Justin E. H. Smith

Experiment, Culture and the History of Philosophy

A guest post for the Early Modern Experimental Philosophy Research Project at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

A question of central methodological importance for the historian of philosophy concerns the appropriate relationship between the aspects of philosophy’s past that a scholar takes on, on the one hand, and on the other the current agenda of non-historical philosophy. Recently, in the results of a query launched by Mark Lance at the NewAPPS blog, my own deep worry about the state of the discipline was confirmed: a good many non-historian philosophers believe that, at the end of the day, history-of-philosophy scholarship should make itself relevant to the cluster of questions currently being investigated in philosophy. I could not disagree more strongly. To riff on John F. Kennedy’s famous line, I believe that we should not be asking what the history of philosophy can do for us, but rather what we can do for the history of philosophy. That is, we should be attempting to do justice to past thinkers by carefully reconstructing their own world of concerns. In doing so, we shall often have to move beyond the boundaries of what we consider philosophy (and even of what they considered philosophy).

I have argued in many fora that we should respect the historical usage of the term ‘philosophy’. Some have objected that it is a semantic issue –as in, a mere semantic issue– what might have been called by a certain name in another era. What is important, they say, is whether the activity so-called in fact has any continuity with what we are doing when we do philosophy. To some today, the discontinuity seems most evident when we consider early modern experimental philosophy. There simply is no meaningful sense, they maintain, in which we can think of meteorology as a proper part of philosophy, even if this is how it was conceived in the history of natural philosophy from Aristotle through (at least) Boyle.

To continue reading, please go here.

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.

'Curious kinks of the human mind': Cognition, Natural History, and the Concept of Race

This is a paper I am currently working on. It's something new for me, attempting to look at some salient moments in the history of so-called 'racial science', particularly the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the late 18th century, through the lens of recent cognitive-science literature on racial categorization. It tries to do a lot in a short space, and I don't know whether it all fits together yet. Comments are very welcome.

Immanuel Levy, Ueber den Vitalismus in der Mineralquellen-Lehre (Leipzig, 1862)

This work is remarkable for a number of reasons. It is a contribution to the scientific literature on balneotherapy, or the treatment of illnesses through visits to mineral baths. It is also a vociferously anti-Leibnizian tract, which takes up G. E. Stahl's side of what by the 19th century had been cast as a show-down between vitalism and mechanism, with Leibniz defending the latter camp and the Halle Pietist physician defending the former. Remarkably, Levy's work contains an extensive paraphrase in Latin of Leibniz's side of the correspondence, which may be one of the first republications of the work after Stahl's original 1720 edition (followed by Louis Duten's 1768 edition of Leibniz's part).

But most of all it is an interesting work because it shows how surprisingly late a certain distinctive tradition of natural philosophy survived in German medicine, even coexisting with other, seemingly opposed tendencies which we associate with high modernism: Levy cites both Jean-Baptiste van Helmont and Auguste Comte as authorities on various questions.

I hadn't given it much thought, but vitalism --which looks at first glance like a hopeless, backwards-looking current kept alive into the early 20th century, a 'dead-ender', so to speak-- was in fact the last pocket of natural philosophy to go extinct, to give way to 'science' in the narrower sense we understand it today. By 'natural philosophy' here I mean the investigation of concrete scientific questions, and often of practical medical or therapeutic questions, in a way that typically begins by an invocation of the authority of ancient philosophical texts, and that never loses sight from there of the ultimate imperative to rerum cognoscere causas, which often requires one to invoke transcendent or non-natural principles --and in particular principles that are conceived on the model of souls--, even as it is purporting to elucidate very narrown domains of the natural world (such as the working of mineral baths).

Here are just a few excerpts that I hope to use at some point (probably in the 'Leibniz and Medicine' article I am supposed to be writing). It's a shame I didn't know about this before I finished my book.

*

Vitalism, in the legitimate sense, is the theory of the ultimate foundation of life.

Investigators of nature and physicians in all times --from the most ancient to the most recent-- have meditated upon the ultimate foundation, and have attempted to arrive at it.

We recognize in the calidum innatum of Hippocrates the Heraclitean philosophy; in the animistic vitalism of Galen the Aristotelian philosophy; in van Helmont's archeus influus and in the subordinate archei that are innate in the parts [we recognize] the neo-Platonic philosophy. The Cartesian 'cogito, ergo sum' led to Stahl's abstract animism, which defines his principium vitae as rational soul or nature acting vitally and with intelligence, for which the corporeal organs are only passive tools par excellence, whose activity is transmitted directly from the soul, [and] which carry out every motion only on orders from the soul. -- With ponderous genius Leibniz attempted in vain to gain a direct influence on this theory, which was put forth by Stahl in the Theoria medica vera with the strength and rigor that are characteristic of this deep thinker: [in vain, that is,] in that he elucidated the phenomena of life from a physico-mechanical standpoint, and sent his counter-comments to the author [i.e., Stahl]...

