22 research outputs found
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
The Inuit discovery of Europe? The Orkney Finnmen, preternatural objects and the re-enchantment of early-modern science.
The late-seventeenth century saw a peak in accounts of supposed encounters with âFinnmenâ in Orkney. These accounts have shaped the folklore of the Northern Isles. Scholars linked to the Royal Society suggested the accounts represented encounters with Inuit. Subsequent explanations included autonomous travel by Inuit groups and abduction and abandonment. These accounts should be understood as part of a European scientific tradition of preternatural philosophy, occupied with the deviations and errors of nature. Far from indicating the presence of Inuit individuals in Orkney waters, they provide evidence of the narrative instability of early-modern science and its habit of âthinking with thingsâ. Captivated by Inuit artefacts, the natural philosophers and virtuosi of the Royal Society imagined Orkney as a site of reverse contact with the âprimitiveâ. Nineteenth-century antiquarians and folklorists reliant on these texts failed to understand the extent to which objectivity was not an epistemic virtue in early-modern science
The heart and home of horror: The great London fogs of the late nineteenth century
This article centres on the unprecedentedly severe fog crisis which afflicted London between the 1870s and the mid-1890s. An overview of meteorological developments prefaces an interrogation of the mid-Victorian origins of environmental cost-benefit analysis and the only slowly dawning awareness that adverse weather conditions might make a significant contribution to mortality and morbidity from respiratory disease. At the same time, exceptionally degraded air quality came to be associated with the threat of physical and psychological degeneration in the poorest inner and eastern districts of the city. Perceived as a totality, these bodies of knowledge and ideology - economic, epidemiological and social Darwinistic - reinforced and legitimated a catastrophist fin de siĂšcle vision of almost unbearably debilitating social, economic and cultural relationships between 'darkness at noon' and the potential implosion of the late nineteenth century metropolis