The Machine Analogy in Medicine: A Comparative Approach to Leibniz and His Contemporaries

Abstract

Raphaele Andrault notes that Leibniz’s designation of organic bodies by the term “machine” may be traced back to his partial adoption of the corpuscular philosophy. This explanation, however, has for her the disadvantage of leaving unaccounted for the notable differences between the various uses of this analogy, whether in Leibniz’s philosophy itself or, more broadly, within the medical sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stahl and Leibniz, for example, both make use of the comparison between the human body and the clock, but it leads both of these authors to exactly opposite epistemological consequences. For this reason, Andrault finds it worthwhile to compare Leibniz’s use of the analogy with the use to which it is put in the medical texts that were known or read by Leibniz. Basing her comparison principally on the works of Steno and Malpighi, Andrault attempts to determine whether the description of bodies as machines has to do only with a lexicalization that does not in fact imply any particular ontological or epistemological thesis, or whether, on the contrary, this description involves certain doctrinal positions that remain to be specified.