Self-knowledge, Perception, and Margaret Cavendish’s Metaphysics of the Individual

Abstract

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 it is self-knowing – and it is a part in relation to other parts, and to the whole of matter, insofar as it is a perceptive part. This is so because self-knowledge is purely self-referential and complete, while perceptive knowledge is purely relational.

Bodies and Their Potential Parts: The Not-So-Friendly Reception of Digbean Quantity

“…On the ontological status of parts in Cavendish's metaphysics, seePeterman 2019, Shaheen 2019, and Georgescu 2021 …”

Each book its own Babel

“…A lower average difference of 19 A program that set out to explain nature in terms of bodies in motion was all the time plagued by explicit disagreement about what bodies were. Whether bodies are simply extension as it was for Descartes, or whether they should include properties usually ascribed to spirits as for Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish (Rusu 2021;Georgescu 2021), and whether they were impenetrable and (infinitely) divisible (Roux 2017) were issues that pervaded the program. a corpus tells us that the spread of scores is more centered around the average.…”