Who is faith cavendish

Her contemporary Thomas Hobbes argued along the same lines:. Cavendish does subscribe to the view that only material things are real and substantial, [ 14 ] but she is not thereby committed to the view that the only existents are material. Cavendish suggests as much when she says that we might be surrounded by immaterials, but that we cannot detect them.

She also emphasizes that when she denies the existence of immaterials, she is merely denying the existence of natural immaterials — she is saying that the ideas and minds that we detect and know are a part of nature and hence are material. Cavendish is committed to saying that the ideas and minds that we encounter are a part of nature and are material. She is not thereby denying the existence of immaterials simpliciter. She is committed to the view that there are no natural immaterials.

A problem that arises, however, is that Cavendish also appears to be committed to saying that human minds cannot perceive or detect immaterials and that we cannot form ideas of them. Cavendish suggests very strongly that we can think and speak of immaterials in her remark that they might in fact surround us; she says that even if they did, we would be none the wiser.

But still the question remains about how Cavendish can allow that we are able to think or talk about immaterials at all, if we are not able to perceive or detect or have ideas of them. There are a number of ways that Cavendish might maneuver here.

One would be to defend the thesis that although our natural and hence material minds can form no conception of an immaterial, there is another aspect of our minds — an aspect that is not material — and it can form conceptions of immaterials. Cavendish hints at the thesis when she states that natural reason cannot have an idea of an incorporeal being, leaving open that non-natural reason could have an idea of an incorporeal being.

A problem of course is that Cavendish does not seem to be able to allow that natural reason can have an idea of non-natural reason or that it can put forward the thesis that non-natural reason can form conceptions of immaterials.

Another maneuver would be to make a distinction between knowledge and faith and argue that although our minds cannot detect immaterials or have any evidence for their existence, there must be some way in which our minds are able to conceive of immaterials such as God , or else we would not even be capable of faith.

Cavendish writes for example that. A problem of course is that if Cavendish is committed to the view that natural reason can form no conception of an immaterial, then she can allow that we have ideas of things that are the effect of an immaterial cause, but it is difficult to see how we could have an idea of that immaterial cause itself. So long as she "take[s] and idea to be the picture of some object" Cavendish , 74 and so long as immaterials cannot be captured in a figure or image, it would appear that she is committed to saying that we can have no ideas of immaterials at all.

A third maneuver that Cavendish could make is to say that when she talks in the language of immaterials, she is using terms that she does not take to be referential, but that are still serving an important communicative role. For example, when she speaks of the immaterial souls that might surround us, and the way in which they would be nothing to us, she might be trying to make a point in the language of her opponents. They speak in terms of immaterials, and Cavendish might want to attempt to engage them.

She says for example at the start of Philosophical Letters ,. A potential problem for the view that Cavendish is making this third maneuver in all cases in which she uses the word "God" is that there are texts outside of Philosophical Letters in which she uses the word but is not directly responding to the view of a theistic opponent.

But she is also clear in numerous passages that we have no idea of God or any other immaterials, and no idea of infinitude, and so it is likely that in those texts she is responding to a presumptive opponent, or perhaps just that she is being careful to articulate her piety. Indeed, a final interpretive proposal is that in some cases Cavendish might be using the language of immaterials to exhibit piety and devotion. There is a further discussion of this proposal, and also of the third maneuver, in section six below.

For Cavendish, philosophical inquiry is not a matter of attempting to converge on an understanding of all that there is. It is instead a matter of satisfying our curiosity as to the details of those things that have already gotten or that are capable of getting our attention.

There may be things that are not material, but these cannot be the subject of investigation at least not by us. We cannot speak or think or theorize about them. It would appear that strictly speaking we cannot even make the assertion that these things might exist, as we do not have any ideas of them.

Cavendish speaks of them nonetheless, and we are left with the interpretive question of why. A final argument that Cavendish offers for the view that matter thinks and is intelligent is from the orderly behavior of bodies. One of the longstanding puzzles of seventeenth-century philosophy and science was how to explain this behavior. Cudworth lays out the puzzle very neatly. First, he offers a trilemma:.

