Descartes and Medicine (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 3o9 issues, but, biography aside, this does not seem sufficient justification to pack all of them in as key factors in his exposition. Galileo was a good rhetorician, and Finocchiaro has shown this beyond shadow of doubt; yet his adversaries, the Churchmen he was trying to convince, were not moved by his rhetoric, and indeed they proved to be quite capable rhetoricians themselves. Actually, apart from a brief analysis in the first chapter, Finocchiaro has very little to say about this state of affairs, and particularly about Galileo's failure to achieve his intended goal. Perhaps the reason for this lies in a notorious characteristic of rhetorical argument: it tends to convince those who want to believe its conclusion anyway, whereas it mainly infuriates those who find that conclusion unacceptable. In the present day, when people generally believe that the earth moves, one can be quite satisfied and even delighted with Galileo's rhetorical skill; in 1632, especially in Rome and Florence, when the weight of authority and the evidence of common sense were clearly against this conclusion, one could just as easily have been incensed at the perversity of Galileo's attempt to force its acceptance. Galileo's overall failure, it seems to me, can be attributed only to his inability to prove his point by the canons of proof acceptable in his day, namely, those of strict demonstration in the sense of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Finocchiaro's attempt to show that Galileo did not subscribe to such canons (pp. 18-22) is unconvincing; in the seventeenth century there simply were no other canons to replace Aristotle's for this task, at ]east not in the common consensus of educated men. The fact that Galileo does not explicitly insist on the demonstrative character of the arguments in the Dialogue (whereas he does this in his earlier writings and in his later Two New Sciences) can easily be explained in terms of Finocchiaro's own thesis, that of the book's essentially rhetorical character. To have proposed his arguments as strict demonstrations could have been fatal on two counts: (1) such a procedure would have directly contradicted the decree of 1616, a sequel no Churchman of his time could possibly accept; and (~) the flaws in his proffered proofs, when taken to be strictly demonstrative, would have discredited him even in the eyes of the scientific community of his day. So he had to invoke less stringent logical requirements (perhaps akin to those philosophers of science require in the present day--though this is surely a debatable extrapolation) in order to get a hearing under such circumstances. These criticisms notwithstanding, the book is a genuine tour de force, and its author can only be congratulated for contributing such a wealth of knowledge, insight , and stimulation to Galilean studies and to the philosophy of science generally. WILLIAM A. WALLACE Catholic University of America G. A. Lindeboom. Descartes and Medicine. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1979. Pp. 134. $16.5o. Descartes's life and work is, of course, a matter of public record to the degree that almost every aspect of his genius has been the subject of commentary. Even in areas 310 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in which Descartes did not distinguish himself as preeminent, studies abound. His relatively pedestrian medical and biological ideas have not escaped this irrepressible scholarly instinct for plentitude. Nor is there anything especially disheartening in the meticulous examination of a great man's thoughts, even when the thoughts themselves , as in the present case, fall somewhat short of greatness. Simply because Descartes 's views of physiology and pathology were not as keen as his metaphysical, mathematical, and mechanical speculations, these are not disqualified as far as the historically minded Cartesian scholar is concerned. Yet another study of Descartes and medicine, therefore, would be very welcome indeed if it succeeded in enriching our understanding of his thought in general or the history of medicine in particular. I am afraid G. A. Lindeboom does not quite succeed in either of these worthwhile endeavors. The first sentence of Lindeboom's preface is enough in itself to disorient most students of the scientific revolution. He writes, "There is no need to...