Justin E. H. Smith

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.

A Note on Spinoza and Race

As I recall Spinoza is generally held to have a pretty good record when it comes to race. There is as far as I know only one passage of one letter, written to Pieter Balling in July, 1664, in which he seems to use the term 'black' in a negative way. I haven't seen the original Dutch (I've seen notes that suggest it may in fact have have been written in Spanish first, and then translated), which would be helpful, but I will cite Curley's English rendition here:

One morning, as the sky was already growing light, I woke from a very deep dream to find that the images which had come to me in my dream remained before my eyes as vividly as if the things had been true --especially the image of a certain black, scabby Brazilian whom I had never seen before. For the most part this image disappeared when, to divert myself with something else, I fixed my eyes on a book or some other object. But as soon as I turned my eyes back away from such an object without fixing my eyes attentively on anything, the same image of the same Black man appeared to me with the same vividness, alternately, until it gradually disappeared from my visual field (IV 76, 25-IV 77, 6).

Rather than handing out laurels to, or withholding them from, past thinkers on the basis of the connotations we assume must timelessly attach to words, it would be more useful to try to trace back the connotations that led the thinkers themselves to employ these words. And here there can be no doubt that Spinoza is using a stock example from the history of humoral medicine.

To be 'black' in this context is to have a surfeit of black bile or melancholy, and thus to be earthy, and thus to be associated with corpses and other supposedly dark things. In extreme cases, a melancholic person, in addition to being dark or 'muddy' him or herself, can also hallucinate corpses or, alternatively, 'black' men.

In The Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton attributes to Jovianus Pontanus the view that those born under the influence of Saturn are "very austere, sullen, churlish black of colour" (Mem. I, subs. 3, 397). Hercules de Saxonia is cited as holding that "these that are naturally melancholy" are "of a leaden colour or black" (ibid., 399). Burton himself adds that a certain subspecies of melancholics "are fatter than others..., of a muddy complexion" (ibid, 400).

It is precisely such people, according to Guianerius, who "think themselves dead many times, or that they see, talk with black men, dead men, spirits and goblins frequently" (ibid., 400). Gordonius writes that extreme melancholics see and talk "with black men, and converse familiarly with devils" (ibid., 402). Gentilus Fulgosus is cited as relating the story of a melancholy friend, who "'had a black man in the likeness of a soldier' who followed him wherever he was" (ibid.). 

In a footnote to the citation from Guianerius, Burton distinguishes two different sorts of reactions to sudden, unexpected visions: there are those who blandiuntur, and those who territant, i.e., those who are 'terrified', which is to say, etymologically, those who are rendered earthy, of which a sign is the sudden darkening of the face. The extreme consequences of this, for people of a certain humoral disposition, is to come to believe that they themselves are corpses (a condition which has apparently been clinically confirmed in recent years).

I suspect that this particular sort of hallucination originally had no racial connotation whatever, but was thought to be the straightforward consequence of the excessive production of black bile. That blackness is associated with earth in humoral medicine (an association also widely attested in sub-Saharan ethnography too; see, e.g., Goody 1977) enables in turn the association of the melancholic condition with corpses, and the interchangeability of the figure of the black man with that of the corpse. 

It is likely that between the time of Burton's work and Spinoza's letter, there is a superimposition of a racial or quasi-racial connotation upon the figure of the black man, and that the term is gradually deprived of its original humoral significance. In Spinoza's case the figure is not only racialized, but is explicitly associated with a particular geographical region; and yet, at the same time he retains the scabrousness of the old visions of corpses that interested Burton.

In any case Spinoza's hallucinated Brazilian does not appear out of nowhere; if he in fact saw it as he reports, then this was under circumstances much like those that cause me to see images from old Looney Tunes cartoons when I shut my eyes to go to sleep: a historically conditioned phantasm. And when Spinoza relates it, in the context of a letter about the nature of misleading perceptions, he is probably drawing more on a (perhaps unconscious or largely forgotten) familiarity with medical literature than he is on any negative associations that he himself attaches to blackness.

Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy in Historical Perspective

[Abstract submitted for the volume Philosophy and Its History: Methods and Aims of Research in the History of Philosophy (eds. Mogens Laerke, Eric Schliesser, and Justin E. H. Smith), under consideration at Oxford University Press.]

Many advocates of the new experimental philosophy claim to be returning to an older, forgotten conception of philosophical inquiry. Thus Appiah writes that “experimental philosophy, rather than being something new, is as old as the term ‘philosophy’” (Experiments in Ethics, Oxford UP, 2008). If this is correct, what does it tell us about the relationship of current philosophy as generally conceived (that is, as ‘non-experimental’) to its history? I will argue that Appiah’s identification of a long tradition of experimental philosophy is indeed thoroughly confirmed by the historical evidence, particularly as regards the early modern period. From the Renaissance until sometime in the 18th century, philosophy included the study of everything, or at least everything that involved “inquiring into things below the earth and in the sky,” to cite the famous accusation against Socrates in the Apology. This is the meaning implied in the title of the journal of the Royal Society of London, the Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1666, and it is the meaning of ‘philosophy’ as understood by Margaret Cavendish in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy of the same year. If we understand ‘experiment’, as Cavendish does, to include what we today would think of as ‘experience’ or ‘field science’, then a survey of a wide variety of texts from the period, which I propose to undertake here, will show that for early modern thinkers, ‘experimental philosophy’ was not simply a branch or wing of some more basic activity, but indeed carried the primary signification of the term ‘philosophy’ itself. While there was of course a parallel understanding of philosophy as a priori reflection on foundational truths, in general this conception was associated with the fruitless School philosophy so many 17th-century novatores sought to overcome. The contrary conception of philosophy, as inquiring into the things of the earth and the sky, had its immediate antecedent in the practical endeavors of the so-called ‘chemical philosophers’ and other figures who were, to draw on Robert Boyle’s distinction, as interested in lucriferous undertakings as luciferous ones.

