Frances Power Cobbe: Animals, Vivisection, and a Row with Darwin

Discussing Alison Stone’s book, Frances Power Cobbe (Cambridge, 2022). Cobbe was an influential Victorian philosopher who developed a moral theory on the status of animals and their ethical treatment. She attempted to reconcile her deep Christian beliefs with new ideas in science and the emergence of atheism. An interlocutor of Charles Darwin, George Eliot, J S Mill, and Annie Besant – Cobbe was a prolific essayist and effective law reformer. She founded anti-vivisection associations that survive to this day. We consider the importance of Cobbe’s philosophy for the status and treatment of animals today.

BIO: Alison Stone is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lancaster. She currently works on women in nineteenth-century philosophy. She has edited Frances Power Cobbe: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Feminist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century British and American Women Philosophers, with Lydia Moland.

Her previous books are: Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2004); Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2006); An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (Polity Press, 2007); Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (Routledge, 2011); The Value of Popular Music: An Approach from Post-Kantian Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) – which won the Outstanding Publication Award from the Popular Music Interest Group, Society for Music Theory; Nature, Ethics and Gender in German Romanticism and Idealism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018); Being Born: Birth and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2019).