By conrtrast Leibniz found a spirit more receptive to his theory in Stahl's colleague at Halle, Friedrich Hoffmann, who, under the influence of this philosophy, at the same time took up Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood as a positive starting point for his mechanico-dynamical theory of life. But the Leibnizian philosophy continues to have a strong influence both in the natural sciences as well as in the medicine of the present era; it constitutes the basis of Lotze's mechanical theory of life...

All this simply by way of a preface to the description of that sort of vitalism that has arisen in the theory of therapeutic springs, has long influenced it and to some extent influences it still.

For vitalism in the theory of therapeutic springs, to the extent that it is not an expression for as-yet-unknown properties, manifests itself as pseudo-vitalism, as mysticism...

The meteorology of Aristotle treats the earth as an animated organism, whose inner life is announced by the manifold changes in the surgace, wherein parts variously dry out, while others grow saturated and so are elevated to a higher degree of life energy. Thus certain parts were transformed and renewed, and in this way the life of the earth differs from that of plants and animals, whose entire organism ripens and ages, without renewal...

That one can expect only mysticism in the views of the Middle Ages concerning mineral springs is self-evident. But in the modern age itself, after geology had already begun to develop as a science, and discoveries were made without which the perection of the theory of springs would never have been possible, the natural-philosophical tendency [in this theory] has had as a consequence that the Aristotelian treatment of the earth as an animated organism has again found much support, whereby the springs are the products of secretion, [or] according to others the products of the earth's respiratory process, or the respiratory process of a free activity that is bound up in a polarity with the moon. Schelling himself proposed the hypothesis of an 'organic-telluric galvanochemistry', which by means of [a process comparable to [?]] Volta's batteries brings about the formation of the mineral springs in the interior of the earth.

Now as concerns the 'spirits of the springs' especially, which for so long have manifested their monstrosity in the theory of therapeutic springs and to some extent, in a more or less concealed way, continue to do so, these are in fact of a completely modern origin, and have nothing to do with the spirits of the ancient authors, other than the name; or [at least] they are derived from a completely perverted account of these spirits. For these newer spring spirits are nothing but ghosts, while the spirits of the ancients were, as is unmistakable on an attentive reading, a way of describing gases, which they were not yet able to distinguish from one another chemically...

*

Der Vitalismus im legitmen Sinne ist die Theorie von dem letzten Grunde des Lebens.

Ueber diesem letzten Grund haben die Naturforscher und Aerzte aller Zeiten -- von den ältesten bis auf die neuesten -- nachgedacht und sich bemüht, ihm nahe zu kommen...

[Wir] erkennen in dem calidum innatum des Hippokrates die Heraklitische, in dem animistischen Vitalismus Galen's die Aristotelische, in dem archeus influus und den ihm untergeordneten archei partibus insiti van Helmont's die Neuplatonische Philosophie. Das Cartesianische 'cogito, ergo sum' führte zu dem abstrakten Animismus Stahl's, welcher sein principium vitae als anima rationalis seu natura vitaliter et cum intelligentia agens definirt, welchem die körperlichen Organe nur schlechthin passive Werkzeuge sind, denen ihre Thätigkeit unmittelbar von der Seele mitgetheilt ist, welche jede Bewegung nur auf Befehl der Seele ausführen. -- Auf diese, in der Theoria medica vera mit der dem tiefen Denker eigenen Schärfe und Konsequenz von Stahl durchgeführte Theorie versuchte mit weit überlegenem Genie Leibnitz vergeblich einen direkten Einfluss zu gewinnen, indem er vom physikalisch-mechanischen Standpunkte aus die Lebenserscheinungen beleuchtete und seine Gegenbemerkungen dem Author zuschickte...

Einen dankbareren Geist fand Leibnitz dagegen für seine Lehre in dem Halleschen Kollegen Stahl's, Friedrich Hoffmann, welcher unter dem Einfluss dieser Philosophie zugleich die Harveysche Entdeckung des Blutkreislaufs zum positiven Ausgangspunkte für seine mechanisch-dynamische Lebenstheorie nahm. Die Leibnitzsche Philosophie wirkt aber, wie in den Naturwissenschaften, so auch in der Medizin der Gegenwart noch fort; sie bildet die Basis der mechanischen Lebenstheorie Lotze's...

Dies nur als Vorbemerkung für die Schilderung desjenigen Vitalismus, welcher in der Heilquellenlehre aufgetreten ist, sie lange beeinflusst hat und zum Theil noch beeinflusst.

Denn der Vitalismus in der Heilquellenlehre hat, so weit er nicht als Ausdruck für noch unbekannte Eigenschaften aufgetreten ist, als Pseudo-Vitalismus, als Mysticismus sich manifestirt...

