Justin E. H. Smith

The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy: A Workshop (Updated)

Princeton University, Department of Philosophy

May 7-8, 2011

Provisional Program:

Raphaële Andrault, université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne: "The Notion of Life in the Physicotheology of Ralph Cudworth and Nehemiah Grew: A  Comparative Study"

Catherine Abou-Nemeh, Princeton University: "Réaumur’s Crayfish Experiment in Hartsoeker’s Système: Regeneration and the Limits of Mechanism"

Gideon Manning, Caltech: "How Descartes' Medicine Made the Scientific Revolution"

Anne-Lise Rey, université de Lille: "Metaphysical Problems in Francis Glisson's Theory of Irritability"

François Duchesneau, université de Montréal: "'Organism' in the Leibniz-Stahl Controversy"

Ohad Nachtomy, Fordham University and Bar-Ilan University: "Leibniz and the Logic of Life"

Justin E. H. Smith, Concordia University and the Institute for Advanced Study: "Blood Transfusion and Pythagoreanism in the Royal Society"

Karen Detlefsen, University of Pennsylvania: "Finality and Functional Explanation in Descartes' and Malebranche's Theories of Living Beings"

Domenico Bertoloni-Meli, Indiana University: "The Uniformity of Nature and the Diversity of Organisms in the Early Modern Period"

Andreas Blank, Universität Paderborn: "Julius Caesar Scaliger on Biological Species and the Ordinary Power of God"

*

Organized by Justin E. H. Smith and Ohad Nachtomy.

Funding provided by the Princeton University Council on the Humanities, and the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University.

This event is open to the public.

For more information, please contact Justin Smith: jehsmith at ias dot edu

Divine Machines: An Interview at New APPS

Today is the first in a series of New APPS Interviews, which will run every Wednesday through the end of May, picking up again in September. 

Today's interview is with Justin E. H. Smith, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ from January through June 2011. His new book, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life has just appeared with Princeton University Press (2011). 

*

John Protevi: Thanks very much for doing this interview with us, Justin.  Your book is subtitled “Leibniz and the Sciences and Life,” yet in the Introduction you also write that you will look at Leibniz in relation to "what we would now call 'biology'." Why the scare quotes on "biology"?

Justin Smith: I don't take those as scare quotes so much as marks signaling a use-mention distinction. One of my guiding principles in the book was, to the extent possible, to respect actors' categories, to avoid using names for concepts, practices, or entities that would not have been familiar to the people I was writing about; and 'biology', for example, makes its first appearance only in the late 18th century.

JP: fair enough. What is at stake in this use-mention distinction for you in writing in the genre of history of philosophy? (If that is indeed the genre in which you would place your work.)

JS: This is not just terminological quibbling: it is rather a necessary part of working one's way back into the problems that early modern philosophers faced, rather than allowing ourselves to update their problems so that they come out as more familiar to our own world of concerns than they in fact are. I certainly take this task to be a necessary and incontrovertible part of history-of-philosophy scholarship. The branch of philosophy that interests me is what was called at the time 'natural philosophy', which would later be sliced off and partitioned into biology, chemistry and other concrete 'sciences'. If we take actors' categories seriously, then, when we do the history of biology or chemistry we are willy-nilly doing the history of philosophy.

To continue reading, go here.