Title:
Margaret Cavendish’s perceptual epistemology
Abstract:
It is a pillar of Cavendish’s natural philosophical system that everything perceives, where perception is defined as ‘exterior knowledge’, or ‘knowledge of exterior parts and actions’. I have argued that the claim that everything perceives is strictly a metaphysical claim that does not imply that everything has mental or epistemic states; claims about perception are in that sense analogous to causal or relational claims. Cavendish’s account of perception and knowledge in humans and other animals in particular seems to be aimed at explaining their epistemic significance while still counting as an instance of the more general case, and her theory of patterning in those cases seems to be central to that aim. How can we square Cavendish’s claim that perception in general is direct and her claim that humans and animals perceive by patterning? This talk is an attempt to answer that question, in part by putting Cavendish into dialogue with theories of knowledge by acquaintance and with direct realist theories of perception.