Cudworth settles on the third horn of the trilemma after ruling out the other two. Bodies are dumb and dead, and so are not the source of their own order, and it would be beneath God to attend to bodily affairs Himself Cunning , — Cudworth also considers a fourth option—that the orderly behavior of bodies is secured by the existence of laws of nature.

Here Cudworth is pointing out, and Cavendish will agree, that we do not account for the orderly behavior of bodies by positing laws of nature if we do not know what a law of nature is or how it operates. On Cudworth's view, the orderly behavior of bodies is secured by immaterial minds or plastic natures that attach to bodies and work to keep them on the rails.

In something like the way that our immaterial minds intelligently guide our bodies, plastic natures intelligently guide the bodies that compose the plant and animal and mineral world.

Cavendish agrees with a [highly modified] version of this last statement. She will raise the objection, though, that minds that move and come into contact with and attach to bodies must be material themselves. Like Cudworth, Cavendish generates her view on the orderly behavior of bodies from a rejection of the Epicurean doctrine that the order that we encounter in nature arises by chance. Something is keeping bodies in line, according to Cavendish, and to do its job it must be active and knowledgeable and perceptive.

It cannot be immaterial, however, and so. Cavendish rejects the view that matter is not capable of engaging in orderly behavior on its own. It does not require the assistance of a plastic nature, for example, and it is not clear how such a thing could be of any help anyway.

Cavendish is indeed shocked at the temerity of those who think that we can speak intelligibly of an immaterial divine being but then allow that some of its creatures would be dead and barren. Cavendish does not appear to allow that we can speak intelligibly of God or other immaterials , and so perhaps she is making the point that if we could, we would conclude that whatever He would pack into such a proxy He would have packed into bodies in the first place.

Bodies have information about the bodies in their vicinity, according to Cavendish, and this is in part because bodies are perceptive and in part because the universe is a plenum of contiguous bodies that are in a position to communicate with each other.

Cavendish offers a number of reasons for supposing that the universe is a plenum, including that nothingness can have no properties and that God would not create non-being.

Cavendish will have to be careful about putting any weight on this last argument, if she also holds that we have no idea of God and no ideas of any immaterials more generally, but she does make sure to offer the additional argument that contains no theological premises. The universe is a plenum of contiguous bodies, she supposes, and these bodies are also perceptive and are in regular communication with the bodies in their local environment.

Bodies must be in communication with each other, she thinks, if they are to exhibit the organized and orderly behavior that they do. Cavendish defends the view that the universe is a plenum of contiguous bodies that are perceptive and intelligent. The view is in part a reminder that the natural world is more active and vital than we might have thought.

Cavendish also leverages the view to generate a distinction between natural productions, which she takes to be highly sophisticated and intricate, and human artifacts, whose components are often rushed together and, as a result, lack the history of communication and collaboration that is found in bodies that humans have left untouched.

Cavendish says of the bodies of nature very generally that. The bodies that compose an artifact are also natural bodies, of course, and so they have a history of perception and communication with the bodies with which they are standardly continguous, but human artifice is often a matter of extracting such bodies from their normal context and putting them in a position that is foreign and unfamiliar.

These bodies are still perceptive, but the combinations into which they are forced to enter are not as well-functioning. An everyday example that might shed light on Cavendish's thinking here is the difference between an office staff of individuals who have a long history of working together and a group of office workers that was just recently assembled.

Statistically speaking the first group would be able to get a lot more done. Cavendish expects in advance that artifacts would not be as well-functioning as natural productions, but she points to examples as well:. The language here from Cavendish is no doubt strong, and she is overstating her case if she thinks that instruments and other artifacts are bound to be defective in principle.

She would be right to note, however, that many of the instruments of her own time were false informers, at least to some degree. She would also argue that the best sort of artifact is one that incorporates bodies that have a long history of communication and collaboration — that is, artifacts that in large part are not artifacts, but that consist of components that are already productions of nature Cunning , She singles the "perfect natural eye," for example, and she would argue that one of the reasons that it is able to do what it does is because of the complexity and coordination of the smaller bodies that enter into it.

If we create an artificial eye, Cavendish thinks, it had better be made up of similar items. In that case, we should also be careful for taking too much credit for our production, if we are relying on work that had already been long underway.

