Justin E. H. Smith

Embodied Selves in a World of Atoms: The Case of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

(Forthcoming in the volume on 'Embodiment' in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series.)

At its most capacious, 'atomism' can be taken to refer to any theory according to which the world consists in elementary units, which are not further analyzable into something more elementary. 'Units' should be understood here not to refer to particles, but to any physical or metaphysical, quantitatively or qualitatively basic principle from which the perceptible world derives. The most familiar variety of atomism, the variety that can still be called 'atomism' even in the most restricted sense, takes the basic units as elementary particles that are (i) physical; (ii) ungenerable and incorruptible; and (ii) qualitatively neutral or lacking in 'secondary' qualities, as the color, smell, etc., of compound bodies emerge from the arrangements of the atoms constituting them.

If we take atomism of this latter variety as the standard model, which we might call 'Democritean', then we may begin to construct a typology of atomisms by plotting them in relation to criteria (i)-(iii). At some remove from the Democritean model we find Leibniz's theory of monads, according to which the basic units of reality are indeed ungenerable and incorruptible, and are responsible for the qualitative variety of the phenomenal world without themselves bearing these qualities, and yet according to which, by contrast with Democritean atomism, these requisites are not the physically indivisible constituents of the phenomenal world, in the way bricks are the constituents of a house, but rather are the metaphysical requisites of the physical world. Leibniz calls them variously 'atoms of substance' or 'metaphysical atoms'. Commentators have tended to take this doctrine, and Leibniz's labels for it, as amounting to a rejection of atomism, but on a certain more capacious view of what atomism might be, we could instead take Leibniz's claim that he is committed to metaphysical rather than physical atoms as commitment to a variety of atomism.

 Quite a bit further still from the Democritean model we find the momentary quality atoms of the 7th-century CE Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti, or of his predecessor, the 6th-century philosopher Dignāga. These are atoms only in the sense that they are the basic units of reality, not constituted by anything else, and not comprehensible in terms of something more fundamental. Buddhist philosophers posited these as the fundamental ingredients of the world in the course of a denial of any more stable or enduring world of real individual substances.

One implication of any version of atomism might be thought to be that there can be no composite substances, which is the same thing as to say that there can be no embodied selves, and that anything composed out of atoms will remain only an arrangement of atoms, an ens per aggregatum. An important development in subsequent Indian philosophy however, as I will describe in this chapter, would be an attempt from within an orthodox school of what would later be called ‘Hindu’ philosophy to argue, against the Buddhists, that embodied selves can exist within an atomic universe. The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school worked out a coherent account of how the world can consist both in atoms and at the same time, in contrast to the Buddhist denial of the self, in selves that are necessarily embodied in complex arrangements of atoms.

Two principles that would seem to be incompatible with atomism are called in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy avayavin or 'whole', and sāmānya or 'universal'. According to D. N. Shastri, these are the "two chief synthetic or unifying principles" at work in this school.[1] Yet the principle attainment of at least the Vaiśeṣika branch of this school was to spell out an atomistic theory of the natural world, and an important question arises as to how any atomistic doctrine could possibly accommodate real wholes, let alone universals universals. In at least this regard, the Dharmakīrtian variety of atomism is rather more coherent, or at least predictable, to the extent that it takes only dharmas or discrete moments to exist, and denies any causal connection between them or synthesis of them. Such synthesis can exist only in our thought, according to the Buddhists. Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, by contrast, wants to have both atoms as well as real, embodied, composite substances.

Here, Leibniz's metaphysical atomism shows up as a middle road, as he evidently believes that, as a result of the perceptual activity of the simple substances from which compound bodies result, these compound bodies may be elevated to the level of corporeal substances, which is to say true unities per se, grounded metaphysically in an embodied self, or, as Leibniz puts it, something analogous to the moi. At the same time, Leibniz utterly denies the reality of universals, which by contrast Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika strongly defended. In this chapter I would like to go some distance towards illuminating the philosophical justification of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika defense of ‘substance atomism’, which simultaneously reduces reality to elementary particles, yet holds onto the reality of the substances, and even of the universal kinds, constituted by these particles. I would like, in particular, to show how the coherence of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika account of embodied wholes is grounded in, and inseparable from, this school’s parallel theory of universals—a prima facie outlandish theory according to which the universal is literally inherent in the individual whole in a manner comparable to the inherence of water in a pot.  

Both Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika atomism and Leibnizian corporeal-substance theory might be accused of seeking to have their cake and eat it too. But this accusation is wrong in both cases, since in both cases it is precisely the unifying function of the moi or soul, or Leibniz, or the mind (manas) for Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika that transforms the thing in question from a bodily aggregate to an embodied substance. This comparative approach may help us to gain insight into the parameters of, and the range of possibilities in, thinking about the problem of embodiment. Ordinarily (as in, e.g., Epicureanism, Gassendism, Buddhism, among others), atomism is taken to hold that there simply are no indissoluble, transcendent selves behind or prior to the collections of atoms. But this is not the case in the varieties of atomism we are considering here. Our examples show, in fact, that on a certain understanding of atomism, one which has emerged independently on different continents and in different centuries, the very purpose of invoking atoms as the basic ingredients of reality is not at all to explain away composite wholes, but rather to give a coherent account of the nature of their composition, an account of a reality that is analyzable down to an atomic level, but that nonetheless consists in real, complex, composite, embodied selves.