But if philosophy was conceived as any inquiry whatever, and de facto most often as natural-scientific inquiry, what does this mean for the current interest of the historian of philosophy in entering into conversation with the discipline’s past representatives? I will argue that a proper understanding of the history of the concept of philosophy prevents us from supposing that there exists a distinct activity at all, which emerged in Greek antiquity, was passed on to the Romans, moved by the high middle ages, after a brief detour through the Muslim world, into Western Europe, and matured there until being transferred, for the final stage of its unfolding, into the academic philosophy departments of the English-speaking world. It is the supposed continuity of this tradition that, in much scholarship in the history of philosophy, is supposed to justify treating past philosophers as if they were current philosophers: they are our disciplinary colleagues, as Jonathan Bennett famously put it, with the one difference being that they are dead.

But this presentism imposes on past figures a job description they could not have recognized as their own. We cannot, I argue, establish that both they and we are philosophers in view of a certain specified list of shared questions, since it is just as important to pay attention to the genre of writing, and to the overall systematic ends of a given work in which a question arises that appears to be of transhistorical interest. And here, again, what we see is that the questions that are of supposed transhistorical interest to philosophers tend most often to appear in the course of the sort of investigation that we today would have difficulty calling ‘philosophical’. Instead, philosophical questions are engaged more or less en passant in the course of treatises on optics, dynamics, generation, medicine, chemistry and alchemy, astronomy and astrology, and so on.

So far, this all sounds like fodder for the new experimentalists’ argument in favor of recovering a richer self-conception of philosophers. Yet, as I argue in conclusion, there is an important difference between the project of early modern philosophers on the one hand, who wrote on the generation of maggots, the causes of comets, and whatever else interested them, and on the other the experimental philosophers today who wish to set up their experimental project as a sort of offshoot or branch of philosophy departments in their present form. To recover the early modern conception of philosophy today would be to simply allow all varieties of scientific research, conducted within or beyond universities, to count as philosophy, rather than to modify the conception of academic philosophy, in its current state, to allow for the running of a limited number of ‒ mostly psychological ‒ experiments. This is an end that even the most ardent advocates of the new experimental philosophy do not consider desirable. The sociological reasons for this need not detain us here. Instead we will be content to show simply that the new experimentalists are quite correct to argue that they are recovering an important and forgotten conception of the project of philosophy, one that thoroughly dominated in the 17th century, and to show, moreover, that this conception's predominance precludes any possibility of thinking of history-of-philosophy scholarship as a transhistorical discussion of the core problems of a discipline with sharp and unchanging boundaries.

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.

Pierre Gassendi on Eating Meat (1658)

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

(From the Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia vol. II, Physicae Sectio III. Bk V. ch. 1, 301-2. To read the original Latin, click ‘keep reading’ below.)

... Thus the rather more special difficulty concerning the aliment of man is touched upon; who should appear to have been made, and disposed [comparatusque] by nature to enjoy the gifts of the earth, that is, plants and fruits, but turns away from the slaughter of animals and the use of their flesh. Certainly nature’s intention as to what is permissible to eat is not hard to discern from the conformation of the teeth alone. Accordingly when Nature formed us among earthly, motile, animate beings, she did not give us such teeth as those have that by their nature should feed on meat --as lions, wolves, and others that are for that reason called carnivores--, but such as those have that feed on plants or various sorts of fruits-- as do horses, sheep, and others that are not considered carnivores.