There are some potential problems with Cavendish's argumentation for the view that matter thinks. For example, her argument that it is inconceivable that minds could move and not be material might seem to contradict another argument that features prominently in her system and that is considered more fully in section 4 : namely, that most of the things that happen in nature are beyond our capacity to understand. In particular, Cavendish will argue that much of what happens in the natural world is incomprehensible to us in the sense that we do not understand why bodies have the brute capacities by which they do all that they do.

She considers the example of magnetic attraction, for example, and familiar Humean examples like the ability of certain foods to nourish, and she argues that although we do not understand how or why bodies have the capacities that they do, bodies have them nonetheless.

She offers all of these examples in partial defense of her view that matter thinks: we do not understand how it thinks, but that is just a fact about us and what we are in a position to find intelligible. Cavendish accordingly leaves herself open to the objection that although we may not understand how minds could be immaterial and also partake of motion, minds might in fact be immaterial movers.

Cavendish might reply to this objection by making a distinction between things that are inconceivable in the strong sense that there is a contradiction in our conception of them, and things that are inconceivable in the weaker sense that we lack the cognitive resources to understand them. She might argue that immaterial motion is incoherent in the former sense.

An opponent might at the same time propose that our inability to understand how immaterial minds and bodies could interact is no evidence that they do not interact: instead, it is just evidence of our own cognitive limitations. Cavendish would presumably reply that bodily interaction must always involve contact and hence that material-immaterial interaction is incoherent in the strong sense.

Another potential objection is in effect a reductio response to Cavendish's argument that the bodies that surround us need to be intelligent if they are to exhibit the order that they do. The objection is simply that bodies are not intelligent, and so there must be some other explanation for that order. Here Cavendish would just bite the bullet — and insist that in fact it is not a bullet — and respond that a number of the predications that we make of the objects that surround us presuppose that those objects are perceptive intelligent.

We might point to other examples of expert behavior that are more mundane, and we might reflect on how we can get tripped up if we attempt to bring that behavior to the level of attention.

Cavendish herself supposes that a lot of skillful and adaptive human behavior takes place below the threshold of awareness:. Cavendish is not opposed to appealing to a background philosophy theory to help to make sense of particular phenomena — but she does not want to deny the paradigm cases to any such theory must be accountable. A different objection that Cavendish faces is that there is something odd in saying that minds move or that they are spatial.

There are plenty of figures in the history of philosophy who have posited the existence of entities that are not in space, even though these entities still in some way apply to, or are a part of, everyday objects.

Most famous, perhaps, is Plato's positing of the existence of numbers, perfect geometrical figures, and other universal entities.

Here Cavendish and her opponents are presumably at loggerheads. There may be something odd about saying that minds move, she would insist, but there is something even more odd about saying that the entirety of person partakes of motion without their mind partaking of motion as well.

Perhaps we have immaterial minds that exist in a non-spatial Platonic realm, or that are otherwise non-spatial, but these are not the minds that we have in mind when we are speaking of the earthly entities that have imagistic and dimensional ideas and partake of motion.

Cavendish is in effect imploring us to take seriously that the language of moving minds is only unusual against the background of an impoverished conception of matter. One of the objections that Cavendish has to address, courtesy of her seventeenth-century opponents, is that the prospect of thinking matter is unintelligible and thus that it is false that all of reality is material.

For example, Descartes insists that something is not a property of a body unless there is a conceptual tie between it and the essence of body:. For Descartes, shape is a property of bodies because something cannot be a shape unless it is the shape of an extended thing.

Motion is a property of bodies because something cannot have motion unless it has a location and so cannot have motion unless it is extended Descartes , II. Our thoughts and volitions, however, cannot be conceived as having length, breadth, or depth. We find a similar argument in the work of Malebranche:. It is impossible to conceive of a thought as having a size, or as being a certain distance from another thought or from a body, so a thought is not a body or the property of a body Cunning Cavendish could not disagree more.

In tackling the question of the nature of mind, her first order of business is to establish that matter thinks. Only then does she consider the question of whether or not we can understand how it thinks. She argues that we do not and that it is not surprising that we do not, given that we do not know the answer to hardly any of the how and why questions about the things that we encounter in nature.

