The fact that monstrous births were not represented in independent learned publications of the eighteenth century, except for the case of hermaphrodites, does not mean that the interest in them had disappeared or that they were no more considered proper objects of inquiry. This paper focuses on the medical understanding of monstrosity at the Royal Society of London. I point to the use of monstrous births in strengthening the authority of medical practitioners and lecturers. I also show some of their (...) uses in providing new questions for the scenes of medical inquiry of the period and as crucial evidence in the understanding of regular physiological phenomena. I discuss some of the reasons why monstrous formations continued to defy an 'Enlightenment' approach to nature based on the search for order and regularity. (shrink)

In his accounts of plant and animal generation Pierre Gassendi offers a mechanist story of how organisms create offspring to whom they pass on their traits. Development of the new organism is directed by a material “soul” or animula bearing ontogenetic information. Where reproduction is sexual, two sets of material semina and corresponding animulae meet and jointly determine the division, differentiation, and development of matter in the new organism. The determination of inherited traits requires a means of combining or choosing (...) among each parent's contributions, and towards this end, Gassendi outlines the nature of competition and dominance among animulae. Unlike his fellow mechanists, Gassendi can extend his mechanism to his heredity account, because his proposed vehicle for ontogenetic transmission is material. That proposal in turn relies on his atomist hypothesis. The relative uniformity of atoms allows animulae to operate equivalently across different modes of generation, spontaneous or otherwise. Further, his molecular model of atomic structures allows a material means of storing ontogenetic information received from the souls of parent organisms. These accounts—flawed and sketchy—unsurprisingly fail to specify how hereditary information might be borne physically, and in any case do not meet Gassendi's own empiricist standards. Yet this generation theory with pretensions to a materialist mechanism establishes Gassendi's firm commitment to a unity of the sciences through an atomist ontology that underlies all physical phenomena, including the organic. (shrink)

In this article, an account of the architecture of the cognitive contamination system is offered, according to which the contamination system can generate contamination represen- tations in circumstances that do not satisfy the norms of contamination, including in cases of mere visual contact with disgusting objects. It is argued that this architecture is important for explaining the content, logic, distribution, and persistence of maternal impression beliefs – according to which fetal defects are caused by the pregnant mother’s experiences and actions (...) – which in turn provide important evidence of the architecture of the cognitive contamination system. (shrink)

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control (...) of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)