7 research outputs found
Monsters, Laws of Nature, and Teleology in Late Scholastic Textbooks
In the period of emergence of early modern science, âmonstersâ or individuals with physical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required special explanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern with monsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholastic authors of university textbooks. This paper will reconstruct the main theses of the treatment of monsters in Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question as to how their accounts conceived natureâs regularity and teleology. It shows that they developed a naturalistic teratology in which, in contrast to the naturalistic explanations usually offered by the new science, finality was at central stage. This general point does not impede our noticing that some authors were closer to the views emerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relatively autonomous from God and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. In this connection, this paper suggests that the concept of the laws of nature developed by the new science âas exception-less regularitiesâtransferred to natureâs regularity the âstrongâ character that Late Scholasticism attributed to finality and that the decline of the Late Scholastic view of finality played as an important concomitant factor permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature
Monsters in early modern philosophy
Monsters as a category seem omnipresent in early modern natural philosophy, in what one might call a âlongâ early modern period stretching from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when the science of teratology emerges. We no longer use this term to refer to developmental anomalies (whether a two-headed calf, an individual suffering from microcephaly or Proteus syndrome) or to âfreak occurrencesâ like Mary Toftâs supposedly giving birth to a litter of rabbits, in Surrey in the early eighteenth-century (Todd 1995). But the term itself has a rich semantic history, coming from the Latin verb monstrare (itself deriving from monere, to remind, warn, advise), âto show,â from which we also get words like âmonitor,â âadmonish,â âmonumentâ and âpremonitionâ; hence there are proverbs like, in French, le monstre est ce qui montre, difficult to render in English: âthe monsters is that which shows.â Scholars have discussed how this âmonstrativeâ dimension of the monster is in fact twofold: on the one hand, and most awkwardly, the monster is an individual who is âpointed at,â who is shown; on the other hand, the monster is a sign, a portent, an omen, and in that sense âshows usâ something (on the complex semantic history of the term across Indo-European languages see Ochsner 2005). The latter dimension persists in naturalized form in the early modern period when authors like Bacon, Fontenelle or William Hunter insist that monsters (or anomalies) can show us something of the workings of Nature
The material soul: Strategies for naturalising the soul in an early modern epicurean context
We usually portray the early modern period as one characterised by the âbirth of subjectivityâ with Luther and Descartes as two alternate representatives of this radical break with the past, each ushering in the new era in which âIâ am the locus of judgements about the world. A sub-narrative called âthe mind-body problemâ recounts how Cartesian dualism, responding to the new promise of a mechanistic science of nature, âsplit offâ the world of the soul/mind/self from the world of extended, physical substanceâa split which has preoccupied the philosophy of mind up until the present day. We would like to call attention to a different constellation of textsâneither a robust âtraditionâ nor an isolated âepisodeâ, somewhere in betweenâwhich have in common their indebtedness to, and promotion of an embodied, Epicurean approach to the soul. These texts follow the evocative hint given in Lucretiusâ De rerum natura that âthe soul is to the body as scent is to incenseâ (in an anonymous early modern French version). They neither assert the autonomy of the soul, nor the dualism of body and soul, nor again a sheer physicalism in which âintentionalâ properties are reduced to the basic properties of matter. Rather, to borrow the title of one of these treatises (LâĂme MatĂ©rielle), they seek to articulate the concept of a material soul. We reconstruct the intellectual development of a corporeal, mortal and ultimately material soul, in between medicine, natural philosophy and metaphysics, including discussions of Malebranche and Willis, but focusing primarily on texts including the 1675 Discours anatomiques by the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy; the anonymous manuscript from circa 1725 entitled LâĂme MatĂ©rielle, which is essentially a compendium of texts from the later seventeenth century (Malebranche, Bayle) along with excerpts from Lucretius; and materialist writings such Julien Offray de La Mettrieâs LâHomme-Machine (1748), in order to articulate this concept of a âmaterial soulâ with its implications for notions of embodiment, materialism and selfhood
Descartes, René
Scholars generally consider René Descartes to
be the father of early modern philosophy insofar
he rejected scholasticism, Aristotelianism,
but also Renaissance philosophies and
grounded a new system of knowledge whose
roots lie solely in the mind and not in previous
assumptions. This defines a modern self that
achieves the knowledge of nature and shapes
the modern universe. In the Discours de la
MĂ©thode (1637) and the Meditationes de
prima philosophia (1641), after rejecting earlier
education, doctrines, and scientiĂŠ, Descartes
isolates the powers of the mind (i.e.,
clear and distinct ideas) as the beginning of
any certainty. Yet, having considered Descartesâ
system as dismissing all doctrines and
beliefs, in this entry I will first examine some
relations between the French philosopher and
those contexts and then discuss the novelties of
his system. After a short biography, in the
second section, I will briefly explore the interrelations
between Descartes and Renaissance
scholars, whom he reproached for their precipitate
conclusions. Third, I will unearth his criticism
of Aristotelian-scholastic philosophy
(which he reproached for its preconceptions),
while highlighting his attention to a few Aristotelian
texts. Fourth, I will investigate a few
innovative aspects of his methodology; this
consists of novel combination of intellectual
cognition and experimentation. As a result,
Descartesâ entire natural philosophy consists
of a theoretical framework that defines the
principles of knowledge and the architecture
of science, while the body of all disciplines and
the knowledge of particular issues are methodologically
and experientially constructed.
Despite several limitations, Descartesâ system
is remarkably innovative
Seeking Intellectual Evidence in the Sciences: The Role of Botany in Descartesâ Therapeutics
While improving medicine through physics had the capacity to liberate seventeenth-century thinking from traditional beliefs about souls and spirits, mechanics generated complications. Descartesâ mechanical physics is a perfect example, for his efforts to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical medicine, steering intellectual evidence into this second field, were ultimately unsteady. His view of biomechanics had reduced living bodies to automated machines, thereby making definitions of life and health and the active treatment of diseases difficult. However, Descartesâ rarely-studied notes on botany reveal a new scenario, wherein he understood bodily therapeutics to be connected to physiology, making botany a lever to introduce the intellectual evidence of theoretical medicine into its practical counterpart. These documents enable a greater comprehension of the functional unity within bodies, instance refined definitions of bodily individualities, and reveal Descartesâ use of disease to define health and to produce therapeutics, thus demonstrating a strong relationship between the life sciences and his philosophy