Human & Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy & Medicine ed. by Stefanie Buchenau and Roberto Lo Presti (review)

This collection of essays is another example of a new intellectual history of early modern science and medicine that closely integrates philosophy, natural philosophy, and medical theory and (sometimes) practice. Recent examples include the edited volumes The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge and Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy.¹ In their Introduction, Stefanie Buchenau and Roberto Lo Presti emphasize the interaction of medical and philosophical theories in early modern discussions of cognition, as well as the continuity of early modern ideas with ancient ones, and within the early modern era, continuities between earlier and later ideas. They argue, therefore, that the historiographical notion of a Cartesian rift between the mind and the body and between humans and animals is misleading and even misguided as a lens through which to view early modern concepts of cognition. Ideas of ancient philosophers and particularly of Aristotle remained central to any such discussion.

Human & Animal Cognition consists of three parts, devoted to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The authors include a mixture of younger and more mature scholars, and their approaches vary widely, although the introduction does a good job of elucidating common themes. The first and longest part explores what the editors call "sixteenth-century Aristotelian anthropology" (p. 15), and offers some fresh takes on Renaissance Aristotelianism. Simone de Angelis and Roberto Lo Presti give contrasting analyses of Aristotle's De anima and its Renaissance interpreters, while Christoph Sander and Davide Cellamare discuss Catholic and Protestant interpretations of human and animal souls. Hiro Hirai looks specifically at medical authors, including Jean Fernel, Jacob Schegk, and Daniel Sennert, in examining human and animal embryogenesis and the soul. In the last essay in this section, Marie Gaille revisits Ambroise Paré's "rational surgery" and surgical knowledge of the human body.

Part II, ostensibly on the seventeenth century, focuses mainly on comparative anatomy and therefore animals are much more prominent than in Part I. Domenico Bertoloni Meli examines Giovanni Battista Morgagni's (eighteenth-century) discussion of diseases of the brain, which relied largely on animal evidence. Justin Smith's delightful essay tackles birdsong as a philosophical problem, focusing on theories of language. What he refers to as the "naturalization of the soul" (p. 147) is the topic of Charles Wolfe's essay; if the soul is corporeal, then what makes humans special? He also focuses mainly on the eighteenth century, while Claire Crignon's study of Thomas Willis returns to the seventeenth century and the relationship between the brain and the soul in both animals and humans. Gianni Paganini closes Part II with a fascinating comparison of Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi (both, we should note, anti-Cartesians) on animals and the political contract.

The shortest section, but the most thematically unified, is Part III, on eighteenth-century discourses of sensibility. François Duchesneau, Stephen Gaukroger, and Tobias Cheung analyze, respectively, Albrecht von Haller, anthropological medicine in eighteenth-century France, and Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis. Stefanie Buchenau concludes with the German physician Ernst Platner's idea of the sense of the self, which, she argues, he drew from Aristotle. She brings back to the surface the central thread of Aristotle that provides the backdrop for much of the volume.

As is often the case with works that are self-consciously revisionist, at times there is a feeling in Human & Animal Cognition of jousting against straw men. Certainly the historiography of early modern science has acknowledged the significance of Renaissance Aristotelianism, and Aristotle in general, since the work of Charles Schmitt in the 1960s. Likewise, a revived (and revised) intellectual history of science has been around for at least a decade; and many authors, including myself, have argued that the importance of Descartes's dualism has been exaggerated. I was also disappointed that few of the authors considered animals as animals, rather than merely as instruments to find...