List of Illustrations Introduction 1 The Didactic and the Elegant: Some Thoughts on Scientific and Technological Illustrations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 3 2 Temples of the Body and Temples of the Cosmos: Vision and Visualization in the Vesalian and Copernican Revolutions 40 3 Descartes’s Scientific Illustrations and ’la grande mecanique de la nature’ 86 4 Illustrating Chemistry 135 5 Representations of the Natural System in the Nineteenth Century 164 6 Visual Representation in Archaeology: Depicting the Missing-Link in Human (...) Origins 184 7 Towards an Epistemology of Scientific Illustration 215 8 Illustration and Inference 250 9 Visual Models and Scientific Judgment 269 10 Are Pictures Really Necessary? The Case of Sewall Wright’s ’Adaptive Landscapes’ 303 Bibliography 339 Notes on Contributors 373 Index 377. (shrink)

A case study in historical cognitive science, this paper addresses two claims made by radical proponents of new dynamical approaches. It queries their historical narrative, which sees embodied, situated cognition as correcting an individualist, atemporal framework originating in Descartes. In fact, new Descartes scholarship shows that 17th-century animal spirits neurophysiology realized a recognizably distributed model of memory; explicit representations are patterns of spirit flow, and memory traces are changes left by experience in connections between brain pores. This historical sketch supports (...) the second dynamicist claim, that connectionists' stress on the cognitive importance of pattern-recreation needs supplementing by dynamicists' real-time focus and attention to the active roles of body and environment. Animal spirits theory exhibits just the 'continuous reciprocal causation' between brain, body, and environment which Andy Clark sees as dynamicism's central contribution, and allows for the embedding of brains in culture as well as the physical world. (shrink)

There are two standing, incompatible accounts of Descartes’ contributions to the study of psychosomatic phenomena that pervade histories of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry. The first views Descartes as the father of “rational psychology” a tradition that defines the soul as a thinking, unextended substance. The second account views Descartes as the father of materialism and the machine metaphor. The consensus is that Descartes’ studies of optics and motor reflexes and his conception of the body-machine metaphor made early and important contributions (...) to physiology and neuroscience but otherwise his impact was minimal. These predominately negative assessments of Descartes’ contributions give a false impression of the role his philosophy played in the development of medicine and psychiatry in seventeenth-century France and beyond. I explore Descartes’ influence in the little-known writings of a doctor from Toulouse, and . A study of Bayle gives us occasion to rethink the nature and role of psychosomatic explanation in Descartes’ philosophy. The portrait I present is of a Cartesian science that had an actual and lasting effect on medical science and practice, and may offer something of value to practitioners today. (shrink)