The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science(25 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science)

It was in 1660s England, according to the received view, in the Royal Society of London, that science acquired the form of empirical enquiry we recognize as our own: an open, collaborative experimental practice, mediated by specially-designed instruments, supported by civil discourse, stressing accuracy and replicability. Guided by the philosophy of Francis Bacon, by Protestant ideas of this worldly benevolence, by gentlemanly codes of decorum and by a dominant interest in mechanics and the mechanical structure of the universe, the members of the Royal Society created a novel experimental practice that superseded former modes of empirical inquiry, from Aristotelian observations to alchemical experimentation. This volume focuses on the development of empiricism as an interest in the body – as both the object of research and the subject of experience. Re-embodying empiricism shifts the focus of interest to the ‘life sciences’; medicine, physiology, natural history. In fact, manyof the active members of the Royal Society were physicians, and a significant number of those, disciples of William Harvey and through him, inheritors of the empirical anatomy practices developed in Padua during the 16th century. Indeed, the primary research interests of the early Royal Society were concentrated on the body, human and animal, and its functions much more than on mechanics. Similarly, the Académie des Sciences directly contradicted its self-imposed mandate to investigate Nature in mechanistic fashion, devoting a significant portion of its Mémoires to questions concerning life, reproduction and monsters, consulting empirical botanists, apothecaries and chemists, and keeping closer to experience than to the Cartesian standards of well-founded knowledge. These highlighted empirical studies of the body, were central in a workshop in the beginning of 2009 organized by the unit for History and Philosophy of Science in Sydney. The papers that were presented bysome of the leading figures in this area are presented in this volume.

Table of Contents:
Embodied Empiricism.- The Body as Object.- Victories for Empiricism, Failures for Theory: Medicine and Science in the Seventeenth Century.- Practical Experience in Anatomy.- Early Modern Empiricism and the Discourse of the Senses.- Alkahest and Fire: Debating Matter, Chymistry, and Natural History at the Early Parisian Academy of Sciences.- John Locke and Helmontian Medicine.- The Body as Instrument.- Empiricism Without the Senses: How the Instrument Replaced the Eye.- Mastering the Appetites of Matter. Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum.- ‘A Corporall Philosophy’: Language and ‘Body-Making’ in the Work of John Bulwer (1606–1656).- Memory and Empirical Information: Samuel Hartlib, John Beale and Robert Boyle.- Lamarck on Feelings: From Worms to Humans.- Embodied Minds.- Carelessness and Inattention: Mind-Wandering and the Physiology of Fantasy from Locke to Hume.- Instrumental or Immersed Experience: Pleasure, Pain and Object Perception in Locke.- Empiricism and Its Roots in the Ancient Medical Tradition.- Embodied Stimuli: Bonnet’s Statue of a Sensitive Agent.- Empiricist Heresies in Early Modern Medical Thought.

Review :
From the reviews: "Three different major dimensions of the study of the body and the emergence of empiricism this is a collection, then, which makes us think anew about the origins of the methods and mentality of the scientific movement in its formative centuries. ... this collection places the human body back squarely in our mapping of the development of early modern science." (John Gascoigne, Metascience, October, 2010) What the reader will extract from the text overall is an insightful and informative spectrum of medical and scientific practices (and to some extent their philosophical implications) throughout much of the early modern period. Wolfe and Gal have done a good job of bringing together a wide range of contributions emerging from various disciplines, resulting in a wonderful analysis of the practice - rather than the theory - of empiricism in early modern science. Jordan Taylor (2011): The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 19:6, 1223-1226