[Proposal for Membership at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2010-11]
Modern natural philosophy has often been characterized as taking shape in large part out of the rediscovery of certain legacies of ancient thought, particularly the atomism and incipient materialism of Epicurus and his follower Lucretius (see, e.g., Wilson 2008). But this rediscovery of the legacy of antiquity occurred simultaneously with the geographical discovery of what is too often bracketed by historians of science and, more grievously, by historians of philosophy, as ‘the rest of the world’. In the book I am currently researching, I intend to present an interpretation of the impact of this latter discovery on early modern natural philosophy, and also to show why its impact on natural philosophy is relevant to the emerging understanding of human nature (or the absence of it) over the course of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Though seldom noted by historians of philosophy, interest in the world beyond Europe’s boundaries was omnipresent in early modern natural-philosophical texts. To cite a particularly vivid example, William Harvey, as reported by George Ent in the epistle dedicatory to the former’s Anatomical Exercitations concerning the Generation of Living Creatures of 1653, believes that
the whole earth now lies open before us, and the zeal of our travellers has made us familiar not only with other countries, and the manners and customs of their inhabitants, but with the animals, the vegetables, and the minerals also that are met with in each. And, indeed, there is no nation so barbarous which has not discovered something for the general good that had been overlooked by more civilized countries. But whall we imagine that nothing will accrue to science from such advantages as we now possess, or that all knowledge was exhausted in the earlier ages of the world? If we do, the blame most certainly attaches to our indolence, nowise to all-bountiful nature.
I will be focusing upon three distinct elements of Harvey’s rich observation: (i) the animals, vegetables, and minerals discovered over the course of the first few centuries of European exploration, as well as other features of the natural environment; (ii) the idea that no nation is ‘so barbarous’ that it ‘has not discovered something for the general good’; and (iii) ‘other countries, and the manners and customs of their inhabitants’. These correspond respectively to the three three major parts of the book, which I have labelled ‘Nature’, ‘Natives and Nature’, and, finally, ‘Human Nature and Human Difference’.
I. Nature
In the first part of the book, I will show how the real discovery of new plant, animal, and mineral kinds, as well as the presumed discovery of physical and meteorological phenomena unknown in Europe, transformed natural philosophers’ understanding of the extent of the work left for them to complete, as well as of the methods by which to complete it.
One of the great insights of early modern cosmology, and also eventually of mathematical physics, had been that, always and everywhere, the same laws hold as here. This was an insight of mechanical philosophers such as Descartes and Leibniz, who both believed, for example, that the arc of a projectile such as a cannonball can be studied by the same methods and with the same presuppositions as the motion of the heavenly bodies; and it was also an insight of the less well known chemical philosophers, who believed that microcosmic machines could be made to reproduce in miniature the workings of the whole world. Yet this distinctly modern view that partout et toujours, tout et comme ici, to use Leibniz’s formulation, appears to be challenged by many of the reports coming in from around the world by explorers and naturalists. It is not just that people are different in the far Antipodes, but that the behavior of nature seem different as well. There is thus a problem of what we might call the ‘local nuances of universal physics’: Kepler worried that light is refracted differently at the poles, to cite one well-known example. Problems such as this directly impacted debates about the relevance of individual observations to the discovery of regularities in nature: individual observations are also always local observations, and as science become an endeavor of global reach, both in that it extended around the world and in that it sought for laws expected to remain valid always and everywhere, such observations would prove both problematic and indispensable (Cooper 2007).
Beyond the physical and meteorological contours of the far reaches of the globe, the most important respect in which the extra-European world posed a challenge to natural science arose from the vast numbers of new species of flora and fauna waiting to be incorporated into European catalogs and practices. It was precisely the expansion of knowledge of these domains, and particularly the expansion of botanical knowledge, that served as the impetus for new taxonomic projects that would go beyond the entrenched reliance on the authority of, e.g., Theophrastus’s botanical classifications, limited as they were to species of the eastern Mediterranean. The immensity of the project of describing the new kinds of plants, and to a lesser extent animals, that became known through exploration brought with it no small doubt about the completability of the science of nature, which is to say about the attainability of exhaustive natural knowledge. Yet the expansion of the task of science was itself an incentive to reconceive scientific inquiry as a project that can be carried out even as one lacks knowledge of its end point. Thus Robert Boyle notes that “adventurous Navigators… have often doubted, whether what they had so imperfect a sight of, were a Cloud, or an Island… judg’d it advisable to steer towards it… for if it were a deluding Meteor [i.e., a cloud], they would not however sustain so great a loss in that of a little labor, as in case it were a Country, they would in the loss of what might prove a rich Discovery… if they desisted too soon from their Curiosity, they could not rationally satisfie themselves, whether they slighted a Cloud or neglected a Country.” The discovery of America, while seeming to push further from sight the end of the search after knowledge, also provided a model and inspiration for perseverance in the absence of a perceptible end goal.
II. Natives and Nature
In the second part of the book I intend to show how the immensity of the task of accounting for these new things and phenomena brought about a dependency upon the natural knowledge of indigenous peoples, and thus, problematically, a dependency of science upon precisely the sort of non-scientific knowledge systems from which it was in the process of distinguishing itself.
