Philosophical Letters

Abstract

Abstract This chapter features a selection of excerpts from Cavendish’s book, Philosophical Letters. The passages treat a number of topics and issues: the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes; the philosophy of René Descartes; the philosophy of Henry More; the science of Constantijn Huygens; gender; the role of theology in philosophy; God; the inconceivability of God; empty space and the impossibility of vacuum; the identity of a body and its location; materialism; the eternity of matter; creation; sensory perception; patterning; animal knowledge; freedom; motion; the transfer of motion; the impossibility of immaterial motion; embodied cognition; laws of nature; the spirit of nature; vitalism and the activity of matter; panpsychism; the struggle for bodies to maintain their structural integrity; individuation; death and regeneration; imagination; certainty; action at a distance; action by contact; the natural soul of the human being; the supernatural soul of a human being; how to read scripture; illegitimate uses of scripture; order vs. disorder; the interdependence of the bodies of nature; natural magic; occasional causation; medicine; and the limits of science. Philosophical Letters is not an actual correspondence in which Cavendish has a thorough and extended exchange with Descartes, Hobbes, More, and Van Helmont. Such a back-and-forth was presumably not in the cards, in part because of gender norms surrounding the question of who should engage in intellectual disputation with whom. In Philosophical Letters Cavendish engages a fictional correspondence between herself and a “Madam” who has asked her to comment on the work of all four philosophers.

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