Johannes Jessenius became known by his contemporaries mostly as an exponent of the Italian anatomical Renaissance in Central Europe at the end of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The image of Jessenius in the twentieth century was also created with respect to his activities in the area of anatomy in Wittenberg and Prague in particular. The aim of this article is to put Jessenius into the context of the development of anatomy in (...) the sixteenth century. An important point in this progression can be seen in the change of the definition of anatomy from the art of dis- secting bodies and a “method” of instructing students to the way of acquiring knowledge of bodies and nature. The crucial role in this process played anatomical writings of the second half of the 16th century and the development seems to be connected with methodological discussions at the University of Padua. Jessenius, in his anatomical writings, primarily followed the Paduan anatomist Andreas Vesalius, whose work De humani corporis fabrica expresses the fundamental change in Renaissance anatomy. In addition, the methodological background of the anatomical Renaissance, which Jessenius became acquainted with during his studies in Padua, also echoes in Jessenius’ works. (shrink)

This volume addresses the interdependencies between visual technologies and epistemology with regard to our perception of the medical body. It explores the relationships between the imagination, the body, and concrete forms of visual representations: Ranging from the Renaissance paradigm of anatomy, to Foucault's "birth of the clinic" and the institutionalised construction of a "medical gaze"; from "visual" archives of madness, psychiatric art collections, the politicisation and economisation of the body, to the post-human in mass media representations. Contributions to (...) this volume investigate medical bodies as historical, technological, and political constructs, constituted where knowledge formation and visual cultures intersect. Contributors are: Axel Fliethmann, Michael Hau, Birgit Lang, Carolyn Lau, Heikki Lempa, Stefanie Lenk, Joanna Madloch, Barry Murnane, Jill Redner, Claudia Stein, Elizabeth Stephens, Corinna Wagner, and Christiane Weller. (shrink)

Historians have recently paid increasing attention to the role of the disputation in Italian universities and humanist circles. By contrast, the role of disputations as forms of entertainment at fifteenth-century Italian courts has been somewhat overlooked. In this article, the Milanese "scientific duel" described in Luca Pacioli's De divina proportione is taken as a vantage point for the study of the dynamics of scientific patronage and social advancement as reflected in Renaissance courtly disputes. Pacioli names Leonardo da Vinci as (...) one of the participants in the Milanese dispute. In this paper I argue that Leonardo's Paragone and Pacioli's De divina proportione are likewise the outcome of the Milanese "scientific duel." By challenging the traditional hierarchy of the arts, they both exemplify the dynamics of social and intellectual promotion of mathematicians and artists in the privileged setting of Renaissance courts, where courtly patronage could subvert the traditional disciplinary rankings. (shrink)

This book investigates what actually happens when Pierre Bayle writes about the past and challenges the still prevalent view that he is dispassionate in the way he treats the subjects of the more than two thousand articles in his biographical Dictionnaire historique et critique. It opens with two case studies of the way he uses the sources available to him, which reveal a committed writer at work. Subsequent chapters explore the theory that shapes his erudition; the method that he devised (...) to discern falsehood from truth; his critical approach to Scripture; his conceptual reconstruction of the past. Bayle emerges from this as a writer whose interest in the past is more than antiquarian. The ideal of impartiality, which he drew from Renaissance conceptions of history, is not neutral but always situated. For all their apparent objectivity, the articles in the Dictionnaire are actually shaped by the debates, conflicts, and politics of Bayle's own time and place. In 1989, when this book was first published, its intertextual and contextualised reading of Bayle was innovative. Although many similar studies followed, this book led the way by developing an approach that allows us to gain access to the deeper strata of Bayle's thought. (shrink)

Au moment où paraît l’Anatomie de la Mélancolie de Robert Burton (1e édition en 1621), l’humorisme se trouve sérieusement remis en cause par les découvertes du contemporain de Burton, William Harvey, concernant la circulation du sang. Comment expliquer alors la parution de cet ouvrage qui se présente comme une somme de toutes les connaissances médicales, philosophiques ou historiques accumulées au sujet de la mélancolie depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à la fin de la Renaissance ? L’article se donne pour objectif de comprendre (...) quel peut être l’intérêt stratégique d’un recours au discours mélancolique et à la théorie des humeurs, lesquels deviennent sous la plume de Burton des instruments idéals permettant d’attirer l’attention sur la crise politique, sociale, économique et religieuse que traverse la monarchie anglaise de Jacques Ier. (shrink)