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[1] D. N. Shastri, Critique of Indian Realism: The Philosophy of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Its Conflict with the Buddhist Dignāga School, Delhi, Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1997 [1964], 306.

Tierexperimente als Erkenntnistheorie in der frühen Neuzeit

Ein Vortrag an der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek zu Hannover, Freitag, 29 Juni, 2012. 

Zusammenfassung. Was haben die Naturphilosophen der frühen Neuzeit gehofft, von Tieren zu lernen? Insbesondere: Was glaubten sie, konnte man dadurch erreichen, sie aufzuschneiden? In einem frühen Text mit dem Titel Directiones ad rem medicam pertinentes von 1672 legt Leibniz nahe, dass man durch Vivisektion an Tieren, in Kombination mit Untersuchungen an menschlichen Leichen, ein zusammengesetztes Bild davon erhalten kann, wie der menschliche Körper inwendig funktioniert; und diese sind von höchstem Interesse für die Philosophen der frühen Neuzeit mit ihrem entschiedenen Interesse an Gesundheit und langer Lebensdauer als Komponenten eines guten Lebens. Aber diese Vorstellung setzt eine hinlängliche Ähnlichkeit zwischen tierischen und menschlichen Körpern voraus, um Rückschlüsse von jenen auf diese zu rechtfertigen, was vielleicht so lange relativ unproblematisch ist, wie man über bloße Anatomie spricht. Aber wenn man die Aufmerksamkeit auf die Vitalprozesse und auf die Untersuchung der Sinne, der Reizung und ähnliches richtet, muss das Modell der Tier-Maschine unausweichlich in den Hintergrund treten. Weit davon entfernt, dass dieses Modell tatsächlich als Impuls und Rechtfertigung für das Aufkommen der Vivisektion in der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts diente, wie oft geglaubt wird, gab es in Wirklichkeit, wie ich darlegen werde, einen breiten Konsens – wie wir besonders in den theoretischen Schriften über Vivisektion von Leibniz, Richard Lower und Robert Boyle sehen –, dass es gerade die Unrichtigkeit des Modells der Tier-Maschine war, die die Vivisektion zu einem lohnenden und Erkenntnis versprechenden Unternehmen machte.

 

Georg Ernst Stahl y la curiosa historia del “Vitalismo” Leibniziano

[I Congreso Iberoamericano Leibniz, San José, Costa Rica, 10-12 Julio, 2012. Gracias a Leon Garcia Garagarza y Rafael Nájera por la traducción]

Hasta la fecha, los estudiosos sólo han tenido un acceso muy limitado a los documentos relacionados con el amargo debate que G. W. Leibniz y Georg Ernst Stahl mantuvieron acerca del papel del alma en el cuerpo y sobre las fuentes de la movilidad corporal. Las únicas dos o menos traducciones completas del latín –la de Blondin de 1864 y la de Carvallo del 2004--, adolecen, cada una a su manera, de fallas y no son enteramente confiables. En ambas, la falla más significativa es que las dos toman como base de sus propias publicaciones la edición de la correspondencia mediada titulada Negotium otiosum, seu Skiamachia [Una contienda fatigosa, o: Boxeo de sombra] que Stahl diera a la luz en 1720, a pesar de que, como sabemos ahora –y como pudiera adivinarse a partir del temerario título que escogió—el mismo Stahl presentó un recuento completamente distorsionado del debate, tanto en el modo en el que enmarcó el debate en su prefacio, como en las notas y en las interpolaciones que añadió a las partes del debate dedicadas a representar las opiniones de Leibiniz, por no mencionar las frecuentes alteraciones de las propias palabras de Leibiniz. Si acaso Stahl creía que “boxeaba con la sombra” de su enemigo, esto es porque éste ya llevaba cuatro años muerto, y no estaba pues en condiciones de realizar un contraataque.

Sin embargo, un examen de los manuscritos que Leibiniz le enviara al intermediario Carl Hildebrand von Canstein entre 1709 y 1711, nos muestra la mente filosófica de Leibiniz en su punto más sutil, y constituye la expresión más madura de sus ideas fisiológicas y filosóficas acerca de la estructura y la función de los cuerpos vivos., Cada participante en la contienda epistolar enarbola ideas opuestas sobre la naturaleza de la vida y sobre el sistema de los principios que rigen el mundo de los fenoménos. Stahl rebate la perspectiva micro-mecanicista en los intentos contemporáneos por explicar los procesos fisiológicos, mientras que Leibiniz se erige por su parte como un firme partidario de tal perspectiva, y se empeña en establecer una mathesis specialis aplicable a los cuerpos orgánicos, capaz de correlacionar las inferencias empíricas con los modelos mecanicistas y de eslabonar el conocimiento práctico con el teórico. Stahl y Leibiniz exponen concepciones divergentes sobre la conexión entre el cuerpo y el alma y sobre el papel que los principios psíquicos tienen en la formación, organización y funcionamiento de las “máquinas de la naturaleza.” Ambos difieren asimismo en su evaluación de la relevancia que tiene la teleología para explicar las funciones y las disfunciones, así como los comportamientos normales y patológicos de los animales y de los seres humanos.

