History Workshop, Work-In-Progress Seminar: Lucy Johnson, "Cavendish on the Distinction between the Artificial and the Natural"

Abstract: Margaret Cavendish often claims that there is a sharp metaphysical distinction between natural and artificial entities. There is a question, however, of whether she has the philosophical resources to do so. In the scholastic tradition, the artificial and the natural are distinguished by the source or principle of their motion. Natural objects have their source and principle of motion within themselves, whereas artificial objects and craft objects do not. In Cavendish’s materialist metaphysics, all matter is self-moving, which might lead us to suspect that like her mechanist contemporaries, she should do away with the distinction between art and nature. In this talk, I will argue that in fact it is matter’s self-movement and self-knowledge which allow Cavendish to draw the distinction between artifacts and natural objects. Getting the importance of self-motion to the art-nature distinction in view, I argue, also helps us to better understand Cavendish’s deployment of this distinction in her criticisms of mechanical philosophy.