“Novel Philosophy”: Mapping a Path for a Woman in the Radical Enlightenment

Abstract

In my 2017 novel, The Weight of Ink, I tell the story of a Jewish woman from a small community of seventeenth-century Portuguese Inquisition refugees who is irresistibly drawn to the philosophical questions of her time. Devising a way to surmount the barricades blocking her path to the necessary education, Ester Velasquez undertakes a forbidden correspondence with philosophers of her day. In contemporary chapters alternating with seventeenth-century ones, two modern historians discover the papers left by Ester Velasquez and work to understand what she achieved and how, and where her output might fit in the history of the day’s thinkers. In this chapter, I explore a few of the ways literature might be useful for the philosophy classroom—among them, helping to overcome students’ perception that philosophy is dry and irrelevant to their daily lives. Using examples of scenes from the novel, I show not only how the history of philosophy can be brought to life in fiction, but how characters’ physical and emotional experiences can generate and be fused with philosophical questions, so that philosophical debate is the inevitable consequence of a lived life, and can hold readers’ hearts just as it engages their minds.