En este trabajo se argumentará, en primer lugar, que el prolongado argumento de Lebniz contra la opinión de Stahl acerca del papel del alma en el cuerpo constituye su más enérgico rechazo a la doctrina que poco tiempo después vendría a denominarse 'vitalismo', según la cual la vida es, a fin de cuentas, una fuerza no corporal que juega un papel causal en el ámbito corporal, en particular, el papel de preservar la estructura del cuerpo a través del tiempo. Para el Leibniz maduro, por otro lado, la vida es solamente percepción, y por lo tanto incumbe sólo a sustancias simples. Los cuerpos animales, en contraste, tienen su organización y funcionalidad como resultado de 'sólo su estructura vegetativa', es decir, como resultado de factores estrictamente no vitales y micromecánicos. Tal y como bromea Leibniz, si el alma tuviera la responsabilidad de mantener unido el cuerpo, entonces, como Crísipo había observado antes que él, realmente no estaría haciendo nada más de lo que hace la sal en un jamón curado. 



Sin embargo, desde las décadas inmediatemente posteriores a la publicación del Negotium otiosum y hasta el día de hoy, persiste la impresión de que la teoría leibniziana del cuerpo orgánico constituye al menos una concesión parcial al 'vitalismo' tras el evidente fracaso del mecanicismo austero de un Descartes o un Borelli. De hecho, algunos han visto en la teoría de Leibniz sobre la estructura orgánica del cuerpo una anticipación de ese tipo de vitalismo materialista que caracterizaría mucha de la filosofía natural francesa del siglo 18, un vitalismo según el cual toda la materia está viva y no existen individuos vivientes discretos. Fue en parte en vista de este aspecto del legado de Leibniz que Jacques Roger se quejaría de que "en general, el siglo 18 no comprendió muy bien la metafísica de Leibniz". ¿Cómo podemos explicar esta pobre comprensión? En este trabajo se argumentará, en segundo lugar, que el variado legado de Leibniz en el siglo 18 tiene mucho que ver con el hecho de que no hubo un sólo Leibniz en ese periodo sino varios Leibnizes locales. El Leibniz escoriado en Halle por ser un mecanicista impío no le habría sido para nada familiar a los científicos naturales franceses que, como mínimo, habrían pensado que Leibniz no era lo suficientemente impío. En general, podríamos decir que éste último grupo se enfocó en el pan-organicismo de Leibniz, según el cual todo en el mundo tiene una estructura orgánica, y lo confundió con pan-vitalismo, mientras que Stahl se enfocó en la doctrina leibniziana de la armonía preestablecida y correctamente comprendió una importante consecuencia de ella: que, a pesar de que todo el mundo está estructurado orgánicamente, nada en el mundo, al menos si se considera desde el punto de vista fenomenal, está vivo.



En tercer lugar, finalmente, se argumentará aquí que los argumentos de Leibniz contra Stahl no alcanzan a ser una concesión al vitalismo, sino que, en efecto, son una radicalización del anti-vitalismo que Leibniz había heredado de la tradición mecanicista: Descartes, después de todo, había dejado abierta la posibilidad de que al menos algo de la percepción estaría fundamentada en órganos y procesos corporales. Si se quiere entender el verdadero carácter del anti-vitalismo de Leibniz se debe primero, sin embargo, dirigir la atención a la preocupación con que Leibniz se opone a lo que él considera como involuntaria impiedad de los pietistas de Halle, incluyendo a Stahl, quien creía que Dios permite entidades 'vice-gerentes' para manejar la estructura y movimiento de los cuerpos. Al final, para Leibniz, el vitalismo de Stahl, así como la teoría de Newton del 'sensorium', es, de hecho, una variedad de animismo, y Leibniz, quizás mucho más que cualquier otro mecanicista, es extremadamente sensible al peligro de lo que él considera un incipiente culto a la naturaleza. En este sentido ha sido un error entre algunos de los seguidores y comentadores de Leibniz el suponer que la introducción del concepto de organismo de parte Leibniz tiene algo que ver con rechazo al mecanicismo: de hecho, tal y como el debate con Stahl muestra, este concepto permitió a Leibniz ofrecer una versión de mecanicismo adecuada para la tarea de explicar la estructura y movimiento de los cuerpos animales sin tener que hacer referencia a lo que el veía como la noción transcendental de 'vida'.

*


Bibliografía

T. Blondin, Œuvres medico-philosophiques et pratiques de G.E. Stahl, Tome VI, Paris: J.-B. Baillière & fils, 1864. 



Sarah Carvallo, La Controverse entre Stahl et Leibniz sur la vie, l’organisme et le mixte, Paris: Vrin, 2004.

François Duchesneau and Justin E. H. Smith, The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy, in The Yale Leibniz Series, Yale University Press, forthcoming.

L.J. Rather and J.B. Frerichs, “The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy, I: Leibniz’s opening objections to the Theoria medica vera”, Clio Medica, 3 (1968), 21-40.



L.J. Rather and J.B. Frerichs, “The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy, II: Stahl’s Survey of the Principal Points of Doubt”, Clio Medica, 5 (1970), 53-67. 



Georg Ernst Stahl, Skiamachia, sive, Negotium otiosum, Halle: Litteris & Impensis Orphanotrophei, 1720.