Die Meteorologie des Aristoteles betrachtet die Erde als belebten Organismus, dessen inneres Leben durch die mannigfachen Veränderungen der Oberfläche sich kundgebe, wobei abwechselnd Theile austrockneten, andere wasserreich würden und somit zu höherer Lebensenergie zu erhoben. So alterten abwechselnd die einzelnen Theile und verjüngten sich wieder, und hierdurch unterscheide das Leben der Erde sich von dem der Pflanzen und Thiere, deren ganzer Organismus reife und altere, ohne sich zu verjüngen...

Dass man vom Mittelalter auch in den Anschauungen über die Mineralquellen nur Mysticismus erwarten kann, versteht sich von selbst. Aber selbst in neurer Zeit, nachdem die Geologie bereits als Wissenschaft sich zu entwickeln angefangen und Entdeckungen gemacht hatte, ohne welche die Vervollkommnung der Quellenlehre niemals möglich gewesen wäre, hat die naturphilosophische Richtung es zur Folge gehabt, dass die Aristotelische Betrachtung der Erde als eines belebten Organismus wieder vielfachen Ausdruck fand, wonach dann die Quellen die Sekretionsprodukte, nach Anderen die Produkte des Athmungsprozesses der Erde, oder einer freien, mit dem Monde in Polarität begriffenen Thätigkeit deselben wären. Schelling selbst stellte die Hypothese eines 'organisch-tellurischen Galvanochemismus' auf, welcher durch Voltasche Riesenbatterien im Innern der Erde die Entstehung der Mineralquellen bewirke...

Was nun aber speziell "die Brunnengeister" betrifft, welche in der Heilquellenlehre so lange ihr Unwesen getrieben haben und zum Theil, in mehr oder minder versteckter Weise, noch treiben, so sind diese eigentlich ganz modernen Ursprungs und haben mit den spiritus der älteren Schriftsteller nichts als den Namen gemein, oder sind aus gänzlich verkehrter Auffassung dieser spiritus hervorgegangen. Denn diese neueren Brunnengeister sind... nichts als Gespenster, während  die spiritus der Aelteren der bei aufmerksamem Lesen gar nicht zu missverstehende Ausdruck für die Gase waren, die man noch nicht chemisch zu unterscheiden vermochte...

The 'Catalog of Meats' vs. the Historia Animalium; Or, Why There Is No Sanskrit Zoology

Francis Zimmermann's 1982 La jungle et le fumet des viandes [The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats] is a remarkable book. Ostensibly, it is a study of Ayurvedic medicine by a student of the great ethnographer Louis Dumont, but it would be more correct to describe it as a contribution towards the anthropology of natural science, and in this respect to be an important precursor to works such as Scott Atran's Cognitive Foundations of Natural History of 1991.

While Atran focuses on an explicit comparison between folk-taxonomical systems, on the one hand, and on the other the Linnaean system at the foundation of scientific taxonomy, Zimmermann instead seeks to explain why there is nothing like zoological taxonomy in the Indian tradition. His answer is that zoology is effectively edged out by pharmacy, but that pharmacy, in turn, needs to be understood as implying both a cosmology and an epistemology based on 'qualities' (guṇa) and 'savors' (rasa). Understood this broadly, it is not surprising to find 'meats' among the things listed in the Indian pharmacopoeia, nor to find that it the 'cataloguing of meats' comes to play the role in the Indian tradition that the classification of animals would play for Aristotle.

Diet, Embodiment and Virtue in the Mechanical Philosophy (Revised)

This is a revised draft of a paper that will be appearing in a special issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, edited by Emma Spary and Barbara Orland, entitled "Assimilating Knowledge: Food and Medicine in Early Modern Physiologies." There are still a number of rough spots to be worked out in the citations and also, perhaps, in the argument. Comments are very welcome. --JS.

The Pre-Adamite Controversy and the Problem of Racial Difference in 17th-Century Natural Philosophy

For a pdf version of the article, click here. Forthcoming in M. Dascal, V. Boantza, and A. Cattani (Eds.), Controversies in the Scientific Revolution. This version replaces the earlier draft, entitled "Autochthony and Traduction: The Unity and Diversity of the Human Species in Early Modern Philosophy," which I posted on 28 March.

 

Race as Innate Schema and as Historical Kind: The Pre-Adamite Controversy in Context

[Forthcoming in in Marcelo Dascal, Adelino Cattani, and Victor Boantza (Eds.), Controversies within the Scientific Revolution (John Benjamins Publishing, 2010).

Justin E. H. Smith

Abstract. Recent research at the boundary of cognitive science, 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 is 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 ineliminable feature of human cognition of social reality, it was by no means inevitable that this feature should develop into a quasi-biological classificatory scheme. Some authors, such as Blaut 1993 and Hobson 2004 distinguish between implicit and explicit racism, the first of which "locates 'difference' through cultural, institutional and environmental criteria rather than genetic properties" (Hobson 2004, 220), while the latter, a 19th century invention, seeks to root racial difference in the available biological science of the era. On this definition, it stands to reason that there could not be explicit racism much before the late 18th century, since, after all, there was as yet no science of biology.

