20190725T090020190725T1145Europe/AmsterdamDescartes, The Traité de l'homme, and the Cartesianizing of Dutch Medicine
Although the importance of Descartes' work for the development of physical science in the pre-Newtonian period has been extensively explored in the literature, the impact of his work on the medical and biomedical sciences has not been examined in the same detail. This has been in spite of the explicit and repeated statements by Descartes that the establishment of a new medicine, built systematically upon his physics, formed a fundamental aim of his whole philosophical project. Acceptance of this medical dimension of Descartes' program requires the re-examination of several issues in our understanding of the genesis, reception, and historical influence of Cartesianism. For beginning with Descartes himself, but extending through the work of Cartesian physicians such as Henricus Regius, Louis de la Forge, and Theodoor Craanen, Cartesianism became a dynamic program for a revolutionary form of biomedical inquiry, one that promised a new research program in the life sciences that would attract enthusiastic followers and ardent critics throughout Europe. This session draws together an international group of scholars who have been directly concerned with these dimensions of Cartesianism. These contributions will explore the background, elaboration, traditional and innovative elements of medical Cartesianism, as well as its evolving public expression, with particular focus on the issues surrounding the production and influence of the posthumous Traité de l'homme and Descartes' other medical works. This session also highlights the interactions of the history of science, medicine and philosophy, and the importance of lesser-known figures in the construction of early modern science and philosophy.
Organized by Phillip R. Sloan
Janskerkhof 2-3, Rm. 013History of Science Society 2019meeting@hssonline.org
Although the importance of Descartes' work for the development of physical science in the pre-Newtonian period has been extensively explored in the literature, the impact of his work on the medical and biomedical sciences has not been examined in the same detail. This has been in spite of the explicit and repeated statements by Descartes that the establishment of a new medicine, built systematically upon his physics, formed a fundamental aim of his whole philosophical project. Acceptance of this medical dimension of Descartes' program requires the re-examination of several issues in our understanding of the genesis, reception, and historical influence of Cartesianism. For beginning with Descartes himself, but extending through the work of Cartesian physicians such as Henricus Regius, Louis de la Forge, and Theodoor Craanen, Cartesianism became a dynamic program for a revolutionary form of biomedical inquiry, one that promised a new research program in the life sciences that would attract enthusiastic followers and ardent critics throughout Europe. This session draws together an international group of scholars who have been directly concerned with these dimensions of Cartesianism. These contributions will explore the background, elaboration, traditional and innovative elements of medical Cartesianism, as well as its evolving public expression, with particular focus on the issues surrounding the production and influence of the posthumous Traité de l'homme and Descartes' other medical works. This session also highlights the interactions of the history of science, medicine and philosophy, and the importance of lesser-known figures in the construction of early modern science and philosophy.
Organized by Phillip R. Sloan
Medicine, Method, and Metaphysics: Tradition and Innovation in Descartes' Medical Works from the Writing of L’Homme to Its Posthumous PublicationsView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 07:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 07:30:00 UTC
In this paper, I will address three related topics: (1) I will discuss Descartes' medical sources and aims when he was writing the long eighteenth chapter of Le Monde (The World), devoted to the study of L'Homme (Man) in the early 1630s. (2) I will demonstrate the significant novelty introduced in the fifth part of the Discourse on Method (1637), where the link between method and medicine was rethought, as well as the relationship between medicine and metaphysics, especially in comparison to Harvey's treatise On the movement of the heart and blood (De motu cordis and sanguinis in animalibus). I will also discuss Descartes' influence in medicine especially through Henricus Regius' medical teaching in Utrecht. (3) I will highlight the primacy given to medicine in the Passions of the Soul (1649), the last book published by Descartes, after the Meditations, Objections and Replies and the Principles. I will show its links with La Description du corps humain (The Description of the Human Body). Finally, I will explore the relevance of the publication of the Treatise on Man together with La Description du corps humain in 1664 in Paris by Clerselier with Remarks by Louis de La Forge, a physician, after the Latin version of the De Homine published in 1662 in Leiden by Schuyl.