Towards a General Science of the Past: Abductive Inference and Inductive Consilience in Paleontology, Archeology, and History

Annual Lecture Series of the Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh

November 18, 2011.

Abstract. What are the special epistemological problems that arise in the sciences that aim to know the past? And is there a problem with calling these sorts of inquiry 'sciences' at all, to the extent that they are concerned with non-present and non-repeatable states of affairs? It was in large part in view of its pastness that Karl Popper qualified evolutionary theory as a 'metaphysical research programme'. Carl Hempel was more or less alone among 20th-century philosophers of science in making the case for the possible scientificity of history, yet for him history was to be conceived first and foremost as involving the subsumption of particular events under 'general historical laws'. For Hempel, the study of the past need no more be concerned with particular events or things than theoretical physics is. Yet even if the record of past events reveals patterns and regularities, those who study them must confront and explain irreducible singularities --why this outcropping of rock looks just like this and not some other way, or why this burial mound is exactly the size it is-- that sharply divide the sciences of the past from the sciences, like physics, to which Hempel hoped to assimilate them. It is this distinguishing feature that led G. W. Leibniz to define history, whether natural or civil, as nothing other than the science of res singulares, and that since the time of Leibniz has led many thinkers to suggest that criteria for truth and knowledge in the historical sciences must be established differently than in other fields. Two notable examples of such suggestions are, first, C. S. Peirce's notion of abduction, as distinct from both induction and deduction, which, though he did not propose it mainly for this purpose, has been particularly well suited in such fields as paleontology and archeology to the task of reasoning back to a particular event from its particular traces; and, second, William Whewell's description of evolutionary theory as a 'consilience of inductions'. In this paper, I would like, first of all, to describe the early development of a methodology for the 'science of singular things' in the work of Leibniz and his contemporaries, particularly in their effort to reconstruct the earth's biotic past based on fossil evidence. Next, I will move on to consider more recent reflections, from the evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson and others, on some of the inherent epistemological difficulties in the classification of extinct species, and how this sets the project of paleontological taxonomy apart from the taxonomy of living species. Then I will turn to a consideration of the theoretical engagement with the epistemological obstacles confronted in the project of knowing the past as this has developed in archeological theory over the course of the 20th century, focusing particularly on the processualist school, which attempts to apply Hempelian ideas about history as science within a concrete domain of empirical inquiry. In all of the areas of inquiry we consider --evolutionary theory, paleontology, archeology, and civil history--, I hope to show, first of all, that the same basic difficulties are confronted: a fact that strongly favors an approach to any one of these fields as a branch, along with all the others, of a general science of the past. Second, I aim to show that the unifying thread in all of these was most clearly discerned in the 17th-century notion of 'natural history', and in particular in the insight of the natural historians that the distortive effect of the passage of time in the vestiges history studies --as when the onion-like layers of a mammoth tusk erode-- might be approached not as an impediment to real knowledge of the past, but rather as the very key to its reconstruction.

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.

Leibniz on the History of Nations and the Theodicy of Cultural Difference

[Abstract submitted for the Theodicy anniversary conference at Notre Dame, Fall, 2010]

Leibniz composed the Theodicy at the very peak of his activity as a historian. Contrary to widespread belief that he undertook this activity only grudgingly, in fact he pursued his historical research with great interest (even if he did it more slowly than his employer would have liked), and even saw it as inseparable from his broader intellectual project-- his philosophy, if you will. Thus he complains to Nicolaes Witsen in a letter of 1698 that "people criticize me when I attempt to take leave of the study of mathematics, and they tell me that I am wrong to abandon solid and eternal truths in order to study the changing and perishable things that are found in history and its laws" (Ger'e 1873, No. 36). And in a 1708 draft of a proposal to Peter the Great for the classificatory system to be used in the eventual library of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Leibniz identifies history, alongside mathematics and physics, as one of the three ‘Realien’ or distinct domains of science, namely, the one that "involves the explanation of times and places, and thus of singular things" including "the descriptions and attainments of kingdoms, states, and peoples" (Ger’e 1873, No. 73).

But what are the laws of the study of res singulares? And do these laws cover all human affairs, or only a certain subset of them? There is a commonplace of later German philosophy of history, extending at least from Kant to Marx, according to which history just is European history, since only Europe had succeeded in initiating the process of global change that alone makes human life more than static, and thus, by implication, more than animal. Thus Kant thought that the inhabitants of undiscovered South Sea islands are no more the subjects of history than are sheep, while Marx maintained that the British imposition of industrial weaving equipment in Bengal had been a blessing to those upon whom it was imposed, since it is only through technological change that cultural change can happen, and history just is cultural change. The distinction that Marx would later make in terms of technology was made by Leibniz, mutatis mutandis, in terms of religion: only those who have been absorbed into the "true doctrine of the unity of God and the immortality of souls" (Theodicy, Preface) may be considered as having lived, as Kant would later put it, a life worth living, and it's only a life worth living that is a life worth writing down, which is to say a historical life.

For at least the early Leibniz, there is no hierarchy of races (pace Fenves 2005), but only a basic distinction between barbarians on the one hand and children of God on the other. This dichotomy comes out very vividly in, for example, an early text such as the Method for Insituting a New, Invincible Militia of 1671, in which he proposes that "slaves captured from all over the barbarian world will be brought [to an island such as Madagascar], and from all of the wild coastal regions of Africa, Arabia, New Guinea, etc. To this end Ethiopians, Nigritians, Angolans, Caribbeans, Canadians, and Hurons fit the bill, without discrimination. What a lovely bunch of semi-beasts!" (A IV i, 408-10). In an important sense, it is true that what Leibniz is proposing is 'without discrimination': the people he proposes to treat in this horrific way are suitable subjects of such treatment because they lack knowledge of what Leibniz would call in the Theodicy the 'true doctrine'; if they had this knowledge, their Ethiopian or Canadian origins would immediately become irrelevant to their moral status. Leibniz's conception of how one might come to hold this true doctrine, moreover, changes dramatically over the course of his career. In 1671, he probably held that baptism alone could suffice; by the time of the Theodicy, in contrast, the paths to the true doctrine are many. One such path is Islam: Mohammed, he writes, "showed no divergence from the great dogmas of natural theology: his followers spread them abroad even among the most remote races of Asia and of Africa, whither Christianity had not been carried; and they abolished in many countries heathen superstitions which were contrary to the true doctrine of the unity of God and the immortality of souls" [Theodicy, Preface, 51]. By the time of the Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, composed in 1715-16, Leibniz no longer requires even a genealogical connection to the Abrahamic tradition and its revelations in order for a people, such as the Chinese, to come to knowledge of the true doctrine of God. Thus the clear distinction of the 1671 New Method between us and them begins to collapse, as the possibility opens up that the semi-beasts might simply happen upon knowledge of the true doctrine by means of an innate, or natural, theology.

Already, we have ample material to ask a number of Theodicy-inspired questions about Leibniz's conception of the histories of nations, and his conception of the nature of human cultural difference. Does Leibniz have any sort of account of the conditions under which a community, such as the Chinese, might arrive unaided at the sort of natural theological knowledge that moves one out of the barbarian's world? Is there moreover any deep reason, motivated by Leibniz's abiding commitment to the harmony of the world order, and the explanation of degrees of perfection in terms of God's choice of the best --because most plenitudinous-- order, why there should be barbarians at all? That is, can we ask in the conceptual terms provided for us in the Theodicy, why there are barbarians in the same way that we are already familiar with asking, and with answering by means of tools the Theodicy gives us, the question as to why there are mosquitoes or earthquakes?

I will argue that we in fact can approach the question of cultural difference in terms of the basic argument of the Theodicy, and indeed that Leibniz believes, notwithstanding his explicit disdain for barbarianism, that cultural diversity is good when considered in a holistic way. Evidence that this is in fact what he thinks can be discerned, I will argue, in much of his work, contemporary to the Theodicy, on the ancient history of preliterate Eurasian peoples such as the Scythians and the Huns, and on their languages as the sources of modern living languages. In this respect, Leibniz's mature conception of history is much more capacious than that of Kant or Marx: it includes everyone, and it includes the entire span of human existence, even what would later come to be called 'prehistory'. 

Finally, I will argue that, for the reasons already spelled out, Leibniz's philosophy of culture and of cultural difference places him in a lineage that will later include not Kant and Marx, but rather the communitarian thinker Johann Gottfried Herder: Leibniz and Herder both believe that cultural distinctness is rooted in linguistic community, that the cultural identity preserved by language is one that is more deeply rooted than the written records of history conceived as the sequence of recorded events, and that, ultimately, distinct cultures cannot be measured against one another, but rather each has its place in the whole order of human culture, and each is in the end, in spite of the superficial uniqueness of its cultural forms, an expression of the same underlying human reality.

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Select Bibliography

Peter Fenves, “Imagining an Inundation of Australians; or, Leibniz on the Principles of Grace and Race.” In Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, edited by Andrew Valls, pp. 73-89. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Stefano Gensini, Leibniz: L'armonia delle lingue. Bari: Biblioteca Universale Laterza, 1995.

V. I. Ger’e (Ed.), Sbornik pisem i memorialov Leïbnitsa otnosiashchikhsia k Rossii i Petru Velikomu. Saint Petersburg, 1873.

Schulenburg, Sigrid von der, Leibniz als Sprachforscher. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1973.  

De la mécanique tractorique à la pyrotechnie: le modèle leibnizien de l'animal-machine

(À présenter au Colloque québécois de philosophie moderne, université de Sherbrooke, 10-11 octobre, 2009)

