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N°spécial de revue/special issue HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science Année : 2021

ANIMISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: SOUL-BASED EXPLANATIONS IN EARLY MODERN NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND MEDICINE

Résumé

Animism and its DiscontentsThe aim of this special issue is to explore varieties of animism in western European natural philosophy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It focuses on “natural philosophical animism”, by which we mean the position that the soul, along with its various faculties and powers, is integral to the functioning of nature as a whole, or to the functioning of some natural entities. The term “animism” itself originally emerged in the eighteenth century in connection with the work of Georg Ernst Stahl, and came to be used as a general term for a variety of positions that were intended as a challenge to the mechanist and materialist accounts of nature proliferated during the early modern period. Sometimes it is also portrayed as the most extreme and the most inappropriately metaphysical form of such positions. In the 19th century, animism seemed like the clearest case and worst offender of an atavistic tendency in man to project agency on nature, for instance in the work of the influential French historian of medicine Charles Daremberg, who wrote, in his discussion of Stahl, that:As far as I am concerned, I see no difficulty in declaring that seeking, outside of the organism itself, some being whatsoever in order to explain life, seems to me to be a conception from the infancy of the art. It casts us back into those primitive times when men, not knowing how to account for the phenomena of nature, had a God, a Demigod, some specific genie, or simply blind fatum for explaining each of its manifestations […] I dare affirm that, if religious partisanship or pure theology had not taken hold of animism, this doctrine would not have survived its author. (Daremberg 1870, p.1022)Daremberg’s appraisal of animism is characteristic of the traditional evaluation of it found in many authors inspired by positivism. In the first place, animism is here regarded not as a genuine philosophical or scientific position, but rather a relapse to a primitive, mythical thinking that simply projects human agency onto natural processes to compensate for the utter lack of proper scientific explanation. Secondly, animism is disqualified as a scientific and philosophical view, and its popularity is explained away by purely religious motives and concerns. As such, animism seems to be not just an alternative to mechanical and materialist explanation, but rather an irrational opposition to scientific inquiry as such.But such traditional judgments lack nuance in at least two ways. On the one hand, they overlook the wide variety of animist positions and the notable evolution of animism during the period from the 16th to the 18th century, and the extent to which animism frequently went hand in hand with forms of mechanism and materialism. In response, the contributions to this special issue consider how animist conceptions of the soul and of the soul’s involvement in nature were transformed throughout this period, sometimes by thinkers who were not invariably animists themselves. In doing so, this issue investigates animism not as a monolithic category, but rather as a variety of positions offering very different pictures of the soul, of matter and of the workings of nature.Secondly, the traditional judgment of animism overlooks animism’s active contribution to the development and transformation of natural philosophy in early modernity. For the various forms of animism and of criticisms raised against it manifested controversies within the scientific enterprise that concerned not just the theory, but also the practice and social context of natural philosophy and medicine. Moreover, it is inaccurate to claim that animism always harmonized well with religious and theological concerns. As several contributions to this special issue reveal, the tendency to involve the soul within natural philosophy threatened at times to lead to a naturalization of the soul.

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Philosophie
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halshs-04242777, version 1 (15-10-2023)

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Boris Demarest, Jonathan Regier, Charles T. Wolfe. ANIMISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: SOUL-BASED EXPLANATIONS IN EARLY MODERN NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND MEDICINE. HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, 11 (2), pp.494-501, 2021, ⟨10.1086/715975⟩. ⟨halshs-04242777⟩
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