Before the Two Cultures: Merging the Canons of the History of Science and Philosophy

In early modern European natural philosophy and medicine, scholars encountered the problem of the “formless birth” in their studies into generation, alongside “monstrous” and “perfect” births. Such formless births included the hen’s egg, the unformed bear cub, and the human false conception – said to be shapeless lumps of moving flesh – and these types of conceptions influenced how natural philosophers, like William Harvey and Jan Baptiste van Lamzweerde, approached experiments on, or explanations of, generation. This article suggests that the history of these unformed births provides fresh insights into how early modern scholars “thought” with formlessness. That is, early modern scholars drew on a longstanding discourse of shapeless conceptions to address the mechanisms of formless generation, “true” generation, as well as to understand other unformed or interstitial creatures in nature. The article argues that this history of thinking with formless births contributes to our picture of the significant role that unnatural births, such as “monsters”, played in early modern natural philosophy.

Guido Reni’s early critics described him as a painter of “celestial ideas,” and his artistic process has been characterized as one rooted in the fantasia and the Idea. From the seventeenth-century on, Reni’s figures were praised for the “airs of the heads,” a notion with astrological and medical connotations, while the papal physician and art critic Giulio Mancini described Reni’s manner as “spirited,” a term suggestive of the airy movement Reni so powerfully represented in his Aurora. The concept of “spirit” or “spirits” also retained important connotations in early modern medicine and natural philosophy. A reconsideration of Reni’s Aurora in the context of medical and natural philosophical investigations of generation, artistic creation and the nature of and relationship between celestial and terrestrial regions demonstrates the connections between early modern artistic reception, medicine and natural philosophy.

SummaryHistorians of science have neglected early modern natural philosophers' varied attitudes to the history of philosophy, often preferring to use loose labels such as ‘Epicureanism’ to describe the survival of ancient doctrines. This is methodologically inappropriate: reifying such philosophical movements tells us little about the complex ways in which early modern natural philosophers approached the history of their own discipline. As this article shows, a central figure of early modern natural philosophy, Robert Boyle, invested great intellectual energy into his depiction of the history of philosophy. Boyle's historical worldview was mediated through an array of textual traditions: classical, patristic, humanist and contemporary. Drawing extensively on his manuscript notes, this is examined for three topics. First, from his turn to natural philosophy in the late 1640s, Boyle combined a sceptical attitude towards philosophy's potential – stemming from humanist historicisations of the ‘speculative’ heritage of Greek philosophy – with a belief in natural philosophy's efficacy as a spiritual exercise, as performed by ancient ‘priests of nature’. Second, Boyle's attitude to the history of matter theory was far more complex than any simple comparison with ‘ancient atomism’ can convey. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Boyle held Epicurus to be a speculative and reductionist philosopher, leading him to posit a different lineage for a non-reductionist corpuscularianism which depended on exploitation of non-standard historiographical traditions. Appreciating this allows us to make an intervention in the ongoing debate about the relationship between corpuscularianism, chymistry and experiment in Boyle's philosophy. Third, Boyle's historicisation of supposedly anthropomorphic philosophies in his famous Free Enquiry (1686) exploited recent theological historiography, most importantly Samuel Parker's combination of the history of idolatry with the history of Greek philosophy, which itself relied on developments in continental sacred history. It was this historicisation, rather than any philosophical realities, which led to the positing of the mechanical philosophy as more compatible than Aristotelianism with Christian doctrine.

ABSTRACTIn an early modern context, ‘vitalistic’ natural philosophies had been associated with antiauthoritarian political theories. Whilst mechanical philosophy has been characterized as amenable to (or even, sometimes, inspired by) conservative politics on account of the structural analogies between passive and inert particles that can only be organized by externally imposed strict mechanical laws on the one hand, and similarly passive citizens, on the other, vitalism understood as a monistic, dynamic materialism purportedly implicated alternative modes of agency and organization. This alternative model incorporated inherently active, self-organizing agents allegedly capable of bringing about higher structures in a bottom-up fashion both in the natural and in political realm. In this paper, I focus on James Harrington’s appropriation of William Harvey’s physiology and examine whether the republican philosopher actually made use of the political potential said to be inherent in vitalistic discourse. I intend to show that Harrington, rather than boldly capitalizing on vitalism’s decentralizing and democratic potential, adapts his physiological imagery to his wider set of ideas concerning human nature and moral psychology underpinning his politics. Simple analogy between vitalism and antiauthoritarianism is then lost in Harrington’s writings, pointing to a more complex relationship between early modern natural and political philosophy.