Shapin (1994) has emphasized the importance of local expertise in the acquisition of scientific knowledge in the early modern period, as for example in the reliance of men of science upon uneducated divers for information concerning the effects of water pressure on the human body. In many cases, particularly in the identification and classification of plant, animal, and mineral kinds not native to Europe, natural philosophers had no alternative but to rely on the local knowledge of members of cultures generally held to be by nature lacking sufficient rationality to fully participate in the scientific endeavor themselves. This reliance created a sort of epistemological tension: scientific claims are only as trustworthy as the scientist who communicates them, yet often science was constrained to rely upon native knowledge if there was to be any advance at all in knowledge of the natural world beyond Europe’s borders. I will be focusing on cases of this sort of reliance in the scientific disciplines of botany, zoology, and to a lesser extent also chronology and meteorology. These are the domains for which the richest record remains of a history of appropriation and absorption on the part of Western science of non-Western knowledge, and of an epistemological tension of the sort just described. Moreover, there is compelling evidence that botanical and zoological knowledge was and is shaped by universal features of human cognition (see Atran 1991; Lloyd 2007), and that the differences between different cultures’ taxonomical systems are underlain by deeper affinities. These could explain in part the relatively smooth exchange of knowledge in these fields in early modern exchanges between cultures: European systems of living nature may have shared certain universal features with, and so have remained more rooted in, the sort of folk-science one could expect to find, for example, among Native Americans at the beginning of the Columbian era than would have been the case, e.g., in the increasingly mathematized and abstract mechanical physics of the same era. I will produce a number of case studies that reveal the significant extent to which a variety of areas of scientific study in Europe were influenced by non-European systems of knowledge and practices. These will include, to cite just a few examples, G. W. Leibniz’s work on medicinal roots and his arguments for the utility of studying non-Western pharmaceutical practices; Wilhelm Piso and Georg Markgraf’s influential Historia naturalis Brasiliae of 1658, which argues for the same, but from a more experienced point of view; Nicolaes Witsen’s innovations in ethnobotany in his natural histories of Muscovy and Tartary; the reliance on indigenous knowledge in learned journals such as the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Sçavans; and the origins of comparative chronology and its impact on the interpretation of biblical cosmogony.
III. Human Nature and Human Difference
Finally, in the third part of the book, I will investigate the relationship between the encounter of different natural-knowledge systems in the early modern period, on the one hand, and on the other the gradual emergence of distinctly modern ideas about human physical and behavioral diversity, in, for example, the physical anthropology and racial science that begins to appear over the course of the 18th century in the work of Buffon, Kant, Blumenbach and others. One of the motivating insights of this research program as a whole is that human diversity is a ‘problem’ not just at the ethical and the political level, but also at the theoretical and natural-philosophical level. Though early modern political philosophy witnessed the rise of egalitarianism and liberalism, the sort of equality conceived in these philosophies was and only could be equality among equals, and it was in large part left up to science or natural philosophy to determine who was to count as equal. The sort of questions asked by natural philosophy were: Do we all have the same origins? In spite of our superficial differences, do we all have the same nature? Does nature have the power to alter human nature? Here I will focus on the account of human origins, and the subsequent dispersion and differentiation of the human species, given in the ‘cosmographies’ of the 17th century and in the new ‘systems of nature’ of the 18th century. I will show how this genre of natural-philosophical speculation, in offering hierarchicalized classifications of higher primates and of human types, in turn would give rise by the mid-18th century to systems of scientific racism. Particular topics of interest will include the controversy surrounding Isaac La Peyrère and the polygenesis debate, and more generally the connection between libertine thought and non-biblical accounts of human origins; the origins of the concept of race in the work of François Bernier and others, as well as its philosophical roots and its connection to contemporaneous metaphysical debates about essences; pre-Darwinian theories of organic change, particularly as they relate to what we would describe as the phenotypic diversity of the human species, and particularly in connection with the explanation of the perceived physical differences between Europeans on the one hand and Africans and Native Americans on the other. In this connection, I will be particularly interested in considering the ‘degenerationist’ accounts offered by Buffon and others of the perceived inferiority of New World (and, more particularly, New French) flora, fauna, and peoples. In sum, I will be studying the long history of the gradual transition from missionary universalism --the view that ‘savages’, as members of God’s creation, share equally in humanity with Europeans, and it is only their ignorance of the revealed truth of scripture that explains their perceived inferiority-- to scientific racism.
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Throughout the book, although I will deal with a wide range of texts and authors, G. W. Leibniz will stand as a representative par excellence of the globally informed natural philosophy of the early modern period to which I wish to draw attention. He is the principal bridge between my earlier work in the history and philosophy of biology and this new project, and he is also an important node in the global networks of natural-knowledge acquisition I am now researching, from his early proposals to Louis XIV for colonial expanison into Africa and eventually the New World, to his later links to naturalist explorers in Asia, such as Nicolaes Witsen, the author of the 1692 work Noord en Oost Tartarije. Already in my earlier work I have begun to consider Leibniz’s systematic interests in universal taxonomy; his early designs on the Canary Islands and the connection of this plan with his interest in natural resource extraction as well as in the theory of the formation of the earth; and his interest in establishing the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences largely as a node for the accumulation of natural knowledge from the Eurasian sphere. In all of the parts of the book outlined above, Leibniz is a key player. Having written an exhaustive study of Leibniz’s philosophy of biology, to appear from Princeton University Press in early 2010, I am now interested in understanding the broader network of authors who shared these global concerns with Leibniz. I expect to publish the intended book, with Princeton University Press as well, in 2012 or 2013. It will be my central research focus for the coming years, and my exclusive focus during the period of membership at the Institute.
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