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EMBODIED EMPIRICISM WORKSHOP 2009 Titles and Abstracts |
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and Paul Joseph Barthez, the term “sensation” refers to a wide range of organic and reflexive phenomena beyond the Hallerian dualism of muscular “irritability” and nervous “sensitivity”. While Condillac is mainly interested in the transformation of sensations into “experiences” and “judgments” of the soul, Bonnet develops a detailed scheme of the fibre œconomy of sensitive agents that transform outer stimuli into “physical sensations” (sensations physiques). Bonnet thus discusses the organic differentiations of physical sensations and the relation of “physical ideas” (idées physiques) to the “organization” of living “organized bodies” (corps organisés).
Antonio Clericuzio, ‘The Organical Motions of Body Fluids’. Mechanical and Iatrochemical Theories in 17th-Century Physiology This paper explores early modern views of animal oeconomy, focussing on Italian physiologists active in the second half of the 17th century. It will seek to delineate theories and practices related to blood, namely the views of spirits and fermentation, as well as the debate and conflicts about the transfusion of blood and blood-letting. I'll take into account the relationship of mechanical models to empirical investigation of vital fluids. Assessing the chemical composition of blood played a relevant part in 17th-century physiology. I am paying special attention to the experimental procedures used to identify the nature and properties of spirits, salts and other components of blood. I set out to explore links between the knowledge of blood and the practice of phlebotomy. Special attention will be paid to the physiological views of Malpighi, Borelli and Bellini, notably to their fusion of mechanical and iatrochemical theories.
Harold Cook, Victories for Empiricism, Failures for Theory: Medicine and Science in the 17th Century For millennia, learned physicians tried to develop theoretical principles that would guide their preventative and therapeutic actions. The most enduring foundations were built on the discourse of the four elements, four qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry), four humours, six non-naturals, and the ways these combined to yield individual temperaments and constitutions. As these fundamentals came under attack in the 17th century, empiricism and medical specifics once again seemed the best method of finding certainty in therapy. This was no simple change in 'method' proposed by the learned, however, since the developing medical marketplace gave empirics many new opportunities for promoting their views and forcing the rest to take account of them. Does this transition in medicine also apply to 'science' more generally, giving prominence to those 'matters of fact' that have gained our attention in recent years? I intend to make a case for answering 'yes'.
Ofer Gal & Raz Chen, Empiricism without the senses: How the Instrument Replaced the Eye Tycho Brahe’s spectacular observations put instruments at the forefront of all empirical investigation, yet in the manifesto of instrumentally-aided observation, The Assayer, Galileo vehemently distances himself from Tycho and his tradition. In doing so, he is willing to avow strangely Aristotelian and apparently anti-empiricist views. Galileo, it is revealed, is no longer willing to accept his instrument—the telescope—as a mere aid to the eye. This is the role it is assigned by his Jesuit interlocutors, for whom the naked eye, the divinely created organ, is always the preferred choice. Galileo is not arguing for Copernicanism or Platonism (as The Assayer is usually interpreted). Rather, he espouses a new, radical concept of instrumental observation in which the instrument completely replaces the eye. His arguments present the human sense organ as a fundamentally flawed instrument, which mediates and distorts. The instrument, in contrast, is embodied mathematics, an extension of reason, allowing the mind unmediated reading of nature’s “mathematical characters.” The controversy between mild and radical instrumentalism continued throughout the 17th century, with its original themes still present, in an elaborate form, in the debate over telescopic sites between Hooke and Hevelius in the 1670s.
Guido Giglioni, Mastering the Appetites of Matter. Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum Francis Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum (published posthumously in 1627) occupies a paradoxical place in the history of seventeenth-century medicine and natural philosophy. On the one hand, it is the work where Bacon expounded, at his clearest and best, in vernacular and not in Latin, his views on the material appetites of nature, and did so not by writing in the abstract, but by describing and performing experiments aimed at disclosing the appetitive nature of matter. On the other hand, this original model of experimental investigations on the appetites of matter was abandoned by the great majority of Bacon’s followers, especially those associated with the Royal Society, replaced with the more reassuring project to mechanise the natural forms and passions of matter. By doing so, man was restored as the proper subject of knowledge and appetite, whereas nature was left with its status of lifeless object of dispassionate study. In this paper I will explore the theoretical and experimental strategies deployed by Bacon to investigate the appetites of matter. It will become apparent that a characteristic hermeneutical circle underlies Bacon’s natural philosophy, a circle that, depending on the chosen point of view, could be regarded at the time as either virtuous or vicious. On the one hand, Bacon was convinced that man’s self-knowledge rested on the knowledge that nature has of itself, since nature is first and foremost appetite and man’s essence is rooted in appetite. On the other hand, he was also convinced that knowledge of nature was based on knowledge of the self, since the best accounts concerning the nature of the appetites were to be found in the works of poets and historians. This is what Bacon meant by ‘georgics of the mind’: the understanding of the material appetites of nature cannot be separated from an ethical and political consideration of the mechanisms mediating knowledge and appetite in human societies.
