Mechanism, Life and Mind in Modern Natural Philosophy

359 Pages·2022·8.185 MB·English

by  Charles T. Wolfe, Paolo Pecere, Antonio Clericuzio (editors)

International Archives of the History of Ideas 240
Archives internationales d'histoire des idées
Charles T. Wolfe
Paolo Pecere
Antonio Clericuzio   Editors
Mechanism,
Life and Mind in
Modern Natural
Philosophy
International Archives of the History of Ideas
Archives internationales d’histoire des idées
Volume 240
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Charles T. Wolfe • Paolo Pecere
Antonio Clericuzio
Editors
Mechanism, Life and Mind
in Modern Natural
Philosophy
Editors
Charles T. Wolfe Paolo Pecere
Département de philosophie Department of Philosophy
Université Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès Università di Roma Tre
Toulouse, France Rome, Italy
Antonio Clericuzio
Department of Humanities
Università di Roma Tre
Rome, Italy
ISSN 0066-6610 ISSN 2215-0307 (electronic)
International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées
ISBN 978-3-031-07035-8 ISBN 978-3-031-07036-5 (eBook)
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Contents
1 Introduction: Mechanism, Life and Mind in Modern
Natural Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Antonio Clericuzio, Paolo Pecere, and Charles T. Wolfe
Part I Life and Mechanism
2 Scaliger Bacon Harvey Glisson: A Trajectory in the Early
Modern History of Vegetative Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Guido Giglioni
3 Jacob Schegk on Plants, Medicaments,
and the Question of Emergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Andreas Blank
4 Particles, Universal Spirit and Seeds: John Evelyn’s
Theory of Matter in Elysium Britannicum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Oana Matei
5 Stimulus and Fibre Theory in Giorgio Baglivi’s
Medicine: A Reassessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Luca Tonetti
6 ‘Febris non est morbus, sed bellum contra morbum’.
A Study of Seventeenth-Century Theories of Fever. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Antonio Clericuzio
7 ‘The Operation of Nature Is Different from Mechanism’:
Cudworth’s Account of Plastic Nature
and Its Plotinian Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Riccardo Chiaradonna
8 The Chain of Motions and the Chain of Thoughts.
The Diachronic Mechanism of Spinoza’s Friends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Raphaële Andrault
v
vi Contents
9 Both Natural and Supernatural: Leibniz’s Integrated
Model of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Antonio M. Nunziante
10 Experience, Analogy and Mechanism in Maupertuis’s
Theory of Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Marco Storni
11 “Nutrition, Vital Mechanisms and the Ontology of Life” . . . . . . . . . . 175
Cécilia Bognon-Küss
12 Expanded Mechanism and/or Structural Vitalism:
Further Thoughts on the Animal Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Charles T. Wolfe
Part II Mechanisms of the Mind
13 Powers of the Body and Eclipse of the Soul.
From Descartes On . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Emanuela Scribano
14 Shaftesbury’s Conception of Human Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
Ursula Renz
15 Psychology and Mechanism: Christian Wolff
on the Soul-Body Analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero
16 Mental Machinery and Active Powers from Hartley to Ward . . . . . . 299
Federico Boccaccini
17 Mechanism, Organization, Mind: A Kantian Legacy
in Nineteenth Century Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
Paolo Pecere
18 Organic Memory and the Perils of Perigenesis:
The Helmholtz-Hering Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
Lydia Patton
Contributors
Raphaële Andrault CNRS IHRIM-ENS de Lyon, Lyon, France
Andreas Blank Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria
Cécilia Bognon-Küss Laboatoire Épigénétique et destin cellulaire, UMR 7216,
Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France
Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
Riccardo Chiaradonna University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
Antonio Clericuzio University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
Guido  Giglioni Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Università di Macerata,
Macerata, Italy
Oana Matei Vasile Goldiș Western University of Arad, Romania, Arad, Romania
University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
Antonio M. Nunziante University of Padua, Padua, Italy
Lydia Patton Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA
Paolo Pecere University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
Ursula Renz University of Graz, Graz, Austria
Emanuela Scribano Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
Marco Storni University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Luca Tonetti University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Charles T. Wolfe Département de philosophie & ERRAPHIS, Université de
Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France
vii
Chapter 1
Introduction: Mechanism, Life and Mind
in Modern Natural Philosophy
Antonio Clericuzio, Paolo Pecere, and Charles T. Wolfe
Abstract 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 contri-
butions in this volume build and articulate links, ‘conceptual transfers’ and interpol-
linations 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.
Why a new volume on mechanism, life and mind in early modern thought, combin-
ing 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.
In the past two decades, there has been a great deal of innovative yet careful
scholarship on three areas which overlap, but never seem to explicitly take account
of each other’s accomplishments: work on the nature and diversity of early modern
mechanism (e.g. Gabbey 1985, 2004; Clericuzio 2000; Bertoloni Meli 2006); work
on the status of the body in early modern science (Wolfe and Gal 2010; Lawrence
and Shapin 1998), and lastly, work on the philosophical dimensions of early modern
A. Clericuzio · P. Pecere
University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]
C. T. Wolfe (*)
Department of Philosophy, Université de Toulouse-2 Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2022
C. T. Wolfe et al. (eds.), Mechanism, Life and Mind in Modern Natural
Philosophy, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives
internationales d’histoire des idées 240,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07036-5_1
2 A. Clericuzio et al.
biological theories and ‘life science’ more generally, including medicine (on the
former see Smith 2006, Nachtomy and Smith 2014, and on the latter, Distelzweig
et al. 2015). Notable figures such as Descartes, Harvey and Leibniz have been inter-
preted in new ways, following various insights stemming from these three historio-
graphical trends; the question of the status of existing sciences such as medicine and
the set of practices and natural-historical theories that would partly come to be
designated as ‘biology’ by the 1790s (McLaughlin 2002; Zammito 2018; Wolfe
2019; forthcoming), has been a greater object of attention in studies of early modern
science than in earlier generations.
The aforementioned historiographical trends have also produced new insights on
crucial moments of the history of the mind-body problem in both the early and late
modern periods (see Pecere 2020a for a critical overview). In particular, a growing
number of studies have focused on the development of nineteenth century psychol-
ogy and physiology of perception, considered as the transition between modern
mechanical philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind (e.g. Hatfield 1990;
Lapointe 2019). The development of mechanistic models of the mind in a growingly
experimental neurophysiology and psychology led to the assessment of the alleged
limits of mechanism with respect to functional organization and sensations (Tennant
2007; Pecere 2020b).
The work featured here tries to respond to this new cluster of problems and inter-
pretive responses to them, focusing on the two ‘pairs’ of Mechanism and Life, and
Mechanism and Mind.
Major figures of mechanism in early modern medicine (or ‘iatromechanism’, a
highly contestable category, as Raphaële Andrault has shown: contrast her work
with Grmek 1972), such as Steno, Borelli, Bellini, Cheyne, Pitcairne and Boerhaave
among others, do speak of the mathematically specifiable mechanical properties of
the bodies they study as laws of nature since these ensure that the appeal, e.g. to the
functioning of a pump or a sieve to explain a heart or a liver, is backed up by further
guarantees. But what is their overall mechanistic commitment? This ranges, quite
pluralistically, as Dennis Des Chene noted beautifully (Des Chene 2001), from the
idea of the world as a machine (clockwork, design) to a mechanistic ontology of the
particles or components that compose the physical world, to – more interestingly for
present purposes – an interest in the heuristic potential of mechanism, e.g. automata
(from Descartes’ fountains to ‘living machines’; see also Shapiro 2003). This heu-
ristic potential is of particular interest because it is both adapted to and challenged
by the specific reality of embodiment – the challenge of mechanical models faced
with the living body. Though most historians have celebrated Boyle as the champion
of the mechanical philosophy, he resorted to notions like spirits, ferments and
semina to account for physiological processes. It is apparent that the traditional
opposition of iatromechanism and iatrochemistry proves of little help in under-
standing early modern medicine and life sciences. Though some physicians, like
Bellini and Pitcairne, pursued the reduction of physiology to mechanics, in the sec-
ond half of the seventeenth century most physiologists adopted Harvey’s doctrine of
the circulation of the blood, corpuscular theories and investigated topics like diges-
tion and respiration by merging mechanism and iatrochemistry. Chemical theories