“so alluring in theory, so pernicious in practice”: Amelia Opie’s Feminist Materialist Critique of Radical Philosophy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A British writer in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Amelia Opie clearly demonstrates in her 1805 novel, Adeline Mowbray, an ideological relationship to the English radicals or Jacobins with whom she was linked in the 1790s. In an attempt to help codify her political engagements, I focus my analysis specifically on women’s education and rationality in relation to late 18th-century radicalism. I argue that through her discourse, Opie challenges conventional sex-based notions of education, advocating intellectual development for women to complement feminine capabilities. Such argument aligns her with those radicals like Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin who look directly to reason as the wellspring of all social and personal development. However, Opie also reveals radical philosophy to be disabled by a rationality that is too abstract, an intellectual exploration that fails to consider the full implications of material reality, an approach to social change which women experience as particularly toxic. Opie privileges reason in specific connection to women, but she reconstructs that rationality by exposing the necessity of its full cognizance of and connection to concrete reality. Opie thus exploits the weaknesses and possibilities of radical philosophy to reconsider educational as well as gender norms shaping women’s lives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".