Snait Gissis, Feelings embodied. From ‘worms’ to humans: the case of Lamarck In his writings between 1800- 1820 Lamarck posited a set of questions relating to three specific issues: (1) How do organisms adjust (adapt?) to the environment in which they live? (2) What is the role of the directionality of time in “la marche de la nature”? and (3) What is man‘s place in nature? To address them he utilized philosophical, cultural and ‘biological’ resources. His discussions of these topics turned his writings into a reservoir of insights and ideas that, for almost a century, were influential and generative in biology, psychology and social thought, and in particular, in those areas where biology and biological knowledge acquired political, social and moral significance. I shall discuss Lamarck’s later works, particularly, but not solely , those from 1809-1820. These assumed his evolutionary standpoint, which he had worked out between 1800-1806. Lamarck was the first to give a systematic evolutionary account of feelings. By virtue of his evolutionising nature, on the one hand, of his zoological rather than medical perspective, on the other, and because of his particular institutional affiliation, Lamarck occupied a special position within the context of late 18th-early 19th century discussions of the physiology-psychology of the embodiment of feelings. The evolutionary framework made it possible to avoid the categorisation of psychological experiences as either mental or physical, and to describe the loci of feelings as an evolving nervous system across the branching tree of nature. His zoological perspective allowed him to take humans neither as his starting point nor as his model. He believed ( e.g. in Philosophie Zoologique) that a certain general feeling based on the activity of an interconnected nervous system, one already present in even simple invertebrates, was the basis of all further evolution. Thus Lamarck discussed first-person experiences/feelings, which are experienced as private, subjective, and intentional, through this non- personalized perspective, and in his exposition came to include the evolution towards cognition. But in making the leap from ( sensory) processing to experience and to feelings, and when trying to indicate what were the basic conditions and features of the process, he made use of contextual elements from contemporaneous natural history and medicine as well as contemporaneous social and linguistic theorising.
Cynthia Klestinec, Practical Experience In Anatomy Often flagged as an origin of empiricism, experience has a range of meanings in the context of early modern natural philosophy and medicine. It has been aligned with practical knowledge, knowledge of contingent effects, and the un-theorized perception of phenomena accessible to the senses. In the realm of anatomical inquiry, experience joined reason to constitute (according to Galen, Mondino, Berengario da Carpi, Niccolò Massa and many others) the approved anatomical method. For medical students, however, experience was linked to handiwork. Cutting open corpses, dissecting external and internal structures, students recognized that experienced hands could distinguish structure from chaos; experienced hands could reveal objects to sight. In Padua, the home of the famous anatomical theater of 1595, students connected these features of anatomical inquiry with private anatomical exercises rather than public demonstrations. They also associated this kind of manual labor with virility not senility, with the youthful anatomist, Giulio Casseri, and not his aging predecessor, Girolamo Fabrici. From Casseri and from private exercises, students sought more immediate experiences of anatomy. This paper queries the private settings in which anatomical knowledge was produced and the extent to which medical students, emphasizing handiwork and notions of immediacy, recharged the meaning of experience and embodied knowledge in the fields of anatomy and surgery. Using the exchange between students, professors and local practitioners, this paper aims to reconsider the role of practical experience in anatomical training. Gained in private and among professors and practitioners, practical experience, for these students, was not associated with rustic ignorance or with women and their secret knowledge but rather with strength, virility, and coming-of-age-masculinity.