Why the Traité de l'homme Was Not Published by DescartesView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 07:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 08:00:00 UTC
Descartes several times wrote that the aim of his philosophy was to provide an understanding of medicine so as to improve human life. Why, then, did he hold back his full views about the subject? Could they have been dangerous? Descartes composed a manuscript on human physiology but held it back. Only a few of his closest Dutch friends saw a copy of physiological manuscript of the early 1640s, and they kept it safe from public scrutiny, as he asked. Descartes continued working on the problems in it, making the text a mess that he could hardly read himself, as he told Mersenne in 1648. But a version, based on the manuscript circulated to his friends as edited by Florentius Schuyl, was later published in Latin (1662) as De homine; two years later an edition in French appeared, the Traité de l'Homme, overseen by Claude Clerselier. The text famously ends abruptly, with no discussion of the human soul. If we read Descartes's own views not as complete in the early 1630s but as evolving from the conversations of his youth - in the years before Galileo's condemnation - the later disputes in Utrecht, and his last work, Les Passions (1649), we can see how the agenda was set by materialist Epicureanism. Giving a full account of humanity without the need to explain the immortal soul would indeed have been dangerous; later commentaries in the published editions tried to remove the threat, but cannot be taken as Descartes's own opinion.
False Images Do Not Lie: Using Anatomy in Rene Descartes' Treatise on ManView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science10:15 AM - 10:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 08:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 08:45:00 UTC
Illustrations and paper technologies contributed to and enhanced early modern science and especially the study of anatomy during the sixteenth century, not least by providing more accurate representations of the human body and allowing for the dissemination of consistent images. This paper documents a moment in the use of anatomical illustration involving disputes over Rene Descartes' posthumously published Treatise on Man (1662/1664), a work with its own convoluted history and reception, involving multiple copies of the original manuscript and three sets of illustrations made by three different physicians: one set for the Latin edition and two others for the French edition. Focusing on these illustrations, this paper will argue that they primarily model how the visible movements of the body might be caused, with little attention to accurately describing the parts of the body as seen in dissection. In the medical terminology of the period, they narrowly focus on actio--action or function--and were conceived as an answer to the question of how the hidden parts of the body operate. In this way, they provide an alternative to traditional anatomical illustrations focused on historia and how the body is actually structured. Thus the Treatise is an especially interesting work for its history, for the disputes and rationale that led to its famous images, their reproduction both in later published works and in students' notebooks throughout Europe, and for the demarcated yet productive role given to anatomical illustrations apart from an accurate description of the human body.
Gideon Manning Independent Scholar, Visiting Scholar At Claremont Graduate University
The Overcoming of the Cartesian Paradigm in Physiology: The Case of Burchard de VolderView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science10:45 AM - 11:15 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 08:45:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 09:15:00 UTC
Descartes' medical reception can be separated into several phases in the seventeenth century, starting with its first introduction and extending to its sophisticated refinements. This talk examines a final moment in its reception in the Low Countries in the work of the Leiden professor Theodoor Craanen who can be credited with bringing to the fore the consequences of Descartes' reduction of physiological phenomena to the interaction of invisible particles. Craanen's fellow Leiden professor Burchard de Volder, most famous for opening the first experimental cabinet in a European University, forcefully criticized Craanen's reductive approach as "speculative". As an alternative, De Volder proposed an experimental-mathematical approach to medical questions that was firmly rooted to the consideration of visible processes only, and on their interpretation in the light of mechanical principles. The treatment of respiration is a case in point, figuring prominently in this polemical exchange. If, on the one hand, the standard Cartesian treatment of respiration was based on the circular thrust of air caused by the dilatation of the thorax moved by animal spirits, De Volder proposed an account based on the elasticity of the air and on the law of Boyle-Mariotte whereby the lungs are inflated and deflated by different conditions of pressure within and outside them. By examining the dispute between Craanen and De Volder we can learn how one extreme of medical Cartesianism met resistance in the Netherlands and how English virtuosi played a hand in this resistance.
Andrea Strazzoni Independent Scholar, Guest Researcher At The Gotha Research Centre Of The University Of Erfurt
Commentary: Descartes, the Traité De L'Homme, and the Cartesianizing of Dutch MedicineView Abstract Organized Session11:15 AM - 11:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 09:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 09:45:00 UTC
