Margaret Cavendish’s conception of memory has received little scholarly attention. Here, I taxonomize various notions of memory within her system, focusing primarily on a crucial distinction between what she calls ‘memory’ and what she calls ‘remembrance.’ I argue that Cavendish considers remembrance a more general and pervasive action in nature than memory. Memory, an action uniquely associated with animal creatures, refers to the animal’s reason storing past sense perceptions and conceptions such as thoughts, ideas, imaginations, etc. Remembrances, or voluntary repetitions (...) of past motions, manifest in two varieties. In the first, the animal retrieves perceptions or conceptions stored in memory. In the second, which all creatures exhibit, a creature’s parts voluntarily repeat past actions via custom or habit, such as in respiration and photosynthesis. These remembrances do not rely on anything stored in memory but derive directly from what Cavendish calls a creature’s ‘self-knowledge.’. (shrink)

In this paper, I present three claims belonging to Cavendish’s theory of the passions. First, positive and negative passions are species of love and hate. Second, love and hate involve pleasure and pain. Third, pleasure and pain are regular and irregular, where these notions are to be understood in teleological terms. From these commitments, it follows that hate is irregular. I argue that this consequence is a problematic one for Cavendish. After defending my reading through a consideration of Cavendish’s reflections (...) on mental health and disorder, I explore ways in which she might revise her commitments to avoid the problem. Throughout the paper, I demonstrate the extent to which Cavendish’s theory of the passions draws on Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas that loomed large in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writings on the topic. (shrink)

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 (...) interpretation, one of which turns on whether Cavendish allows for action at a distance. I argue that she does. (shrink)