Alan Salter, Early Modern Empiricism and the Discourse of the Senses In the second half of the 16th century English sense literature shifts from commentary on scripture and the occasional medical text to work that in style, format and content is more irregular and more fabulous. The senses no longer appear as topical inputs but as subjects in their own right. They show up in books of poetry and drama, in travel and geography and in pageants. My paper examines this “discourse of the senses” and its effect on early modern empiricism as exemplified in the works of William Harvey and his contemporary Helkiah Crooke, author of the 1615 anatomy text, Mikrocosmographia.
Lisa Shapiro, Immersed Experience: Passionate Perception and Human Understanding John Locke is often taken to be the founding theorist of Early Modern Empiricism, and this is in keeping with his self-presentation in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding as an under-labourer, clearing away the rubbish, so that the likes of Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens and Newton can tap cleanly into the springs of knowledge. While he aims to clear the ground of the brambles of metaphysics, so that we can see that human understanding comes simply from experience, Locke’s conception of experience is all too informed by the metaphysical models – those of both Platonists and Aristotelians -- he rejects. In particular, he conceives of sensory experience as dispassionate, conveying information about the properties objects in the world are meant to have independently of human efforts to engage with that world. In his view, the experience through which we understand the world might as well be disembodied. Interestingly, empiricist philosophers who follow Locke in eschewing any metaphysical underpinning for human knowledge subtly modify his conception of experience. While they too conceive of sensation as providing knowledge of properties of objects, these properties are not be understood at a remove from human engagement with the world. Sensory experience does convey information about the world, but it is always about the world as we are immersed in it. To perceive is to perceive with passion, that is, to incorporate some dimension of the way things affect our well-being. Immersed experience is embodied experience. In this paper, I show how this latter line of thought is pervasive in late 17th and early 18th century thought. It is manifest in figures central to the development of the theoretical foundations of empiricism – Berkeley and Condillac – as well as those more on the fringes of the discussion – Margaret Cavendish and Charles Bonnet (to take two figures at the beginning and end of the discussion). Equally, it figures in medical writings of the disorders of the passions, as seen in the work of Mandeville on hypochondria, in early sensibility theorists such as Francis Hutcheson, and in Rousseau’s account of the development of human understanding found in Emile. But if this conception of experience was so pervasive, why has the Lockean model hold such a grip on the philosophical imagination? The answer, I suggest, lies in the challenges of modeling scientific knowledge gained from immersed experience. Immersed experience lends itself quite well to what might be called particularist knowledge – highly context sensitive understanding of the world. Scientific knowledge, however, aims for what might be called universal knowledge – an understanding that derives from the generalizability of any particular experience. In the absence of any developed account of how immersed experience can yield such universal knowledge, it is all too easy to fall back on the Lockean account of experience which, through its very shortcoming, is able to account for how experience can ground a universalist knowledge.
Justin E.H. Smith, Cranklings and Turnings About': The Relation of Physiology to Theory of Action in Willis, Spinoza, Tyson, and Locke Much early modern metaphysical speculation as to the precise relation, if any, between the causal order of bodies and that of minds seems to run parallel to, and often to overlap with, a very important question in the history of physiology, to wit, whether everything an animal is capable of doing may be traced back in the end to some observable feature of its anatomy. Thus, to cite one of many examples, Thomas Willis supposes that the relative automatism of a cat's behavioral repertoire may be treated as arising from the relative smoothness of the feline brain, from the fact that it "wants all Cranklings about." But how exactly can ethological, and even mental or spiritual, capacities be read off of anatomical features? What do cranklings have to do with the inherence of a deliberating mind capable of free action? The debate surrounding these questions seems to parallel --and perhaps even to influence-- the contemporaneous debate as to the nature or possibility of mind-body causation and also as to the scope of mechanical explanation. Nowhere do the two levels of discussion --the metaphysical and the physiological-- come together more clearly than in Part II of Spinoza's Ethics, but this instance is only the clearest expression of a general strategy for explaining what bodies, and in particular living bodies, are capable of by appeal to their structure and organization. This is a strategy, moreover, that would appeal equally to the Empiricist engagement with living bodies as to the Rationalist, and thus may serve for us as an excellent case study in the irrelevance of the distinction between these two schools to understanding much of what interested their representatives. John Sutton, Carelessness and Inattention: chance and the physiology of habit between Locke and Hume Associated ideas, complained Locke, follow one another ‘without any care or attention’. Fifty years later, Hume resolved the sceptical despair brought on by philosophical reasoning only by avoiding the perils of thinking, returning to mindlessness: ‘carelessness and in-attention alone can afford us any remedy. For this reason I rely entirely on them’. How did British natural and moral philosophers in the early 18th century think of the processes by which thoughts, fancies, memories, daydreams, and feelings come to mind without prompting either by reason or reality, by the will or by the world? Examining works by Mead, Harris, Gibbs, Watts, Cheyne, Branch, and others, I detail the role of bodily fluids and nervous spirits in ‘conveying the mischief’ by which imagination tends to ruffle our calm. Minds are often surprised by their own habits, and various forms of regimen were recommended in medical psychology and moral physiology to ‘pinion’ the imagination and still the wandering thoughts. I anchor these local discussions within a longer history of practices for coping when ‘our mind is elsewhere’; and, in service of an enquiry into ‘embodied empiricism’, I suggest new angles on the background to Hume’s views on the bodily bases of custom and habit.
