Justin E. H. Smith

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

Princeton University, Department of Philosophy

May 7-8, 2011

Provisional Program:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

This event is open to the public.

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

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.

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.