit the theme of the conference, among the many ideas that have emerged from my project I decided to focus on Sophie Germain's philosophical work in light of its contribution to processual approaches to philosophy and social theory and hence the abstract of my talk.
Abstract
In this talk I look at the philosophical work of Sophie Germain, a woman mathematician and philosopher in nineteenth century France. Although forgotten after her death Germain’s contribution to mathematical sciences has been revisited and reappraised in recent years, but her philosophical work is still in the margins. The talk emerges from a wider Leverhulme funded project of writing a feminist genealogy of ‘automathographies’, tracing the process of becoming a woman mathematician. In thus thinking genealogically, I raise the question of why there are still so very few women in mathematics, I look at the past to excavate the conditions of possibility of this on-going problem and try to re-imagine the future in terms of the possibilities for women repositioning themselves in science in general and mathematics in particular. In this context I revisit Germain’s contribution to the history of ideas, particularly focussing on her writings on social, political and cultural questions of her time. What I argue is that Germain’s adventures in philosophy and social theory were a bold transdisciplinary move, particularly considering that not only did she attempt to engage in the philosophical debates of her time, but she also tried to transpose concepts from mathematics, physics and mechanics to the social, cultural and political realm, as well as to individual characters, attitudes and trends entangled with them, thus surpassing the individual-society divide. In this context she was a truly transdisciplinary thinker avant la lettre and thus her philosophical work should be considered in a genealogical line of processual approaches to philosophy and social theory, which are currently reshaping the way we understand and analyse the social.
Apart from the usual comment that nobody knew that Sophie Germain's philosophical ideas were so highly praised by the founder of sociology Auguste Comte , only four years after Germain's untimely death in 1831, we had a very interesting discussion about her bold transdisciplinarity at a time when disciplines were rigidly shaping their boundaries, but also about the idea of automathographies as well as the question of how a woman mathematician was defined at the time, as well as about how many more women mathematicians in the past, we still don't know about. Delivering this keynote address at the University of Limerick was a pleasure on its own, particularly thinking about Sophie Germain's philosophical reflections on space and time.
You can watch the keynote talk at the link above.