Thanks to a very helpful email from Jonathan Shaheen, I just updated The Letters in the Philosophical Letters, my page that tries to say what each of the many letters is about. PL 4.23 refers, I learn, to Constantijn Huygens. As the page now says: Number: 4.23Topic: On assorted further questionsReference: Includes a reference to a Mr …
Continue reading “Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters”
After putting together a small set of extracts from Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters for a class, I figured that others might find it interesting or useful, so I posted it online: Some of the Philosophical Letters. That page presents five of the letters in part 1 of Cavendish’s book: letter 1 (which is introductory), letter 4 …
[Cross posted from http://philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/cavendish-and-causal-models/.%5D I want to say a little bit about the way Margaret Cavendish thinks about causation.[1] A key aspect of that is an inversion, or set of inversions, of what other modern philosophers were up to. One prominent trend in modern philosophy was what is called mechanism. The central mechanist idea is …
I have attempted to list below all the editions of Cavendish’s works published in the last 20 years. This list does not include appearances of Cavendish’s works in anthologies; translations; texts in subscription databases; or editions in theses and dissertations. Cavendish, Margaret. 1994. The Blazing World and Other Writings. Edited by Kate Lilley. London: Penguin. …
Continue reading “Recent editions of works by Margaret Cavendish”
[Cross-posted from http://philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/supernatural-soul-2/.%5D One of Margaret Cavendish’s longer discussions of the supernatural soul comes towards the end of part 2 of the Philosophical Letters [PL], where she discusses the work of Henry More. Unlike More, who believes in natural, extended, incorporeal spirits, we ought — Cavendish thinks — to distinguish between natural and supernatural souls. …
Continue reading “What does Cavendish’s supernatural soul do?”
[Crossposted from http://philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/cavendish-and-the-supernatural-soul/.] Despite her materialism about nature, and her related view that the human mind is corporeal, Margaret Cavendish thought that human beings also have a divine and supernatural soul, which is not corporeal. There are plenty of questions one might ask about this, but for now I just want to ask when she thought …
Continue reading “Cavendish and the divine, supernatural, immaterial soul”
At one point, ‘sympathy’ seems to have been (largely?) a name for a physical phenomenon, and a certain sort of explanation of that phenomenon (see this earlier post on More and Mersenne). Over time, ‘sympathy’ seems to have become more exclusively used to describe a psychological phenomenon (e.g., Hume, Smith). I’m curious about how sympathy …
Following up on this post, I’ve posted The Letters in the Philosophical Letters. This describes some features of Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters. For each of the letters in the Letters it gives a brief description of the letter’s topic, and says which authors and texts are referred to.
Stewart Duncan