For example,. For Cavendish, the fact that we do not understand how matter thinks is not evidence that matter does not think. If it was, then we would have evidence against the occurrence of many of the phenomena that we encounter on a daily basis.

Anticipating Hume, Cavendish is arguing that particular causal relations are not known a priori , and that if we did not have the relevant experience, every causal connection would seem just as arbitrary as any other Hume , Here Cavendish is again pre-figuring Hume.

This is a sustained theme throughout her corpus. For example, we do not understand why the bodies that are involved in digestion would work together to digest, rather than to do something else Cavendish , —9. Nor do we know why the bodies that compose water and ice are transparent, when the bodies that come together to form other beings are not Cavendish , We can speculate on these, but in the end.

Bodies in the natural world clearly have capacities, Cavendish is maintaining, and it is by such capacities that they do what they do. We do not understand why a particular body or configuration of bodies would have the particular capacities that it does, and there is no special problem posed by the fact that we cannot understand how matter thinks Cunning As we saw in Section 3, Cavendish's metaphysics is circumscribed insofar as it does not aim to constitute a complete account of all that there is.

In addition, it will provide only limited accounts of the things whose existence it does capture. Cavendish is fully aware of the limits of her project, and indeed part of that project is to motivate the view that we do not understand nearly as much as we ordinarily presume Clucas , —4; Broad , —7.

Anticipating Hume yet again, and also Locke, she is supposing that once we identify the line beyond which philosophical inquiry is no longer productive, we will devote our energies elsewhere, and to better effect.

For Cavendish and Hume, many of the sharpest minds are engaged in the pursuit of goals that are in fact a dead end. These individuals could be working on down-to-earth projects that benefit humankind generally; and by expressing their nature in a more sustainable way, they would be happier themselves. Another case is point is the attempt that philosophers might make to offer wholly perspicuous definitions or accounts of fundamental notions — like those of matter, motion, divisibility, dependence, agency, and authority.

Cavendish discusses these of course, and indeed they are among the bedrocks of her philosophical system, but she nowhere attempts anything like a full-blown account of what they are. What she says about matter and its properties is especially telling —.

For Cavendish, there will be no explication of the nature of motion in terms of matter or vice versa, but that does not mean that she supposes that we do not know matter or motion when we encounter them.

She supposes that we know these well enough to draw conclusions that are relevant to our most pressing matters of concern, but she does not think that in order to be able to identify instances of motion, etc. The order of approach would appear to be the other way around — a full-blown account would have to do justice to incontrovertible paradigm cases; but the identification of paradigm cases would not require that we have in hand the more general theory that paradigm cases are supposed to help us to generate.

Cavendish appears to be thinking that if we wait for a clear and full-blown account of our most rock-bottom notions before we take on the pressing issues of the day, we will never in fact get to them, and the discipline of philosophy will lose its relevance if not its luster.

An interesting wrinkle in Cavendish's view of the orderly behavior of bodies is her insistence that when bodies interact they do not transfer motion to each other. On the assumption that properties cannot literally slide or hop from one body to another, cases in which one body does take on the motion of another body would be cases in which the second body also takes on the matter that has that motion. But we do not observe a body to become more massive when it is moved as a result of its contact with another body.

As Cavendish explains in her description of a hand that moves a bowl,. The second body moves in the right way in response to the first body and the other bodies in its vicinity , but only because all bodies are intelligent and perceptive and for the most part agreeable, and they communicate with each other about how to proceed. A given amount of motion is inseparably tied to the body that has it, according to Cavendish, and so motion never transfers from a first body to a second — unless of course the first body loses some of its matter, in which case there is a transfer of motion, but only because there is at the same time a transfer of matter.

The motion that is transferred is not transferred from the matter that has it; instead, that matter and motion both transfer together. Cavendish supposes that motion is never transferred on its own, but she also allows that a body can redirect motions that another body already has. That is, a body never transfers any amount of motion to a second body, but a body can and often does redirect the motions of a second body.

Bodies indeed often dominate other bodies and force their motions to run counter to what they would otherwise be:. A body never loses its motion, and motion is never transferred on its own from one body to another, but a body can redirect the motions that a second body already has, and in a way that might give the appearance that motion has been transferred.

