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  1. Cavendish’s Aesthetic Realism.Daniel Whiting - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (15):1-17.
    In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Margaret Cavendish’s remarks on beauty. According to it, Cavendish takes beauty to be a real, response-independent quality of objects. In this sense, Cavendish is an aesthetic realist. This position, which remains constant throughout her philosophical writings, contrasts with the non-realist views that were soon after to dominate philosophical reflections on matters of taste in the early modern period. It also, I argue, contrasts with the realism of Cavendish’s contemporary, Henry More. While (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • The Life of the Thrice Sensitive, Rational and Wise Animate Matter: Cavendish’s Animism.Jonathan L. Shaheen - 2021 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (2):621-641.
    This paper explores Cavendish’s argument for what she calls “animate matter.” Her commitment to the ubiquity of animate matter, styled “Cavendish’s animism,” is presented as the conclusion of an inference to the best explanation of nature’s order. The reconstruction of Cavendish’s argument begins with an examination of the relationship between God’s creation of our world and the order produced through nature’s wise governance of her parts. Cavendish’s materialism and anti-atomism are presented as ingredients in her final account of God’s ordering (...)
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  • Whole-Parts Relations in Early Modern Philosophy.Emanuele Costa - 2021 - Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences.
    The approach adopted by Early Modern authors to the notions of ‘whole’ and ‘part’ (what is called, in contemporary metaphysics, “mereology”, from the Ancient Greek word μερος: ‘part’) constitutes a central feature of their respective systems. The issue of what constituted a whole became all the more crucial as the new, revolutionary approaches to matter and extension – which mark the unavoidably fuzzy beginning of what we define as “modernity” – demanded a novel (and in some cases, radical) approach to (...)
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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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  • Women Philosophers on Economics, Technology, Environment, and Gender History: Shaping the Future, Rethinking the Past.Ruth Edith Hagengruber (ed.) - 2023 - De Gruyter.
    In times of current crisis, the voices of women are needed more than ever. The accumulation of war and environmental catastrophes teaches us that exploitation of people and nature through violent appropriation and enrichment for the sake of short-term self-interest exacts its price. This book presents contributions on the currently most relevant and most urgent issues: reshaping the economy, environmental problems, technology and the re-reading of history from the non-western and western tradition. With an outlook into the problems of class, (...)
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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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  • A Vitalist Shoal in the Mechanist Tide: Art, Nature, and 17th-Century Science.Jonathan L. Shaheen - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (5):111.
    This paper reconstructs Margaret Cavendish’s theory of the metaphysics of artifacts. It situates her anti-mechanist account of artifactual production and the art-nature distinction against a background of Aristotelian, Scholastic, and mechanist theories. Within this broad context, it considers what Cavendish thinks artisans can actually do, grounding her terminological stipulation that there is no genuine generation in nature in a commitment to natural and artistic production as the mere rearrangement of bodies. Bodies themselves are identified, in a conceptually Ockhamist manner, with (...)
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