Justin E. H. Smith

PHIL 420/609B: MATTER THEORY AND ALCHEMY FROM JĀBIR IBN HAYYĀN TO ISAAC NEWTON

PROFESSOR JUSTIN SMITH (JUSTISMI@ALCOR.CONCORDIA.CA)
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY, CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

AUTUMN, 2009, CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
W 17:45-20:15 SGW

With guest appearances from:

•    Victor Boantza, Department of History, McGill University
•    Andrea Falcon, Department of Philosophy, Concordia University
•    Vera Keller, Department of English, McGill University
•    Ted McCormick, Department of History, Concordia University

Brief Description:

The natural philosophy of the 17th century is marked by a widespread effort to redescribe natural change exhaustively in terms of the size, shape, and motion of subvisible particles or corpuscles. This endeavor has long been held to have constituted a wholesale rejection of premodern theories of natural change, which relied upon a metaphysics of matter and form being guided through change in accordance with their natural ends or teleology.

But early modern natural philosophy has its prehistory, too, and part of this takes us back to some rather unlikely sources. In this seminar, we will consider the roots of modern natural philosophy in the tradition of what Bill Newman, reviving a lapsed actor’s category, has called ‘chymistry’, which is to say the practical and theoretical investigation of the nature of mixtures and compositions. In passing, we will also touch upon a number of related subjects, such as the nature of ‘the occult’, the conceptual problems of perpetual motion and magnetism, and the epistemological issues arising within the new experimental philosophy of the early modern period. We will be adopting a rigorous historical and contextualist approach to the philosophical questions arising from our chosen topic, and so will also have occasion, in an interdisciplinary spirit, to consider the social, economic, and technological forces at play in the chapter of natural philosophy we have undertaken to study.

New Table of Contents

DIVINE MACHINES:
LEIBNIZ’S PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

1.    The Place of Biology in Early Modern Science
2.    Hard Problems, Old and New
3.    The Corporeal Substance Problem: Compatiblism, Incompatibilism, and Beyond
4.    Leibniz’s Towering Predecessors: Aristotle, Descartes, and Hobbes
5.    Leibniz’s Synthesis
6.    A Note on Terminology

PART I: FIRST THINGS

CHAPTER 1: ‘QUE LES PHILOSOPHES MEDICINASSENT’: LEIBNIZ’S ENCOUNTER WITH MEDICINE AND ITS EXPERIMENTAL CONTEXT

1.    Chemistry and Iatrochemistry
2.    The Directiones ad rem medicam pertinentes (1671)
3.    The Paris Notes
4.    The 1690s: Griping Pains and ‘Fables to the Deaf’
5.    The De causis febrium (1704-5)
6.    The Polemic against G. E. Stahl in Relation to Leibniz’s Earlier Works on Medicine
7.    Leibnz and Animal Experimentation

CHAPTER 2: ‘THE HYDRAULICO-PNEUMATICO-PYROTECHNICAL MACHINE OF QUASI-PERPETUAL MOTION’: LEIBNIZ ON ANIMAL ECONOMY

I.    The Idea of Animal Economy
8.    Introducing the Animal-Economical Manuscripts
9.    The Machina animalis (1677)
10.    The Corpus hominis et uniuscujusque animalis est machina quaedam (1682-6)
3.1. Nutrition
3.2. Fermentation
4. The De scribendis novis medicinae elementis (1682-3)
5. The De causis febrium (1704-5)
6. Nerve Fibers and Muscle Contraction: The Influence of Bernoulli, Baglivi, and Hoffmann
7. The Animadversiones in G. E. Stahlii Theoriam medicam veram (1709-10)
    7.1. Soul as Perceiver vs. Soul as Body-Preserver
7.2. Animal Economy, Preestablished Harmony, and the Best of All Possible Worlds
     8. Conclusion