02 Nov 2018 09:00 AM - 11:45 AM(America/Vancouver)
20181102T090020181102T1145America/VancouverWhy "Body" Matters: Premodern Paradigms of Corporeality
Hardly anything seems more ordinary than the extended, concrete bodies populating the world of experience. Yet in explaining their manifest properties, physicists must appeal to entities radically unlike the bodies of our experience. Medieval Aristotelians too struggled to resolve tensions between the characteristics of the bodies we experience (corporeality), and the principle that accounts for the way bodies are (matter). This panel uncovers key difficulties that theorists of the High Middle Ages encountered when deploying Aristotelian notions of body to account for the bodies we experience. It thus offers a new window onto the fraying and reweaving of medieval paradigms of the physical world in the thirteenth century. The first three papers examine tensions within medieval paradigms of corporeality. Neil Lewis will explore medieval attempts to fit ‘body’ into the Aristotelian categorial scheme by distinguishing body as substance and quantified body. David Cory will examine the emergence of a ‘dual explanation’ of physical phenomena in terms of materiality and corporeality. Nicola Polloni will show how this duality raised questions about matter’s (un)knowability, putting its physical function into tension with its metaphysical limitations. The last two papers treat two cases, concerning bodily properties, that challenged Aristotelian paradigms among thirteenth-century Christian and Islamic intellectuals. Therese Cory will examine how Parisian theorists sought to integrate light into their paradigm of corporeality. Emma Gannagé will examine how the post-Avicennian medical tradition handled the problem of bodies exhibiting secondary qualities (magnetism or healing properties) beyond those manifested by all bodies in common.
Columbia, Fourth FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
Hardly anything seems more ordinary than the extended, concrete bodies populating the world of experience. Yet in explaining their manifest properties, physicists must appeal to entities radically unlike the bodies of our experience. Medieval Aristotelians too struggled to resolve tensions between the characteristics of the bodies we experience (corporeality), and the principle that accounts for the way bodies are (matter). This panel uncovers key difficulties that theorists of the High Middle Ages encountered when deploying Aristotelian notions of body to account for the bodies we experience. It thus offers a new window onto the fraying and reweaving of medieval paradigms of the physical world in the thirteenth century. The first three papers examine tensions within medieval paradigms of corporeality. Neil Lewis will explore medieval attempts to fit ‘body’ into the Aristotelian categorial scheme by distinguishing body as substance and quantified body. David Cory will examine the emergence of a ‘dual explanation’ of physical phenomena in terms of materiality and corporeality. Nicola Polloni will show how this duality raised questions about matter’s (un)knowability, putting its physical function into tension with its metaphysical limitations. The last two papers treat two cases, concerning bodily properties, that challenged Aristotelian paradigms among thirteenth-century Christian and Islamic intellectuals. Therese Cory will examine how Parisian theorists sought to integrate light into their paradigm of corporeality. Emma Gannagé will examine how the post-Avicennian medical tradition handled the problem of bodies exhibiting secondary qualities (magnetism or healing properties) beyond those manifested by all bodies in common.
Organized by Therese Cory (University of Notre Dame)
Body as Substance and Quantified Body in the Early Thirteenth CenturyView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography09:00 AM - 09:33 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 16:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 16:33:00 UTC
This talk will explore the relation of the notion of body to the Aristotelian categorial scheme as expressed in the distinction between body as substance (corpus substantia) and quantified body (corpus quantum) employed by thirteenth and fourteenth-century thinkers. The focus will be on the early thirteenth-century thinker Robert Grosseteste, an important figure in the history of science and the first in the Latin West to write a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, where this distinction makes one of its earliest appearances.
Matter and Body: Complementary Explanations of Physical Causation in the Middle AgesView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography09:33 AM - 10:06 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 16:33:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 17:06:00 UTC
Matter and body are conceptually distinct ways of addressing the same physical reality, i.e. that which is fundamental in physical reality. Hence, material causes and bodily causes are on the same explanatory level, or so it seems to us. Yet medieval explanations of physical causation took a different route entirely, and adhered to a dual explanatory model in which matter and body play complementary roles. The 13th-century Dominicans, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, for instance, distinguished matter from body, and supplied them with different functional roles in physical causation. For them bodies are the things in ordinary experience which cause via contrary causal features (e.g. heat and cold). In contrast, "matter" is a more complex concept, usually referring to something like a susceptibility or openness to the causal features of body. Matter and body are both required in medieval paradigms of physical causation. In my paper, I will shed light on the basic meanings of the two complementary concepts in some select 13th-century thinkers, and on the role of matter in particular in explaining causal action among bodies.
