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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Recovering Matter’s “Most Noble Attribute:” Panpsychist-Materialist Monism in Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and 17th-Century English Thought

Branscum, Olivia Leigh January 2022 (has links)
This dissertation offers a new interpretation of the metaphysics of two seventeenth-century women philosophers – Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Anne Conway (1631–1679) – and brings to light an unnoticed tradition in seventeenth-century philosophy. I argue that both Cavendish and Conway can be understood as panpsychist-materialist monists: despite their other differences, they agree that there is one kind of substance in nature or creation, and that the single sort of substance always displays material features and mental capacities. Further, I propose that Cavendish and Conway are joined by the physician Francis Glisson (1597–1677) and the poet John Milton (1608–1674) as examples of a distinct panpsychist-materialist tendency in early modern England. ‘Panpsychist-materialist monism’ may at first seem too clunky to serve as the moniker of a movement, but it earns its keep by accurately capturing three elements of the figures’ systems that, when studied together as a group of related commitments, reveal the philosophical significance of each person’s views. My reading therefore bears on the project of interpreting Cavendish and Conway on their own terms and changes the way their context should be understood. Moreover, to the extent that contemporary philosophers of mind draw on philosophers from history in the formulation of their current views, the work presented in this dissertation stands to make a difference in present-day philosophy as well.

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