Spinoza’s Missing Physiology

Abstract

This article concerns the notion of living bodies that Spinoza develops in the Ethics (published posthumously in 1677). While commentators have emphasized the relevance of Spinoza's works for contemporary physiology, they have neglected to study Spinoza's own views on this topic. My aim is to draw attention to the specific parti pris that underlies Spinoza's passages on anatomy. To do so, I first compare Spinoza's claims on human body with the conceptions developed in his immediate historical environment. Then, I propose to draw a parallel between Lakatos's notion of "negative heuristics" and the high level of generalization Spinoza demonstrates in his propositions on the human body. This parallel allows me to show how Spinoza's critical remarks on our knowledge of human body have heuristic value.

The Chain of Motions and the Chain of Thoughts. The Diachronic Mechanism of Spinoza’s Friends

“…While they have a mechanical understanding of physical interactions, they do not adopt the Cartesian understanding of the human body as Malebranche did, for instance. They rather insist on the lacunas and errors of the Cartesian physiology, and emphasize more generally our common ignorance of both the exact relationships between our body and the other bodies, and the exact interactions between the different components of our own body (Spinoza 2016(Spinoza , 1306Andrault 2019). But this insistence on the limits of our knowledge does not prevent them from claiming that bodies are submitted to intense and numerous (if not infinite) interactions with other natural bodies.…”

Atheist Therapy: Radical Embodiment in Early Modern Medical Materialism

“…Rey contrasts La Mettrie's "mechanistic determinism" with the unpredictability of the organism in the sense of the vitalist physicians Bordeu and Ménuret de Chambaud: "La Mettrie misses the specificity of the living," and Bloch still defends the old thesis of Cartesian mechanistic sources of materialism, which he considers "partially verified" in the case of La Mettrie: "not only by the title of L'Homme-Machine, but also by the inspiration, which he claims, of the iatromechanist theories developed, in the wake of Cartesianism, by Boerhaave and expounded at least by the latter's great disciple, Haller, of whom La Mettrie in his turn gives himself as a disciple." 8 Roger refers in a study on iatromechanism to "La Mettrie's 7 King (1963), Andrault (2016). 8 Rey (2000): 137; Bloch, "A propos du matérialisme d'Ancien Régime," in: Bloch (1998): 313-314.…”