Margaret Cavendish as Critic and Reviser of Hobbes on Matter and Motion

Abstract Margaret Cavendish’s materialism holds that all motion is self-motion. Although she shows affinities to Hobbes’s understanding of “entire cause,” her strategy opposes features of Hobbes’s account of matter while revising his understanding of “motion.” Cavendish’s rejection of Hobbes’s persistence principle and his account of “place” can be understood as following from a more thorough interpretation of the impossibility of abstracting accidents from bodies.