As therefore such teeth are granted by nature to men as are granted not to carnivores, but to other [creatures] which feed on the simple gifts of the earth, why do we not recognize from what we are permitted by this lack, so that we should abstain from meats, while however making use of other things. The matter can moreover be confirmed from the fact that we see all children prefer apples to partridges, and are one and all lovers not of meats, but of fruits; certainly [this is] because nature is in them as yet in a certain manner pure, and unaltered, ... until such a time as the daily use of meat will distort nature itself by means of a steady tempering. ‘In a certain manner’, I say, for if the child has been formed from the seed and nourished from the milk of the parents, who themselves have abstained from meats; or if, at least, with milk given up, it is not fed on meats and meaty broths, it will undoubtedly incline very much toward fruits. It can likewise be seen from the [fact that] with us the natural arms or instruments for tearing and by cutting meats could not have been sufficient, as it was necessary to contrive and to seize upon artificial [ones], such as knives, which living beings feeding on meats otherwise do not require. It can be seen moreover from this, that as concerns meats we turn away from uncooked ones; it is necessary to cook them in various ways, in order that they should be made more agreeable, which preparation is not required by other living beings that feed on meat. Evidently for these other beings Nature has also made a provision for agreeableness. As surely in respect of us she does not deserve to be called a stepmother, who has both given to us and to other living beings suitable instruments, and endowed a fruits and other edible things with a certain wonderful agreeableness in bringing them to maturity, it can moreover be seen from that which is attested not only by the Sacred Histories that the first men were commanded to live, and did live, not on meats, but on fruits, and only long after that time on the use of meats, and [this] was tolerated on account of the hardness, as is said, of their hearts. But in the profane authors as well it was very common in the Golden Age of the first men not to make use of other foods than those that spontaneously spring forth from the earth. It can be seen moreover from the fact that not only holy men, who have retreated into the solitudes of religion, abstain from meats, but in fact also the philosophers, who thanks to moral virtue are led to abstinence, and have a life that is both long and healthy. It can moreover be seen from the fact that the use of plants and of fruits is not so onerous to the stomach as is meat, if indeed the fare is lighter. As the meat of animals is produced from and stored in the fattier part of them, it can only be dissolved and distributed throughout the parts of our bodies with much more difficulty. Nor indeed is it the case that flesh arises from flesh, as is commonly said-- that is by sticking flesh to flesh, as one sticks plaster to plaster. It can be seen moreover from the fact that it is not to be feared that not enough men can be convinced to quit these foods, as the strength of bulls, the the agility of deer, and the similar gifts of other animals do not derive from other foods [than plants].... It can be seen moreover from the fact that it is not to be opposed that the Brazilians, the Hurons, and other savages have been discovered to feed on human flesh, as if they should seem to be unsubject to Nature’s command, as on this head Nature has been distorted in them as much as in others, and so much more when they have retained less of humanity, as have those who are not only carnivores simply, but, more specifically, anthropophagi.

Table of Contents

[From the proposal for my current book project, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Early Modern Philosophy in Global Context, 1580-1750]

Introduction

 

i. Beyond Comparative Philosophy

ii. Centers of Commerce, Centers of Philosophy

 

Part I. Nature

 

Chapter 1. The Local Nuances of Universal Physics

 

i. Navigation and the Problem of Longitude

ii. The Declination of the Magnet

iii. Barometry and Temperature

 

Chapter 2. Taxonomy

 

i. Flora

a) The Importance of simplicia. Wilhelm Piso's Historia naturalis Brasiliae as Case Study.

b) Botanical Systematics from Jungius to Ray

ii. Fauna

a) Locke, Leibniz, and the Species Debate in Scientific Context

b) Tyson's Orang-Outang and the Problem of the 'Lower' Boundary of Humanity

 

Chapter 3. Degeneration

 

i. From Bulwer to Buffon

ii. The Downward Motion of Adaptation: The Implicit Normativity of Degenerationism

iii. Variation within Fixed Boundaries: Degenerationism and Species-Fixism

 

Part II. Natives and Nature

 

Chapter 4. Native know-how and European Understanding

 

i. Authority and Reliable Testimony in Early Modern Field Science

ii. Local Nuances and Local Knowledge: The Problem of European Dependency

iii. The Upward Motion of Practical Knowledge

 

Chapter 5. Classification and the Science of Singular Things

 

i. The Dual Senses of 'Ethnotaxonomy'

ii. Bioprospecting and 'Glottoprospecting'

iii. Case Study: Leibniz and the Floral, Faunal, and Linguistic Diversity of the Russian Empire

 

Part III. Human Nature

 

Chapter 6. Early Modern Anthropology as Natural Philosophy

 

i. The Place of 'Man' in 'Systems of Nature'

ii. The Relationship Between Early Ethnography and the Project of Natural History

 

Chapter 7. The Problem of Origins

 

i. Isaac La Peyrère and the Pre-Adamism Controversy

ii. Polygenesis and Scripture

iii. The Challenge of Diffusionism

 

Chapter 8. The Emergence of Race

 

i. François Bernier's New Division of the Earth

ii. Leibniz's Critique of Bernier

iii. Herder, Blumenbach, and the Divided Legacy of Leibnizian Anthropology

Beyond Comparative Philosophy

[Excerpt from the proposal for my current book project Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Early Modern Philosophy in Global Context, 1580-1750]

The proposed book is a book about philosophy as a global phenomenon, but it is not a comparative study of philosophical traditions. One great disadvantage of comparative study, plotting, for example, medieval Latin logicians against the Sanskrit authors of the Navya-Nyāya tradition, is that it takes these to be closed systems of thought, each generated out of a distinct civilizational character. But this misses the fact that, to a great extent, philosophical traditions, like other aspects of culture (tool use, agriculture), emerge through diffusion. Europe, moreover, is neither the initial source of the diffusion, nor, when it comes to be a significant node in the process of diffusion, is Europe's significance defined principally by internal developments.

