This paper pursues a question about the spatial relations between the three types of matter posited in Margaret Cavendish's metaphysics. It examines the doctrine of complete blending and a distinctive argument against atomism, looking for grounds on which Cavendish can reject the existence of spatial regions composed of only one or two types of matter. It establishes, through that examination, that Cavendish operates with a causal conception of parts of nature and a dynamic notion of division. While the possibility of unmixed spatial regions is found to be consistent with both the doctrine of complete blending and Cavendish's anti-atomism by themselves, it is finally ruled out by a consideration of her theory of place. In fact, the geometrical question of the spatial relations between types of matter that drives the paper is ultimately exposed as illicitly mathematical from the perspective of Cavendish's metaphysics.Keywords Margaret Cavendish · Early modern metaphysics · Anti-atomism · Divisibility · Seventeenth century anti-mathematicism · Early modern female philosophers · New narratives in the history of philosophy · Individuation of bodies Margaret Cavendish's materialism presents a number of interpretive challenges to historians of philosophy seeking to understand her metaphysics. The pressing interpretive question that I want to explore here concerns how to understand a basic tenet of Cavendish's materialism, which is usually called her doctrine of complete blending, following O'Neill (2001). As I explain in Sect. 1, Cavendish claims that nature is composed of three different types of matter: rational animate matter, sensitive animate matter, and inanimate matter. The "commixture" of these types is held to be so thorough that "no particle in nature can be conceived or imagined" that fails to contain
Studies of witchcraft belief and persecution in Russia have been profoundly, and to a significant degree mistakenly, shaped by European understandings of witchcraft as fundamentally demonic and integrally linked to the power of the devil. Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson's concepts of “prosaics” and “semiotic totalitarianism,” derived from their readings of M. M. Bakhtin, offer a productive way to set imported preconceptions aside and to comprehend the specificities of Muscovite witchcraft beliefs. Pre-Petrine ideas about witchcraft conformed to no uniform, overarching ideological or explanatory schema, satanic or otherwise. Muscovite witchcraft operated instead as a diffuse, resolutely prosaic collection of beliefs and practices, whereas the more demonologically inflected European beliefs approached the imposed uniformity of “semiotic totalitarianism.” In this article, Valerie Kivelson and Jonathan Shaheen propose a corrective to a widespread propensity for reading Russian material through European paradigms and analyze Russian beliefs on their own, prosaic terms.
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