The physician and philosopher Johannes Jessenius, an enthusiastic anatomist in Wittenberg, often had to defend his anatomical practices against Lutheran orthodoxy, as is apparent from the invitations he wrote concerning his dissections. His most systematic defence can be found in the introduction to his description of the dissection performed in Prague in 1600, where he provides three different strategies for the justification of anatomical research. The first method traditionally builds on the use of the ancient dictum ‘know thyself;’ the second (...) strategy is based on teleology, which Jessenius adopted from Vesalius’ work; and the final method is derived from the philosophical tradition of the Renaissance. Jessenius makes use of the concept of the dignity of man in order to support the dignity of anatomical practice. The fundamental meaning of the philosophical framework of Jessenius’s approach emerges from the comparison with both Andreas Vesalius, whose Fabric was one model for Jessenius’s anatomical work, and with the speech delivered by Adamus Zaluzanius a Zaluzaniis prior to Jessenius’s Prague anatomical performance. (shrink)

The illustrated anatomical works of Andreas Vesalius, now icons of medical history, exemplified Renaissance humanists' attitudes toward the human condition. Methods of teaching medical students gross anatomy have evolved from the attitudes and methods of Renaissance scientist-scholars. The work of Vesalius is crucial to understanding the revolution in early modern medicine, for not only is it devoted to minute observation and exploration of the human body, but also to translating new knowledge by means of art. In the (...) process of illustration, the cadavers become ennobled, leading the viewer to contemplation of the nature of our common humanity. It is the thesis of this paper that the merging of art and science achieved in the great anatomical studies of the 16th and 17th centuries may still be useful in the education of medical students by allowing a balance between scientific detachment and compassion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 477 (p. 32), although some might consider him to have been an important historian of logic. I am not certain that citing Carnap and Heideggar (p. 75) can do much to clarify Vires. When one reads 'Henrique Estienne' and "Hipotiposes pirronicas" (p. 266) in an Italian book he is a bit taken aback and wonders whether the author has done his homework. The writer missed a golden (...) opportunity to connect Galileo to the tradition, for his still unpublished Quaestiones on logic and the De motu (both written before 1600) have many interesting comments which tie in directly with the material developed in this volume. This could have provided an excellent bridge to the next'century, when the analytic method began to take a more central role in scientific and methodological discussions. There is still room for a number of studies on the evolution of the analytic method during the Renaissance. Unfortunately Crescini's study barely scratches the surface of this immense subject. Let us hope that his book will at least have the effect of encouraging others to treat the matter with more care, in greater depth, and more exhaustively. The volume is provided with a preface by Giorgio Radetti, who claims more for it than it actually provides, as well as noting that it is the first part of a more comprehensive study by the same author on the formation of the analytic method in Cartesian philosophy (p. 5). The book has a useful index, but unfortunately no bibliography. CHARLESB. ScxiMrrr The University of Leeds Le thomisme et la pens#e italienne de la Renaissance. By Paul Oskar Kristeller. Conference Albert-le-Grand 1965. (Montr6ah Institut d'~tudes m~di~vales, and Paris: Vrin, 1967. Pp. 287. $6) Surprisingly little is known about the later history of Thomism. This brief but very rich lecture by Professor Kristeller, renowned historian of Italian Renaissance philosophy, examines one period in the later career of St. Thomas' thought. This study, based chiefly on unpublished source material, shows that Thomas was very much present to both the humanists and to the academic philosophers during the Renaissance. Such leading humanists as Lorenzo Valla, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Marsilio Ficino, quote St. Thomas frequently and with approval. Even the unfavorable attitudes of Ermolao Barbaro or Baptista Mantuanus show that Thomas was already the most celebrated of mediaeval philosophers. The professors of philosophy at Italian universities, such as Pierre Pomponazzi, speak of Thomas with great respect and regard his theology as in conformity with the truths of faith, even when they reject his philosophy as being in disaccord with the authentic teaching of Aristotle. St. Thomas made a continuous contribution to the development of Renaissance theology and philosophy. Yet the principal Italian thinkers did not follow him strictly nor fall under his exclusive influence. Thomas is merely one of the most important sources, not the prevailing influence, in Renaissance thought. Ficino, for example, is,178 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in accord with Thomas on certain important points, but his own theology is more in the spirit of Plato and Augustine. Professor Kristeller's vast learning is at the service of admirably balanced conclusions. Not everyone will agree with all his interpretations; Ficino perhaps did not imagine himself to be "constructing a system of philosophy" (p. 96) since the very title of his work, Theologia platonica, suggests that he continues, with new materials, the labor of mediaeval theolo#ans. And Ficino's doctrine of the continuity of the supernatural life of the soul in this world and the next (p. 120) seems to be completely in accord with Thomas. But the author's very careful scholarly method and sound general conclusions are beyond criticism. Two hitherto unpublished Latin texts are printed in critical edition at the end of the French lecture, the Opus aureum in Thomistas by Baptists Mantuanus, which is anti-Thomas, and the Opusculum ad Laurentium Medicem on beatitude, by Vincentius Bandellus, which is pro-Thomas. Like Professor Kristeller's fine lecture, these new texts are a permanent contribution to scholarship. PAUL J. W. MILLER University of Colorado The Anatomy of Leviathan. By F. S. McNeilly. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968. Pp... (shrink)

