Gideon Manning

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Research interests

History of modern philosophy, history of medicine, history of biology

Research Statement

My research focuses on the medical and life sciences as they existed from the early sixteenth-century to the beginnings of the nineteenth-century. With an emphasis on historical accuracy, I try to provide philosophical accounts of the ideas and arguments of past thinkers as they understood their predecessors and attempted their own experimental and theoretical innovations. Inevitably with genuine innovation came new problems, both scientific and philosophical, and sensitivity to the social, religious and institutional contexts in which living things were studied and described is required to understand these new problems as well as attempts at their resolution. For not only did the early modern sciences of life influence the treatment of traditional philosophical questions, philosophical assumptions also informed and constrained the burgeoning experimental research of the period.

Currently I am studying the early modern mathematician and natural philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who struggled to explain life using only the resources of mechanics, i.e. size, shape and motion of parts. Topics that must be addressed in order to understand Descartes’ “biology” include (but are not limited to) the relationship between the mechanical arts and the new mechanical science, the early modern view of machines and negative feedback mechanisms, the role of the mind in reflex action and behavior generally, as well as the principles of evidence used to justify claims about which sub-visible mechanisms are at work when.

Since coming to Caltech in 2007 I have completed three published or forthcoming papers:

• Naturalism and un-naturalism among the Cartesian physicians, in Inquiry, Vol. 51, No. 5, pp. 441-463, October 2008
• Descartes’ healthy machines and the human exception (forthcoming)
• When the mind became un-natural: psychology in the Cartesian aftermath (forthcoming)

In addition, I have joined with colleagues on projects of mutual interest. Most notably:

• A book project with Mordechai Feingold in which we bring together the work of leading historians of science and philosophy to discuss the assimilation and transformation of matter-form thinking in early modern natural philosophy. All contributions to the volume derive from a 2008 conference organized as part of the Guises of Reason project supported by the Mellon Foundation.
• A conference project with Tracy Dennison focusing on early modern medicine and its historiography. Our guiding idea is to have social and intellectual historians join with historians exploiting techniques from statistics and experimental science to discuss topics ranging from longevity and child mortality to contagion and public policy.