Abstract
Margaret Cavendish is a seventeenth-century philosopher who was a contemporary of Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, and Robert Boyle, and published fourteen books, including five important works of natural philosophy.
In this lecture, we will discuss her unique metaphysics, which is at once materialist and panpsychist. She believes that all that exists from humans to cells, rocks, and trees has a mind. We will also discuss how her pre-Newtonian philosophy anticipates contemporary findings in quantum.
About the speaker
Jennifer McWeeny is professor at Emerson College and Professor II at the Centre for Gender Research. Professor McWeeny specializes in philosophies of gender and race, philosophy of mind, phenomenology and existentialism, and decolonial studies. She is a progenitor of the field of feminist philosophy of mind and has developed a theory of gender that sees genders as a function of the type of self-body relation that structures consciousness. Her theoretical frameworks have been utilized by scholars as a means to address issues in gender theory, critical race pedagogies, legal studies, literary studies, queer theory, communication, ecofeminism, trauma studies, decolonial theory, and disability studies.