Tanja Klemm legt in dieser kunsthistorischen Studie ihr Augenmerkauf das Verhältnis von Bild, Wahrnehmung und Betrachterkörpern im Spätmittelalter und in der Renaissance. Medizin, Naturphilosophie, Theologie und Bildtheorie dieser Zeit nimmt sie unter der Perspektive einer historischen Phänomenologie der Verkörperung in den Blick: Sinnliche Wahrnehmung versteht sich vor dem Hintergrund zeitgenössischer Theorien vom lebendigen Körper (corpus animatum) in einem ganzkörperlichen Sinn; Wahrnehmung - in den Worten der Zeit perceptio bzw. conceptio - erfolgt als gesamtorganismischer Vorgang. In einem ersten Teil der (...) Studie liegt der Fokus auf der Lebendigkeit und Sinnlichkeit des corpus animatum aus medizinischer, theologischer und bildtheoretischer Sicht. Daraus entwickelt die Autorin eine Theorie des Bildes und der verkörperten Wahrnehmung, die bisher innerhalb der Renaissanceforschung nicht im Mittelpunkt des bild- und wahrnehmungsgeschichtlichen Interesses stand. In einem zweiten Teil exemplifiziert sie diese Theorie anhand von kunsthistorischen Studien zu Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer und Martin Schongauer. (shrink)

The theme of conspiracies plays a key role in Machiavelli's writings, in which can be found considerations and analyses on the use of conspiracy as an instrument of conquest of power, and as a technique for political fighting. This volume denies an interpretation in which Machiavelli limited himself to warning against conspiracies, judging them as a dangerous and useless tool. In reality, he elaborated a real phenomenology or anatomy of the conspiracy. His thoughts on this theme represent a practical (...) manual for the "coup d'état" and the violent seizure of power. But as always, they also contain brilliant intuitions on political psychology, the sociology of power, and social anthropology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 477 (p. 32), although some might consider him to have been an important historian of logic. I am not certain that citing Carnap and Heideggar (p. 75) can do much to clarify Vires. When one reads 'Henrique Estienne' and "Hipotiposes pirronicas" (p. 266) in an Italian book he is a bit taken aback and wonders whether the author has done his homework. The writer missed a golden (...) opportunity to connect Galileo to the tradition, for his still unpublished Quaestiones on logic and the De motu (both written before 1600) have many interesting comments which tie in directly with the material developed in this volume. This could have provided an excellent bridge to the next'century, when the analytic method began to take a more central role in scientific and methodological discussions. There is still room for a number of studies on the evolution of the analytic method during the Renaissance. Unfortunately Crescini's study barely scratches the surface of this immense subject. Let us hope that his book will at least have the effect of encouraging others to treat the matter with more care, in greater depth, and more exhaustively. The volume is provided with a preface by Giorgio Radetti, who claims more for it than it actually provides, as well as noting that it is the first part of a more comprehensive study by the same author on the formation of the analytic method in Cartesian philosophy (p. 5). The book has a useful index, but unfortunately no bibliography. CHARLESB. ScxiMrrr The University of Leeds Le thomisme et la pens#e italienne de la Renaissance. By Paul Oskar Kristeller. Conference Albert-le-Grand 1965. (Montr6ah Institut d'~tudes m~di~vales, and Paris: Vrin, 1967. Pp. 287. $6) Surprisingly little is known about the later history of Thomism. This brief but very rich lecture by Professor Kristeller, renowned historian of Italian Renaissance philosophy, examines one period in the later career of St. Thomas' thought. This study, based chiefly on unpublished source material, shows that Thomas was very much present to both the humanists and to the academic philosophers during the Renaissance. Such leading humanists as Lorenzo Valla, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Marsilio Ficino, quote St. Thomas frequently and with approval. Even the unfavorable attitudes of Ermolao Barbaro or Baptista Mantuanus show that Thomas was already the most celebrated of mediaeval philosophers. The professors of philosophy at Italian universities, such as Pierre Pomponazzi, speak of Thomas with great respect and regard his theology as in conformity with the truths of faith, even when they reject his philosophy as being in disaccord with the authentic teaching of Aristotle. St. Thomas made a continuous contribution to the development of Renaissance theology and philosophy. Yet the principal Italian thinkers did not follow him strictly nor fall under his exclusive influence. Thomas is merely one of the most important sources, not the prevailing influence, in Renaissance thought. Ficino, for example, is,178 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in accord with Thomas on certain important points, but his own theology is more in the spirit of Plato and Augustine. Professor Kristeller's vast learning is at the service of admirably balanced conclusions. Not everyone will agree with all his interpretations; Ficino perhaps did not imagine himself to be "constructing a system of philosophy" (p. 96) since the very title of his work, Theologia platonica, suggests that he continues, with new materials, the labor of mediaeval theolo#ans. And Ficino's doctrine of the continuity of the supernatural life of the soul in this world and the next (p. 120) seems to be completely in accord with Thomas. But the author's very careful scholarly method and sound general conclusions are beyond criticism. Two hitherto unpublished Latin texts are printed in critical edition at the end of the French lecture, the Opus aureum in Thomistas by Baptists Mantuanus, which is anti-Thomas, and the Opusculum ad Laurentium Medicem on beatitude, by Vincentius Bandellus, which is pro-Thomas. Like Professor Kristeller's fine lecture, these new texts are a permanent contribution to scholarship. PAUL J. W. MILLER University of Colorado The Anatomy of Leviathan. By F. S. McNeilly. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968. Pp... (shrink)

