1,704 research outputs found
What Ever happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth-Century Irritability
No full textThis article investigates the reasons behind the disappearance of Francis Glisson’s theory of irritability during the eighteenth century. At a time when natural investigations were becoming increasingly polarized between mind and matter in the attempt to save both man’s consciousness and the inert nature of the res extensa, Glisson’s notion of a natural perception embedded in matter did not satisfy the new science’s basic injunction not to superimpose perceptions and appetites on nature. Knowledge of nature could not be based on knowledge within nature, i.e., on the very knowledge that nature has of itself; or – to look at the same question from the point of view of the human mind – man’s consciousness could not be seen as participating in forms of natural selfhood. Albrecht Haller played a key role in this story. Through his experiments, Haller thought he had conclusively demonstrated that the response given by nature when irritated did not betray any natural perceptivity, any inner life, any sentiment interi´eur. In doing so, he provided a less bewildering theory of irritability for the rising communities of experimental physiology
Phantasms of Reason and Shadows of Matter: Averroes’s Notion of the Imagination and Its Renaissance Interpreters
No full textRecensione di: Guido Giglioni, Francesco Bacone, Carocci, 2012
No full textRecensione di: Guido Giglioni, Francesco Bacone, Carocci, 201
From Thomas More to Thomas Smith: Utopian and Anti-Utopian Understandings of Economic Change in Sixteenth-Century England
No full textFrom the Woods of Experience to the Open Fields of Metaphysics: Bacon's Notion of "Silva"
No full textIn the annals of both philosophy and science, Francis Bacon is usually portrayed as one of the most vocal advocates for the need to apply a method to the study of nature. And yet both in his methodological writings and in the actual samples of natural history he produced in the course of his life, Bacon insisted that the investigator should be able to cope with particulars, contingencies and anomalies without projecting hastily drawn conclusions and untested notions of order onto a material that, by its very nature, resists being ordered. In this article, I argue that Bacon viewed lack of order as both heuristically productive and socially beneficial. His well-known pronouncements on method should be read against the background of his recurrent pleas for a direct experiential involvement with nature. On more than one occasion, Bacon emphasized the need for the human mind to be – temporarily – lost in experience. He represented this form of experimental alienation through the symbol of the forest, the silva. Bacon's silva alludes to a pre-linguistic stage of experience in which the mind is kept as far as possible from notiones and verba (read idola) and allowed to explore the copious array of natural particulars and resemblances that constitutes nature
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