Andrew Cooper's seamless translation of Amalia Holst's On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Education is cause for celebration. In this work, Holst makes crucial contributions to the "vocation debates" of the eighteenth century, and offers insightful and penetrating critiques of her male contemporaries, who, in contrast to Holst, repeatedly argued that women were not fit for philosophical education. Her insightful and penetrating critiques reveal the extent to which these apparently enlightened thinkers were not able to fulfill the goals of the Enlightenment. And Holst seeks to do just that. This work is bound to transform the ways we teach and research this crucial moment in the history of philosophy, challenging us not only to expand the philosophical canon but also to rethink trusted philosophical premises and arguments.
Andrew Cooper is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is author of The Tragedy of Philosophy: Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Project of Aesthetics (2016) and Kant and the Transformation of Natural History (2023), and has published numerous articles on Kant, post-Kantian philosophy, and philosophy of science.