The goal of this essay is to explore the meaning of experience in William Harvey’s natural philosophy. I begin with Cunningham’s argument that, for Harvey, anatomy was an experience-based science of final causes. But how could one experience final causes? I answer this by first articulating Harvey’s conception of anatomy, before turning to his understanding of experience.What did anatomia mean in the early seventeenth century? Consulting dictionaries, the texts of anatomists, and following Cunningham, we can assert that anatomists conceived of (...) their work as both a manual art and a rational science.1 Medicine had long proved problematic, failing to fit into disciplinary.. (shrink)

Kant’s analysis of the concept of natural purpose in the Critique of judgment captured several features of organisms that he argued warranted making them the objects of a special field of study, in need of a special regulative teleological principle. By showing that organisms have to be conceived as self-organizing wholes, epigenetically built according to the idea of a whole that we must presuppose, Kant accounted for three features of organisms conflated in the biological sciences of the period: adaptation, functionality (...) and conservation of forms..Kant’s unitary concept of natural purpose was subsequently split in two directions: first by Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, that would draw on the idea of adaptative functions as a regulative principle for understanding in reconstituting and classifying organisms; and then by Goethe’s and Geoffroy’s morphology, a science of the general transformations of living forms. However, such general transformations in nature, objects of an alleged ‘archaeology of nature’, were thought impossible by Kant in the §80 of the Critique of judgment. Goethe made this ‘adventure of reason’ possible by changing the sense of ‘explanation’: scientific explanation was shifted from the investigation of the mechanical processes of generation of individual organisms to the unveiling of some ideal transformations of types instantiated by those organisms. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1730, shortly before his death, the Paris anatomist Joseph‐Guichard Duverney wrote his will, leaving his anatomical specimens to the Académie des Sciences, of which he was a member. But the will was disputed by Pierre Chirac, supervisor of the Jardin du Roi where Duverney, as professor of anatomy, had performed most of the dissections that produced the specimens. The ensuing debate between Chirac and René‐Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, arguing for the Académie, reveals the tensions surrounding both the concept (...) of intellectual property in this period and the collective enterprise in natural philosophy. The differing roles and audiences of the Académie and the Jardin were central to this debate. In addition, this essay explores the origins and significance of the anatomical specimens themselves and their changing role in instruction and display, as well as the transition from the cabinet of curiosities to the natural history museum. (shrink)