In a long-term transformation, that begins in Antiquity but takes a crucial turn in the Renaissance anatomies, the “fibre” becomes from around 1750 the operative building block and at the same time the first unifying principle of function-structure-complexes of organic bodies. It occupies the role that the cell takes up in the cell œconomies of the second third of the nineteenth century. In this paper, I will first discuss some key notions, technical analogies, and images that are related to (...) “fibre”-concepts from Andreas Vesalius to Albrecht von Haller and then focus on Charles Bonnet's and Denis Diderot's fibre œconomies. In Bonnet's and Diderot's fibre œconomies, the self-active, regulating properties of fibre-agents and their material structures, that reach from fibre bundles, tissues and membranes to apparati of organs, are united within the concrete whole of individual organized “systems” or “networks.”. (shrink)

“The longer you work, the more the mystery deepens of what appearance is, or how what is called appearance can be made in another medium."—Francis Bacon, painter This, in a nutshell, is the central problem in the theory of art. It has fascinated philosophers from Plato to Wittgenstein. And it fascinates artists and art historians, who have always drawn extensively on philosophical ideas about language and representation, and on ideas about vision and the visible world that have deep philosophical roots. (...) John Hyman’s _The Objective Eye_ is a radical treatment of this problem, deeply informed by the history of philosophy and science, but entirely fresh. The questions tackled here are fundamental ones: Is our experience of color an illusion? How does the metaphysical status of colors differ from that of shapes? What is the difference between a picture and a written text? Why are some pictures said to be more realistic than others? Is it because they are especially truthful or, on the contrary, because they deceive the eye? _The Objective Eye_ explores the fundamental concepts we use constantly in our most innocent thoughts and conversations about art, as well as in the most sophisticated art theory. The book progresses from pure philosophy to applied philosophy and ranges from the metaphysics of color to Renaissance perspective, from anatomy in ancient Greece to impressionism in nineteenth-century France. Philosophers, art historians, and students of the arts will find _The Objective Eye_ challenging and absorbing. (shrink)

Yoga has come to be an icon of Indian culture and civilization, and it is widely regarded as being timeless and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic research and an analysis of both ancient and modern texts, Yoga in Modern India challenges this popular view by examining the history of yoga, focusing on its emergence in modern India and its dramatically changing form and significance in the twentieth century. Joseph Alter argues that yoga's transformation into a popular activity idolized for its (...) health value is based on modern ideas about science and medicine. Alter centers his analysis on an interpretation of the seminal work of Swami Kuvalayananda, one of the chief architects of the Yoga Renaissance in the early twentieth century. From this point of orientation he explores current interpretations of yoga and considers how practitioners of yogic medicine and fitness combine the ideas of biology, physiology, and anatomy with those of metaphysics, transcendence, and magical power. The first serious ethnographic history of modern yoga in India, this fluently written book is must reading not only for students and scholars but also practitioners who seek a deeper understanding of how yoga developed over time into the exceedingly popular phenomenon it is today. (shrink)

This masterly study has a grand sweep. It ranges over centuries, with a long look backward over several millennia. Yet the history it unfolds is primarily the story of individuals: thinkers and dreamers who envisaged an ideal social order and described it persuasively, leaving a mark on their own and later times. The roster of utopians includes men of all stripes in different countries and eras--figures as disparate as More and Fourier, the Marquis de Sade and Edward Bellamy, Rousseau and (...) Marx. Fascinating character studies of the major figures are among the delights of the book. Utopian writings run the gamut from fictional narratives to theoretical treatises, from political manifestos to constitutions for a new society. The Manuels have structured five centuries of utopian invention by identifying successive constellations, groups of thinkers joined by common social and moral concerns. Within this framework they analyze individual writings, in the context of the author's life and of the socio-economic, religious, and political exigencies of his time. Concentrating on innovative works, they highlight disjunctures as well as continuities in utopian thought from the Renaissance through the twentieth century. Witty and erudite, challenging in its interpretations and provocative in the questions it poses, the Manuels' anatomy of utopia is an adventure in ideas. (shrink)