Modern European philosophy has often worked very hard to conceal its non-European sources: thus Leibniz, for example, blames the Arabs for distorting the legacy of the Greeks, rather than expressing gratefulness for their preservation of the Greek tradition.  And the Greek tradition itself is retroactively made European, rather than being placed in continuity with other Eastern Mediterranean and Indo-European traditions with which it was in contact and out of which it grew (see Burkert 2004 for a judicious treatment of the Greek debt to Eastern traditions). Professionally trained historians have long recognized that Europe was never Europe alone, but was always defined by its exchanges and encounters with the world beyond its borders. Yet historians of philosophy remain, whether they recognize it or not, committed to a view of European philosophy that is in its essence Hegelian, according to which Europe is not just one node in a global system, but is instead the very center and culmination of world history.  This center may for them be compared with (implicitly or explicitly inferior) systems of thought, but may not be seen as existing in continuity with, and emerging as a result of exchange with, these other systems. 

Comparative study, whether of crop-rotation systems or of metaphysical traditions, is not uninformative, but in philosophy comparative study has entirely dominated previous attempts to comprehend philosophy as a global phenomenon. The proposed book will contribute to the correction of this imbalance, by revealing the impact of the early modern encounter with the extra-European world on European philosophy. The focus will be not on encounters with other systems of thought that might be candidates for the name 'philosophy', but rather, principally, with nature itself, and with the systems of natural knowledge of cultures that would later be called 'primitive', but that were generally described in the early modern period as 'savage' or 'pagan'. This encounter, I will show, like the Jesuit encounter with Chinese learning, or the 18th-century encounter with the Sanskrit tradition, had a significant impact on the self-understanding of European philosophy in the modern period, on the way it conceptualized problems, and on the answers it produced to solve them.

 

Centers of Commerce, Centers of Philosophy. One does not have to be a committed materialist in order to acknowledge the close connection between the history of philosophy on the one hand and the history of commerce on the other. Indeed, one of history's more prominent idealist philosophers, G. W. Leibniz, observed of the exchanges between China and Europe that the commerce of goods is always accompanied by a 'commerce of light'.  In fact, it is striking the extent to which the history of the geography of philosophy --by which we may understand the motion of the centers of philosophical activity from one region to another-- parallels the motion of centers of trade from one region to another.  Thus, for example, over the course of the 16th century, the center of much natural-philosophical inquiry shifts from northern Italy to the Low Countries, just as many other spheres of cultural activity do. 

 

That philosophy has its own geography, with its own centers and peripheries, is one that philosophers ordinarily do not wish to acknowledge, since philosophical inquiry is supposed to be inquiry into questions that are always and everywhere the same, and moreover, philosophical inquiry, not requiring lab equipment or fieldwork, should be able to be pursued with a very low budget. Yet the fact remains that, still today, one cannot become a prominent philosopher without ever leaving one's home if one happens to be born in the global peripheries. Indeed, for reasons we will not pursue here, but which are surely not entirely coincidental, the most impactful philosophy appears to be produced in closest proximity to the centers of global finance.  This was at least as much the case in the early modern period as it is today.

 

Yet centers of finance, in turn, are but the headquarters of vast and --since the beginning of the modern period-- global enterprises. Once we acknowledge that centers of philosophy move along with centers of commerce, we might next inquire whether the former, too, have a field from which data come back and are in turn processed and speculated upon. In this book, I will not argue that this is a general or unchanging feature of the history of philosophy, but I will argue that it characterizes early modern natural philosophy very well.  The centers of philosophical activity in England, Holland, and France were at the same time the centers of global imperial and commercial projects, and the philosophy itself reflected this: it was fundamentally characterized by the global activity of the societies in which it was carried out.

 

The field of encounters that will be of most interest in this book are those that take place beyond the boundaries of the other great empires of the early modern world.  Consideration of the encounter with the Chinese and Islamic worlds (and also to some extent the Indian world, though, apart from Bernier and a few other sources, it was not until the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries that the richness of the 'Brahminical' tradition came to be noticed in Europe), too easily lends itself to comparative study of the history of philosophy, which the proposed work seeks emphatically to avoid. We do not want to measure up different systems of natural philosophy, European and non-European, and see how they fare relative to one another, but rather to study European philosophy in its global context.  For this, the encounter with 'Lapps', 'Cafres', and 'Cannibals' is generally as revealing as that with the Chinese and the Turks.  To put this point metaphorically: if Leibniz hoped for a 'commerce of light' between Europe and China (see Perkins 2005), I wish here to look at that activity that precedes commerce, namely, resource extraction, and to show that just as there is a commerce of light that moves alongside the commerce of goods, there is also an 'extraction of light'.  This occurs mostly in encounters with people who have no manufactured wares to trade, but do have what we will be calling here 'native knowledge': environmentally conditioned know-how, presumed to be ungrounded by theory.  Not coincidentally, this sort of encounter happens in those parts of the world in which European expansion was focused not on establishing delicate relations with trading partners, but rather on moving directly to resource extraction.

