Cavendishian Acquaintance-First Epistemology

Alison Peterman (University of Rochester)

Abstract: Margaret Cavendish was a great 17th century English philosopher who had a strikingly naturalistic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. In the first part of this talk, I introduce my interpretation of Cavendish's system, which centers this naturalism, and runs counter to common interpretations of her as a panpsychist. The panpsychist reading comes in part from Cavendish's claim that every creature, from animals to plants to stones and planets, is knowing. So in the second section of the talk, I develop a Cavendishian account of knowledge on which everything is knowing but panpsychism is not entailed, and I try to motivate this account of knowledge with an eye to contemporary epistemological concerns.