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 ‘birth of subjectivity’ with Luther and Descartes as two alternate representatives of this radical break with the past, each ushering in the new era in which ‘I’ am the locus of judgements about the world. A sub-narrative called ‘the mind-body problem’ recounts how Cartesian dualism, responding to the new promise of a mechanistic science of nature, “split off” the world of the soul/mind/self from the world of extended, physical substance—a split which has preoccupied the philosophy of mind up until the present day. We would like to call attention to a different constellation of texts—neither a robust ‘tradition’ nor an isolated ‘episode’, somewhere in between—which have in common their indebtedness to, and promotion of an embodied, Epicurean approach to the soul. These texts follow the evocative hint given in Lucretius’ De rerum natura that ‘the soul is to the body as scent is to incense’ (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 ‘intentional’ properties are reduced to the basic properties of matter. Rather, to borrow the title of one of these treatises (L’Âme Matérielle), 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 L’Âme Matérielle, 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 Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine (1748), in order to articulate this concept of a ‘material soul’ with its implications for notions of embodiment, materialism and selfhood

The Gut-Brain Axis:Historical Reflections

The gut–brain axis and the microbiome have recently acquired an important position in explaining a wide range of human behaviours and emotions. Researchers have typically presented developments in understandings of the microbiome as radical and new, offering huge potential for better understandings of our bodies and what it means to be human. Without refuting the value of this research, this article insists that, traditionally, doctors and patients acknowledged the complex interactions between their guts and emotions, although using alternative models often based on nerves or psychology. For example, nineteenth-century doctors and patients would have been well acquainted with the idea that their stomachs and minds were somehow connected, and that this interaction could produce positive or negative physical and mental health impacts. To demonstrate this, this article offers a snapshot of medical and public thought on (what we currently call) the gut–brain axis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, using Britain as a key case study due to the prevalence of gastric problems in that country. It commences by exploring how nineteenth-century doctors and patients took for granted the intimate relations between gut and mind and used their ideas on this to debate personal health, medical theory and social and political discourse. The article then moves on to argue that various medical sub-disciplines emerged (anatomy, physiology, surgery) that threatened to reduce the stomach to a physiologically complex organ but, in doing so, inadvertently began to erase ideas of a gut–mind connection. However, these new models proved unsatisfactory, allowing more holistic ideas of the body–mind relationship to continue to carry currency in twentieth-century psychological and medical thought. In the late century, pharmacological developments once again threatened to minimise the gut–brain axis, before it once again became popular in the early twenty-first century, now debated through a new language of microbiology