Monsters in early modern philosophy

Monsters as a category seem omnipresent in early modern natural philosophy, in what one might call a “long” 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 “freak occurrences” like Mary Toft’s 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), “to show,” from which we also get words like “monitor,” “admonish,” “monument” and “premonition”; hence there are proverbs like, in French, le monstre est ce qui montre, difficult to render in English: “the monsters is that which shows.” Scholars have discussed how this “monstrative” dimension of the monster is in fact twofold: on the one hand, and most awkwardly, the monster is an individual who is “pointed at,” who is shown; on the other hand, the monster is a sign, a portent, an omen, and in that sense “shows us” 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

Pere Alberch's developmental morphospaces and the evolution of cognition

In this article we argue for an extension of Pere Alberch's notion of developmental morphospace into the realm of cognition and introduce the notion of cognitive phenotype as a new tool for the evolutionary and developmental study of cognitive abilities

Sobre la aclimatación: Boudin y la geografía médica On acclimatization: Boudin and medical geography

Para comprender los estudios de geografía médica realizados por Boudin, analizamos las diferencias que lo separan de las teorías aclimatacionistas defendidas en ese mismo período histórico por Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Ambos representan dos posiciones paradigmáticas referidas al problema de la aclimatación. Para entender la diferencia entre esos modelos analizamos el concepto de clima (heredero de Humboldt) que ambos toman como punto de partida para sus estudios y consideramos de qué modo piensan la variabilidad o flexibilidad de los organismos para plegarse a las exigencias climáticas. Esto nos conduce a un estudio sobre el modo como Boudin pensó la aclimatación de hombres y razas y, consecuentemente, el problema de la colonización.<br>In order to understand the medical geography studies by Boudin, we analyze the differences that set him apart from the acclimatization theories defended during that same historical period by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Each one of them represents a paradigmatic position in relation to the problem of acclimatization. To understand the difference between these models, we analyze the concept of climate (from Humboldt) undertaken by both as a starting point for their studies, and consider their thoughts on organism variability or flexibility to respond to climatic requirements. This leads us to a study on Boudin's thoughts on the acclimatization of humans and races, and consequently, his thoughts on the colonization issue