Justin E. H. Smith

On ne risque pas de susciter de grandes controverses en proposant que les étiquettes 'mécaniste' ou bien 'philosophe mécaniste' sont hautement imprécises.  Il n'y a, semble-t-il, ni des conditions nécessaires ni sufficientes qui justifierait la classification de certains philosophes commes des mécanistes, tout en excluant d'autres philosophes de ce club préstigieux.  Mais il y a un problème encore plus serieux que ça: on ne sait non seulement pas qui doit être qualifié comme 'mécaniste': on ne sait pas très clairement non plus comment penser la catégorie de machine dans le sens accepté à l'âge classique. La plupart des chercheurs ont simplement présumé qu'un seul type de machine --celle qui est mue par la force de poulies, de roues dentées et de leviers, et qui est qualifiée par Kaspar Schott dans son traité de 1567, Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica, comme 'tractorique'-- peut servir comme modèle de la mécanicité en général. Les philosophes dits 'mécanistes' ont par conséquence très souvent été critiqué d'avoir laissé libre cours à leurs imaginations analogiques, car évidemment le corps d'un animal (pour prendre comme exemple l'obstacle le plus serieux à quelleconque science tractorique universelle) n'est pas constitué par un ensemble de roues et de leviers. Mais en fait il y a eu une multitude de types de machines, chacune ayant un principe de mouvement fondamentalement différent de celui de la machine tractorique. Comme le suggère le titre du livre de Schott, le jésuite allemand était surtout intéressé par les machines qui sont mues par la force de l'eau et de l'air. D'autres penseurs --et particulièrement ceux comme Cornelis Drebbel et Joachim Becher qui rêvaient de construire des machines de mouvement perpetuel-- s'intéressaient plutôt aux principes chimiques, comme la fermentation, qu'à la tractorique comme sources de mouvement dans la machine. D'autres encore, comme Robert Boyle et G. W. Leibniz, s'intéressaient tout d'abord à ce que celui-ci qualifiera comme la 'machine hydraulico-pneumatico-pyrotechnique', c'est à dire, la machine qui est conservée en mouvement grâce au juste milieu d'air, d'eau, et d'un type d'explosion qui ressemble à celle qui est provoquée par la poudre à canon. D'après Leibniz, le corps animal est précisément une machine de ce type.  Etant donné que Leibniz était aussi un panorganiciste, pour lequel à la fin du compte tout ce qu'il y a dans le monde n'est qu'un corps animal ou un corps qui ressemble à celui d'un animal, ça doit aller sans dire que ce n'est pas qu'une question mineure que de demander comment Leibniz a envisionné la mécanicité du corps animal. Dans ce propos donc je me propose d'esquisser la théorie leibnizienne de la machine hydraulico-pneumatico-pyrotechnique, et en ce faisant de montrer son importance pour notre compréhension de sa théorie de substance corporelles, et finalement pour notre compréhension de son ontologie profonde. Sur la base de cette analyse de Leibniz, je vais argumenter qu'en général le mécanisme du second 17e siècle, loin d'être une sorte de 'bidulisme' naïf qui chercherait à reduire toute la complexité des êtres naturels à un modèle qui s'inspirait de la dernière invention technologique, ou qui ne serait qu'une pure invention de l'imagination analogique, en fait essayait de prendre compte des connaissances gagnées dans la première instance de l'observation de la nature elle-même.  Donc c'était pour les 'mécanistes' la nature qui dictait ce qui doit ou peut compter comme machine, et pas les machines qui dictait les principes qui regnent dans la nature.

Race, Essence, and the Historical Life of Natural Kinds

[Presented in the colloquium series of the Boğaziçi University Philosophy Department, 21 July, 2009]

Recent research at the boundary of cognitive anthropology and philosophy in the field of ‘folk taxonomy’ or ‘folk biology’ has drawn remarkable conclusions about the regularity of certain aspects of classification across cultures.  Atran 1990 has argued that in the highly structured and articulated domain of folk-taxonomical knowledge, there are universal constraints upon the different ways different cultures may carve the world up, and that Aristotle, and later Linnaeus, were no more free of these constraints than were the Guatemalan Indians whose taxonomic system Atran himself studied. Francisco Gil-White 2001 has extended this programme of research from cognition of animal and plant kinds to subkinds of the human species, that is, to what are generally called 'races'. Gil-White's argument is that not only is there an a priori structure for cognizing and classifying biological species, but human cultural groups are also, in turn, constrained to think of other human cultural groups on the model of biological species: that is, the same innate tendency toward essentialism about animal kinds is what makes human beings, everywhere and for the most part, racists. But there are some points of disanalogy that threaten Gil-White's thesis, the most important being that species are biologically significant categories (even if evolutionary theory has taken them down a few notches from their earlier status as eternal natural kinds on a par with gold or even triangles), whereas races are not. Part of Atran's thesis had been that, while rough, folk-biological taxonomy generally maps reliably onto the divisions in nature, whereas there simply are no corresponding divisions in nature that might enable "folk racial science" to "get it right." Where then do racial categories come from, if not an a priori fit between the mind and the natural world? Here, it will be helpful to introduce Hacking's notion of 'historical kind', and to consider in terms of it the relatively recent emergence of 'race' as a distinctively scientific category. What we see when we do this is that, while some variety of us/them dichotimization may be an inelimnable feature of human cognition of social reality, it was by no means inevitable that this feature should develop into a quasi-biological classificatory scheme. For this to happen, there also had to be a distinct confluence of ideas, particularly in the work of Buffon, Blumenbach, Kant and others, about human nature and human diversity. The aim of this talk will be to spell these out.

