Cavendish’s Anti-Hobbesian Materialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 74-89
Author(s):  
Stewart Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Human Beings

This chapter examines the distinctive materialist philosophy of Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish gave a materialist account of the natural world, but departed in several ways from Hobbes’s materialism. Her view was a panpsychist one, on which some matter was fundamentally and irreducibly sensitive, and other matter was fundamentally and irreducibly rational. The chapter argues that Cavendish’s view lies in some ways between Hobbes’s view and Henry More’s. Cavendish’s view also reverses the mechanist model of explanation used by Hobbes and others: rather than explaining thought in terms of motion, Cavendish explains motion in terms of thought. The chapter also notes Cavendish’s sometime view that human beings have a divine, immaterial, supernatural soul, and examines her views about how, and to what extent, material beings can conceive of immaterial ones.

Cavendish vs. Descartes on Mechanism and Animal Souls

2019 ◽  
pp. 642-658
Author(s):  
Hadley Cooney
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Analogical Argument ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Nature Of Matter

In the Discourse on the Method, Descartes attempts to prove that animals are mere machines, lacking reason and, by extension, consciousness. This chapter explores the response to this position offered by Margaret Cavendish in her 1664 Philosophical Letters. Following a reconstruction of the analogical argument Cavendish constructs to refute the Cartesian position, there is an examination of Cavendish’s metaphysical views in contrast to Descartes’s, revealing the sharp divide between these two thinkers on questions related to the nature of matter, the intelligibility of mechanical explanations in nature, the proper conception of reason, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

scholarly journals As palavras e os bichos: sobre o lugar do homem no jogo das representações científicas | The words and the beasts: on the place of man in the game of scientific representations

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Milla Benicio
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Scientific Representations ◽  
Complex Transformation ◽  
The Creation

RESUMO O principal objetivo deste artigo é traçar o itinerário científico e filosófico que permitiu à modernidade a criação de um novo campo de visibilidade dentro da ciência, enfraqueceu o antigo pressuposto da centralidade do homem em relação aos demais seres e levou a uma complexa transformação nas relações do homem com o mundo natural. Nosso foco será, portanto, a grande reorganização epistemológica e cultural do Ocidente, cujas quebras de paradigmas revolucionaram não apenas as noções ligadas à natureza, mas, principalmente, ao papel do homem nesse cenário.Palavras-chave: Reorganização Epistemológica; Homem; Mundo Natural.      ABSTRACT This article aims to draw the scientific and philosophical route which allowed to modernity the creation of a new field of visibility within science. This field weakened the old assumption of the centrality of human beings in relation to other and led to a complex transformation in human relationships with the natural world. Our focus will therefore be the major epistemological reorganization of the Western, whose breaking paradigms revolutionized not only the concepts related to the nature, but, mainly, to the role of the man in this scenario.Keywords: Epistemological Reorganization; Man; Natural World.

The Subjectivity of Nature

2017 ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
James Miller
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Objective World ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
The Way

Daoism proposes a radical reversal of the way that modern human beings think about the natural world. Rather than understanding human beings as “subject” who observe the “objective” world of nature, Daoism proposes that subjectivity is grounded in the Dao or Way, understood as the wellspring of cosmic creativity for a world of constant transformation. As a result the Daoist goal of “obtaining the Dao” offers insights into the ecological quest to transcend the modern, Cartesian bifurcation of subject and object, self and world. From this follows an ideal of human action not as the projection of agency onto an neutral, objective backdrop but as a transaction or mediation between self and world.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
David Cunning
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Political Capital ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Embodied Intelligence

This chapter is an introduction to the central philosophical views and arguments that Cavendish advances, and it also includes a brief biography. The chapter foreshadows Cavendish’s views, in part by quoting select texts in which she discusses, for example, the activity and intelligence that are ubiquitous in the natural world; the material nature of all creatures (including human beings and their thinking minds); God; the order, organization, and teleology of the natural world; the transfer of motion; sensory perception; embodied intelligence; conscious vs. unconscious thinking; ideas; causation; imagination; freedom; fame; gender; agency and authority; social and political capital; and the interdependence of creatures, among other topics.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Strachan Donnelley
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Fly Fishing ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Essential Unity ◽  
The Mind

This book is written with the knowledge that serious cancer will foreshorten the author’s life. It is an expression of a life of exploring ideas and nature. And it is an affirmation of the essential unity of human beings and a natural order that is valuable and good. Following Alfred North Whitehead, this order can be called “nature alive.” The author has been shaped by an impulse to explore the life of the mind and the recognition of his own fundamental ignorance. The writing and contents of the book are shaped by two themes. One, “living waters,” centres on the direct experience with the nonhuman world, particularly fly-fishing, and is a metaphor for the fact that the natural world is fluid and dynamic, not completed and static. The second theme is “magic mountains,” which refers to the influence that important philosophical thinkers have had on the author’s thinking and self-identity. Each chapter in the book is designed to reveal the development of this tradition of questions and ideas and to invite readers to carry that dialogue further in their own lives and minds.

