Color in a Material World

Margaret Cavendish against the Early Modern Mechanists

Bibliographic Data

ID10696668
AuthorsColin Chamberlain (0000-0003-3713-9068, Temple University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume128
Issue3
Pages293-336
Publication date2019-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Philosophical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8108 • E-ISSN: 1558-1470
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00318108-7537283
OpenAlexW2963299409
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited67

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible

Aesthetics · Art · Attribution · Colored · Epistemology · Perception · Property (philosophy) · Sociology · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Historical Philosophy and Science · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology