The health of the body-machine? Or seventeenth century mechanism and the concept of health

Perspectives on Science 11 (4):421-442 (2003)
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Abstract

. The concept of bodily health is problematic for mechanists like Descartes, as it seems that they need to appeal to something extrinsic to a machine, i.e., its purpose, to determine whether the machine is working well or badly, and so healthy or unhealthy. I take issue with this claim. By drawing on the history of medicine, I suggest that in the seventeenth century there was space for a non-teleological account of health. I further argue that mechanists can and did appeal to structural integrity, as a non-teleological notion of form, to ground the norms required for ascriptions of health.

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Lisa Shapiro
McGill University

Citations of this work

Cartesian Functional Analysis.Deborah J. Brown - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (1):75 - 92.
Descartes on the Theory of Life and Methodology in the Life Sciences.Karen Detlefsen - 2016 - In Peter Distelzweig, Evan Ragland & Benjamin Goldberg (eds.), Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 141-72.
Descartes and the Dissolution of Life.Barnaby R. Hutchins - 2016 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 54 (2):155-173.

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References found in this work

Leviathan.Thomas Hobbes - 1904 - Harmondsworth,: Penguin Books. Edited by C. B. Macpherson.
The philosophical writings of Descartes.René Descartes - 1984 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Leviathan.Thomas Hobbes - 2006 - In Aloysius Martinich, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Early Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary. Blackwell.
Descartes’s Dualism.Marleen Rozemond - 1998 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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