Cavendish's Panpsychism

Chris Meyns (Utrecht University), Chris Meyns

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) is a panpsychist of sorts. They hold that all of nature must have sense and reason, to explain how there can be order in the world. However, several different ways of constructing Cavendish’s claim have thus far not been systematically distinguished. Here I contrast a centralized and a distributed account of panpsychist order. A distributed order account, I argue, captures best how Cavendish takes nature to be divided into parts, and takes those parts to have agency, sense and perception. Order in nature, then, is coordinated between nature’s parts. After responding to a potential worry about how parts could inform one another, I conclude that Cavendish takes there to be a distributed basis of order in the natural world.

http://www.chrismeyns.xyz