Medicina y política en Francesco Patrizi: el cuerpo de La Ciudad Feliz
Besides some disagreements, La citta felice of Francesco Patrizi has usually been considered both as a work belonging to the utopian genre of sixteenth century or as a philosophical portrait of the real Venice. In this essay, I maintain, instead, that La citta felice was born in Patrizi’s mind from his attempt to support the Aristotelian political, aristocratic, order and to justify it according to the principles of the philosophical and Platonic medicine of Marsilio Ficino. Such an attempt led him to describe the polis as a human body, applying the Hippocratic-Galenic system to explain its internal functions and considering that the political order of the city arises from the civic body’s needs for maintaining the quantity and quality of natural, vital and animal spiritus.
The Grain and the Spirit in Mediaeval Anatomy
ACCORDING to one series of mediaeval anatomical manuscripts, the arteries are said to originate in a black grain in the heart: "Haec est historia arteriarum, quae procedunt ex corde. Et haec venae sunt, quae pulsant. etenim principium processionis earum est a nigro grano, quod est intus in corde, in quo spiritus habitat."' An accompanying illustration (Fig. 1) shows the heart with the black grain and four blood vessels leading out from it. This particular figure is an "artery man" of the so-called Fiinfbilderserie anatomical drawings.2 Other figures in the series illustrate veins, bones, nerves, and muscles, but only in the artery man is there a heart with a black grain.3 In the statement above, the arteries are defined as "veins that pulsate." Their point of origin from a black grain in the heart puts them in close contact with the spiritus, which is also said to dwell in the heart. According to Costa ben Luca (d. ca. 912) death results when spiritus leaves the heart: "Causa autem, qua egreditur hic spiritus a corde, est causa mortis.... "4 What this spiritus amounts to is not always easy to decide. Depending on context, it can apparently mean either breath or soul, that is, the purely physical stuff of respiration or the ethereal immortal substance of man's being.5 In the Fiinfbilderserie anatomical treatise it
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.