From Tractorics to Pyrotechnics: Leibniz's Model of Animal Bodies

[Submitted for the First Quebec Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, université de Sherbrooke, October 10, 2009]

Scholars have long been aware that 'mechanist' or 'mechanical philosopher' is a very slippery label. There seem to be no necessary or sufficient conditions for classifying certain philosophers as mechanists but not others, and much as with 'feminist' or 'analytic philosopher', the prudent taxonomist will simply permit all self-identifiers to come under the label, while withholding it from anyone who does not actively embrace it. But things may be even more problematic than we've thought: not only do we not really know what a mechanist is; we also don't have a clear idea of what is to count as a machine.  Most scholars have taken one kind of machine --the machine driven by pulleys, gears, and levers, and identified somewhat derisively by Kaspar Schott in his 1657 Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica as a merely 'tractoric' machine-- as the model of mechanicity in general.  'Mechanist' philosophers have accordingly often been criticized for letting their analogical imaginations run wild, since patently animal bodies (to cite the most obvious stumbling block for a universally applicable science of tractorics) are not composed of gears and levers.  But there were in fact many other kinds of machine, driven by fundamentally different principles than those of the clock.  As the title of his book suggests, Schott was mostly interested in machines driven by water and air.  Others --particularly those such as Cornelis Drebbel and Joachim Becher who sought to build their own perpetual-motion machines-- were more interested in chemical principles such as fermentation than in tractoric principles as a source of machine motion. 

Still others, such as Robert Boyle and G. W. Leibniz, were principally interested in what Leibniz would call 'hydraulico-pneumatico-pyrotechnical [HPP] machines', that is machines that are kept in motion by the appropriate interaction of air, water, and a certain kind of chemical explosion akin to that in gunpowder.  Leibniz thought animal bodies were just such a machine.  Given that Leibniz was also a panorganicist who believed that, in the end, everything is an animal body or somehting like it, clearly it should be important for scholars to pay attention to the sort of machine he took animal bodies to be.  In this presentation, I shall summarize Leibniz's theory of HPP machines, and I shall attempt to show the importance of this theory for our understanding of his theory of corporeal substance, and ultimately for our understanding of his deepest ontological commitments.  On the basis of Leibniz's example, I shall further argue that much late-17th-century mechanism, far from amounting to a crude 'contraptionism' that would seek to reduce the complexity of natural beings to whatever passed at a given moment of history for state-of-the-art technology, in fact sought to incorporate knowledge of processes gained in the first instance from direct investigation of natural processes that clearly defied any attempt to model them tractorically. 

‘A corporall Philosophy’: Language and ‘Body-Making’ in the Work of John Bulwer (1606-1656)

[To appear in Ofer Gal and Charles Wolfe (Eds.), Embodied Empiricism (Springer Verlag)]

Justin E. H. Smith

Francis Bacon, in his 1605 work The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, argued for a ‘real character’ or artificial language that would be able to communicate intended meanings from one person to another with perfect transparency.  This is a project that would be important throughout the rest of the century, with thinkers such as Samuel Hartlib, John Wilkins, and G. W. Leibniz all making significant contributions to the study of aritifical and formal languages. 

Notes of Cogitations are of twoo sortes; The one when the Note hath some Similitude, or Congruitie with the Notion; The other Ad Placitum, hauing force onely by Contract or Acception. Of the former sort are Hierogliphickes, and Gestures. For as to Hierogliphickes, (things of Ancient vse, and embraced chiefly by the AEgyptians, one of the most ancient Nations) they are but as continued Impreases and Emblemes. And as for Gestures, they are as Transitorie Hierogliphickes, and are to Hierogliphickes, as Words spoken are to Wordes written, in that they abide not.

In some fashion or other, it is the first kind of ‘Hierogliphickes’, in the sense Bacon describes here, that will dominate in the 17th-century efforts to develop an ideal, artificial writing system, one that would not be based on mere convention, but would instead serve transparently for producing ‘Emblemes’ of the things one wishes to denote.  The second variety Bacon identifies, gesture, will in contrast gain little attention.  Yet little attention is not none at all.  Over the course of the 1640s, the obscure Baconian natural philosopher John Bulwer would develop his predecessor’s notion of transitory hieroglyphics into an elaborate system, one that would indeed serve as the starting point for the later sciences of, among other things, sign language and sociolinguistics. 

According to Jeffrey Wollock, Bulwer would entirely ignore Bacon’s interest in an ideal language, focusing instead exclusively upon Bacon’s characterization of gesture, indeed turning this into the centerpiece of his chirological project. According to Wollock, “this was in part because [Bulwer] retained older views on the inherent ontological harmony between man and the universe, but also because, for Bulwer the physician, the underlying neurophysiological basis of gesture confirmed it as the universal ‘language’ of humanity.”  It would be more correct to say, however, that Bulwer does not abandon the search for an ideal language, but indeed believes that he has already found one in gesture.  In examining why he believes this, we might be able to discern an important rift in 17th-century debates about the universal character, between those who believe that this can be nothing other than an artificial language, and those who believe that it is precisely artifice that obscures meanings, and that any universally comprehensible system of communication will be perfectly natural as opposed to artificial.  But in considering Bulwer’s understanding of the natural, and of the way that nature equips bodies with a sort of mute natural language, we are also able to gain access to a curious, if not terribly influential,  theory constituting a point of contact between early modern philosophy of language on the one hand and the early modern metaphysics of body on the other.  The best way to draw this connection out, over the course of the following two sections, will be to focus on Bulwer’s very different --and at first glance unjustifiably different-- judgments about two different ways in which the body is implicated in human activity: as the vehicle of meanings in body language, and as the object of human artifice in tattooing, foot-binding, and other forms of body modification. 