What both the cognitivist account as well as the theory of 'implicit racism' miss, however, is that there are significant ways in which one and the same theory of the other can serve vastly different purposes in different historical contexts. Perhaps no chapter in the history of thinking about human diversity illustrates this point better than the transformations in the theory of polygenesis from the mid-17th to the mid-19th centuries, which I propose to study in detail in this chapter. The most prominent early modern defender of polygenesis was Isaac La Peyrère, a French theologian and the author of the scandalous 1655 work, Prae-Adamitae. According to the Pre-Adamite thesis, there is a scriptural basis for the view that there were 'men before Adam'. Properly understood, scripture provides a way of accounting for the presence of human beings at the far corners of the globe, with no knowledge of the revealed truth of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and with physiognomies that could, with the limited and distorted information available, be thought to be different enough from those of Europeans to justify the claim of separate creations.

Now in context Pre-Adamism served to call into question the legitimacy of the missionary enterprise, which, however ethnocentric, was nonetheless based on a presumption of a universal human nature: these people warrant conversion because they are, at bottom, like us. While based in scripture, it undermined one of the central projects of the institutions that derived their authority from scripture. Its temperament was skeptical: given the available information about ancient history and prehistoric migrations of peoples, there was very good reason to think that the inhabitants of different continents and far-flung islands had to come into being separately from those people thought to be descended from Adam and Eve. In an earlier work, for example, the 1644 Relation de l'Islande, La Peyrère criticizes the view that the Icelanders, along with their revered 'prince' Odin, are descended from an errant faction of the ancient Roman army as follows: "[W]hat is the hope of being able to accept all of the fables that they tell about this Asiatic Odin, and what connection could such weak fables have with the age of Pompeius, which is an age so well known, and so historical?" (XXXV). For La Peyrère, the principle of parsimony spoke against the project of rooting all newly discovered peoples in the available historical tradition, but in the end it was just this that monogenetic accounts of human origins had to do in order to account for the ancestral link of, say, the Native Americans to the first parents in the Garden of Eden.

One of the implicit messages of early modern polygenesis might be summed up as: "let us leave them alone, for they are not like us." This went directly against the missionary outlook, which might in turn be summed up as: "let us interfere in their world, for they are like us." In this respect, early polygenesis anticipates the Herderian defense of irreducible cultural specificity, against the prevailing spirit of Enlightenment universalism. Yet by the 19th century, polygenesis theory would be remolded to support a very different sort of hortation: "let us dominate them, for they are not like us." In this period, it would come to serve as one of the principle arguments, especially in the United States, in defense of the now threatened institution of slavery. This remarkable malleability of the purposes to which the theory of polygenesis can be put strongly suggests that a cognitivist account of the innate basis of racial classification cannot tell us much of anything about racism as a factor in the social and political sphere. It also suggests that if we want to understand the history of racism, we would do well to turn our focus from the various accounts that have been offered of the nature of human difference, and pay attention instead to the way in which these accounts serve to buttress or undermine the political and economic institutions --such as missions in the 16th and 17th centuries, or slavery in the 19th century-- that benefit from systemic inequality.

We might have an innate tendency to essentialize cultural difference-- and this tendency might help to explain why a polygenetic account of human origins suggested itself so easily to a thinker such as La Peyrère. If we do have this tendency, then it is certainly something to be acknowledged and dealt with as a real factor in intercultural strife. But it is a mistake to suppose that this innate disposition is at the same time a disposition to enmity. Indeed, one very broad implication of the consideration of the history of the concept of race for the cognitivist thesis about the innateness of the perception of racial difference is this: what we are constrained to think given the innate structure of our minds often tells us next to nothing about how that innate structure will be expressed in a particular cultural form and in particular historical circumstances.

*

Scott Atran, The Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

James M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World (London: Guilford Press, 1993).

Francisco Gil-White, "Are Ethnic Groups Biological 'Species' to the Human Brain?: Essentialism in our Cognition of Some Social Categories," in Current Anthropology 42 (2001): 515-554.

John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Isaac La Peyrère, Relation de l'Islande (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1644).

---- ---- ---- ----. Prae-Adamitae, sive, Exercitatio super versibus duodecimo, decimotertio, & decimoquarto, capitis quinti Epistolae D. Pauli ad Romanos : quibus inducuntur primi homines ante Adamum conditi (Amsterdam, 1655).

Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work, and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987).

'Animal' as Category: Some Practical Consequences

[Forthcoming in Klaus Petrus and Markus Wild, Animal Minds and Animal Morals, 2010]

Abstract. The modern conception of moral status, in which humans are supposed to have absolute moral commitment to all other humans, while having no properly moral commitments, but only indirect ones, to the vast majority of other animals, is the result of a long and complex genealogy, and one that has yet to be written. If I speak of genealogy here it is because, with Nietzsche (1887), Foucault (1975), and Bernard Williams (1994), I wish to suggest that an investigation into the deep historical sources of a common assumption of the modern world might reveal, at the same time, the extent to which this assumption is merely or largely verbal, serving as the ad hoc account we give of a system of practices which only begins to make sense when we consider the way these practices emerge out of a world that did not share our assumptions. 

