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  1. Kenelm Digby (and Margaret Cavendish) on Motion.Daniel Whiting - 2024 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 6 (1):1-27.
    Motion—and, in particular, local motion or change in location—plays a central role in Kenelm Digby’s natural philosophy and in his arguments for the immateriality of the soul. Despite this, Digby’s account of what motion consists in has yet to receive much scholarly attention. In this paper, I advance a novel interpretation of Digby on motion. According to it, Digby holds that for a body to move is for it to divide from and unify with other bodies. This is a view (...)
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  • Veil of Light: The Role of Light in Cavendish's Visual Perception.Brooke Willow Sharp - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (51):1471-1494.
    Margaret Cavendish’s views about the nature of bodies and perception leave her with a potentially problematic implication: that light has no role in visual perception. For her, perception occurs through the self-motion of animate matter, not through a mechanical system that appeals to local motions and collisions of contiguous bodies. This means that motion is not transferred from external objects with light playing a mediating role; the matter of our eyes simply moves itself to copy the sensible qualities of external (...)
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  • Is Margaret Cavendish a naïve realist?Daniel Whiting - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (2):321-341.
    Perception plays a central and wide‐ranging role in the philosophy of Margaret Cavendish. In this paper, I argue that Cavendish holds a naïve realist theory of perception. The case draws on what Cavendish has to say about perceptual presentation, the role of sympathy in experience, the natures of hallucination and of illusion, and the individuation of kinds. While Cavendish takes perception to have representational content, I explain how this is consistent with naïve realism. In closing, I address challenges to the (...)
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  • The Duchess of Disunity: Margaret Cavendish on the Materiality of the Mind.Colin Chamberlain - 2024 - Philosophers' Imprint 24 (1):1-18.
    Sometimes we love and hate the same thing at the same time. Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)—the maverick early modern materialist—appeals to this type of passionate conflict to argue that the mind is a material thing. When our passions conflict, the mind or reason conflicts with itself. From this Cavendish infers that the mind has parts and, therefore, is material. Cavendish says this argument is among the best proofs of the mind’s materiality. And yet, the existing scholarship on Cavendish lacks the kind (...)
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  • Margaret Cavendish on conceivability, possibility, and the case of colours.Peter West - 2021 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (3):456-476.
    Throughout her philosophical writing, Margaret Cavendish is clear in stating that colours are real; they are not mere mind-dependent qualities that exist only in the mind of perceivers. This puts her at odds with other seventeenthcentury thinkers such as Galileo and Descartes who endorsed what would come to be known as the ‘primary-secondary quality distinction’. Cavendish’s argument for this view is premised on two claims. First, that colourless objects are inconceivable. Second, that if an object is inconceivable then it could (...)
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  • Color in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish against the Early Modern Mechanists.Colin Chamberlain - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (3):293-336.
    Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...)
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  • Margaret Lucas Cavendish.David Cunning - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Move Your Body! Margaret Cavendish on Self-Motion.Colin Chamberlain - 2024 - In Sebastian Bender & Dominik Perler (eds.), Powers and Abilities in Early Modern Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 105-125.
    Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) argues that when someone throws a ball, their hand does not cause the ball to move. Instead, the ball moves itself. In this chapter, I reconstruct Cavendish’s argument that material things—like the ball—are self-moving. Cavendish argues that body-body interaction is unintelligible. We cannot make sense of interaction in terms of the transfer of motion nor the more basic idea that one body acts in another body. Assuming something moves bodies around, Cavendish concludes that bodies move themselves. Still, (...)
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  • Self-knowledge, Perception, and Margaret Cavendish's Metaphysics of the Individual.Laura Georgescu - 2021 - Early Science and Medicine 25 (6):618-639.
    For Margaret Cavendish, every single part of matter has self-knowledge, and almost every part has perceptive knowledge. This paper asks what is at stake for Cavendish in ascribing self-knowing and perceptive properties to matter. Whereas many commentators take perception and self-knowledge to be guides to Cavendish’s epistemology, this paper takes them to be guides to her metaphysics, in that it shows that these categories account for individual specificity and for relationality. A part of matter is a unique individual insofar as (...)
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  • Motion as an Accident of Matter: Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes on Motion and Rest.Marcus P. Adams - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy.
    Margaret Cavendish is widely known as a materialist. However, since Cavendishian matter is always in motion, “matter” and “motion” are equally important foundational concepts for her natural philosophy. In Philosophical Letters (1664), she takes to task her materialist rival Thomas Hobbes by assaulting his account of accidents in general and his concept of “rest” in particular. In this article, I argue that Cavendish defends her continuous-motion view in two ways: first, she claims that her account avoids seeing accidents as capable (...)
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  • Margaret Cavendish on the Order and Infinitude of Nature.Michael Bennett McNulty - 2018 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 35 (3):219-239.
    In this paper, I develop a new interpretation of the order of nature, its function, and its implications in Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. According to the infinite balance account, the order of nature consists in a balance among the infinite varieties of nature. That is, for Cavendish, nature contains an infinity of different types of matter: infinite species, shapes, and motions. The potential tumult implicated by such a variety, however, is tempered by the counterbalancing of the different kinds and motions of (...)
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