Life as Concept and as Science in Early Modern Thought

Abstract

What are early modern life sciences, the sciences of? What is the relation of philosophical considerations on living versus dead matter, or the possibility of animate matter, to such sciences? In this entry I examine such questions. 3 Life as concept or as scientific object: the problem Hor: What is Life? Cleo: Every body understands the Meaning of the Word, though, perhaps, no body knows the Principle of Life, that Part which gives Motion to all the rest (Mandeville 1729/1924, II, 167). Life is a polysemous notion. Early modern thinkers, no less than us, moved imperceptibly between usage in which 'life' might be the life of a person, or the art of living well, or morally, and usage closer to what we might think of as a 'scientific' sense of life, i.e., the object of a science like biology (which only comes into being in the late eighteenth century). Scholarship on early modern philosophy has had less difficulty in picking out the specific issues concerning 'biological life', embodiment, organism and so on (see Smith (ed) 2006, Nachtomy and Smith (eds) 2017, Wolfe and Gal (eds) 2010), than the corresponding scholarship on early modern science, which has classically been determined by intellectual models deriving from the physico-mechanical sciences. That is, the idea of the Scientific Revolution and the historiography that studies (some would say constructs) this object, has almost entirely neglected the life sciences: they are simply not part of the story. Our concept of the Scientific Revolution does not include debates over generation, semina rerum, species, anatomy, vivisection, animal souls, irritability and so forth. 1 Some responded by declaring that there were no revolutions in the life sciences, perhaps until cell theory in the 19 th century. Yet early modern life science certainly exists, from physiology to theories of generation, from the chemical investigation of blood, aether and spirits to treatises on fermentation and fevers. As such, we can then inquire into its relation to the constitution and stabilization of other parts of natural philosophy, such as mechanics and atomistic physics. Figures such as Harvey, Descartes and Borelli, or Boyle, Pitcairn(e) and Malpighi, or Charleton and Boerhaave then loom large on the map and if our goal were to revise accounts of the Scientific Revolution so that they took account of such figures, it would seem reasonably easy to achieve. Indeed, some scholars seek to inscribe sciences like medicine, physiology, anatomy, notably (natural history is a more difficult case) into a mainstream, mechanistic-science friendly narrative (Grmek 1972, Bertoloni Meli 2008, 2011; see here The Mechanization of Life). Thus Domenico Bertoloni Meli elegantly emphasizes the interplay between the mathematical and medical disciplines: "when unraveling the intellectual world in the seventeenth-century, we can no longer separate the history of anatomy from the history of science as if anatomists and physicians inhabited a different world from not only mechanical and experimental philoso...

Sounding the Depths of Providence: Mineral (Re)generation and Human-Environment Interaction in the Early Modern Period

“…On Bourguet's "organic system," seeCheung 2006;Duchesneau 2003;Duchesneau 2010;Wolfe 2019. I am thankful to the anonymous reviewer for his/her suggestions in this regard (see also the comment in note 3).…”