This week's most underrated, Sarah Hutton, teaches (I believe) in the English Department at Aberystwyth University in Wales. She is the great explorer of what one might call the shadow history to the canonical story of Early Modern philosophy. She has written (among other topics) on the great Renaissance and Cambridge Platonists, the Quakers, and the fascinating Anne Conway. Sarah Hutton is an important historian of medicine and she has made many significant scholarly contributions by, for example, editing Cudworth and the Letters between Anne Conway and Henry More. Her contributions are also more social: she is famous for bringing people together in conferences and pioneering volumes.
I am particularly fond of her paper on Emilie du Châtelet which called attention to one of the greatest minds of the eighteenth century; she attempted a creative synthesis of Newton and Leibniz. I remain baffled that people interested in the reception of Leibniz or, say, the long gestation of Kantianism remain ignorant of Voltaire's better half.
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