For our first talk of the year, we invite Colin Chamberlain, associate professor in the UCL Department of Philosophy and early modern philosophy expert, to discuss his recent paper "A Different Shade of Realism: Margaret Cavendish’s Materialism about Colour".
Margaret Cavendish is a realist about colour. She holds that grass is green even when no one is around to see it and, more generally, that the colours of bodies are independent of the experiences they elicit in perceivers. At the same time, Cavendish is an eliminativist about accidents or qualities, construed as beings that exist in bodies but that are not themselves bodies.
For Cavendish, there are not bodies with accidents. There are just bodies. But this creates a problem. Cavendish’s realism suggests that colour is a response-independent accident or quality of bodies, whereas the eliminativism suggests there are no such things. In this paper, we show how Cavendish reconciles these positions. Colour, for Cavendish, is not an accident or quality of body. Colours are bodies.