What Ever Happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth-Century Irritability

Giglioni, Guido

doi:10.1017/s0269889708001920

Cited by 35 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…After publishing significant medical works, such as De rachitide (on rickets) in 1650 and De anatomia hepatis (on the anatomy of the liver) in 1654, Glisson produced this treatise on the "life of nature," describing life as immanent to matter: "life is the intimate and inseparable essence of matter" and "matter contains within itself the root of life" (Glisson 1672, b1 v ). Now, it would be easy to dismiss this as a kind of substance metaphysics, as indeed Haller did when he both credited Glisson with the discovery of the property of muscular irritability and excluded him from the history of science proper (Giglioni 2008; Glisson does coin the term irritabilitas); but clearly Glisson reflects on the nature of our organic structure (organizatio), its relation to our sense organs, and how animal spirits are not a sufficient explanation of the features of "animation" and complex perception which our sense organs display. However, it remains a challenge to integrate this aspect of Glisson into a scientific revolution narrative (it is rather a species of matter theory); further, this very immanentism means that the nature of life is not a problem to be investigated for Glisson (as it must be for all vitalists).…”

Section: Glissonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vitalism in Early Modern Medical and Philosophical Thought

Wolfe

2020

Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences

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Section: Glissonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vitalism in Early Modern Medical and Philosophical Thought

Wolfe

2020

Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences

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“…After publishing various significant medical works, such as De rachitide in 1650 and De anatomia hepatis in 1654, Glisson produced this treatise on the 'life of nature'. Now, it would be easy to dismiss this as a kind of substance metaphysics, as indeed Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) did when he both credited Glisson with the discovery of the property of muscular irritability and excluded him from the history of science proper (Giglioni 2008); but clearly Glisson reflects on the nature of our organic structure (organizatio, § 11), its relation to our sense organs, and how animal spirits are not a sufficient explanation of the features of 'animation' and complex perception which our sense organs display. The great scholar of Glisson, Guido Giglioni, has also stressed the presence of related ideas of the "appetites of matter" in a more apparently mainstream figure, Francis Bacon, together with a sustained interest in the "prolongation of life," particularly in his posthumous Sylva Sylvarum (Giglioni 2005(Giglioni , 2009.…”

Section: Ontology Of Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Life as Concept and as Science in Early Modern Thought

Wolfe

2019

Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences

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What are early modern life sciences, the sciences of? What is the relation of philosophical considerations on living versus dead matter, or the possibility of animate matter, to such sciences? In this entry I examine such questions. 3 Life as concept or as scientific object: the problem Hor: What is Life? Cleo: Every body understands the Meaning of the Word, though, perhaps, no body knows the Principle of Life, that Part which gives Motion to all the rest (Mandeville 1729/1924, II, 167). Life is a polysemous notion. Early modern thinkers, no less than us, moved imperceptibly between usage in which 'life' might be the life of a person, or the art of living well, or morally, and usage closer to what we might think of as a 'scientific' sense of life, i.e., the object of a science like biology (which only comes into being in the late eighteenth century). Scholarship on early modern philosophy has had less difficulty in picking out the specific issues concerning 'biological life', embodiment, organism and so on (see Smith (ed) 2006, Nachtomy and Smith (eds) 2017, Wolfe and Gal (eds) 2010), than the corresponding scholarship on early modern science, which has classically been determined by intellectual models deriving from the physico-mechanical sciences. That is, the idea of the Scientific Revolution and the historiography that studies (some would say constructs) this object, has almost entirely neglected the life sciences: they are simply not part of the story. Our concept of the Scientific Revolution does not include debates over generation, semina rerum, species, anatomy, vivisection, animal souls, irritability and so forth. 1 Some responded by declaring that there were no revolutions in the life sciences, perhaps until cell theory in the 19 th century. Yet early modern life science certainly exists, from physiology to theories of generation, from the chemical investigation of blood, aether and spirits to treatises on fermentation and fevers. As such, we can then inquire into its relation to the constitution and stabilization of other parts of natural philosophy, such as mechanics and atomistic physics. Figures such as Harvey, Descartes and Borelli, or Boyle, Pitcairn(e) and Malpighi, or Charleton and Boerhaave then loom large on the map and if our goal were to revise accounts of the Scientific Revolution so that they took account of such figures, it would seem reasonably easy to achieve. Indeed, some scholars seek to inscribe sciences like medicine, physiology, anatomy, notably (natural history is a more difficult case) into a mainstream, mechanistic-science friendly narrative (Grmek 1972, Bertoloni Meli 2008, 2011; see here The Mechanization of Life). Thus Domenico Bertoloni Meli elegantly emphasizes the interplay between the mathematical and medical disciplines: "when unraveling the intellectual world in the seventeenth-century, we can no longer separate the history of anatomy from the history of science as if anatomists and physicians inhabited a different world from not only mechanical and experimental philoso...

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“…In an entry on "irritability" for the Supplément to the Encyclopédie, Haller asserted that it occurred under the impact of une violence extérieure ("an external force"). He also hoped to have demonstrated that "irritated did not betray any natural perceptivity, any inner life, any sentiment intérieur" ( [53], p. 490). In other words, it is quite clear that Haller's concept of irritability could very well function within the philosophic matrix of the atomistic self, in that it did not require a conception of permeable boundary, or of cutaneous membrane as a site for the sentiment formation.…”

Section: Sentiment and The Sensible Subject: Becoming "Affectively Rementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Wolfe argues ( [54], p. 152), Haller's key goal in his dualistic conceptualisation of irritability as a muscular property, and sensibility as that which "'report [s]' to the soul," reserved "an independent 'arena' or space of existence for the soul." The soul, for Haller, was "a being which is conscious of itself, [which] represents to itself the body to which it longs, and by means of that body the whole universe" (Haller quoted in [53], p. 478).…”

Section: Sentiment and The Sensible Subject: Becoming "Affectively Rementioning

confidence: 99%

Porous Skins and Tactile Bodies: Juxtaposition of the Affective and Sentimental Ideas of the Subject

Zolkos

2016

Humanities

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This article brings together two ideas that authors in theoretical humanities tend to consider in isolation-of affect and of sentiment-and investigates what conceptions or imaginaries of the subject these ideas have historically relied on and reproduced. When viewed from the lens of the theory of subjectivation, the contemporary notions of affect and the modern sentiment tradition not only reveal significant conceptual, epistemic and ideational overlaps, but they are both kinds of critique of the liberal individualistic subject. Engaging the methodology of juxtaposition, I bring together the affective porous subject (drawing on the work of Teresa Brennan) with the modern sentiment idea of the sensible body, focusing in particular on the 17th-and 18th-century neurological discourses of sensibility in the work of Albrecht von Haller, Georg Ernst Stahl and others. I argue that the modern sentiment tradition forms part of the genealogy of affect in that its ideas of sensibility and sympathy foreground one of the tenets of affective subjectivity: namely, that the subject emerges through (rather than predates) ecological exposure, membranous permeability and nervous responsiveness. In this sense, both the sentimental and affective notions of the subject operate as forms of critique of the idea of Cartesian self and of the disavowal of relational and/or dialogical subject in Western philosophy.

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What Ever Happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth-Century Irritability

Cited by 35 publications

References 17 publications

Vitalism in Early Modern Medical and Philosophical Thought

Vitalism in Early Modern Medical and Philosophical Thought

Life as Concept and as Science in Early Modern Thought

Porous Skins and Tactile Bodies: Juxtaposition of the Affective and Sentimental Ideas of the Subject

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