 

The proposed book is by no means a work of social and economic history, and my aim is not to study the sociology of philosophy (see Collins 1998), but rather only the way in which this process influenced the content of natural philosophy in the period.  It will be useful, however, to provide a brief survey in this introduction, based on the work of Braudel (1979), Wallerstein (1974, 1980), and others, of the emergence of European centers of cultural activity from the Renaissance and into the modern period, particularly with an eye to the way in which the emergence of universities and scientific societies paralleled the emergence of other varieties of cultural activity, what Francis Bacon identifies in the New Atlantis as "letters, arts, and civility," in the course of explaining how the Native Americans came to lack these basic markers by which centers are distinguished from peripheries. The overall aim of this book is to show how early modern globalization impacted that branch of letters, arts, and civility that we call 'philosophy'.  A part of this story will include the encounter with people, both real and, as in Bacon's case, imagined, but another perhaps more fundamental part will concern the encounter with new features of nature, features that only become salient when natural science and natural philosophy come to have, for the first time, the whole world open to them for study.

Dimitrie Cantemir, System of the Mahommedan Religion (1722)

[Originally composed in Latin, but first published in Russian, in St. Petersburg, in 1722. Further translation and explanatory notes to follow.]

Chapter 33. Of Mahommedan Atheists

'Atheism' is in the Arabic language zindak and ilhad, and 'atheist' is mulhid, or, in the Persian language, nahoda. Among the Muslims, and above all among the Turks, under this name are included all those who, under a white turban, preach the Qur'anic doctrine, but do not accept that Muhammed himself is a divine prophet, nor believe that there is any book that was written by God and given to the people by means of some prophet, for which reason they are also held to be mulgid, 'atheist', and kitabsiz, 'without the book'. 

That there are many such people in the Turkish Empire, and above all in Constantinople, is something not only that the Turks themselves say, but that we saw [first hand], and that we observed in discussion with men who are very learned and competent in matters of physics, who were of the opinion, that nature itself, or natural motion and activity, are all that those who say and believe that God exists understand by the name 'God' and by the attributes of the name. And [they are of the opinion] that the human being and edifice is no more noble or beautiful than any other natural thing, but only a degree of natural composition. About this composition they say that it consists in elements that are placed in agreement with one another, and that a physical creature consists in these elements. As an example, they say that the horse is more noble than the mule, the lion more noble than the wolf, the bee more noble than the fly, the ant more noble than the worm, the cypress more noble than the pine, the pine more noble than the linden, and evergreens more noble than all deciduous plants. And all fruit-bearing and fruit-giving plants are more noble than the fruitless ones. And so man is more noble and more beautiful than all animals. However, with respect to matter, form, and the harmonious composition of his very atoms, in no way does he excel other natural things, and all beings in the natura rerum are generated and corrupted, having their cycle in accordance with the determination and the measure of their composition. At the end of this activity (that is, at the cessation of their natural motion), every part of the composite body returns to its former and primordial state, that is, to its natural beginnings, and it is dissolved, and then the parts take on forms, that is, this atom combines with that one, another with another, and in this way they remain constantly and unceasingly guided, directed, and contained within their natural motion.

*

Атеисм убо арапским языком зиндак и илгад, атеист же зиндик, мулгид и с персидского находа называется. Под сим именем у мухаммедан а наипаче турков содержатся все те, которые под белою шапкою Кураново убо учение исповедуют, самого же Мухаммеда, яко пророк божий бысть, не премлют, ниже веруют какую-либо книгу от бога написанну и чрез некоего пророка людем посланну быти, откуду у них муглид "атеист" и китабсиз "без книги" тожде быти веруется. 

Таковых в Турецкой Империи а наипаче в Константинополе множайших быти не токмо сами турки сказуют, но и мы некиих видехом и еще людей зело ученых и в фисических вещех искуснейших, ниже в разговорах усмотрехом сицевое имети мнение, яко едина и самая натура или натуральное движение и делание суть вся та, яже под именем божиим и свойствами имени его взиматися от верующих быти бога глаголются и веруются. И яко существо или здание человеческое несть честнейшое и изящнейшое, паче иных натуральных вещей, разве чином естественного растворения. О котором растворении глаголют, яко составляется из согласно стекающихся елементов, из нихже фисическая плоть состоится. Дают приклад, якоже глаголют: конь имеется честнейший быти осла, лев честнейший волка, пчела честнейшая мухи, мравий честнейший червя, кипарис честнейший сосны, сосна честнейшая липы и все древеса всегда зеленеющиеся честнейшие увядающих.И сих всех древес сиречь заматерелых и неплодных честнейшие и благороднейшие суть овощеносные и кий-либо плод творящие. Тако и человек по чину естественного растворения над всех животных благороднейший есть и преизящнейший. Инако бо по смотрению материи, формы и стихийного самых атомов сложнения, ничимже над иные естественные превосходит вещи и вся в сем вещей естестве бытности и естества своего период разве от сильнейшего  препрятие возъимеют по определению и размерению растворения притекают и оканчевают. При конце же того делания (то есть в престатии от оного натурального движения) кияждо сложенного тела из первых стихий части к древним и первым своим исто натуральным началам обращаются и в таяжде разрешаются и потом из тления применяются в формы, то есть из сего атома и иный, из оногоже еще в иный и тако непрестанно и бесконечно водими, управляеми и своим си натуральным движением содержими пребывают.

