There is Something in the Air: Cavendish on Patterning and Action-at-a-Distance

Abstract

A standard view in the seventeenth century is that, in cases of sensory perception, external bodies stamp or impress an image of themselves onto the sense organs of the perceiver. Cavendish famously disagrees: she holds that sense organs are highly active in perception and that they pattern images of external bodies by their own self-motion. Cavendish indeed supposes that in patterning and other cases of occasional causation, the affected body is highly active, but here I argue that she also holds that its cause is highly active: it redirects the motion of the affected body. The motion of the affected body (and any body) is always self-motion, or motion that is inseparable from the body that has it. I focus on instances in which a perceiving body patterns an image of the body that is perceived. Copies of the latter — featuring its sound, smell, visual, and other characteristics — come into contact with the sense organ of the perceiver, and only then is the external body perceived. Air and other bodies in the medium play a critical role in patterning, coming into contact with the bodies that they affect and redirecting motions that they have already.