Introduction: the age of reflexion Part I. Romanticism: 1. Romanticism and the sciences David Knight 2. Schelling and the origins of his Naturphilosophie S. R. Morgan 3. Romantic philosophy and the organization of the disciplines: the founding of the Humboldt University of Berlin Elinor S. Shaffer 4. Historical consciousness in the German Romantic Naturforschung Dietrich Von Engelhardt 5. Theology and the sciences in the German Romantic period Frederick Gregory 6. Genius in Romantic natural philosophy Simon Shaffer Part II. Sciences of (...) the Organic: 7. Doctors contra clysters and feudalism: the consequences of a Romantic revolution Nelly Tsouyopoulos 8. Morphotypes and the historical-genetic method in Romantic biology Timothy Lenoir 9. ’Metaphorical mystifications’: the Romantic gestation of nature in British biology Evelleen Richards 10. Transcendental anatomy Philip F. Rehbock 11. Romantic thought and the origins of cell theory L. S. Jacyna 12. Alexander von Humbolt and the geography of vegetation Malcolm Nicholson Part III. Sciences of the Inorganic: 13. Goethe, colour, and the science of seeing Dennis L. Sepper 14. Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Romantic physics in Germany Walter D. Wetzels 15. The power and the glory: Humphrey Davy and Romanticism Christopher Lawrence 16. Oersted’s discovery of electromagnetism H. A. M. Snelders 17. Caves, fossils and the history of the earth Nicholas A. Rupke Part IV. Literature and the Sciences: 18. Goethe’s use of chemical theory in his Elective Affinities Jeremy Adler 19. Kleist’s bedlam: abnormal psychology and psychiatry in the works of Heinrich von Kleist Nigel Reeves 20. Coleridge and the sciences Trevor H. Levere 21. Nature’s book: the language of science in the American Renaissance David van Leer 22. The shattered whole: Georg Buchner and Naturphilosophie John Reddick. (shrink)

The import of Petrarch's description of Laura extends well beyond the confines of his own poetic age; in subsequent times, his portrayal of feminine beauty became authoritative. As a primary canonical text, the Rime sparse consolidated and disseminated a Renaissance mode. Petrarch absorbed a complex network of descriptive strategies and then presented a single, transformed model. In this sense his role in the history of the interpretation and the internalization of woman's "image" by both men and women can scarcely (...) be overemphasized. When late-Renaissance theorists, poets, and painters represented woman's body, Petrarch's verse justified their aesthetic choices. His authority, moreover, extended beyond scholarly consideration to courtly conversation, beyond the treatise on beauty to the after-dinner game in celebration of it. The descriptive codes of others, both ancients and contemporaries, were, of course, not ignored, but the "scattered rhymes" undeniably enjoyed a privileged status: they informed the Renaissance norm of a beautiful woman.1· 1. On this "thoroughly self-conscious fashion," see. Elizabeth Cropper, "On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style," Art Bulletin 58 1976): 374-94.Nancy Vickers is an assistant professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth College. She has published articles on Dante and Petrarch and has recently completed a book, The Anatomy of Beauty: Woman's Body and Renaissance Blazon. (shrink)

Through the historical portrait of Galen, I argue that even an enchanted nature does not prevent the performance of violence against nature. Galen, the great physician-philosopher of antiquity, is best known for his systematization and innovation of the Hippocratic medical tradition, whose thought was the reigning medical orthodoxy from the medieval period into the Renaissance. His works on anatomy were the standard that Vesalius’ works on anatomy overturned. What is less known about Galen’s study of anatomy, (...) however, is its philosophical and theological edge. In this paper, I show that it is precisely because nature is enchanted that Galen undertakes the grisly practices of anatomical dissection and vivisection, which entail violence against nature. First, I illustrate the violent character of Galen’s anatomical experiments. Second, I elucidate Galen’s anatomical methodology as a form of philosophizing and theologizing with a scalpel. Third, I explicate the importance of the demonstration of divine teleology that anatomical dissection reveals. Fourth, I sketch how anatomical dissection as a way of knowing nature and God becomes a kind of anatomical, liturgical theology. I conclude that, at least for Galen, an enchanted nature is not in itself exempt from violence. (shrink)

What is, what was the human? This book argues that the making of the human as it is now understood implies a renogotiation of the relationship between the self and the world. The development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy paradoxically also illuminated the similarities between human and non-human. This collection considers the borders between humans and their imagined others: animals, women, native subjects, machines. It examines border creatures (hermaphrodites, wildmen, and cyborgs) and (...) border practices (science, surveying, and pornography). (shrink)

Western culture has a few traditions of representing the human body – among them mortuary art (gisants), the freak show, the culture of the relics, renaissance art and pre-modern and modern anatomy. A historical analysis in the spirit of Norbert Elias is offered with regard to body – person relationship in anatomy. Modern anatomy is characterized by separating the story of the person from the story of the body, a strategy that is incompatible with the bio-psycho-social (...) paradigm of clinical medicine. The paper discusses different aspects of the above traditions and how they might bear on this conflict and on contemporary bioethics and bedside practice. (shrink)