Anik Waldow, Empiricism and its Roots in the Ancient Medical Tradition Kant introduces empiricism as a deficient position that is unsuitable for the generation of scientific knowledge. The reason for this is that, according to him, empiricism fails to connect with the world by remaining trapped within the realm of appearances. If we follow Galen’s account of the debate ensuing among Hellenistic doctors in the third century B.C., empiricism presents itself in an entirely different light. It emerges as a position that criticises medical practitioners who stray away from the here and now by indulging in theory-driven a priori forms of reasoning. In so doing empiricism remains at all times committed to the world and its agents. In this paper Galen’s account of empiricism will serve me as a means to unravel the dynamics of a discussion that aims to re-assess the standards of a dogmatic scientific practice. By looking at Bacon’s and Gassendi’s perception of the ancient medical tradition I will furthermore show that the understanding of what empiricism is crucially depends on the understanding of what scepticism is.
Charles T. Wolfe, Empiricist heresies: the polemic against experiment in early modern medical thought
Richard Yeo, ‘Memory and Empiricism: Hartlib, Beale and Boyle’ Robert Boyle and John Beale both had connections with Samuel Hartlib and his correspondence network. The position of these three can be taken as an ‘empirical’ one in the sense that they favoured ‘particulars’ over ‘systems’. I suggest that there is a link between this position and their view of the role of memory in natural history and ‘science’ more generally. Hartlib’s diary and letters show that the call for empirical particulars coexisted with a view that information could be reduced and arranged to aid memory. Beale’s letter to Boyle reveal some interestingly different approaches to the question of how far collaborative Baconian natural histories (collections of medical, chemical and other data) should rely on individual memory, either natural or trained. Beale was a collector of empirical data, but he sought to manage this in his memory. In his early writings, Boyle was also concerned with training himself to expand and retain his ‘experiences’; but he soon cautioned against premature ‘systems’, and this had implications for the ordering of content that arts of memory usually relied upon. Boyle’s resistance to Beale’s advice about memory shows up a tension within the ‘Baconians’. Furthermore, the sheer mass of material potentially collected under Baconian natural histories implied the need for ‘disembodied’ information, in the sense of some kind of externalised memory store.
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Peter Anstey, Locke and Helmontian medicine This paper provides a critical assessment of what we might call John Locke's philosophy of medicine. Locke is commonly known as 'the father of British Empiricism' and as an 'advocate of the mechanical philosophy', however, the historiography that underlies these epithets has tended to obscure an important facet of Locke's intellectual persona, namely the nature of his chymical and medical commitments. A study of his chymical and medical remains reveals that Locke was a chymical physician and that a source of many of his distinctive views in medicine derive from the Flemish chymist Joan Baptiste van Helmont.
Tobias Cheung, Embodied Stimuli: Bonnet’s Statue of a Sensitive Agent In this paper, I focus on relations between sensibility, organic fibres and the soul-body-interface in the second half of the eighteenth century in France. The process of the mediation and transformation of embodied stimuli in a “human statue” is the main theme of Etienne Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754) and Charles Bonnet’s Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’âme (1760). Both call embodied stimuli “sensations” (sensations) and the faculty to receive sensations “sensibility” (sensibilité). Like in the writings of the Montpellier medical doctors Théophile Bordeu |
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