[PUBLICATION] “Confluence of Research Worlds” podcast: Natalia Zorrilla Sirlin

Philosopher Natalia Zorrilla Sirlin, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina, is in residence at the Collegium – Université de Lyon Institute of Advanced Studies for the 2023/24 academic year. Her research focuses on the relationship between clandestine literature of the late 17th and early 18th centuries and the work of Émilie Du Châtelet, an 18th-century French scientist and philosopher.

[Émilie du Châtelet] expressed very radical ideas: she defended women’s access to education, not only as students – under the same conditions as men – but also as producers of knowledge, since she herself was a great scientist of her time.

In order to analyze texts from the “siècle des Lumières” (“Age of Enlightenment”), Natalia Zorrilla Sirlin uses the concept of “gynodicy”. This neologism was coined on the model of theodicy, the attempt to reconcile the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent God with the existence of evil. Gynodicy is therefore an attempt to reconcile the recognition of equal rights for men and women with the perpetuation of patriarchy, a system based on the domination of women by men.

In order to carry out this research, Natalia Zorrilla Sirlin is working in collaboration with Susana Seguin at the Institute of History of Representations and Ideas in Modernities (IHRIM – Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités).