TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series Vol. 7: Cavendish’s Color Theory | Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Colin Chamberlain, Professor of Modern Philosophy at The College of Liberal Arts, Temple University, Philadelphia, in this lecture investigates early modern philosophers — such as Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, Nicholas Malebranche, and John Locke — who hold that color is an illusion created by the human mind. These philosophers accept the mechanical hypothesis, according to which physical nature is like a giant machine, fully described in terms of a privileged set of mechanical or geometrical properties like size, shape, position, solidity, and motion. Material things, according to this hypothesis, are ‘the lean, spare objects of geometry,’ to borrow Dan Garber’s apt phrase, and are not really colored. The apparent redness of ruby, or the greenness of grass, is rather a human projection onto an otherwise colorless world. Chamberlain argues that Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) — philosopher, poet, science fiction writer, and playwright — provides a refreshing alternative to this early modern consensus. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Cavendish holds that material things are generally colored in the way they look to be. Cavendish’s material world is in technicolor, as compared to the drab, geometrical world of the mechanists. Her world is Oz to their Kansas. Unlike the early modern mechanists, Cavendish does not convict color experience of gross illusion, nor does she posit a deep rift between colorful appearances and colorless reality. Instead, she takes the color experience at face value as transparently revealing the colors objects really have. This is the seventh installment in the “TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series,” organized by Adjunct Professor Jordanco Sekulovski. SPEAKER: Colin Chamberlain MODERATOR: Jordanco Sekulovski TThe TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series is a non-profit event hosted by Temple University, Japan Campus, aimed at fostering critical thinking. These free, public lectures feature speakers from various international universities and provide an excellent opportunity to explore recent research in philosophy and the broader humanities.