But how could the human-animal dichotomy have a genealogy at all? What could be more deep-seated, more natural, than this? It is certainly true that the idea that humans are a variety of animal is a very new one. But the default assumption throughout most of human history has been that animals are themselves people, if not exactly in the same way we are (Durkheim and Mauss, 1902; ; Lévi-Strauss 1962; Sahlins 1976). Animals and humans were for most of the history of homo sapiens members of a single, all-encompassing community, in which each member was capable of a certain kind of rational activity grounded in intention and in anticipation of the future; in which members of each kind had reciprocal obligations towards members of all other kinds (even if these obligations did not involve refraining from killing, whether one was to refrain or not was not centrally determined by whether the creature in question was an animal person or a human person); and in which there was no meaningful division between nature and culture, or between the boundaries of the human world and the vast expanses of inhuman and indifferent wilderness that surround it.

Nietzsche, Foucault, and Williams were interested, each in his own way, in determining how we came to account for the range of ways we treat other human beings, and in each case the answer had to do with the invention of something we call 'morality' over the course of Western history. I want to argue in turn that if morality is new, and the loss of a view of the world on which animals are persons is also new, it may be that these two developments are part of a package. That is, coming to think of people as having something we might call 'moral status', rather than just being governed by shame and necessity, or by prohibitions that impose themselves as if from outside as quasi-physical forces, rather than flowing from within as a result of one's autonomous agency, involved a corresponding need to sharply determine the boundaries of the realm of beings endowed with such status. The extension of moral status to all human beings, to put this another way, might have as its flipside the limitation of moral status to only human beings.

From an earlier model on which beings derived their importance from, let us say, their ecological role in a socio-natural theater that included human beings, a new picture emerged on which moral status had to be articulated in terms of criteria based upon the internal capacities of the different kinds of creature. The question was no longer: do these creatures play a vital role in the ecology that includes us?, but rather, are these creatures inwardly like us? Wherein this likeness is to consist would be a question that would receive different answers over the course of history, but most would be variations on the idea that, whereas we have rational souls, or reason, or agency, or language, or recursive language, or a developed neocortex, they do not. The exact way in which these distinctions were to make all the difference, or in which practical consequences were to follow from them, was never entirely clear.  As Richard Sorabji (1995) has noted, "they lack syntax, therefore we may eat them," is hardly a compelling inference.

On the account I wish to articulate, the discovery that there is something universally shared by human beings, regardless of country or clime, regardless of whether the humans in question are friends or enemies, meant at the same time that species became the sole criterion for the determination of the bounds of community.  Human beings came to have moral status because they had this new thing, morality, and for the first time the range of what you can or cannot do to them came to be determined by this new internal capacity.  At the same time, the range of what you can do to beings that are not characterized by that internal capacity grew without limit. The genealogy of morality, as the key defining feature of all human beings, goes together with what we might call the genealogy of animality: the creation of that class of beings that, as non-human, lies outside of the sphere of moral consideration altogether. 

*

Michel Foucault, Surveillir et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris, Gallimard, 1975.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage. Paris, 1962.

Marcell Mauss and Emile Durkheim, De quelques formes primitives de classification. Paris, 1902.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral [1887], in Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. De Gruyter, 1985.

Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason. University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. Cornell University Press, 1995.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity. University of California Press, 1994.

Theories of Generation and Form

[To appear in Peter Anstey (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century]

Introduction

The problem of generation, at its broadest, concerns the way in which entities that at one time do not exist, later do. The generation of animals is just one instance of this problem, as are the coming-into-being of minerals, plants, mountains and other features of the natural environment; planets, stars, and the cosmos itself.  In any given domain, there are, to put it succinctly, three possible solutions to the problem: (i) to hold that nothing ever really comes into being, but only emerges out of a new arrangement of preexisting material parts; (ii) to hold that nothing ever really comes into being, but is always itself pre-contained in the world in a hidden form; (iii) to hold that new creatures come into being as a result of the imposition of some new form on matter, either as a result of God’s direct intervention (as in the traditional Christian account of human embryogenesis) or of the transition of a previously merely potential form to actuality.  One might adopt one of these solutions for a given domain, and another for another: for example, one might hold that the generation of humans involves the supernatural creation of a soul by God in, say, the fourth month of gestation, while in contrast the ‘generation’ of a mountain is really just the rearrangement of already existing dirt.  But in general for those entities to which natural philosophers have traditionally wanted to ascribe some substantial reality, or reality over and above the parts that compose them, only the second or third solution would do. 

