The skein of Margaret Cavendish

Abstract

This essay examines aspects of the monist and materialist thought of the philosopher and poet Margaret Cavendish who, in the seventeenth century, debated with the philosophical tradition that imposed its dualistic and mechanistic vision. Contrary to what Cartesian philosophy traced through the recourse to the cogito and a reversal of the dualism between mind and body, Cavendish's texts allow us to approach another conception of the world: matter, eternal and infinite, has mental properties. Cavendish proposes a relational perspective of matter and approaches the question of life and death from a non-antagonistic perspective of continuity of the living. Since life and knowledge are in all parts of matter, knowledge is not something that belongs only to the human species, but also to other animals and plants. he recovery of Cavendish's materialism allows us to inscribe it in a genealogy different from that of the time, whose masculine and humanistic form is based on the domain of nature, in which an epistemology in favor of life is drawn, and therefore of female character. Regarding the question of gender, it should not be considered only from the point of view of how men and women were constituted in the scientific practices and philosophical discourses of the modern tradition, but insofar as these practices and discourses concealed the desires, the corporality, the love, care, and relationship with other living beings.