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, new anatomical investigations of the brain and the nervous system, together with a renewed interest in comparative anatomy, allowed doctors and philosophers to ground their theories on sense perception, the emergence of human intelligence, and the soul/body relationship in modern science. They investigated the anatomical structures and the physiological processes underlying the rise, differentiation, and articulation of human cognitive activities, and looked for the “anatomical roots” of the specificity of human intelligence when (...) compared to other forms of animal sensibility. This edited volume focuses on medical and philosophical debates on human intelligence and animal perception in the early modern age, providing fresh insights into the influence of medical discourse on the rise of modern philosophical anthropology. Contributions from distinguished historians of philosophy and medicine focus on sixteenth-century zoological, psychological, and embryological discourses on man; the impact of mechanism and comparative anatomy on philosophical conceptions of body and soul; and the key status of sensibility in the medical and philosophical enlightenment. (shrink)

The work of Northrop Frye, evenly divided as it is between those earlier and later literatures and equally influential in both fields, will serve to illustrate the literary-historical myth I have begun to describe. "Romanticism," he writes, "is a 'sentimental' form of romance, and the fairy tale, for the most part, a 'sentimental' form of folk tale."1 Frye's terms are directly adopted from Schiller's famous essay, "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung," though "naive" for Frye means simply "primitive" or "popular" and (...) is not historically identified, as it is in Schiller, with "classical," while "sentimental," as in Schiller, means "later" or "sophisticated." In adopting Schiller's terms, however, Frye has also adopted, though less obviously, Schiller's historical scheme. In the theory of modes that opens the Anatomy, Frye's division of Western literature into a descending scale from "myth" through "romance," "high mimetic," and "low mimetic" to "irony" is correlated to the historical periods in which each mode successively dominates: classical, medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and modern. Like Schiller's starker contrast of the "naive" or classical poet in touch with the natural world and the "sentimental" or Romantic poet alienated from it by modern civilization, Frye's logical and chronological scheme conceives literary history as a process of disintegration or displacement away from the natural integrity and univocality of myth and toward the self-conscious distancing and discontinuities of irony. The history of literature moves, following hard upon an Enlightenment conception of cultural history that derives as much from Rousseau as from Schiller and Friedrich von Schlegel, from the anonymous universality of myth to the individuality or eccentricity of modern fiction. Frye systematically avoids valorizing this "progress of poetry" in any of the ways it has been successively valorized by various schools of ancients and moderns, classics and Romantics, over the past three centuries. Yet he nonetheless repeats the historical scheme that underlies and generates these schools and their quarrels in the first place. It may turn out that the weakness of Frye's rehabilitation of romance is not his avoidance of history, as is commonly charged, but his inability to do without a version of it. · 1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , p. 35. Howard Felperin is the author of Shakespearean Romance and Shakespearean Representation. He has taught at Harvard, the University of California, and Yale and is currently Robert Wallace Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, Australia. (shrink)

I shall never forget my astonishment and delight on reading the 1949 essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," which in turn became the Polemic Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism, and my even greater astonishment and delight at the appearance of "Towards a Theory of Cultural History" , which eventually served as Essay 1 of the Anatomy, when revised and expanded. The remarkable thing about these articles was not so much their content as their assumption, namely, (...) that criticism could at least try to become a science. This assumption was couched in the form of most general scientific orientations, in that Frye took literature in its own terms,1 to begin with, and then did not prejudicially segregate and then destroy the claims of particular "minority groups" within the whole commonwealth of literary life. I did not know it at the time, but Frye was then, as now, fighting for a mode of civil rights. He was then, as now, a libertarian. He first made his name writing on Blake— freedom enough, perhaps—but it has always seemed to me that his center is as much Milton as Blake. But then, to know Blake truly is to understand Milton. · 1. This assumption is to be distinguished from that of "early" Richards, which held that a science for literary studies had to come at literature from the outside, with chiefly psychological instruments. Richards' career has been the most complex critical "life" in our century, I believe, and it should be observed that he has held, and abandoned, more than one assumptive high ground during the course of his long and magnificent involvement with poetry. Angus Fletcher's numerous writings include Allegory: The Thought of a Symbolic Mode, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser, The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's Comus, The Stranger God: A Theoretical Study of the Myth of Dionysus, and Thresholds: A Critical Approach to the English Renaissance. Northrop Frye's response, "Expanding Eyes" appears in the Winter 1975 issue. (shrink)