Cavendish will allow appearances to tell part of the story of a given body-body interaction, but she also makes sure that any such story is informed by deeper metaphysical considerations like that strictly speaking a body and its motion are inseparable. A given body never loses or acquires motion, according to Cavendish.

Bodies also have enough packed into them, she supposes, that there is a sense in which they are the cause of their own perceptions. A potentially counter-intuitive view, Cavendish would argue that the available alternative accounts of perception make no sense at all and that her own view is a close and more coherent cousin of the prevailing mechanist view of her time.

First, she rejects the scholastic doctrine that perception of an object is a matter of receiving from that object an immaterial image or species or form of itself. Cavendish also rejects the mechanist view according to which perception is a matter of unintelligent light traveling from one body to another and then actively producing an image of the first body in the mind of the second. She worries that.

The absurdity of the opinion needs no demonstration, but Cavendish elaborates in just the ways that we would expect. The opinion is absurd in part because it includes that sense organs are passive and inert in the course of the production of sensory images.

The opinion is also absurd because the material medium that is light does not carry within itself any image of the perceived object, and so it does not bring along the resources to produce a perception of that object specifically, or to produce any perception at all. In her own words, Cavendish says that it is unlikely that.

For Cavendish, perception is an almost entirely active process. Although the objects that we sense put constraints on the images that we produce of them, we produce those images in their entirety. Cavendish has a ready reply. According to the view of her opponents, the microscopic bodies that affect our senses do not have qualities like color or taste or smell, but they somehow are able to make us have sensations of these. On this view, the color- and taste- and odor-less microscopic bodies might serve as a kind of trigger, but the production of the relevant sensations is due in large part to dispositions and capacities that are found on the side of the perceiver.

Cavendish would agree that much of the work of a sensory perception takes place in the perceiver. She would add that one of the things that her opponents are overlooking is that, because motion is always inseparable from the body that has it, the motions that enter into the formation of a sensory image are the work of the perceiver as well. Cavendish holds that when one body appears to transfer motion to another, the second body moves of its own accord, but does so in the light of its communication with the first body.

Commentators have worried that even if we allow Cavendish the view that bodies are active and vital and the source of their own motion, she has no way to account for how it is that bodies communicate so successfully with each other if nothing is transmitted between them.

As Detlefsen writes,. O'Neill points the way to an answer. First, she points out that even though for Cavendish a body never transfers its motion to a second body, it still serves as a partial cause of its movement O'Neill , xxx-xxxi. Cavendish says,. In line with the results of section three, Cavendish is applying the view that bodies must come into contact with each other in order to interact. She appears to hold that at the point of mutual contact one body triggers the perceptual activity and self-motion of another, but we are still left with the question of how the first body does this.

That is, we are left with the question of how the second body comes to acquire all of the information that it needs to act in a coordinated and orderly way. Cavendish does not make clear the process by which this occurs Detlefsen , , but she gives us enough material to allow us to speculate.

If the second body makes a copy of the first, and if it does so at the point of interaction, then one obvious proposal is that the first body presents an image of itself at that point of interaction. The second body then makes a copy of that image. It is clear how this would work even in apparent cases of action at a distance.

The universe is a dense plenum of contiguous bodies that are perceptive and that communicate with the bodies that surround them:. In sense perception and other cases of occasional causation, information passes through the air from one body to the next, but not in the form of unintelligent light that stamps an impression on passive and inert sense organs.

Since the universe is a plenum, information passes from an "agent" body to the air that surrounds it, and the air then actively patterns an image of that body, and that image is then patterned again — wash, rinse, and repeat — all the way until the "patient" body is reached.

Along the way, some of the air will travel with a patterned image of the perceived object, and some will communicate an image of the object to bodies that are contiguous — all until the perceiver is reached. Cavendish is also clear that part of what it is for a body to think and be intelligent is for it to have self-knowledge, [ 30 ] and contiguous bodies would be regularly copying such information in order to maximize the coordination of behavior. In many cases, that information just happens to travel a lot farther.

