Research

My research focuses on the medical and life sciences as they existed from the early sixteenth century to the beginnings of the nineteenth century, when biology emerged as a self-standing discipline. 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, institutional and sometimes religious contexts in which living things were studied and described is required to understand these new problems as well as attempts at their resolution.

Over the past few years I have been studying the early modern mathematician and natural philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). Of particular interest is Descartes' struggle to explain life—e.g., growth, nutrition, movement, health, illness, death, etc.— using only the resources of mechanics, i.e. size, shape and motion of parts. The resolution I find in Descartes, borne out many places in his philosophy and science, I call "Cartesian Anthropocentrism." In effect, Descartes proceeds by treating human beings as the point of departure for trying to understand other animate and even inanimate natural phenomena. At the same time, Descartes continues a long tradition of identifying the study of human beings as the culmination of all other scientific study. Human beings are, in other words, the epitome and epilogue of the natural world. Some of the topics that must be addressed in order to understand Descartes' "biology" include the relationship among the mechanical arts, medicine, natural history, metaphysics 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, the normative status of health and disease in a mechanically necessary world, as well as the kinds of evidence used to justify claims about which sub-visible mechanisms are at work in producing visible phenomena.
               
Most recently, I have begun work on three new projects.  First, I have started to trace Descartes' medical influence through a cohort of Cartesian physicians in France, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Germany and Italy. Each country provides its own story of the assimilation of new ideas into orthodox institutions, such as universities and associations of physicians, as well as insight into the processes that led to the founding of scientific societies.  Second, I have begun a reassessment of Galen and his influence in the seventeenth century as part of an effort to more fully integrate the history of medicine into the social and intellectual story of the “scientific revolution.” Notable here is my claim that the “Aristotelian-Galenic” synthesis, often cited as a way to incorporate Galen into historical accounts of early modern institutional and intellectual life, is not sensitive enough to the independence of Galen’s scientific medicine or the separate fate enjoyed by Aristotle and Galen in the seventeenth century and beyond. Finally, I have begun to investigate the demise of the Aristotelian ontology of relations in the early modern period. Whereas Aristotle and many scholastics understood relations as comparable to the other properties of bodies, and therefore actually existing in the world outside us, figures such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) and John Locke (1632-1704) insisted that without the mind, there would be no facts about relations because there would be no relations. Yet in spite of this, even the novatores were committed to there being a host of objective facts about the world—e.g., about time, place, motion, health, and, in Isaac Newton’s (1642-1727) case, action at a distance—that depended on the existence of relations. Better understanding this tension and how it is resolved is the goal of my third project.