No one disputes the tremendous importance of Francis Bacon in the context of early modern natural, moral, and legal philosophy, but assessments of that importance in the long term, and of the man himself, have been subject to considerable debate. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Bacon’s empiricism, specifically his inductive method, was viewed as leading inexorably to modern science; for others, however, Bacon’s larger “reformation of learning” had little to do with the “new science” that ensued. In the 20th century, Theodor Adorno acknowledged Bacon’s importance but criticized the idea he was said to have originated, of a science based on the domination of nature—a view that was reiterated, with some variation, by feminist and eco-minded scholars in the 1980s and later. Meanwhile, Bacon’s moral character as well as his political career were also in doubt, beginning with Thomas Macaulay’s demolition of him in 1837, but recent decades have witnessed a rehabilitation of the man and his work. Whatever the opinion held, the range of Bacon’s thought is so encompassing as to extend across the disciplines, eliciting scholarship from historians of science to political and literary scholars. The following bibliography reflects this range, even if the categories are somewhat arbitrarily imposed and most books move across the boundaries of Bacon’s life and thought. On a final note, the role of Bacon in the ongoing Shakespeare authorship debates has been omitted because it is dismissed by most scholars; for that subject, interested students should nevertheless consult James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

Pierre Gassendi: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy

The late 16th century saw the publication of two descriptions of Monte Baldo written by apothecaries working in the nearby town of Verona. Both texts were published in Latin and Italian and have come to the attention of scholars for the vibrant descriptions of the mountain they contain, as well as for the insight they allow into the European networks of natural philosophers. A more detailed examination of the circumstances that produced Latin and Italian versions of these two descriptions of the same mountain, containing the same type of scientific investigation by men engaged in the same profession and from the same town, makes for a neat case study in considering the issues surrounding translation and authorship in the natural philosophical literature of the early modern period. By setting the study’s findings into the context of the recent ›translation turn‹ in literary studies - and Neo-Latin studies in particular - the case study reveals interesting data for the use of Latin in early modern natural philosophy, as well for the dynamics of northern Italy’s scientific community in the period.

Diet, embodiment, and virtue in the mechanical philosophy

The world soul was often a target of attack in early modern natural philosophy, on grounds of impiety and explanatory vacuity. But it also played an important role in debates about two of the most important questions in natural philosophy: How does nature depend on God, and what explains nature’s organization? As an answer to those questions, it lived on through the early modern period, sustained especially by philosophers who argued that individuals in nature cannot be understood in isolation from the whole. In this chapter it is argued that in this guise, it served as an alternative model of explanation in a context that increasingly emphasized explanation in terms of laws of nature, and that this reflects the fact that these two models represent two fundamentally competing approaches to natural philosophical explanation.

In 1637 a Frenchman named Noël Duret (Durret) published a book in Paris that referred to the heliocentric Copernican system. In 1660 an Ottoman scholar named Ibrāhīm Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci translated the book into Arabic. For more than three centuries this manuscript was buried in an Ottoman archive in Istanbul until it resurfaced at the beginning of the 1990s. The discovery of the Arabic text has necessitated a re-evaluation of the history of early modern Arabic natural philosophy, one that takes into account the intellectual context of Ibrāhīm Efendi and the overarching trends in the world of Sufi mysticism. These trends were reflected in art, literature, philosophy and natural philosophy. Using philological and cultural clues, as well as Ibrāhīm Efendi's own words, we can attempt deductions about why, how and for what purposes Ibrāhīm Efendi chose Duret's book for his project.