Wilhelm Piso, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (1648)

[This is a translation of a section of the first book, 'On the Air, Waters, and Places of Brazil', of Piso's massive, four-book work. It is followed by those passages from the fourth book, on the plants of Brazil, that would later be drawn upon in G. W. Leibniz's De novo antidysenterico americano of 1695, a translation of which will follow shortly. Among other interesting features of this work, the selection translated from Book I may very well be the first European description ever of couvade, which would later be well attested in the ethnographic record. The original Latin text follows. And yes, this is how I spend my Saturday nights.] 

Book I.

...The women are marvellously fertile, and give birth with little pain, rarely aborting. At the time of childbirth the husband lies down in the place of the wife for the duration of the labor, and, like a woman about to give birth, enjoys sweetmeats and feasting, citing the necessity of restoring his lapsed vigor. A preposterous custom, of course, which nevertheless appears to them to be most praiseworthy, as many women, immediately after giving birth, with no one having assisted them, get right up to meet [the men]; nay more, they hasten to the nearby river to cleanse their body, and from here they seek out their nourishment. They do not bemoan the killing of children beyond two or three days, with the mothers filling the whole place with their miserable wailing. With the profuse tears that they have in their power they welcome their relations and their returning friends, whose misfortunes and labors they [peregre] endure, weeping with many sighs and groans, and pressing them to their chests with arms around their neck and head. 

Those who live among the Hollanders and the Portuguese follow Christ, though more indifferently, and the adults are very laid-back with respect to our efforts: nor can our pleading make its way much into their heads, unless they are of a tender age, with souls that are not yet preoccupied, and that are remote from their parents. Their languages are hardly different the one from the other. And however much those who are born [there] descend from a lineage of cannibals, nevertheless through mutual exchange with Europeans and through habit they are improved, and they shed their barbarity, attaining to a humanity that is comparable to our own. Unlike Mediterranean peasants, they are truculent, brutal, without law, without religion, they roam in the manner of wild beasts, without any fixed or stable quarters, and here and there will lie in wait, with admirable knowledge and swiftness, for the fish or wild animals that will be their victuals, whether these be abundant or scarce. They know how to hurl javelins, without a bow, with the most admirable strength and with stupendous skill... The men and the women as well go about with nothing covering their pudenda, with their hair disshevelled, though some of them have it clipped, and with the other body parts hairless; and they adorn themselves with the feathers of differently colored birds. They disgracefully paint their bodies with a certain dusky color pressed out of the lanipapa apple. And nor is the face free of ornamentation: they affix the most vile and tedious little stones to their ears, which have been pierced since earliest infancy, as well as to the lower and upper lips.  

When one of them falls ill, his friends approach, and they conjure a trick, making notice of a remedy that they have already tried out on themselves. Next they scarify and cut deep into the skin of his muscular arms and of parts of his thighs with the spines of the Carnaiba tree, and with the teeth of the fish they also use to sharpen their arrows, so that he bleeds profusely... They bring on vomiting by force by means of the twisted leaves of the Carnaiba, which they force into his throat. With these and similar remedies tried out in vain, they attempt nothing else, nor yet do they relinquish the sick man, but by unanimous consensus, as if desperate for his health, they kill him off with a wooden cudgel, still gratifying him and themselves, that his death has come to pass in a masculine fashion, and that he is liberated of all suffering. In this way, indeed, they rejoice and glory in this moment of death. It is with great applause among his relatives that his enemies take vengeance upon the cadaver of the victim, this one for a shameful love, that one out of brutal indivtiveness, tearing him to pieces in the most savage manner of wild beasts. Others come forth for the flesh and bones, down to the teeth, scraping them down for their frightful banquet.

Book IV.

Chapter 49. Of Caa-apia and Its Properties.

... The indigenous people crush the plant, and expel the poison from the stomach by the juice that is drunk: wounded by serpents or struck by poison arrows, they pour it drop by drop into the wounded person in lieu of an antidote, and not without success. Here there are also other species of Caa-apia, similar in all respects to the first one, except as concerns their leaves, which are of course of the same figure, but are serrated and bristly along their edge, and their stalks are covered with sparse hairs...

Chapter 65. Of Ipecacuanha and Its Properties

Finally, the proper order of things brings us to those much-vaunted salutary roots, which, beyond their power of purgation by both the upper and lower passages, are eminently opposed to all poison. Nor do I believe that one could find on this earth a more effective remedy against the many illnesses arising from a long obstruction, and above all for the assuaging of the fluxus ventris.

There exist two species, neither having been described, to my knowledge, nor their excellent qualities brought to light. And both are dedicated to the same use, but with different degrees of powers, depending upon their figure and their native soil. Indeed, one of them, the smaller one, lying low in the soil, grows in meadows; it is not so different from pennyroyal, for the stalk extends upward with many lanuginous leaves, and is encircled with little white flowers. Its root is course, fibrous, whitish, and it is called by the Portuguese, for the sake of distinction, Ipecacuanha blanca, which, while agitating the body less, resists most powerfully against poisons, and is likewise given to children and to pregnant women. 

