Historically embryogenesis has been among the most philosophically intriguing phenomena. In this paper I focus on one aspect of biological development that was particularly perplexing to the ancients: self-organisation. For many ancients, the fact that an organism determines the important features of its own development required a special model for understanding how this was possible. This was especially true for Aristotle, Alexander, and Simplicius, who all looked to contemporary technology to supply that model. However, they did not all agree on (...) what kind of device should be used. In this paper I explore the way these ancients made use of technology as a model for the developing embryo. I argue that their different choices of device reveal fundamental differences in the way each thinker understood the nature of biological development itself. In the final section of the paper I challenge the traditional view (dating back to Alexander's interpretation of Aristotle) that the use of automata in GA can simply be read off from their use in the de motu. (shrink)

This paper aims to assess the epistemological value of the notion of sympathy in Galen’s thought. It first shows that Galen makes use of two different concepts of sympathy: the ambient concept, according to which the human body manifests a harmonious part-whole relationship, and the technical concept, with which one connects two pathologies on the basis of the fact that the cause of the ailment is elsewhere than where it surfaces. Neither of these sympathies constitutes in itself a causal explanation (...) of reality. The first merely acknowledges an obvious interrelationship, the second acts as an epistemic tool to shift the focus of diagnosis away from the place where the condition manifests itself. However, the two concepts are not absolutely unrelated; and they come together when the sympathetic paradigm is used to understand the unifying action of the psychic and natural faculties. Very significantly, Galen then provisionally defines the cause as a power or faculty (δύναμις) not out of theoretical necessity but for practical reasons. (shrink)

An oft-cited truism about the emergence of a new, ‘mechanistic’ approach to natural philosophy in the seventeenth century is that it was inspired by analogy to the workings of clockwork. In Authori...

In this paper I outline a role for mechanistic conceptions of organisms in ancient Greek natural philosophy, especially the study of organisms. By ‘mechanistic conceptions’ I mean the use of ideas and techniques drawn from the field of mechanics to investigate the natural world. ‘Mechanistic conceptions’ of organisms in ancient Greek philosophy, then, are those that draw on the ancient understanding of the field called ‘mechanics’ — hê mêchanikê technê—to investigate living things, rather than those bearing some perceived similarity to (...) modern notions of ‘the mechanical.’ I have argued elsewhere that evidence of mechanistic conceptions of the natural world can be found, not only among seventeenth and eighteenth century ‘mechanical philosophers,’ but also—albeit in vestigial form — in some ancient Greek texts. Unfortunately, these reports are slight, often by detractors of this approach, and offer only clues as to the motivational context for employing these mechanical conceptions. Here, my purpose is to suggest what role they might have played in the history of natural philosophy. (shrink)