Thus, we may see the problem of generation as consisting in the set of fundamental questions: What things are such that their being cannot be accounted for in terms of the mere rearrangement of things in the world?  If their being is not due to such rearrangement, then how can we account for the fact that they do not appear to have always existed?  Have they in fact always existed, but in a manner unknown to us?  And how could the other option --that they are supernaturally created at a given moment-- be tenable if one is committed to the view, as so many 17th-century British philosophers were, that everything in the world unfolds according to rigid mechanical laws?  In this chapter, we will follow what appears to have been the convention in most natural-philosophical writing of the early modern period, in treating questions of 'biological' generation interchangeably with those coming from chemistry, mineralogy, meteorology, etc.  How do actually existing things come into being?  That is the question, whether it concerns humans, frogs, chemical compounds, or comets.

Kant on Jokes

[Draft of a paper presented to the Montreal 'Reflection on Art and Aesthetics' Workshop, 9 April, 2009. To vote for a version of this essay in the 3QD Philosophy Prize Competition, go here.]

Justin E. H. Smith

 We may as well start with a joke:

Primatologist to chimpanzee: “Bongo, bring me some food.”
(Bongo brings a pile of stones instead of food, and shows a wide, teeth-bearing grin.)

Alright, perhaps not a joke, really. More a primate proto-joke. However we classify it, though, I believe this report (based on a true story), gives us everything we need to generate a theory of humour. To get there, we will have first to do some propaedeutic work, in order to determine exactly what such a theory ought to explain, as also some metatheoretical work to explain where exactly such a theory fits in relation to other, similar projects. 

1. The Funny and the Beautiful

Arthur Danto has noted that every systematic philosopher, whether a refined aesthete or a complete philistine, has at some point taken on the topic of art.  One might add that nearly every one of these has included an account of wit, humour, jokes, comedy, or laughter, or some combination of these, within his theory of art and beauty.  Why is this? Is gelastics –to borrow a neologism coined by Mary Beard from the Greek ‘gelan’: ‘to laugh’-- a subdomain of aesthetics? Let us consider some of the reasons for holding such a view.

There seems to be a great similarity between the way people talk about the ‘aesthetic stance’ and the way they conceive the ‘sense of humour’. The perception of something as a joke or as a work of art requires a certain stance or perspective. Even if it is hard to say what this will be, it seems that the explanations for the one often serve just as well as accounts for the other. For example, Edward Bullough’s criterion of psychical distance, which would account for the reluctance theatre-goers feel at the thought of getting up to save Desdemona from Othello, seems to function in the same way to provide the moral distancing that enables one to laugh at a cruel joke (and most, perhaps all, jokes are cruel, a point to which we might return later).

Geogony, Generation and History from the Consilium Aegyptiacum to the Protogaea

Justin E. H. Smith

[Presented at the Fondacion Orotava, Tenerife, Canary Islands, 14 February, 2009]

In an audacious text of 1671, entitled “A Method for Instituting a New, Invincible Militia that can Subjugate the Entire Earth, Easily Seize Control over Egypt, or Establish American Colonies,” written as an addendum to his better known Consilium Aegyptiacum, Leibniz sketches out a plan for training a new army of warrior slaves:

A certain island of Africa, such as Madagascar, shall be selected, and all the inhabitants shall be ordered to leave. Visitors from elsewhere shall be turned away, or in any event it will be decreed that they only be permitted to stay in the harbor for the purpose of obtaining water.  To this island slaves captured from all over the barbarian world will be brought, 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!  But so that this mass of men may be shaped in any way desired, it is useful only to take boys up to around the age of twelve.

Leibniz proposes to segregate these prisoners according to language, which for him is the same as segregation by race or genus.  In this way, unable to communicate with any warriors beyond their own small squadron, the warriors will be unable to plan an insurrection.  In every race [genere], Leibniz writes,

whoever is most trained in his squadron, which is to say among those who speak his language, shall challenge those who are the best trained in the other squadrons.  The people [gens] that wins that year shall be the leaders.  They will be able to strike terrible blows with their very powerful curved swords, to hit targets with their slings, and to rip things apart with their lances.  They are to be trained to run races at such a speed as will be equal to that of horses. Which will come about first by pursuing them until they are able to touch the mane or the tail, and then freely [i.e., without horses].  They shall learn to swim first with the help of an outer shell or bladder, and thereafter without any covering; they will descend under the water after the example of diving bells [this probably an example inspired by Cornelis Drebbel], and they will learn the method of ascending and descending as they please. They shall learn to jump after the manner of the Tenerifeans, first jumping with the help of a lance... as far as human strength is able to reach, and afterwards without these. 

