Early modern alchemy studied both matter and life, much like today's life sciences. What material life is and how it comes about intrigued alchemists. Many found the answer by assuming a vital principle that served as the source and cause of life. Recent literature has presented important cases in which vitalist formulations incorporated corpuscular or mechanical elements that were characteristic of the New Science and other cases in which vitalist thinking influenced important figures of the Scientific Revolution. Not merely speculative, vitalist ideas also motivated chymical practice. The unity of life science and material science that is found in many formulations of Renaissance alchemy disintegrated in Georg Ernst Stahl's version of post-Cartesian vitalism.
This paper examines Georg Ernst Stahl's first book, the Zymotechnia Fundamentalis, in the context of contemporary natural philosophy and the author's career. I argue that the Zymotechnia was a mechanical theory of fermentation written consciously against the influential "fermentational program" of Joan Baptista van Helmont and especially Thomas Willis, Stahl's theory of fermentation introduced his first conception of phlogiston, which was in part a corpuscular transformation of the Paracelsian sulphur principle. Meanwhile some assumptions underlying this theory, such as the composition of matter, the absolute passivity of matter and the "passions" of sulphur, reveal the combined scholastic and mechanistic character of Stahl's natural philosophy. In the conclusion I show that Stahl's theory of fermentation undermined the old fermentational program and paved the way for his dualist vitalism.
E V E N R E A D E R S who know little else about the history of traditionalIndian learning, at least Sanskrit learning, are likely to know that grammar was the queen of the sciences, with Pāṇini (fourth century B.C.E.?) at the head of a very long and distinguished list of dramatis personae. Over the past two centuries, an impressive body of Western scholarship has been produced exploring the structure of this intricate and sophisticated system of language analysis. What is astonishing, however, even to specialists in the fi eld, is how little scholarship we possess-at least scholarship that is historically deep, systematically ordered, and conceptually rich-on the other traditional Indian forms of language-and-text analysis, beyond the phonology and morphology constituting the sphere of traditional grammar, that take us into domains we would include under any reasonable defi nition of philology-one that demands, not a specifi c set of methodological or theoretical features invariable across all time and space, but the broader concern with making sense of texts.Under such a defi nition, "philology" is certainly the appropriate designation for a range of textual practices and interpretive protocols in the Sanskrit tradition. What is puzzling is that such practices and protocols were never identifi ed as a separate "knowledge form" (vidyāsthāna) 1 -indeed, that no covering term exists in Sanskrit that even approximates "philology." But it is not after all surprising that people can have a conception of the parts of a thing without a conception of a whole; recall Bruno Snell's old argument that in archaic Greece, although there were words for limbs and muscles and frame and skin, there was none for the body as an organic Brought to you by | Florida Atlantic University Authenticated Download Date | 7/12/15 10:33 PM
This paper places in multiple contexts Stahl's formulation of tonic motion, a contractive and relaxative movement of body tissues that was thought to moderate the circulatory blood flowing through their porous structure. The paper analyzes Stahl's theory, elucidates its role in connecting his physiology and pathology, and situates its formulation in his conceptual development as well as the intellectual history of early modern medicine. The theory was at first a post-Harveyan attempt to explain occasional uneven blood flows; it was then expanded to account for the mechanism of blood circulation and metabolism, and formed a fundamental part of Stahl's effort to present a theory of animal heat and fever that would replace the traditional Galenic and fermentational theories. Tonic motion constituted the most important device that counteracted the ineluctable, unceasing corruption of the body, as dictated by its chemical nature; it thus qualified as the preeminent form of what Stahl considered vital motions.
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