Color in a Material World

Margaret Cavendish against the Early Modern Mechanists

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10696668
AutoresColin Chamberlain (0000-0003-3713-9068, Temple University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen128
Número3
Páginas293-336
Fecha de publicación2019-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Philosophical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0031-8108 • E-ISSN: 1558-1470
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00318108-7537283
OpenAlexW2963299409
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas67

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