1,721,018 research outputs found
Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine. Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi
No full textThe volume edited by Gideon Manning and Cynthia Klestinec gathers 10 essays prepared
for a “Festschrift” to celebrate Nancy Siraisi’s scholarly achievements and professional
impact on the history of medicine. The contributions focus on the various
areas of her research and dialogue with her methodology, while also providing new
investigations in the history of medicine
Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin: On Vegetable Souls
No full textIn this rather dense book, Lucas John Mix explores an important although
overlooked concept in the history of the life sciences: the vegetable soul. This
concept helped to differentiate between nonliving and living bodies from Aristotle
to Darwin, as the title suggests. In other words, the vegetative soul accounts
for life, a rather complex concept to define
Introduction: Do winners take it all?
Full text linkIn a recent graphic narrative titled Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy, Steven Nadler and Ben Nadler illustrate the seventeenth century as a period of challenges against authority and established knowledge, politics, and religion. This narrative introduces an important element to the predominant interpretation that considers the early-modern time a revolutionary era. Attributing heretics a crucial role gives nuance to the positivistic account of seventeenth-century science and philosophy. Indeed, this latter framework fails to describe the scientific revolution in its entirety. Considering the role of outsiders, minor or marginalized scholars, and heretics provides a way to overcome these limitations and contributes to a broader attention to the context of scientific knowledge
Being alive in descartes' physiology: Animals and plants, the immutatio and the impetus
No full textIn René Descartes' works there are four major references to living bodies as objects of his natural philosophy. The first is contained in the Fifth part of the Discours de la Méthode, published in June 1637, where Descartes provides a mechanical explanation of the heartbeat and other living functions of the body. The second is in a bio- medical note collected in the Excerpta anatomica dated November 1637, where he discusses nutrition and growth. The third is the famous claim on the absence of a section on living bodies in the Principia philosophiae, published in 1644. The fourth is in La Description du corps humain, Descartes' late physiology likely dated 1647- 1648. In this article, by exploring these passages and contextualizing his physiological observations of animals and plants, I reassemble Descartes' science of life: His dismissal of soul, his mechanical framework, his interpretation of bodily self- maintenance and growth, his understanding of living bodies as integrated and organic systems, and the role of a power such as the immutatio and forces such as the impetus
Ineffective books, compendiums and 'primary' books. Descartes between reading and writing philosophy
No full textWhile Descartes criticized the scholastic system of learning based on books and erudition, he proposed a new way of achieving knowledge through the force of the reason alone. However, this did not develop into an utter refusal of books in themselves, but only of their erroneous and sterile use. The essay aims to sketch (1.) Descartes' attention and interest in books as objects of scientia within his correspondence, (2.) Descartes' definition of a proper use of books (and therefore of a 'legitimate' kind of books), (3.) Descartes' philosophical systematization of both reading and writing under the order of reason. Rhetoric, thus, develops as subject and instrument of reasoning, as well as books and (philosophical) literature
The mechanical life of plants: Descartes on botany
No full textIn this article, I argue that the French philosopher René Descartes was far more involved in the study of plants than has been generally recognized. We know that he did not include a botanical section in his natural philosophy, and sometimes he differentiated between plants and living bodies. His position was, moreover, characterized by a methodological rejection of the catalogues of plants. However, this paper reveals a significant trend in Descartes's naturalistic pursuits, starting from the end of 1637, whereby he became increasingly interested in plants. I explore this shift by examining both Descartes's correspondence and several notes contained in the Excerpta anatomica. Grounded in direct observations, Descartes's work on vegetation provides a modest, though not unimportant, contribution to a natural-philosophical approach to the vegetal realm. This had a direct bearing on his lifelong ambition to explain the nature of living bodies and also fuelled the emergence of botany as a modern science
Gardens, Knowledge, and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period
No full textGardens have increasingly become the focus of scholarly attention. Parallel to a new, fascinating philosophy
of vegetation, historians of philosophy and science have recently begun to shed new light on this field in relocating
knowledge and science in gardens. This stimulating volume is one of the latest, most relevant contributions
Descartes and the Dutch: Botanical experimentation in the early modern period
No full textEarly modern study of plants blossomed in a network of observation, exchanges, collaborations, and epistolary discussions. Following Baconian methodology, Dutch scholars combined the labor of listing and describing plants with botanical experimentation. This empirical approach was a suitable context for Descartes, who exchanged information and performed observations on plants in collaboration with Dutch experimenters. In this article, I focus on (1) the reception of a few botanical experiments of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum in Huygens and Reneri, with whom Descartes was in contact, and (2) Descartes’ collaboration with Reneri. While performing observations on plants together, Reneri acquired Descartes’ theoretical framework (as it arises in his disputations) and influenced the latter with a Baconian approach to the study of living nature. This combination of experimental knowledge and a theoretical framework shaped a Cartesian study of plants, as it later surfaced in Regius and ultimately paved the way to a modern science of plants
BEFORE VITALISM: LIBERTINE BOTANY AND THE NON-OBSCURE LIFE OF PLANTS
Full text linkIn this article, I investigate how much the understanding of plants in French Libertine culture somehow anticipated the vitalistic interpretation of nature as entirely endowed with sensation, perception, and cognition, something one may call protovitalism.Situated between the Renaissance naturalism of Telesio, Cardano, and Campanella (and also Cesalpino) and Glisson's hylozoism, Libertine botany conceived of plants as key figures to challenge the restrictions on living bodies of the more traditional order of nature. Exploring the cases of Guy de La Brosse and Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac's work, two different segments of Libertine culture, I uncover two meaningful interpretations of plant life as comprehensive and non-obscure, therefore subverting both the Aristotelian and the mechanical understanding of nature, suggesting plants as a crucial subject to build a more exhaustive and clearer knowledge of life on
Crocologia. A Detailed Study of Saffron, the King of Plants
No full textIn chapter 6 of his monumental book, Johann Ferdinand Hertodt von Todtenfeld,
a Moravian physician and naturalist, avers that “rightfully, saffron [crocus]
claims for itself the name Regis Vegetabilium (“the King of Plants”), and at the
same time it deserved to be called also ‘Enlivening Panacea’” (p. 65). Although
today saffron is used in cookery and is the subject of Asian traditions, home
remedies and homeopathy, it appears to be one of the most important plants in
early modern pharmacology, as this masterpiece published in 1671 and entirely
devoted to the medical uses of this spice (and here translated for the first time
into English), reveals
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