Leibniz goes on to describe the tremendous feats these warriors will perform with their lances: 

In the beginning they will alight from a higher place by the means of their lance touching the ground below; then they will leap horizontally on a level plane, and finally from below they will leap to the top. The will learn how to climb up smooth surfaces [per lubrica klettern]....  They shall become used to climbing however high their lance may be just by means of fixing their lances beneath them.  They will learn moreover to carry the greatest and strongest lances, like Achilles, and like other ancients.  Indeed, they shall learn to project them with great impetus towards a designated target, as well as of bringing one lance together with another if the one does not suffice for climbing.  By means of this art they will easily conquer the mightiest European fortifications.  They will be able to walk on their lances, as on stilts [wie auff stelzen]. 

La nature ne joue pas

La paléontologie de Leibniz comme métaphysique appliquée

[Présenté dans la série des conférences du département de philosophie, Université du Québec à Montréal, 10 octobre, 2008]

Dans ce propos je veux tout d’abord esquisser les arguments principaux de la Protogaea de Leibniz, en les contextualisant par rapport à son oeuvre philosophique entier, aussi bien que  par rapport à la philosophie naturelle du 17e siècle.  Je vais me concentrer sur son argument concernant les origine des fossiles, tout en essayant de vous montrer comment cette question s’encadre dans des débats fondamentaux à l’age classique concernant l’ontologie et la modélisation des êtres naturels, concernant la faculté de l’imagination et son rôle dans la génération des formes, la nature et la fréquence des miracles, et les limites épistémologiques de tout effort de reconstruire des processus enterrés dans le passé lointain.  Finalement, dans la dernière partie de ce propos je veux proposer, d’une façon très speculative, un lien entre la négation leibnizienne d’une capacité de jouer dans la nature, d’une part, et, d’autre part, l’affirmation 130 ans plus tard du jeu ou Spieltrieb comme catégorie de perception ésthetique par excellence dans l’idéalisme allemand. 

The Death of Nature?

Science, Tradition, and Development in Indigenous Cultures

In a series of important essays, Marshall Sahlins has brought together a number of important questions for our understanding of the relationship between indigenous cosmologies, cultural change, and development. Sahlin's argument is that every culture is a global culture, and incorporates new goods into its global cosmology. I would like to argue here that this incorporation functions not just at the level of goods, but also at the level of 'the commerce of light'.  That is, in our study of indigenous cosmology, just as in our study of indigenous incoporation of imported goods, we must be careful not to insist on imagining the indigenous people in some pristine pre-contact state; we must instead think of indigenous science, even where it incorporates elements of Western science, as nonetheless 'traditional'.  The general tendency however has been to acknowledge the technological adaptability of indigenous cultures -- e.g., the ability to replace bows with rifles without thereby transforming the cosmological understanding of hunting -- while at the same time seeing the knowledge systems underlying such activities as hunting as being perfectly pristine, unchanged by contact.

I would like to focus on the question of indigenous theories of reciprocity in contrast with the Western mechanical model of nature.  What I hope to show is that Sahlins's approach to the cosmologies of capitalism needs to be extended to the comparison of cosmologies in general, that is, that any contrast between, say, 'the' Cree world-view and Western science needs to be made in the light of the long history of structural complimentarity between the two.  What we find on this approach is that the differences between the two are not nearly so great as they've been made out to be: both turn out to be adaptive.  'The' Western world-view is an adaptation to particular political and social exigencies that emerged in the 17th century, while 'the' Cree world-view is in turn an effort to absorb into a preexisting cultural schema the subsequent global impact of the world-view that had emerged in response to local European developments in the 17th century. 

Spontaneous Generation and the Problem of Species Reproduction before and after Descartes

In this article I shall focus on some of the important conceptual problems posed by the purported phenomenon of spontaneous generation, showing how these problems are connected with the theoretical question of the origins and ontology of biological species, above all with the problem of their boundaries.  I will argue that the important conceptual distinction in the history of generation theory was never that between sexually and spontaneously generated animals, but rather that between animals generated through the cyclical reproduction of form, on the one hand, and through what Descartes would call ‘minor causes’ on the other.  For a hylomorphist such as Aristotle, all reproduction is formal, whether sexual or ‘spontaneous’; for a mechanist such as Descartes, all reproduction, including sexual reproduction, is mechanical.

Pre-Adamism, Missionary Universalism, and the Invention of Race

We tend to imagine that our racial classifications map onto natural kinds in the world, that in carving humanity up into 'Caucasoid', 'Negroid', etc., we are, so to speak, carving nature at its joints. In fact, these categories are recent inventions.

In an important sense it is the 17th-century French writer François Bernier who may be considered the founder of the modern science of race.  He is the first to use the term ‘race’ to designate different groups of humans with shared, distinguishing traits.  He describes his innovation in the Journal des Sçavans of 1684 as follows: “So far, Geographers did not use any other criterion when mapping out the earth but that of the different countries or regions to be found on it.  What I noticed in men in the course of my long and frequent travels gave me the idea to divide the Earth otherwise.” 

The Uncashed Metaphor of Natural Selection

(Presented at the Humboldt University of Berlin, April, 2008)

1.

