Against Thinking Matter: The Case of Ralph Cudworth

Marleen Rozemond (University of Toronto, Mississauga)

Ralph Cudworth offered a variety of arguments against thinking matter. In this paper I examine his use of three related arguments. (1) the so-called “Achilles Argument”, on which matter cannot think because the subject of the mental must be simple and matter is inherently composite. (2) This argument presupposes, however, that thinking could not emerge from matter and its inherent qualities. So I next turn to Cudworth’s rejection of emergentism of the mental. I argue that his version is interestingly different from a version developed later by Samuel Clarke. (3) I also examine its connections to yet another argument: a Cartesian argument that relies on the claim that all the qualities of a substance are modes of its nature. Like Descartes, Cudworth holds that thinking cannot be understood as a mode of matter. These arguments rely on very specific views about the relationship between a substance and its qualities.