Academic Theories Of Generation In The Renaissance

This volume deals with philosophically grounded theories of animal generation as found in two different traditions: one, deriving primarily from Aristotelian natural philosophy and specifically from his Generation of Animals; and another, deriving from two related medical traditions, the Hippocratic and the Galenic. The book contains a classification and critique of works that touch on the history of embryology and animal generation written before 1980. It also contains translations of key sections of the works on which it is focused. It looks at two different scholarly communities: the physicians (medici) and philosophers (philosophi), that share a set of textual resources and philosophical lineages, as well as a shared problem (explaining animal generation), but that nevertheless have different concerns and commitments. The book demonstrates how those working in these two traditions not only shared a common philosophical background in the arts curricula of the universities, but were in constant intercourse with each other. This book presents a test case of how scholarly communities differentiate themselves from each other through methods of argument, empirical investigation, and textual interpretations. It is all the more interesting because the two communities under investigation have so much in common and yet, in the end, are distinct in a number of important ways.

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories.

Premodern Sexualities offers rigorous new approaches to current problems in the historiography of sexuality. From queer readings of early modern medical texts to transcribing and interrogating premodern documents of sexual transgression, the contributors bring together current theoretical discourses on sexuality while emphasizing problems in the historicist interpretation of early textualizations of sexuality. Premodern Sexualities clarifies the contributions literary studies can make--through its emphasis on reading strategies--to the historiography of sexuality.

This is an edition of one of the crucial texts of Renaissance skepticism, Quod nihil scitur, by the Portuguese scholar Franciso Sanches. The treatise, first published in 1581, is a refutation of Aaristotelian dialectics and scientific theory in the search for a true scientific method. This volume provides a critical edition of the original text, an English translation (the first ever published), a substantial introduction, and comprehensive annotation.

This monograph is the first to analyze Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Exotericae Exercitationes (1557). In order to make this late-Renaissance work accessible to modern readers, Kuni Sakamoto conducted a detailed textual analysis and revealed the basic tenets of Scaliger’s philosophy.

Jean Fernel (1497-1558) was one of the foremost medical writers of his day, ranked by his contemporaries alongside Andreas Vesalius, reformer of anatomical studies, and Paracelsus, radical reformer of theories of disease and treatment. He is arguably the leading expositor of the Galenic system of medicine. He exemplifies in his Physiologia the method and approach of a typical Aristotelian philosopher in the period immediately before the downfall of Renaissance Scholasticism. John Forrester offers the Physiologia here in its entirety and provides, for the first time, a complete English translation of the work.

This volume collects essays published in the last 20 years. They deal with medicine in the university world of thirteenth to sixteenth century Italy, discussing both the internal academic milieu of teaching and learning and its relation to the lively urban social, economic, and cultural context in which medieval and Renaissance Italian university medicine grew up. Topics covered include the complex interaction of continuity and change in the transition from scholastic to humanistic medicine; humanist presentations of medical lives; the activities of physicians who moved among the worlds of academic learning, princely courts, and city life; the teaching of practical medicine; the relations of medical and surgical learning and practice; and the influence on medical writing of a variety of elements in the broader surrounding intellectual culture.

A groundbreaking, revisionist account of the importance of the history of philosophy to intellectual change - scientific, philosophical and religious - in seventeenth-century England.