After the Second World War, a renaissance in field primatology took place in the United States under the aegis of the ‘new physical anthropology’. Its leader, Sherwood Washburn, envisioned a science uniting studies of hominid fossils with Darwinian population genetics, experimental functional anatomy, and field observation of non-human primates and human hunter–gatherers. Thanks to Washburn’s stimulus, his colleague at Berkeley, the bird ethologist Peter Marler, took up the study of the natural communicative behaviour of apes and monkeys. When (...) Marler’s first primatological student, Thomas Struhsaker, reported in the mid-1960s that the vervet monkeys of Amboseli, Kenya, give acoustically distinct alarm calls to different predators, and respond to alarm calls as if to the sight of those predators, a debate broke out over whether the vervet calls thus function as names, translating as ‘leopard’, ‘eagle’ and ‘python’. Washburn and his students argued that no matter what the behavioural evidence, vervet calls could not be predator names, since monkeys had been shown to lack the neuroanatomical basis of naming. This controversy thus reveals, first, the persistence of older patterns of disciplinary allegiance within the new, synthetic physical anthropology; and second, the impotence of adaptationist Darwinism — common to both sides of the debate — as a force for unity. (shrink)

Medicine and astronomy were both scientific disciplines to which visual demonstration proved helpful, were taught in the universities, and were deeply influenced by humanism and by the development of print culture, but they did not use printed images in the same way. Thus, all the aspects of astronomical activity benefited from the accompaniment of printed images, whereas, even for anatomy, illustration does not seem to have been seen as a necessity in Renaissance medical books. To explore such a (...) difference, the chronology of the development of illustration in both fields (from the first illustrated incunabula to the mid-sixteenth century) is compared, and some explanations (economical, epistemological, cultural) are proposed and questioned. -/- . (shrink)

Descartes was born in La Haye (now Descartes) in Touraine and educated at the Jesuit college of La Fleche` in Anjou. Descartes’modern reputation as a rationalistic armchair philosopher, whose mind–body dualism is the source of damaging divisions between psychology and the life sciences, is almost entirely undeserved. Some 90% of his surviving correspondence is on mathematics and scientific matters, from acoustics and hydrostatics to chemistry and the practical problems of constructing scientific instruments. Descartes was just as interested in the motions (...) of matter as in the supernatural soul, and he advised against spending too much time on metaphysical inquiries which neglect imagination and the senses. After meeting the Dutch engineer Isaac Beeckman in 1618, Descartes became committed to a systematically ‘mechanical’account of nature. This involved explaining all natural processes in terms of interactions between microscopic material bodies in motion. Descartes modelled his physics and cosmology on the behaviour of fluids, which also have a distinctive and central role in his physiology: the key processes for natural philosophical investigation are the circulation and mutual displacement of constrained bodies, rather than the isolated collisions of atoms in a void. Descartes settled in Holland in 1628, and commenced an ambitious programme of physiological research. In 1630 he was ‘studying chemistry and anatomy simultaneously’, and in late 1632 he was ‘dissecting the heads of various animals’, in order to ‘explain what imagination, memory, etc. consist in’. By late 1633 Descartes had almost completed L’homme, the Treatise on Man; but he abandoned plans to publish it along with a work on matter theory and optics which relied on Copernican cosmology, after he heard of the condemnation of Galileo. L’homme was published posthumously in 1662 (Latin) and 1664 (French); not until 1972 was it fully translated into English. L’homme draws on many (mostly unnamed) Renaissance medical writers, and covers, firstly, a range of traditional physiological topics, such as digestion and respiration.. (shrink)

The first important reaction in favor of generic criticism here was that of the Chicago neo-Aristotelians, whose feisty polemics against the "New" critics must have seemed, in the 1940s and 1950s, like voices crying in the wilderness. The popularity of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism—also ostensibly based upon Aristotle's example—won the concept of genre broader support. And today, if the books covering my desk are anything to go by, genre criticism has emerged in force. The flood has brought forth (...) historical studies of Renaissance genres, analyses of traditional genres like the picaresque or of new ones like "the fantastic," ambivalently generic essays in "thematics," efforts to systemize the genres of narrative fiction, and even attempt, through the philosophic analysis of dozens of generic systems, to go "beyond genre." Indeed, the late sixties spawned a journal entitled Genre entirely devoted to theoretical and practical criticism employing the concept. David H. Richter is the author of a forthcoming book: Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction, and an article on Jerzy Kosinski. He is assistant professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. (shrink)

A User's Guide to Melancholy takes Robert Burton's encyclopaedic masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621) as a guide to one of the most perplexing, elusive, attractive, and afflicting diseases of the Renaissance. Burton's Anatomy is perhaps the largest, strangest, and most unwieldy self-help book ever written. Engaging with the rich cultural and literary framework of melancholy, this book traces its causes, symptoms, and cures through Burton's writing. Each chapter starts with a case study of (...) melancholy - from the man who was afraid to urinate in case he drowned his town to the girl who purged a live eel - as a way into exploring the many facets of this mental affliction. A User's Guide to Melancholy presents in an accessible and illustrated format the colourful variety of Renaissance melancholy, and contributes to contemporary discussions about wellbeing by revealing the earlier history of mental health conditions. (shrink)

