402. Life is Not Enough: Medicine in Renaissance France
Challenges to Galenic medical orthodoxy from natural philosophy: Jean Fernel with his idea of the human’s “total substance,” and the Paracelsans.
Themes:
• J.M. Forrester and J. Henry (trans.), Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things: Forms, Souls, and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine (Leiden: 2005).
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• B. Copenhaver, Symphorien Champier and the Reception of the Occultist Tradition in Renaissance France (The Hague: 1979).
• A.G. Debus, The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France (Cambridge: 1991).
• G. Giglioni, “Symphorien Champier on Medicine, Theology, and Politics,” in S. Gersh (ed.), Plotinus’ Legacy: the Transformation of Platonism from the Renaissance to the Modern Era (Cambridge: 2019), 96-124.
• H. Hirai, “Jean Fernel and his Christian Platonic Interpretation of Galen,” in H. Hirai, Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life and the Soul (Leiden: 2011), 46-79.
• A. Wear, R.K. French, and I.M. Lonie (eds), The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: 1985), 175-94.
Comments
Names
Since there are a lot of probably unfamiliar names in this episode, here is a list in order of their mention:
Jean Fernel; Johannes Guinter of Andernach; Joseph Duchesne; Alexandre de la Tourette; Loys de Launay; Jacques Grévin; Jean Ribit; [Roch] de Baillif; Jacques Dubois; Guillaume de Baillou; Symphorien Champier
Names
Thanks for the list of names. I've been enjoying your podcast for several years, listening early every morning with a cup of coffee. To absorb caffeine and philosophy is nicely warming on these cold winter days in Wellington! Although the written form of names can usually be found in the bibliography, I've often wished for a list of this kind. Many thanks to you for the enrichment of my mental life!
In reply to Names by Nelson Wattie
Names
As I've mentioned coffee is the fuel for writing the podcast so it's nice to think of it accompanying the listening experience too!
This episode was an extreme case with so many names, and because French names are hard to spell (the French: "let's pronounce only 30% of the letters in this word, shall we?"). But if there are older episodes you think would benefit from such a list, let me know and I can add that.
The latin of it...
If I didn't mishear, you mentioned the Latin for "life is not enough." If this is the case, could you tell us what it is?
Regards
aao
In reply to The latin of it... by Adnan Onart
Latin
It's non sat est vivere
Emergence
I agree that the Paracelsians were on the right track, but I wanted to add that the idea of emergence from the opposing camp seems pretty important. Even the strictest reductionist about reality today wouldn’t claim that thinking about elementary particles is the starting point for inventing new medicine, and in a way you could accuse the Paracelsians of this kind of thinking. The fact that their theory has fewer emergent “layers” of reality than ours when working from particles to chemistry to biology etc is actually a pretty profound difference. If I recall from your series there were ancient materialist philosophers in India that discussed the mind as an emergent phenomenon, have there been any non-Aristotlean accounts of something like emergence in the west up to this point?
In reply to Emergence by Brandon Freude…
Emergence
Yes good memory, those were the Carvakas! I agree, this is a promising theory and in fact quite a few modern day philosophers of mind go for a view like this. We're obviously going to see a lot of variations on this sort of idea coming up in the 17th century; actually you could think of Descartes as an emergentist for cognitive powers of animals, and all our powers apart from the mental activities of the rational soul.
In reply to Emergence by Peter Adamson
Great, I’m looking forward…
Great, I’m looking forward to that! What about more generic accounts of emergence of properties or tendencies in non mental things? It sounds like non- Paracelsians in this episode think even an inanimate object is kind of more than the sum of its parts? When you have substantial forms it’s easy to say there’s a form of opium that is sleep causing that doesn’t exist in its parts. But, I’m wondering if atomists or Paracelsians or any other “reductionist” kind of metaphysics in ancient, medieval, or renaissance philosophy/physics had anything interesting to say about how aspects of things emerge like this.
In reply to Great, I’m looking forward… by Brandon Freude…
More emergence
Well at least in the European and Islamic tradition the dominance of Aristotelian natural philosophy meant that there was not much scope for that kind of emergentist view. In Islam you do have atomism in the Islamic theological tradition (kalām) but they think that God bestows accidents on atoms, not that the atoms generate higher order properties "from the bottom up". In ancient atomism there is some fairly sketchy talk that runs along emergentist lines, like, familiar substances are generated when atoms get entangled (they have hooks and so on), or soul properties are due to the fluidity of atoms that are particularly smooth and move around easily through the rest of the body. Obviously though it is all a bit hand-waving and improvised, since they had no way of empirically associating properties with underlying atomic structures. As we'll see very soon this is even true of Descartes' attempts to explain physiology in strictly materialist terms.
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