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  1. The Aeolipile as Experimental Model in Early Modern Natural Philosophy.Craig Martin - 2016 - Perspectives on Science 24 (3):264-284.
    What causes winds was regarded as one of the most difficult questions of early modern natural philosophy. Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architectural author, put forth an alternative to Aristotle’s theory by likening the generation of wind to the actions of the aeolipile, which he believed made artificial winds. As Vitruvius’s work proliferated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, numerous natural philosophers, including Descartes, used the aeolipile as a model for nature. Yet, interpretations of Vitruvius’s text and of the relation of (...)
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  • Descartes, Corpuscles and Reductionism: Mechanism and Systems in Descartes' Physiology.Barnaby R. Hutchins - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (261):669-689.
    I argue that Descartes explains physiology in terms of whole systems, and not in terms of the size, shape and motion of tiny corpuscles (corpuscular mechanics). It is a standard, entrenched view that Descartes’ proper means of explanation in the natural world is through strict reduction to corpuscular mechanics. This view is bolstered by a handful of corpuscular–mechanical explanations in Descartes’ physics, which have been taken to be representative of his treatment of all natural phenomena. However, Descartes’ explanations of the (...)
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  • Does Descartes Have a Principle of Life? Hierarchy and Interdependence in Descartes’s Physiology.Barnaby R. Hutchins - 2016 - Perspectives on Science 24 (6):744-769.
    At various points in his work on physiology and medicine, Descartes refers to a “principle of life.” The exact term changes—sometimes, it is the “principle of movement and life”, sometimes the “principle underlying all [the] functions” of the body —but the message seems consistent: the phenomena of living bodies are the product of a single, underlying principle. That principle is generally taken to be cardiac heat.1 The literature has, quite reasonably, taken this message at face value. Thus, Shapiro: “Descartes insists (...)
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  • A dark business, full of shadows: Analogy and theology in William Harvey.Benjamin Goldberg - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3):419-432.
    In a short work called De conceptione appended to the end of his Exercitationes de generatione animalium , William Harvey developed a rather strange analogy. To explain how such marvelous productions as living beings were generated from the rather inauspicious ingredients of animal reproduction, Harvey argued that conception in the womb was like conception in the brain. It was mostly rejected at the time; it now seems a ludicrous theory based upon homonymy. However, this analogy offers insight into the structure (...)
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