Margaret Cavendish, Stoic Antecedent Causes, and Early Modern Occasional Causes

Abstract The chapter provides an analysis of occasional causation in the natural philosophy of Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish rejects “the transmission model,” which underlies the mechanist’s explanation of change, and opts for an account of occasional cause, which involves coordinated changes in quantity of motion. Does Cavendish, in rejecting the mechanist’s account, thereby reject the view that the parts of nature are causally efficacious with respect to one another? While Malebranchean occasional causes are not thus efficacious, it is argued that Cavendish’s occasional causes are, as her Stoic-inspired example of the hand’s tossing a ball shows. The hand’s motion, while not a “perfect cause” of the motion of the ball, nonetheless “activates” or “triggers” the ball’s disposition to move by means of the motion it causes on the ball’s surface.