A Role for Physiology in the Development of Leibniz's Mature Metaphysics?

(Submitted for publication in Smith and Nachtomy (Eds.), Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz, under consideration at Springer)

In the little known text entitled "De novis scribendis Medicinae elementis," conclusively dated by lexical and watermark evidence to the very beginning of the 1680s, Leibniz hopes to account for 'life' (that is, perception and motion), in terms of the 'economy' of the animal body alone. Decades later, in contrast, he will decouple the faculty of perception --in view of which a substance may be said to be living-- from the body, and will root it in the simple immaterial substance. In his later writings, life is just perception, and perception is a non-bodily, spiritual faculty. What early physiological texts such as the "De novis scribendis" (or the "Machina animalis" of 1677, or the "Corpus hominis" of 1680-82) strongly suggest is that Leibniz's mature metaphysical elaboration of just how perception, and the complementary notion of appetite, work in the non-bodily monad seems to have first been worked out in the course of explaining the perception and appetite of animal bodies in straightforwardly physiological or 'animal-economical' terms.

Paragraphs 4-7 of the text (see below) constitute its philosophical core.  Here he says that perception is the primary function of the human body; and the "procuratio" of perception, which I've translated as "ordering", is the secondary function.  Here, in sharp contrast with the later writings, perception is dependent on the organs of sense; and the ordering of perceptions is dependent on the motion of the body.  The greater facilitation of perceptions is the greatest end for an animal or human, and is experienced as an agreeable perception.

In this text, the organs of generation are included among the organs of motion, as generation itself is the procuring of a most agreeable perception through motion. The organs of nutrition, which humans and animals have in common with plants, must already be functioning in order for motion, and then sense, to arise. While Leibniz distinguishes these from the organs of motion, he also describes both the organs of motion and of nutrition as facilitating conditions for the procuring of perceptions (and thus as requisites for the achievement of the greatest human end), indeed describing nutrition as the greatest facilitator of perceptions, insofar as the particles of the body are continually in flux, and without nutrition neither the organs of motion nor of sense could continue to cohere for very long.

In early, physiological texts such as this one or the "Machina animalis," Leibniz believes in the possibility of 'perceiving machines', and that perception is a faculty of the organs of sense, which rely on the organs of motion for the procuring of more perceptions, which in turn rely on the organs of nutrition for their initial formation and for their enduring existence.  Later, Leibniz would attribute everything but perceiving to the ordinary functioning of the machine, and would take this faculty to be the one thing that an animal does that cannot be explained mechanically.  In Leibniz's most mature work on physiology, as one would expect from the philosophical texts of the same period, the perception that is identified with life is no longer seen as a bodily process at all, and the body's motion is something Leibniz now hopes to derive, as he writes to Stahl in 1709-10, from the body's "vegetative structure alone."  Vegetation or nutrition, in turn, neither gives rise to motion and perception, nor is it any longer something that need be explained in terms of the inherence of a soul-like substance, which is to say in terms of perception.

I will accordingly argue in this paper that one of the great innovations of the mature philosophy, an innovation which enables the mature theory of monads to take shape, is the separation of perception from the organs of sense, and the separation of appetite or procuratio from the organs of motion.  The mature analysis of these faculties, though, seems unmistakably to be rooted in Leibniz's early physiological interests, and only subsequently transferred out of the domain of physiology, all the while retaining its original structure. It will thus be argued that this is a case in which Leibniz works out a general account of what's going on fairly early on, but then eventually changes his idea as to what sort of entity this is to be an account of.

Genealogy or Convergence?

Leibniz and the Spectre of Pagan Rationality

(Published in Leibniz: What Kind of Rationalist? Ed. Marcelo Dascal. Springer Verlag, 2008).

In his early years, Leibniz was influenced by the tradition of prisca theologia, a vestige of Renaissance humanism according to which all wisdom must flow from the same source— namely, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, who eventually passed it on to the Greek philosophers.  Because the events of the Gospels were prefigured or intimated by way of typologies in the Old Testament, moreover, it was often thought that the Hebrew prophets were able to share in the evangelion of the New Testament, and in this way Judaism was effectively elided with Christianity, at least in comparison with straightforwadly infidel faiths.  As an apologetic project, this tradition effectively baptized any would-be pagan or infidel one might wish to admire or emulate by positing a hidden connection to revealed truth.

In his mature period Leibniz would look at this tradition with a great deal of skepticism.  For him, if all knowledge is one, and texts from different traditions share in the same truth, this is not because they have the same historical source, but because God gave all men the same ability to rationally comprehend the order of nature and so to know Him through his works.  As Daniel Cook has rightly noted, Leibniz “believed that the superiority of Christianity over other religions was not based on revelation, but on its proximity to natural, rational religion.”  Even if Leibniz believes, as he writes in the Nouveaux essais, that “[w]ith regard to ancient writings . . . we need to understand Holy Scriptures above all things,”  he anticipates that the day will come when "the Romans, Greeks, Hebrews and Arabs have been used up,” and at this point “the Chinese will come to the fore with their ancient texts.”   Scripture, then, is a valuable, but not exclusive, source of ancient wisdom.