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Author: Stephen Gaukroger Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192846779 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
In the course of the eighteenth century, understanding human cognitive life came to be construed as something to be explored in terms of the physiology of the sensory organs, the nerves, and the brain: a form of naturalization that effectively moved cognition out of the realm of philosophy as it had traditionally been understood. Bonnet's Analytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul was at the forefront of these developments, and this is its first English translation. Drawing on his earlier work in natural history--he was the leading entomologist of his era--he approaches problems of the nature of the mind via the physiology and anatomy of the brain and sensory systems. His approach is one of 'reverse engineering', starting from an organic statue without faculties, and investigating how it would need to be modified to produce a human being. Bonnet takes up a position that cuts across the standard understanding of the period as a clash between materialism and dualism. While his approach was rigorously naturalistic and physiological, this did not lead him to reject the notion of a soul. Instead, he argues that, in order to make sense of their sensory abilities, we need to attribute a soul to animals as well as human beings. At the same time, he argues that if personal immortality is to be possible, it can be conceived along the lines of insect metamorphosis, which shows how different biological forms can harbour a single identity.
Author: Stephen Gaukroger Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192846779 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
In the course of the eighteenth century, understanding human cognitive life came to be construed as something to be explored in terms of the physiology of the sensory organs, the nerves, and the brain: a form of naturalization that effectively moved cognition out of the realm of philosophy as it had traditionally been understood. Bonnet's Analytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul was at the forefront of these developments, and this is its first English translation. Drawing on his earlier work in natural history--he was the leading entomologist of his era--he approaches problems of the nature of the mind via the physiology and anatomy of the brain and sensory systems. His approach is one of 'reverse engineering', starting from an organic statue without faculties, and investigating how it would need to be modified to produce a human being. Bonnet takes up a position that cuts across the standard understanding of the period as a clash between materialism and dualism. While his approach was rigorously naturalistic and physiological, this did not lead him to reject the notion of a soul. Instead, he argues that, in order to make sense of their sensory abilities, we need to attribute a soul to animals as well as human beings. At the same time, he argues that if personal immortality is to be possible, it can be conceived along the lines of insect metamorphosis, which shows how different biological forms can harbour a single identity.
Author: Virginia Parker Dawson Publisher: American Philosophical Society ISBN: 9780871691743 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Two striking discoveries made 1740 a turning point in the history of 18th-century biology. Charles Bonnet established that aphids could reproduce without male fertilization. Shortly afterwards Abraham Trembley proved that a tiny aquatic animal, the fresh water polyp, or hydra, could regenerate from cuttings like some plants. The discovery of the polyp was important because of the disturbing metaphysical issues that it raised. In their letters written during the decade of the 1740s to Reaumur, the great French Academician, both Trembley & Bonnet referred to the polyp as an enigma. Not only did it seem to present a new mode of animal reproduction, previously unsuspected, but it called into question the prevailing mechanistic view of animal biology & brought into focus the problem of animal soul. Drawing on some of the most illuminating letters from the private archives of the Trembley family, this study focuses on the discovery of the polyp, using the correspondence of Bonnet & Trembley to understand their common Genevan background & their possible differences in approach from that of Reaumur.
Author: Anne C. Vila Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 9780801858093 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 420
Book Description
If moods are as contagious as colds, and wickedness as debilitating as a bad diet, inquiries into assorted discourses in 18th-century France still have much to tell. Author Anne Vila shows that multiple junctures between the body and the mind promoted a steady commerce of speculation and discussion between science and the social salons of the time. 9 illustrations.
