Justin E. H. Smith

Fifth Annual Conference of the Leibniz Society of North America

June 15-17, 2010
University of California, San Diego

Wednesday, June 15
9:00 am            Welcome
Workshops
9:15-10:30        Editing Leibniz’s Manuscripts (Leibniz-Forschungsstelle)
10:30-12:00      Textual Sources of Leibniz’s Late Philosophy (Donald Rutherford/Justin Smith)

Session 1          Chair: Mark Kulstad (Rice)
1:30-3:00           Paul Lodge (Oxford), “A Guided Tour of the Leibniz-De Volder Correspondence”
3:00-4:30           Stephan Meier-Oeser (Leibniz-Forschungsstelle, Münster), “The Leibniz Code: Semantic Transpositions in Leibniz’s Language of Metaphysics”
4:30-6:00           Daniel Garber (Princeton), “Monadological Metaphysics and the Composition of the ‘Monadology’”

Thursday, June 16
Session 2           Chair: Julie Walsh (UCSD)
9:00-10:30         Stefan Jenschke (Leibniz-Forschungsstelle, Münster), “Perception and Substantial Unity in Leibniz’s Late Metaphysics”
10:30-12:00        Jeffrey McDonough (Harvard), “Leibniz’s Irenic Account of Substance”

Session 3            Chair: Justin Smith (Concordia)
1:30-3:00            Richard Arthur (McMaster), “Presupposition, Aggregation, and Leibniz’s Argument for a Plurality of Substances”
3:00-4:30            Arnaud Pelletier (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation/Leibniz-Archiv, Hannover), “Between the ‘Two Systems’: Leibniz’s Late Reflections on Modifications and Accidents”
4:30-6:00            Thomas Leinkauf (Leibniz-Forschungsstelle, Münster), “The Vinculum Substantiale and the Impact of Metaphysics in Leibniz’s Concept of Reality”

Friday, June 17
Session 4            Chair: Shane Duarte (Stanford)
9:00-10:30           Laurence Carlin (Wisconsin, Oshkosh), “Leibniz’s Final Teleological System”
10:30-12:00         Martha Bolton (Rutgers), “Leibniz on Perception, Appetition and Trans-temporal Identity in the Later Years”

Session 5            Chair: Stephen Puryear (North Carolina State)
1:30-3:00            John Whipple (Illinois, Chicago), “Leibniz’s Exoteric Philosophy”
3:00-4:30            Brandon Look (Kentucky), “The Principles of Leibniz’s Final Philosophy”
4:30-6:00            Donald Rutherford (UCSD), “Method and System in Leibniz’s Late Philosophy”

For further information, contact Don Rutherford (drutherford@ucsd.edu)
Conference website:http://leibnizphilosophy.wordpress.com/

Peut-on lire la Genèse comme histoire naturelle?

Voici le texte de la conférence que j'ai donnée dans le cadre du colloque, "Les Arts de Lire des Philosophes à l'Âge Classique," à l'École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, le 21 mai, 2011.

Blood Transfusion and Pythagoreanism in the Royal Society

Justin E. H. Smith and Cameron Brown

[Presented at the workshop, The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, May 7, 2011]

Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood quickly gave rise to experiments on transfusion of blood between animals. The Cornish physician Richard Lower went so far as to declare himself 'the second Harvey' for having, in 1666, successfully caused blood to circulate back and forth between two dogs, connected by tubes, in front of a spellbound audience at the Royal Society. Respiration and digestion were traditionally seen as two physiological processes that separated living bodies ontologically off from inanimate things: a living body, unlike a stone, remains the individual body it is in virtue of its constant exchange of matter with its environment; it has no cohesion, but is constantly in flux. The circulation of the blood showed that it was in constant internal flux as well, and intraspecies transfusion showed that this flux need not necessarily remain contained within the boundaries of the infividual body. But it was the possibility of interspecies transfusion that generated the most serious metaphysical problems, indeed quite new problems that had not arisen in earlier attempts to understand processes such as nutrition and digestion in terms of a corporeal-substance metaphysics. As early as 1671 G. W. Leibniz recommended that “One should not cease to make tests involving the transfusion of the blood, at least in animals, as in England a weak horse was made strong again by the use of fresh sheep’s blood (Smith 2011, Appendix 1). To the extent that blood was identified variously as the bearer or as the substance of the sensitive and nutritive soul of an animal –the variety of soul that was traditionally seen as being shared in common among all members of a species—to transfuse from one member to another was only to transfer some share of an already shared sort of soul. But the possibility of interspecies transfusion complicated matters by suggesting that one kind’s sensitive soul could animate a member of another kind, thus posing a threat to the very stability of biological kinds. In this paper, we will summarize the key moments in the debate about transfusion in the 1660s, particularly in the English context but also in the work of Jean-Baptiste Denis in Paris. We will argue that quite apart from the experimental success or failure of these experiments, the fact that they were so short-lived --all taking place within the three-year period from 1666 to 1668-- may have something to do with the incompatibility of experimental success with the available background metaphysical theory of the nature of biological species difference.