Mechanism as a scientific pluralism in the early modern medicine and natural philosophy

This book sets out to convey the breadth of early-modern philosophical interest in life and death. It ranges over debates in metaphysics, the life sciences, epistemology, the philosophy of mathematics, philosophical psychology, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of education and ethics. It aims to illuminate the relationships between the problems explored under these headings, as they shift with the changing intellectual and cultural environments in which philosophers found themselves working. Much of the fascination of early modern discussions of life and death lies in the way apparently disparate commitments merge into strange and unfamiliar outlooks that challenge some of our most deeply rooted assumptions. In recent years there has been a wave of interest in the place of the life sciences within early modern natural philosophy, and biological questions about life and death form part of the subject matter under discussion here. But this book has a further ambition: to link the predominantly theoretical preoccupations associated with the study of organisms to the practical aspect of philosophy. Rather than giving priority to themes that anticipate the preoccupations of modern science, the organisation of the volume aims to remind us that philosophy, as our early modern predecessors construed it, was also about learning how to live and die. This is above all why life and death mattered to them.

Beginning with the meaning and use of the word "performance," this essay analyzes some of the ambiguities and tensions performance has historically engendered. These tensions were both social and epistemic and can be sketched out with relation to either the corrupting influences of performance as dissimulation and masquerade or its didactic possibilities as exemplary of morality, virtue, and truth. Following these tensions across the history of antitheatrical literature into early modern natural philosophy, the essay attempts to show some of the ways that natural philosophy was used to perform--regulate, discipline, and direct--its audience(s), while simultaneously being itself performed-through interlocking practices enacted by sites, objects, and humans--as demonstrative of the legitimacy of its social and epistemic authority.

This paper sets out to examine the various temporal frameworks that made up the discourse of early modern natural philosophy. It takes into account a range of views and debates such as the comparison between the achievements of ancients and moderns, belief in the gradual decay of the earth and/or the cyclical nature of time, appreciation of recent improvements in the material conditions of life (especially technology), and projections of future techno-scientific progress, adherence to the doctrine of the prisca sapientia, and Judaeo-Christian notions of apocalypse and future redemption. This analysis also embraces, as a matter of course, changes in the ways natural philosophers both appealed to and reconstituted authorities. I look at Francis Bacon's treatment of time, and at the various sources of his accounts of scientific modernity. I conclude by considering the situation in late seventeenth-century England, when conservative critics of the ‘new’ philosophy – and the Royal Society in particular – charged that the uprooting of natural knowledge from its traditional institutional contexts would pervert the purpose of philosophical knowledge. In turn, supporters of the new philosophy, having defensively compiled lists of modern inventions and scientific discoveries, were to recast the advent of scientific modernity as starting properly with the publication of the Principa Mathematica in 1687.No doubt the greatest wits in each successive age have been forced out of their own course: men of capacity and intellect above the vulgar have been fain, for reputation's sake, to bow to the judgement of the time and the multitude; and thus if any contemplations of a higher order took light anywhere, they were presently blown out by the winds of vulgar opinion. So that Time is like a river that has brought down to us things light and puffed up, while those that are weighty and solid have sunk.

Why a new volume on mechanism, life and mind in early modern thought, combining natural philosophy and more purely philosophical inquiries? Mechanism is the central focus here, as applied to the two key areas of reflections on life, and on the mind. We build on the active scholarship in recent decades on early modern mechanism, on the mind-body problem, and on the role of the life sciences in core issues in early modern philosophy, and hope that the diverse contributions in this volume build and articulate links, ‘conceptual transfers’ and interpollinations between these areas. Issues studied include emergence, fevers, irritation, natural perception, nutrition, plants, psychology, representations, vibrations and vitalism; figures studied include Baglivi, Cudworth, du Bois-Reymond, Evelyn, Glisson, Hartley, Helmholtz, Hering, Leibniz, Regius, Schegk, Shaftesbury, Spinoza and Wolff.