The other is a demi-cubit in length, though endowed with only three or four leaves. It delights in dark places, and is found in denser forests. At the top of its stalk it produces black berries, though not many. Its root is fine, winding, knotted, of a dusky color, unpleasant to the taste, bitter, hot, and piercing. In a dried form it is kept for many years, nor is it easy to cut. Its dosage is one drachma if reduced to a powder, or, in an infusion, two drachmae, give or take.

And both [species] are for daily use, though they prefer it diluted, since either in chewing on it at night in the open air or in mixing it in water, it powerfully communicates its medical virtue to the liquors [of the body]. Afterwards a caput mortuum is left over, and it is prepared again in the same way and is furnished for the same use; though no longer as effective for purging and vomiting, it is now more effective as an astringent. Thus this root does not only remove even the most tenacious sickness-inducing matter from the affected part, expelling it through the upper passage, but also, functioning as an astringent, restores the tonus of the viscera. Beyond this, it relieves flatulence and other illnesses, counters the effect of poisons and of venoms both hidden and manifest, immediately expelling them through vomiting. Wherefore it is carefully [religiose] guarded by the Brazilians, who first revealed its virtues to us.

Frankfurt Orientalist Hiob Ludolf (1624-1704) on Ethiopia

[from the Historia Aethiopica (Frankfurt, 1681). Latin transcription to follow.]

Chapter IX. Of the Abyssinians, of their Spirit, and of their Nature. Generally speaking, the Abyssinians have plenty of spirit, but they are ignorant of how to cultivate it, as they have almost entirely lost their knowledge, not only of the belles lettres and of the sciences, but also of the liberal arts. They have even been neglectful of those who are the most useful to human life, and who should most of all be supported, given the absolute necessity of their services, for example [those who practice] medicine, which almost no one knows...

Although the Abyssinians are as ignorant as I have just explained, they very much love able men; this is what brought it about that the Jesuits were so well received there at the end of the last century. A great mark of their spirit is that, with all the ignorance into which they have been sunk for many centuries, nonetheless they have always cultivated their poetry, not in fact the pagan and profane poetry that is reflected in an infinity of fictions and fables, but rather sacred poetry, for they are such good Christians that they have no interest in hearing of an adulterous Jupiter or a prostitute Venus, of the jealousies of Juno or the debauches of Bacchus, and of all those other fables to which the pagans are attracted only because they consecrate, so to speak, their most infamous crimes... 

Chapter X. Of the Manner in which the Abyssinians Live, of their Manner of Dress, and of Combat. The Abyssinians live very poorly, for as theymake no use of spoons, nor of knives, nor of forks, they are compelled to cut their bits of food and to bring them to their mouths with their fingers. Their taste is so particular that they often sprinkle with bile the flesh that they bring to the table only half-cooked, and this sauce does for them what the most exquisite mustard would do for our most refined eaters...

Chapter XI. In which is treated the Fecundity of Abyssinian Women, the Color of the Abyssinians, and their Cities. The essential reason for the multiplication fo the Abyssinians is the great fecundity of their women. The ease with which they give birth is no less great, for they do it, as happens everywhere in the warm countries, almost without pain. When they wish to bring their child into the world, they bring themselves to their knees, and they free themselves of it in this posture, ordinarily with no help from a midwife.

The children are born red, and not black, but they become black gradually, and this color pleases them much more than any other: thus one must not be surprised when it is said that they depict the Devil as being white, since he is unworthy of their own color.

As for other features, they do not have that defect of the Moors in the nose and in the lips. They are all generally well built, strong, robust, and capable of much work, at which they do not grow tired.

It is principally in the people of the kingdom of Enarea that we find all of these beautiful qualities, both of the spirit and of the body. Those of the Tygre are, by contrast, very unfaithful, deceitful, cruel, and vindicative in the extreme. One also finds among them men who are naturally white; but besides the fact that this sort of white men emit a very bad odor, this whiteness is not agreeable, since it is too close to paleness...

Chapter XII. Of the People Mixed in with the Abyssinians, and of the Languages Used in Abyssinia. ... One also often finds in the deserts those people whom the Portuguese call 'Caffres'. They live without Law, without God, and without a king, and without any habitation more certain than where the night obliges them to sleep. They cover themselves with no clothing; their usual nourishment is the flesh of serpents and of dragons. Their language is sooner a sort of whistling than the voice of man...

It is true that these sorts of whistlings are in common usage among all the Abyssinians; they also have particular characters for marking them in their writing. The Ethiopian language has seven of them that are entirely unknown to us. This is the language that was at first wrongly called 'Chaldaic' in Rome, when certain books in that language began to appear there for the first time...

Isaac La Peyrère, Relation from Iceland (1644)

[Please click 'continue reading' to see the original French text]

XXXII. I have told you that the Icelandic language is based on the ancient Runic language. Doctor Worm, who understands this Runic, and who has written a book on it, has assured me that Icelandic is the purest Runic that we have. As proof of this, the Icelandic characters of which Blefken gave an alphabet in his Relation, are Runic. And he also says that among these characters, there are some that are hieroglyphic, signifying entire words. The good man Angrimus dealt with this chapter in his Crimogée. And since this book is very rare in this country, as well, no doubt, as in the place where you are, you will be pleased that I should hold forth to you on the reading that I made of it, for in revealing to you the antiquity of the Icelandic language, it gives us a great knowledge of the antiquity of the North. 