3. Animals and the environment

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Damien Keown
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Meat Eating ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha

Is Buddhism truly an ‘eco-friendly’ religion? ‘Animals and the environment’ examines the implications of Buddhist teachings such as that human beings can be reborn as animals and vice versa. While the Buddhist ‘sublime attitudes’ such as kindness and compassion seem at first to favour animals to a greater degree than we find in Christianity, human life still takes precedence in the hierarchy of living beings. Rules about plant life are unclear, with Buddhist writers acknowledging the beauty of both the wilderness and civilization. Vegetarianism is largely seen as a morally superior diet, but meat-eating was common at the time of the Buddha and is widely practised by monks today. Buddhist attitudes toward the natural world are complex and are to some extent overshadowed by the belief that the world as we know it is fundamentally flawed.

Nature and Religion in America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett Grainger
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Language ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
North American Continent ◽  
The North ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Complex Words

One of the most complex words in the English language, “nature” (sometimes personified as “Nature” or “Mother Nature”) has been central to developments in American religions. Despite their different origins, the three cosmologies present on the North American continent during the early modern “age of contact”—Native American, African American, and Euro-American—shared a number of similarities, including the belief in an enchanted or animate cosmos, the ambivalence of sacred presences manifested in nature, and the use of myth and ritual to manage these ambivalent presences in ways that secured material and spiritual benefits for individuals or communities. Through encounters on colonial borderlands and through developments in society and culture (in science, economics, politics, etc.), these cosmologies have been adapted, developed, and combined in creative ways to produce new forms of religious life. These developments have been characterized by a series of recurrent tensions, including the notion of divine or spiritual realities as being transcendent or immanent, organicism or mechanism, and of the natural world as including or excluding human beings. Organicist and animist cosmologies, severely challenged by the early modern scientific revolution, were resurgent in the antebellum period, fueling a series of new religious developments, from Transcendentalism and revivalism to Mormonism and the early environmentalist movement. These generative tensions continue to reverberate into the modern day, in part as an outworking of the environmental crisis of the 1960s, which saw a purported “greening” of established religions as well as the rise of new forms of nature spirituality.

Book Reviews: Gordon and Suzuki - It's a Matter of SurvivalAnita Gordon and David Suzuki Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, 278 pp. US$19.95 cloth. ISBN 0-674-46970-4. Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

1992 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-286
Author(s):  
Andrea L. Bonnicksen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
University Of British Columbia ◽  
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ◽  
The University

PrécisIn 1989 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a five-part radio series, “It's a Matter of Survival.” Anita Gordon was the originator and executive producer of the series. David Suzuki is Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia and the host of “The Nature of Things,” a science television program. This book grew out of the radio series and is described on the jacket cover by Edward O. Wilson as “the best piece of extended environmental journalism I've seen to date.” Cited in the end notes are publications in the popular press (e.g., The New York Times) and CBC interviews with a range of environmental commentators such as Lester Brown and Paul Erlich. The book indicts the environmental irresponsibility of human beings as a species and is intended as a response to the radio listeners who wrote to the CBC following the 1989 broadcasts asking what they could do to forestall environmental catastrophe.Gordon and Suzuki begin with a hypothetical glimpse into the “nightmare world of 2040.” Subsequent chapters question how we reached the stage of environmental crisis, explore myths that have blinded us to the crisis, predict future growth trends, describe the ethic of domination over nature, and review the devastation wrought by prevailing definitions of “progress.” The authors end with an alternative (and positive) look at the year 2040 that can be possible if the resolutions they discuss are sought. They conclude that humans as a species have “lost the ability to hear the warning cries of nature” (p. 234), but they hold the hope that humans can emerge from the crisis with a “new collective image of ourselves as a species integrated into the natural world” (p. 238).

Nancy Cato at Noosa

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-292
Author(s):  
Susan Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
Torres Strait Islander ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Environmental Activism ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Northern Australia ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
Murray River ◽  
Torres Strait

AbstractNancy Cato (1917–2000) was born in Adelaide and lived there for the first half of her life. Moving to Noosa in 1967, she became known for environmental activism as well as her writing. Through research for her historical novels set in Tasmania and on the Murray River, as well as her travels in Central and Northern Australia, she developed a strong interest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. She published poetry, stories, plays and journalism, as well as novels set in the Northern Territory, North Queensland, the Riverland and Tasmania. She had a painter's eye as well as a gift for lyrics and a lifelong interest in storytelling. With the emergence of eco-criticism, we can now see her diverse career as a writer as cohering around her love of the natural world and her curiosity about how human beings lived in it. This article considers her writing about her adopted country around Noosa.

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