par Moreau, Elisabeth 
Référence 2nd Annual OZSW Conference in Philosophy (7-8/11/2014: Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
Publication Non publié, 2014
Référence 2nd Annual OZSW Conference in Philosophy (7-8/11/2014: Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
Publication Non publié, 2014
Communication à un colloque
| Résumé : | This paper is centered on early modern matter theories in the medical framework, in particular the attempts of conciliating the academic medical authorities with controversial matter theories such as atomism.In the Renaissance, the highly successful north Italian model of university training (with Padua as its most famous exponent) tailored the philosophy training to the higher faculty of medicine. The academic assumption was that the physician in training would first obtain the bases in natural philosophy before progressing to the applied medical art. At the institutional and doctrinal level, this meant that the medical student could move from Aristotle’s philosophical system to Galen’s medical theory. The intellectual framework started from a philosophical matter theory with four basic qualities (warm, cold, moist and dry) and elements (earth, water, air and fire) mingling into substantial mixtures, to a medical matter theory that relied on the bodily temperament. In turn, the temperament defined our bodily set-up, whose imbalances explained our diseases, and the therapeutical practice. The application of the Aristotelian matter theory to the living human body was at once a traditional post-Avicennian topic and also a challenging question engendering a proliferation of theories in the early modern period. The term physicus, which evolved from a name for the "natural philosopher" to that of the medical doctor (indeed, the physician in English), demonstrates this continuum from natural philosophy to medicine succinctly. The same holds for the evolution of the term physiologia from a synonym for medieval "natural philosophy" into the late Renaissance description of the part of medicine explaining the functioning of our body.In fact, it is physiology that constitutes the focus of this paper. More specifically, I will consider the physiological descriptions of digestion, expressing the common elemental nature of food and human body through the assimilation of nutriments into bodily parts. I will look at a series of philosophically trained physicians: Jean Fernel (1457-1558), Andreas Libavius (1550-1616), Daniel Sennert (1572-1637) and Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637). All of these figures belong roughly to the tradition of Renaissance Galenism, in the sense that they followed Galen in explaining bodily processes. What I will examine in this presentation is how it could happen that despite their shared Galenism, and despite Galen’s explicit rejection of an atomic structure of matter, some of them started to postulate an atomic structure of matter in the early seventeenth century. In such a medical (observational or otherwise empirical) context, Libavius, Sennert, Beeckman and others deviated from the Aristotelico-Galenic understanding of matter and moved towards postulating a discrete structure of matter. However, it is striking that each of them did so for different reasons. Some did so because of considerations concerning the origin of disease, others because of alchemical and pharmaceutical reasons, others because they moved towards a mechanistic conception of the body as a machine made up of canals and pipes. Overall, this paper indicates the context of the alleged "revival of atomism" among early modern philosopher-physicians. At the same time, it casts doubts on the coherence of this "revival". The picture that emerges thus confirms the findings of the previous lecture, by Elena Nicoli, on the eclectic use of ancient sources (in her case Lucretius, in mine Galen) in explaining a specific range of phenomena, and the resulting heterogeneity of the resulting matter theory. |