XXIII. Angrimus says that the Annals of Iceland, which speak of the first inhabitants of the Arctic world, have them coming from an Asiatic prince, named Odin, whom others have called Ottin, who, pushed by the Roman armies that Pompeius commanded in Frigia Minor, took the northern route and ended up in these regisions with the Frigian troops following him. And good Angrimus affirms that the epoch of these Icelandic Annals does not go back any further than Odin. He assures nonetheless that many other peoples of the north have annals that are more ancient still, and that their Histories make mention of a prince called Norus, who gave the first laws to Norway, and built it into a kingdom. That Norus was a son of Thorré, king of Gotland and of Finland, the greatest, most virtuous, and most excellent prince of his era. That his peoples adord him like a God after his death. That Norway called the month of January Thorré, after his name. And that this name is still retained today in Iceland. That King Thorré had a daughter of great beauty, named Goa, who was kidnapped by a foreign prince. That his brother Norus pursued the kidnapper, and that the month following January was called Goa, which is the same name that the Icelanders continue to use today for the month of February. Angrimus next provides a genealogical map of the predecessors of Norus who were placed by the peoples of the North among the gods, one of the sea, one of the winds, one of the snow, one of the cold. And he speaks of one, among others, whom they worshipped as the god of fire, who was well endowed, and lame like the Vulcan of the Greeks, but the best built and most beautiful of all men. That in view of his great beauty they caled him Halogie, which is to say 'big and beautiful flame'. The genealogy goes down to a nephew of Norus, named Gilve, at which point, the Chronicle relates, the great Asiatic Odin arrived in the North.

XXXIV. This diversity of the [different] annals obliged Angrimus to go back even further than those first kings of Norway, and to relate the origin of the peoples of the North to the ancient Canaanite giants, whom Joshua chased from the promised land, and who came to inhabit this country; these were giants like the first inhabitants of the Arctic world, and from whom, it is believed, the first Goths descended, whose name signifies 'giants'. Now, Monsieur, it would not be out of line for me to say a few words at this point, both about this great Asiatic Odin, as well as about the received opinion in this country, that the first men of the North were Canaanites.

XXXV. The great Asiatic Odin was worshipped throughout all of the North, under the name of Mercury, in view of his excellent spirit. It is believed that he is the first author of poetry and magic in the North, which is so well-known and renowned everywhere. I have spoken to you of his poetry, and I would have much to say about his magic, but the subject would warrant its own treatment, which I will reserve for another time. I will content myself with telling you, for now, that I cannot be surprised enough at the negligence of so many men, who adhere to these inveterate errors with so little reflection, and who let themselves get carried away by them without resistance. In the same vein, [I am surprised that] the more these errors give a shock to good sense, and the less they have of plausibility, the more these men believe them, and the more they try to make others believe them. For, Monsieur, what 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?

...

Monsieur,

Your very humble and very obedient servant, La Peyrère

First written in Copenhagen, 18 December, 1644

Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Early Modern Natural Philosophy in Global Context, 1500-1750

[Proposal for Membership at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2010-11]

Modern natural philosophy has often been characterized as taking shape in large part out of the rediscovery of certain legacies of ancient thought, particularly the atomism and incipient materialism of Epicurus and his follower Lucretius (see, e.g., Wilson 2008). But this rediscovery of the legacy of antiquity occurred simultaneously with the geographical discovery of what is too often bracketed by historians of science and, more grievously, by historians of philosophy, as ‘the rest of the world’. In the book I am currently researching, I intend to present an interpretation of the impact of this latter discovery on early modern natural philosophy, and also to show why its impact on natural philosophy is relevant to the emerging understanding of human nature (or the absence of it) over the course of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

Though seldom noted by historians of philosophy, interest in the world beyond Europe’s boundaries was omnipresent in early modern natural-philosophical texts. To cite a particularly vivid example, William Harvey, as reported by George Ent in the epistle dedicatory to the former’s Anatomical Exercitations concerning the Generation of Living Creatures of 1653, believes that

the whole earth now lies open before us, and the zeal of our travellers has made us familiar not only with other countries, and the manners and customs of their inhabitants, but with the animals, the vegetables, and the minerals also that are met with in each.  And, indeed, there is no nation so barbarous which has not discovered something for the general good that had been overlooked by more civilized countries. But whall we imagine that nothing will accrue to science from such advantages as we now possess, or that all knowledge was exhausted in the earlier ages of the world? If we do, the blame most certainly attaches to our indolence, nowise to all-bountiful nature.

I will be focusing upon three distinct elements of Harvey’s rich observation: (i) the animals, vegetables, and minerals discovered over the course of the first few centuries of European exploration, as well as other features of the natural environment; (ii) the idea that no nation is ‘so barbarous’ that it ‘has not discovered something for the general good’; and (iii) ‘other countries, and the manners and customs of their inhabitants’. These correspond respectively to the three three major parts of the book, which I have labelled ‘Nature’, ‘Natives and Nature’, and, finally, ‘Human Nature and Human Difference’.