Margaret Cavendish
All of nature is matter that senses, moves and thinks by itself – there is no immaterial mind and no lifeless mechanism.
Placement
Duchess of Newcastle and prolific author: all of nature is matter that senses and reasons – against Descartes’ immaterial mind, Hobbes’ mechanism and the experimentalists of the Royal Society.
Key ideas
- Vitalist materialism
- Self-moving, perceiving matter
- Critique of experimental philosophy
Criticism
Criticizes 2
Thomas Hobbes influenced by
influenced by
Through her husband’s circle, which included Hobbes, Cavendish shared his view that nature is wholly material, but made matter self-moving and perceptive (Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1655). M. Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655); Philosophical Letters (1664); SEP “Margaret Lucas Cavendish”
Evidence: AI draft
criticised
Cavendish rejected Hobbes’s account of perception as pressure transmitted from objects to the organs, holding that perceiving matter patterns the object by its own motions (Philosophical Letters, 1664). M. Cavendish, Philosophical Letters (1664), Part I (letters on Hobbes); SEP “Margaret Lucas Cavendish”
Evidence: AI draft
Thomas Hobbes › 1588–1679
René Descartes
criticised
In Philosophical Letters (1664) Cavendish rejected Descartes’ separation of an immaterial mind from inert matter, holding that all matter is self-moving, perceptive and rational. M. Cavendish, Philosophical Letters (1664), Part I; SEP “Margaret Lucas Cavendish”
Evidence: AI draft
René Descartes › 1596–1650
Works
A utopian romance appended to the Observations: an empress rules a world of animal-men and disputes with its scientists – an early work of science fiction.
Against the microscopists of the Royal Society: nature is self-knowing, self-moving matter, not a machine.
Position
Cavendish developed a materialism different from Hobbes’: nature is one infinite, self-moving body, and every part of it has sense and reason, so that matter perceives and knows. Against Descartes she denied an immaterial soul; against mechanism she denied that motion is transferred by impact, arguing that each body moves itself in response to others. Against the experimentalists she argued that microscopes distort rather than reveal. She also wrote on women’s exclusion from learning and public life, sometimes defending it, more often protesting it, and in “The Blazing World” a woman becomes empress of another world. Mocked in her lifetime as “Mad Madge”, she has been rediscovered as an original metaphysician.
Life & context
Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), born Margaret Lucas in Essex, went into exile in Paris as maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria and there married William Cavendish, later Duke of Newcastle, whose circle included Hobbes, Gassendi and Descartes. Back in England after 1660, she published a dozen books under her own name, and in 1667 became the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society.
Further main works
- Philosophical Letters (1664)
- Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668)
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