In Marcus P. Adams (ed.),
A Companion to Hobbes. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 413-430 (
2021)
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Abstract
This chapter examines the connections between Hobbes’s and Cavendish’s accounts of
causation. Eileen O’Neill and Marcus Adams have argued that Hobbes and Cavendish share the
same notion of entire causes as necessary and sufficient for producing their effects. While this
account is well-suited to Hobbes’s mechanical account of causation, O’Neill worries that this
claim collapses Cavendish’s account of occasional causation into full on occasionalism. I argue
that a close analysis of Cavendish’s views on the role of external objects in perception shows
that it does make a causal contribution that is not merely moral. Karen Detlefsen has argued that
Cavendish’s account causation requires libertarian freedom and the denial of nature as a
principal cause. This would put Cavendish at odds with both Hobbes’s account of causes and his
account of freedom. I argue that Cavendish’s occasional causation only requires self-motion, that
self-motion does not require libertarian freedom, and that matter is the principal or entire cause
of all the effects in nature. This not only goes a long way in reconciling Cavendish’s views with
those of Hobbes, but also provides a more natural reading of her texts.