Author: Charles T. Wolfe Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9048136865 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 347
Book Description
It was in 1660s England, according to the received view, in the Royal Society of London, that science acquired the form of empirical enquiry we recognize as our own: an open, collaborative experimental practice, mediated by specially-designed instruments, supported by civil discourse, stressing accuracy and replicability. Guided by the philosophy of Francis Bacon, by Protestant ideas of this worldly benevolence, by gentlemanly codes of decorum and by a dominant interest in mechanics and the mechanical structure of the universe, the members of the Royal Society created a novel experimental practice that superseded former modes of empirical inquiry, from Aristotelian observations to alchemical experimentation. This volume focuses on the development of empiricism as an interest in the body – as both the object of research and the subject of experience. Re-embodying empiricism shifts the focus of interest to the ‘life sciences’; medicine, physiology, natural history. In fact, many of the active members of the Royal Society were physicians, and a significant number of those, disciples of William Harvey and through him, inheritors of the empirical anatomy practices developed in Padua during the 16th century. Indeed, the primary research interests of the early Royal Society were concentrated on the body, human and animal, and its functions much more than on mechanics. Similarly, the Académie des Sciences directly contradicted its self-imposed mandate to investigate Nature in mechanistic fashion, devoting a significant portion of its Mémoires to questions concerning life, reproduction and monsters, consulting empirical botanists, apothecaries and chemists, and keeping closer to experience than to the Cartesian standards of well-founded knowledge. These highlighted empirical studies of the body, were central in a workshop in the beginning of 2009 organized by the unit for History and Philosophy of Science in Sydney. The papers that were presented by some of the leading figures in this area are presented in this volume.
Author: Karl S. Guthke Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501745875 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 419
Book Description
The existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life has been a subject of debate since the dawn of recorded history. The Last Frontier, originally published in German in 1983 and now available in Helen Atkins's sensitive English translation, traces the development of the idea that Earth is not the only planet inhabited by intelligent beings, but that there might be a plurality or even an infinity of "worlds" with human or humanoid life. Focusing on the seventeenth to the twentieth century and taking into account theological, philosophical, scientific, popular, and literary writings from American, British, French, and German sources, Karl S. Guthke demonstrates the continuing importance of this question to the process of human self-definition.
Author: Fernando Vidal Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226855880 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
Fernando Vidal’s trailblazing text on the origins of psychology traces the development of the discipline from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Originally published in 2011, The Sciences of the Soul continues to be of wide importance in the history and philosophy of psychology, the history of the human sciences more generally, and in the social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe.
Author: Michael J. Crowe Publisher: CUP Archive ISBN: 9780521359863 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 708
Book Description
This is the first in-depth study in English of the international debate that developed between 1750 and 1900 concerning the question of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Taking a history of ideas approach, the author describes the controversies that-arose over this question and reveals the great extent to which this issue influenced astronomical, philosophical, and religious thought. Professor Crowe shows that the majority of the leading astronomers of the last two centuries participated in this debate and he analyzes how their views interacted with new developments such as Newtonian mechanics, stellar astronomy, Darwinian theory, and astrophysics. This fascinating and critical history shows that the longstanding and widespread belief in extraterrestrial life has for centuries acted to alter major areas of our intellectual life.
Author: Renaud Gagné Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004387633 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 473
Book Description
Historically, all societies have used comparison to analyze cultural difference through the interaction of religion, power, and translation. When comparison is a self-reflective practice, it can be seen as a form of comparatism. Many scholars are concerned in one way or another with the practice and methods of comparison, and the need for a cognitively robust relativism is an integral part of a mature historical self-placement. This volume looks at how different theories and practices of writing and interpretation have developed at different times in different cultures and reconsiders the specificities of modern comparative approaches within a variety of comparative moments. The idea is to reconsider the specificities, the obstacles, and the possibilities of modern comparative approaches in history and anthropology through a variety of earlier and parallel comparative horizons. Particular attention is given to the exceptional role of Athens and Jerusalem in shaping the Western understanding of cultural difference. Contributors are: Matei Candea, Philippe Descola, Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, Anthony Grafton, Caroline Humphrey, Dmitri Levitin, Geoffrey Lloyd, Joan-Pau Rubiés, Jonathan Sheehan, Marilyn Strathern, Guy Stroumsa, and Phiroze Vasunia.
Author: Tobias Cheung Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 900419181X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
Drawing on natural history, theology and philosophy, this book retraces the shifting foundations of the order of things that characterizes the period between Descartes and Kant with respect to three questions: What is an animal? What is a human? What is a machine?
Author: John H. Zammito Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022652079X Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 532
Book Description
This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology.
Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Author: Virginia Parker Dawson
Author: Anne C. Vila
Author: Charles T. Wolfe
Author: Karl S. Guthke
Author: Fernando Vidal
Author: Michael J. Crowe
Author: Renaud Gagné
Author: Tobias Cheung
Author: John H. Zammito