In their classic 1979 article, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm," Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin fault the adaptationist program for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin; its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales, and, as they put it, for "its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of non-adaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features… the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of nonadaptive structures." They announce that in the critique they are offering, they are proceeding in the spirit of "Darwin's own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change."

Spandrels, or the tapering triangular spaces formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angles, are, as they explain, "necessary architectural byproducts of mounting a dome on rounded arches." In other words, you can't have an arch without a spandrel, and you need an arch in order to support a roof. If you ask the architect why he put the spandrel there, he will tell you you don't understand architecture.

Qu'est-ce que l'économie animale chez Leibniz?

(Presented at the Sorbonne, February 22, 2008)

L'economie animale peut être définie comme l'analyse des relations entre les organes d'un corps et ses fonctions.  Chez Leibniz le terme semble être emprunté de la Oeconomia animalis de Charleton de 1659, même si on trouve l'expression dans plusieurs textes du demi-siècle qui le precede, comme par exemple le Cogitationes sive de Dei existentia item animae spiritalitas et possibilis cum corpore unio demonstrantur; nec non, brevis historia oeconomiae corporis animalis proponitur, atque mechanice explicatur Cornelis Hogelande de 1646. 

Comme Leibniz l'explique dans son De novis scribendis medicinae elementis, écrit dans la même période que le Corpus hominis, c'est une discipline synthétique:

Atque haec quidem Analytica est Methodus, dum cuiuslibet functionis media sive organa et horum operandi modum investigamus; atque ita in corporis notitiam per partes venimus[,] quibus absolutis redibimus ad Synthesin, omniaque ad unum coordinata, et primum Motorem motusque instrumenta liquida et solida, horumque connexionem, et omnino totam animalis oeconomiam describemus, praesertim cum hac ipsa analysi in organa cuiusque functionis inquirendo deprehenderimus, idem saepe organon pluribus functionibus inservire, prorsus quemadmodum in Machinis eo maxime ingenium autoris elucet, si multa paucis efficiantur (De scribendis novis medicinae elementis (1680-82)).

Pour Leibniz le corps de l'animal est doublement économique; d'abord, dans le sens où le Créateur des machines naturelles a eu comme but de concentrer le maximum de fonctions dans le minimum d'organes, en faisant des organes qui exécutent plusieurs fonctions à la fois, et dans le sens où l'etude économique de l'animal montre comment se contenter de la description de la machine sans aucune référence à l'âme de l'animal dans l'explication de son activité vitale. 

How to Feed a Corporeal Substance

(Presented at the Mellon Conference on Hylomorphism, Caltech, May, 2008)

In his Will to Power fragments, Nietzsche mocks Kant's reverence for the eternal and unchanging as follows: 'When … Kant says: "Two things remain forever worthy of reverence,"' that is, the starry heaven and the moral law, 'today we should sooner say: "Digestion is more venerable."' KSA, XII, 317.  And in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he puts it even more succinctly: "For verily, my brethren, the spirit is a stomach! " (KSA, IV, pp. 257–8).

There is another, ancient view, one Leibniz identifies as Jewish, according to which "spirit is a bone." This bone is the Luz in Hebrew or the ajb in the Islamic tradition, and has been identified by some historians of medicine with the coccyx.  Thus Leibniz writes in a letter to Johann Friedrich, 21 May 1671 that "even the Jews relate the story that in a certain little bone they call the Luz, the soul survives intact together with the flower of substance' (A II i 116). On this view, “every body, both man and beast, plants and minerals have a kernel of substance." This kernel consists "in a physical point (which is the proximate instrument and as it were the vehicle of the soul, which is located in a mathematical point) [and] endures forever."   Now the coccyx is somewhat larger than a mathematical point, but we get the idea: Leibniz believes early on that there must be some special bit of the body that is immortal, that is, as he writes, "not diminished by teeth or by stomach acid” and that is “so subtle that it even remains in the ashes when the thing is burned.”

In a later text however, a note from February 1676, Leibniz conceives the flower of substance somewhat differently: “I think that the flower of substance is our body," he writes. "This flower… subsists perpetually in all changes … It is easily seen from this why cannibals, devouring a man, have no power over the flower of substance. This flower of substance is diffused through the whole body, and in a way it alone contains form.”   For him, at this point, the flower is not identified with some particular part or other, but rather with the entire body, which is, nonetheless, admitted to be in perpetual flux.   

Now an aggregate for Leibniz has whatever low degree of reality it has in virtue of the very relative stability of the cohesion of its parts.  A corporeal substance, in contrast, has no such cohesion; there is constant flux between it and its environment. And yet it is precisely this capacity to endure throughout the flux that wins for it the status of true substance as opposed to mere aggregate.  The corporeal substance is what is in constant communication with its environment, what has its being only through its environment, to the extent that it takes in material from its environment and transforms that material into itself.  The soul or dominant monad has appetite, to be sure, but this is an appetite for ever more perceptions, not for calories.