From Matter to Materiality: Premodern Quests for Knowing the Principle of CorporealityView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography10:06 AM - 10:39 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 17:06:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 17:39:00 UTC
For a premodern scientist, matter is what made an apple this apple and also distinguished that apple from the mental idea. Matter was the carrier of three-dimensional extension and the bearer of forms, which in turn articulated the patterns of definition, shape, and intrinsic nature of this or any apple. Premodern knowing depended on form whence matter appears to inevitably escape it – as matter is, by definition, what is other than form. How was the premodern understanding of corporeality shaped by the grounding and yet shadowy functions by matter? And how could premodern thinkers grasp what matter is – and subsequently how it can properly satisfy the physical conditions of dimensionality and corporeality – if matter cannot be known? This paper will examine two alternative strategies that were put in place to resolve this puzzle in the High Middle Ages: the denial that knowing matter is possible (Aquinas) and the assumption that it can be known albeit feebly and mediatedly (Scotus and Ockham). While both strategies meant to resolve this puzzle, they also contributed to stress the theoretical flaws which originated by the tension between the physical functions of matter and its (un)knowability. This crucial impasse would facilitate the identification of matter and materiality, as it required philosophers and scientists to provide new answers and narratives beyond the Aristotelian tradition and to drastically contribute to the final ousting of Aristotelian metaphysics from natural science.
Presenters Nicola Polloni Institut Für Philosophie, Humboldt Universität Zu Berlin
Radiance at the Limit of the Material World: Light as a Property of Physical Bodies in Thirteenth-century ParisView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography10:39 AM - 11:12 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 17:39:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 18:12:00 UTC
The theories of light that were in circulation in the European universities of the thirteenth century are currently not well understood, partly because of the tremendous diversity among these theories and the wide range of sources that were drawn upon (for instance, Albert the Great, writing in 1242, identifies eleven different sources and obliquely references many more). Indeed, in the mid-thirteenth century in Europe, theories of the natural world were in a state of accelerated turbulence and change, as European thinkers were exposed to a torrent of new debates and new theories about the physical realm, arriving from Greco-Arabic “natural philosophy.” In developing new visions of the physical world at this time, an important puzzle arose for thirteenth-century thinkers, concerning where light fits into the picture. Is light situated within the world of matter and motion (i.e., having “natural being”), or is it something immaterial? In this paper, building on previous work on medieval Arabic theories of light, I examine a group of three theories from Paris in the 1240s-50s that came down firmly on the physicality of light: the theories of Albert the Great, the early Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure. For all three, light is a property of bodies. Nonetheless, they have trouble explaining why light seems unlike other physical states (e.g., existing in different ways in solid bodies and translucent bodies). I will discuss how they resolved these difficulties, and what their resolution reveals about how they integrated new scientific knowledge
On Bodies and Properties: Physical Effect and Causal Explanation in Arabic Medicine at the Turn of the Thirteenth CenturyView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography11:12 AM - 11:45 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 18:12:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 18:45:00 UTC
The standard Peripatetic view considers the primary qualities as constitutive, with the matter, of the substance of the body. Accordingly the only qualities responsible for any change are the four primary ones: hot, cold, moist and dry. However, properties of bodies like magnetic attraction are non-sensible powers that cannot be explained solely from the mixture of primary qualities. Such specific properties (khāwaṣṣ) would be the observable but unexplained physical manifestation of a specific power proper to some mineral, animal or plant. They can be observed but not deduced rationally. Of course alchemy made considerable usage of such properties or powers, but medicine also used the same notion extensively, especially in pharmacotherapy. Galen already acknowledges the phenomenon, distinguishing between drugs that act through their elementary qualities and those that act “through the peculiar property of their entire substance” without further explanation. The problem, which is at the intersection between medicine and natural philosophy, was precisely how to provide a causal explanation for the properties of a drug that apparently do not result from a mixture of the primary qualities. It will however receive much greater prominence in Avicenna’s medico-pharmacology that shifted the emphasis towards an empirical, non predictable model, relying solely on experience (McVaugh). This paper will examine some responses to Avicenna in the Arabic medical literature at the turn of the thirteenth century aiming at restoring a more speculative approach based on a causal and scientific explanation in terms of the primary qualities within Aristotelian physics.
Nicola Polloni