Cavendish has to be to offering an account along these lines if she is going to be able to reject as less plausible the views of her scholastic and mechanist opponents. She herself thinks that qualities like color and smell and taste literally exist in objects and that a perceiving body patterns all of these. We have seen that Cavendish holds that natural reason cannot perceive or have an idea of an immaterial being. One way to reconcile her view that we cannot have ideas of immaterials with her numerous attempts to speak of God is to say that she is attempting to speak in the language of her opponents.

A problem, however, is that there are passages in which she seems to want to be doing a lot more. For example, she writes that,. I Sent you word in my last, I would not meddle with writing any thing of the Divine Soul of Man, by reason it belongs to Faith and Religion, and not to Natural Philosophy; but since you desire my opinion concerning the Immortality of the Divine Soul, I cannot but answer you plainly, that first I did wonder much you made me question of that, whose truth, in my opinion, is so clear, as hardly any rational man will make a doubt of it; for I think there is almost no Christian in the world, but believes the Immortality of the Soul, no not Christians onely, but Mahometans and Jews: But I left to wonder at you, when I saw Wise and Learned Men, and great Divines, take so much pains as to write whole Volumes, and bring so many arguments to prove the Immortality of the Soul, for this was a greater Miracle to me, then if Nature had shewed me some of her secret and hidden effects, or if I had seen an Immaterial Spirit.

Certainly, Madam , it seems as strange to me to prove the Immortality of the Soul, as to convert Atheists; for it is impossible, almost, that any Atheist should be found in the World: For what Man would be so senceless as to deny a God? Wherefore to prove either a God, or the Immortality of the Soul, is to make a man doubt of either: for as Physicians and Surgeons apply strengthening Medicines onely to those parts of the body which they suppose the weakest, so it is with proofs and arguments, those being for the most part used in such subjects, the truth of which is most questionable.

Here Cavendish is stating quite straightforwardly that we can have faith in the existence of immaterials, and in particular in the existence of God, but that immaterials are not within the province of natural reason. If so, Cavendish is reflecting the view that our best and only interface with God is via faith; she is reflecting her commitment to fideism. A problem, of course, is that it would seem that a person would need to have an idea of God in order to have faith that God exists.

Cavendish is clear that we can have an idea of the effects of God's omnipotence, but she does not think that natural reason can have an idea of an immaterial itself. We can have an idea that there is a cause of these effects, but not an idea of what the cause is, or what it is that makes that idea and idea of God as opposed to something else. Cavendish might posit that we have supernatural and immaterial souls and that these can have an idea of God, but the question again is how she would be entitled to make suppositions about immaterial souls.

One of her aims in circumscribing the limits of natural philosophy is presumably to make room for faith, but there is a worry that she has gone too far in holding that we cannot have ideas of immaterials.

As Descartes remarks,. Cavendish appears to be committed to the view that the only things of which we can think or speak are the mundane things which surround us, or things that can come into contact with them and us but that are further off.

In some passages, she refers to God and His infinitude in order highlight the limits of human understanding. In these passages, Cavendish might be speaking of God in ways that are in tension with her view that we do not have ideas of immaterials.

Ace your assignments with our guide to The Catcher in the Rye! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Antolini Mr. Spencer Stradlater Carl Luce. What is a catcher in the rye and why does Holden want to be one? Does Mr. Antolini really make a pass at Holden?

Why does Holden run away from Pencey? Does Holden have sex with Sunny, the prostitute? What happens to Holden after his date with Sally Hayes and his meeting with Carl Luce both end badly?

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What made Holden cry? Maurice told him if he did then your parents will find out that you spent the night with a whore. Why did Holden begin to cry? How is Holden a phony in Chapter 9? In Chapter 9 , Holden is extremely phony with Faith Cavendish when he calls her at a very late hour. He pretends to be a mutual friend of somebody named Eddie Birdsell and implies that he is a Princeton student. He pretends to be older than sixteen, as he does throughout the novel. What do the fish represent in Catcher in the Rye?

The fish symbolize everyone else but Holden is not a fish. He does not care about the fish because he is a duck. The ducks do not stay in the pond all winter; they have to leave, just like Holden had to leave Pencey. How would you describe Lillian Simmons?