Abstract

For Margaret Cavendish, every single part of matter has self-knowledge, and almost every part has perceptive knowledge. This paper asks what is at stake for Cavendish in ascribing self-knowing and perceptive properties to matter. Whereas many commentators take perception and self-knowledge to be guides to Cavendish’s epistemology, this paper takes them to be guides to her metaphysics, in that it shows that these categories account for individual specificity and for relationality. A part of matter is a unique individual insofar as it is self-knowing – and it is a part in relation to other parts, and to the whole of matter, insofar as it is a perceptive part. This is so because self-knowledge is purely self-referential and complete, while perceptive knowledge is purely relational.

中文翻译：

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自我知识，知觉和玛格丽特·卡文迪许的个人形而上学

摘要

对于玛格丽特·卡文迪许（Margaret Cavendish）来说，物质的每个部分都具有自我知识，几乎每个部分都具有感知知识。本文问了卡文迪许在赋予物质自我知觉和感知特性方面有何利害关系。尽管许多评论员以感知和自我知识作为卡文迪许认识论的指南，但本文认为他们是她的形而上学的指南，因为它表明这些类别说明了个体的特殊性和关系性。就自我了解而言，物质的一部分是一个独特的个体–并且，它是与其他部分以及整个物质有关的一部分，只要它是感知的一部分。之所以如此，是因为自我知识纯粹是自我参考和完整的，而感知知识纯粹是关系的。