Grounds of Natural Philosophy

Abstract

Abstract This chapter features a selection of excerpts from Cavendish’s book, Grounds of Natural Philosophy. The passages treat a number of topics and issues: materialism; empty space and the impossibility of vacuum; the identity of a body and its location; the impossibility of immaterial motion; the different kinds of matter; order vs. disorder; active regions of the world that we do not notice; self-motion; self-knowledge; panpsychism; sensory perception and patterning; dreams; occasionalism; causality; chance; freedom, the cooperation of the parts of nature; individuation; natural productions vs. artefacts; imagination; fame; the afterlife; God; and belief in the existence of God. Cavendish enters into a wide spectrum of philosophical debates in Grounds of Natural Philosophy, but much of the focus is on arguments for materialism, the distinction between rational matter and sensitive matter, the knowledge and information that is shared among creatures, individuation, and the sophistication of natural (as opposed to artificial) productions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.