The sixteenth-century reckoning with extra-European peoples and cultures occurred at precisely the same moment that humanists were increasingly preoccupied with the daily life, material culture, and lived religion of classical antiquity. Leading figures in sixteenth-century antiquarianism took an abiding interest in ethnographic accounts of contemporary peoples and even produced such accounts. This article examines how sixteenth-century readers and scholars placed bodies of literature on ancient and modern customs in dialogue with one another. While scholars have long appreciated that ethnographic and (...) travel writing were deeply mediated by the study of antiquity, that mediation cut both ways. This article addresses the question of how ethnographic descriptions of modern peoples shaped sixteenth-century understandings of the customs and lived religion of antiquity. The writings of merchants and humanists testify to the ways in which the practices of ethnographic writing helped to shape travellers’ and readers’ appreciation of the cultural alterity of classical antiquity. (shrink)

In his Repastinatio . . . Lorenzo Valla launched a heavy attack on Aristotelian-scholastic thought. While most of this book is devoted to metaphysics, language and argumentation, Valla also incorporates chapters on the soul and natural philosophy. Using as criteria good Latin, common sense and common observation, he rejected much of standard Aristotelian teaching on the soul, replacing the hylopmorphic account of the scholastics by an Augustinian one. In this article his arguments on the soul's autonomy, nobility and independency from (...) the body are studied and analysed. His critique of Aristotle's opinions on natural phenomena as being untrue to what we observe will also be briefly studied. His arguments do not show him always to be deep or consistent thinker, but the critical review of Aristotelian philosophy proceeds from some philosophically interesting assumptions. Moreover, from a broader historical perspective his undermining of Aristotle's authority may be regarded as a contribution to the final demise of the Aristotelian paradigm, even though the humanist critique was just one factor in this process. (shrink)

Special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Studies (4.1., Spring 2005) Guest Editor: Lucian Petrescu. -/- .

In late Renaissance medicine, the example of digestion was frequently invoked to prove the elemental composition of the human body. Food was considered as being decomposed in its first elements by the stomach, and digested into a thick juice, which was assimilated by the liver and the body parts. Such a process points to the structure of the human body into four elements that are transformed into different types of humors during several stages of “concoction”. This chapter examines the Galenic (...) interpretation of digestion expounded by the French physician Jean Fernel (1497–1558) in his Physiologia (1567). In this treatise, Fernel states the body composition into elemental portions, while stressing the role of the “innate heat” as the physiological counterpart of the body’s essence or “substantial form”. He applies this view in his account of digestion, where he states that the conversion of food follows the rule of “mixture”. This chapter aims to explore how Fernel applies his interpretation of elements and innate heat to the process of digestion, as well as his sources in Galen’s De facultatibus naturalibus, Avicenna’s Canon and Aristotle’s Meteorologica. It first examines the role of the natural soul and its “nourishing” faculties in nutrition as a physiological function. It then considers the role of elements, humors and innate heat during the “concoction” of food in the stomach, liver and veins. (shrink)

Modern philosophy is often seen as characterized by a shift of focus from the things themselves to our knowledge of them, i.e., by a turn to the subject and subjectivity. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is seen as the site of the emergence of the idea of a subject that constitutes the object of knowledge, and thus plays a central role in this narrative. This study examines Kant’s theory of knowledge at the intersection between the history of science and the (...) history of the modern subject, on the one hand, and in the tension between modern experimental and mathematical science and more traditional Aristotelian conceptions of epistemic perfection, on the other. The dissertation consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, I examine Kant’s concept of experience, and its relation both to Early Modern experimentalism and to the Wolffian tradition. In the second chapter, I argue that Kant adheres to a broadly Aristotelian conception of epistemic perfection – the ideal of understanding – but transforms this ideal into the self-understanding of reason, where reason can only have insight into the products of its own activity. In the third chapter, I use Kant’s conception of space and time to exemplify such products of reason, and argue that, for Kant, space and time are constructively generated representations that function as principles for ordering empirical knowledge. In the fourth and final chapter, I examine Kant’s conception of the subject, and situate it in relation to both the long history of the modern subject and German Enlightenment philosophy. Whereas the modern philosophical conception of the subject is usually taken to combine an ‘I’ functioning as the subject to which mental acts are attributed and an ‘I’ that has the ability to immediately perceive itself as the subject of these acts, I argue that Kant reconceives this relation between the ‘I’ and its acts as a purely intellectual self-relation. The unity of the ‘I’ is not a perceived unity, but a unity brought about by the intellect. (shrink)

The tension between the advocates of the Black Death as the herald of a new age, and those who see plague as proof of the resiliency of medieval mentalities, is rapidly dissolving. The conflict/resolution model, with its overtones of teleology, progress, and Naturphilosophie, is proving less useful to historians of epidemiology than one emphasizing continuity, gradual change, and the stoicism of the ordinary person. Historians of the plague are gravitating more and more to an intensive study of the local impact (...) of the Black Death. Such local studies reveal diversity — in economic and demographic impact, in the availability of historical sources, and in the interpretation these sources allow. The Black Death still retains its “silver lining,” but even that is changing: from proof of the awesome power of nature to level mankind and transform history, to proof of humanity's ability to endure even the worst crisis, to rebuild, and to start again. (shrink)