Margaret Cavendish on Perception, Self‐Knowledge, and Probable Opinion

Philosophy Compass 10 (7):438-450 (2015)
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Abstract

Scholarly interest in Margaret Cavendish's philosophical views has steadily increased over the past decade, but her epistemology has received little attention, and no consensus has emerged; Cavendish has been characterized as a skeptic, as a rationalist, as presenting an alternative epistemology to both rationalism and empiricism, and even as presenting no clear theory of knowledge at all. This paper concludes that Cavendish was only a modest skeptic, for she believed that humans can achieve knowledge through sensitive and rational perception as well as through self-knowledge and can form probable opinions through reasoning

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Deborah Boyle
College of Charleston

Citations of this work

Margaret Cavendish on conceivability, possibility, and the case of colours.Peter West - 2021 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (3):456-476.
Cavendish’s Aesthetic Realism.Daniel Whiting - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (15):1-17.
Visual Perception as Patterning: Cavendish against Hobbes on Sensation.Marcus Adams - 2016 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 33 (3):193-214.

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