William Harvey and the Way of the Artisan
The scientific discoveries of William Harvey are usually studied in the context of the Aristotelian natural philosophy of late Renaissance Europe but it is my contention that they are more profitably understood by reference to what I term the craft empiri
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William Harvey and the Way of the Artisan Alan Salter
Abstract The scientific discoveries of William Harvey are usually studied in the context of the Aristotelian natural philosophy of late Renaissance Europe but it is my contention that they are more pro fi tably understood by reference to what I term the craft empiricism of the period. Harvey’s actual way of inquiry – quite distinct to the claims of his formal works – is to be found in the artisanal techniques of midwives, shepherds, huntsmen and such like who acquired the skills to comprehend their respective object worlds – the birthing mother, the sheep and the lamb, the herd of deer – through rigorous apprenticeship and constant practice. Chief of all their skills, unlearned and tacit, was one of intuitive recognition which enabled them to accommodate variance and disorder in the conduct of their craft. By an exact reading of Harvey’s works, especially his late study on generation, De Generatione Animalium, I show that he too was an artisan, demonstrating the same techniques that he observed and borrowed from the artisans he clearly admired.
Introduction When William Harvey delivered the Lumleian lectures to the London College of Physicians it was not surprising that he selected as his authorities the anatomical texts of the Aristotelians Caspar Bauhin and Andreas Laurentius. He had been educated in the Aristotelian tradition, firstly as an undergraduate at Cambridge and subsequently at Padua, at the time the home to the only Aristotelian medical faculty in Europe; he had a deep understanding of the nature works and was familiar with many of the philosophy texts. His research program was based on the Aristotle of Fabricius, his anatomy Professor at Padua; he chose the chick as the subject of his
A. Salter (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] O. Gal and R. Chen-Morris (eds.), Science in the Age of Baroque, International Archives of the History of Ideas 208, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4807-1_8, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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inquiries into generation, the animal Aristotle chose, and relied on Aristotle’s own studies into animals and on his technique of comparative anatomy. Aristotelian ideas pervade Harvey’s work: the teleology, the centrality of the heart as the sun in the microcosm, the appeal to circularity to explain the movement of the blood and the eternal cycle of generation, the language of universals and the analysis of the structure and function of the part. Harvey adopted scholastic formats for his two major works: the disputatio for De Motu Cordis and the quaestio for De Generatione Animalium. In commenting on Harvey’s demonstration of circulation one writer claims that it was “conceived and executed entirely in the tradition of philosophical anatomy” and that his research program was “philosophical rather than medical”, that is it had no explanatory force (French 1999, 255, 232). Thus reads the scholarly justification of the ‘William Harvey as Aristotelian’ thesis that
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