Introduction

This introduction presents the project of the book, to examine the seventeenth-century debate about materialism that began with the work of Thomas Hobbes. Among those who responded directly to Hobbes, the book focuses on Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. The introduction and book then look at John Locke’s discussion of materialism in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which draws on and responds to that earlier discussion. A central question for all these philosophers is whether human minds are material. They also consider whether animal minds are material, and whether God is. Other philosophical issues, including theories of substance and of the nature of ideas, are repeatedly involved in the discussion. The relation of these discussions to the work of René Descartes is noted.

Cavendish’s Anti-Hobbesian Materialism

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.

Materialism from Hobbes to Locke

Are human beings purely material creatures, or is there something else to them, an immaterial part that does some (or all) of the thinking, and might even be able to outlive the death of the body? This book is about how a series of seventeenth-century philosophers tried to answer that question. It begins by looking at the views of Thomas Hobbes, who developed a thoroughly materialist account of the human mind, and later of God as well. All this is in obvious contrast to the approach of his contemporary René Descartes. After examining Hobbes’s materialism, the book considers the views of three of his English critics: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. Both More and Cudworth thought Hobbes’s materialism radically inadequate to explain the workings of the world, while Cavendish developed a distinctive, anti-Hobbesian materialism of her own. The second half of the book focuses on the discussion of materialism in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, arguing that we can better understand Locke’s discussion if we see how and where he is responding to this earlier debate. At crucial points Locke draws on More and Cudworth to argue against Hobbes and other materialists. Nevertheless, Locke did a good deal to reveal how materialism was a genuinely possible view, by showing how one could develop a detailed account of the human mind without presuming it was an immaterial substance.