Francisco Valles, also known as ‘The Divine Valles’, was most probably the greatest Spanish physician of the Renaissance and succeeded Andreas Vesalius, whom he knew well, as the personal doctor of Philip II of Spain. Valles studied in Alcalá and wrote several works, among which the influential Controversiarum medicarum et philosophicarum. The importance of Valles’s contribution to the debate concerning the number, the specific tasks, and the localization of the internal senses in Aristotle and in Galen is attested by (...) Pedro da Fonseca’s appreciation of his contribution and by the relevance of Valles’s works to the study of the history of philosophy and of anatomy, in antiquity, in the Renaissance and in scholasticism. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while (...) its feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

This book examines the historical development of studies of the brain and behavior from the early work of Aristotle and Galen up to the late twentieth century. Modern neuroscience, a multidisciplinary endeavor, emerged only recently as a unified field . This book does not treat the disciplinary history of neuroscience per se but, rather, the history of attempts to understand the nervous system and its relationship to behavior from a constellation of disciplines all related to what we now call “neuroscience”: (...) anatomy, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, evolutionary theory, and anthropology.Louise H. Marshall is a neuroscientist and director of the UCLA Brain Research Institute's Neuroscience History Archives. Her coauthor, the late neuroscientist Horace W. Magoun, founded the Department of Anatomy at UCLA's Medical School in 1953. Their book grew out of a series of poster presentations put together by Magoun for several national and international neuroscience meetings during the early 1980s. Magoun wrote a twenty‐seven‐page brochure after receiving much enthusiasm from neuroscientists at these meetings—both students and those more established in the field—and many wanted a publication.Not surprisingly, given its early beginnings in poster presentations, the book is richly illustrated. The chapters are arranged only loosely chronologically; their sequence is directed more explicitly by investigative themes. The first chapter outlines three basic “postulates” that direct the organization of the rest of the book and act as conceptual threads: phylogeny , the idea of a structural and functional hierarchy in the nervous system, and the notion that function determines structure. The last chapter, by way of discussion, moves into twentieth‐century developments in the understanding of certain “integrative” systems in the brain and the recognition by neuroscientists of the need for multidisciplinary approaches that integrate anatomical, physiological, and behavioral perspectives.The third postulate, the idea that “form follows function,” receives the most emphasis in the book, and most chapters touch on the oscillating relationship between studies of form and studies of function . The book also illustrates certain historical trends: the anatomical studies of the ancient and Renaissance periods, the more physiological and clinical studies of the nineteenth century, and the instrument‐centered approaches of early twentieth‐century neurophysiology.The book has certain strengths and weaknesses related to the authors' perspective as neuroscientists. As one might expect, elements of presentism arise, as the work of some investigators is described as “anticipating” that of later scientists, and other research—for example, J. L. W. Thudichum's work on brain chemistry—is deemed “surprisingly modern” . However, the book gives wonderfully detailed, precise accounts of scientific developments related to brain and behavior. The authors demonstrate a critical mastery of both primary and secondary sources, with thorough citations, and the book comes with a comprehensive bibliography.Discoveries in the Human Brain does not place neuroscientific developments within a wider cultural or social context, but the authors had no ambitions to do so. They even point to drawbacks of such historical approaches, arguing that they “create issues where none exist and … couch ideas in such convoluted language that the events and concepts become unfamiliar and difficult to fathom” . This position reflects their intended audience: neuroscientists interested in the history of their field. While there is certainly room for professional historians of science to tackle the history of neuroscience, this book will be valuable for historians because literature in the history of neuroscience is sparse. However, it is likely to be of greater value to neuroscientists—in the authors' words, “those workers at the bench who are curious to learn how it all happened.”. (shrink)

In his newly updated version of The Anatomy of a Constitutional Law Case, Alan F. Westin provides a documentary portrait of historically important constitutional law case, 'Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, ' from its rise in a bargaining dispute in the steel industry during 1952 to the aftermath of its decision by the United States Supreme Court. Westin has added to his classic book additional materials and personal commentaries collected since the work was first published. The new (...) information covers what went on within the Truman administration, what went on within the Supreme Court when analyzing and resolving issues that come before it. Westin includes selections from transcripts, briefs and other official proceedings, adds notes describing each phase of the constitutional process, and a section of commentary and questions relating this case to others. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Basic Facts about Dolphins Adaptations to Living in the Water The Dolphin Brain The Human Brain The Human Brain: Summary The Dolphin Brain Compared to the Human Brain The Dolphin Brain: Summary.

The Anatomy of Neoplatonism was the crowning achievement of A. C. Lloyd, the distinguished scholar of late ancient philosophy. He offers a rich and authoritative study of this school of thought, which was highly influential not only on subsequent philosophy but also on Christian theology. His discussion ranges over metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and language, and reveals the fundamental structure of Neoplatonist thought; the book is essential reading for all who work in this area. Lloyd shows that while Neoplatonism is (...) not a modern philosophy, it is indeed philosophy in the modern sense. (shrink)