Medical empiricism and philosophy of human nature in the 17th and 18th century / / edited by Claire Crignon, Carsten Zelle, and Nunzio Allocca.

• TeilnehmendeR: Crignon, Claire,; Zelle, Carsten, 1953-; Allocca, Nunzio,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands : : Brill,, 2013.; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (174 p.)
• Notes: Includes index.

The contributions gathered in this volume endeavour to evaluate the role played by medical empiricism in the emergence of a philosophy of human nature in the 17th century and the role played by philosophical anthropology in the 18th century. Divided into three parts, “1. The Dispute between Metaphysics and Empiricism”, “2. Arts of Empirical Research,” and “3. Relevance of Case Studies,” the volume questions the position of medicine within so-called “natural philosophy”, which encompasses physiology and anatomy, as well as physics, astronomy and chemistry. One of its aims is to understand the tension between the goals pursued by the “natural philosopher” and the objectives set by the \'physician\'. Within natural philosophy, the primary goal is to know nature, the body and the living, and this knowledge implies an effort to understand the causes of natural phenomena. For the physician, on the other hand, the primary goal is to cure the patients’ bodies that are presented to him. Contributors include: Claire Crignon, Claire Etchegaray, Guido Giglioni, Domenico Berto Meli, Anne-Lise Rey, Yvonne Wübben, and Carsten Zelle.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Claire Crignon , Carsten Zelle and Nunzio Allocca -- The Debate about methodus medendi during the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century in England: Modern Philosophical Readings of Classical Medical Empiricism in Bacon, Nedham, Willis and Boyle / Claire Crignon -- The Status of Leibniz’ Medical Experiments: A Provisional Empiricism? / Anne-Lise Rey -- Whytt and the Idea of Power: Physiological Evidence as a Challenge to the Eighteenth-Century Criticism of the Notion of Power / Claire Etchegaray -- Learning to Read Nature: Francis Bacon’s Notion of Experiential Liter- acy (Experientia Literata) / Guido Giglioni -- Of Snails and Horsetails: Anatomical Empiricism in the Early Modern Period / Domenico Bertoloni Meli -- Experiment, Observation, Self-observation. Empiricism and the ‘Rea-sonable Physicians’ of the Early Enlightenment / Carsten Zelle -- Writing Cases and Casuistic Reasoning in Karl Philipp Moritz’ Journal ofEmpirical Psychology / Yvonne Wübben -- Indices / Claire Crignon , Carsten Zelle and Nunzio Allocca.