prompt stringlengths 205 775 |
|---|
The materialist interpreter may take heart when he sees that Aristotle uses the very same kind of analogy as some modern materialists have used. Anger is a physiological process in much the same sense as a house is a set of bricks. Some modern materialists have offered the analogy of a bucket of water being a set of H2O molecules. But Aristotle is more accurate than these materialists. For they want to say that mental states may be identical 41 DM 45oa25-45IaI7; Insom. ch.3. For the word phantasma, see DM 450bio; b24; |
Insom. 46obIo-II; b23-29; 460b3I-46Ia8; 46aIg9-22; 462a8-12. The significance of the last point, however, the observability of the image, will be reduced, when we recall that Aristotle sometimes speaks of our observing physiological processes within ourselves (see pp. 71-72). 42 Insom. 460b3I-46Ia8; 46IaI9-22. A physical interpretation suggests itself also when Aristotle says that the changes left behind in us by earlier |
There are other contrasts too. Aristotle would not agree that perception is simply a physiological process. For this'simply' (Slakey's word) would ignore the formal cause. A house is not simply bricks; it is also a shelter. And this further description is a very important one. Indeed, the formal description of perception is, if anything, more important than the material description. For the body exists for the sake of the soul, in the sense that there would be no point in the existence of bodies and bodily processes, but for the existence of souls and soul states (DA 415bI5-2I |
Cf. also Io35a7-Io, 'the form, or the thing insofar as it has form, should be said to be the thing, but the material by itself should never be said to be so'. Presumably, in the case of anger, the physiological process can occur in sleep, without anger occurring, just as bricks can exist, when a house Aristotle's use of the matter-form distinction in his psychology has been called a strain, a misfit, and an obfuscation.47 But it has the merit of steering us away from the idea that mental states may be identical with, or may be |
Aristotle tells us that anger can be further described as a desire to retaliate, and smelling as an awareness of odour (DA 403a25-b9; 424bI7-I9). But neither answer is very helpful to people with our interests. For the new terms, 'desire' and 'awareness', are, like the original terms ('anger and'smelling'), the names of pathe of the soul. They therefore invite the same question all over again, 'What else are desire and awareness, besides physiological processes?' We would like a description that differs in kind, and is not simply |
But what is the formal description of desire? Aristotle places a strong emphasis on the connexion between desire and action. One of the most interesting passages is the analysis of abilities in M/etaphysics IX. 5. After analysing non-rational abilities, such as the ability of fire to burn, he passes on to rational abilities such as the ability to heal. These latter are connected with desire. Thus one who is able to heal under appropriate conditions necessarily (Io48aI4) will heal, if (a) he wants to, (b) of the two results, healing or withholding health, this is the |
Aristotle links desire and action again, when he says (NE ii39a3I-32) that the efficient cause of praxis (deliberate action) is prohaeresis (a certain kind of desire). More generally, the efficient cause of animal motion is desire.51 Neither these, nor the preceding, statements are offered as providing an analysis of desire. And in some cases the link between desire and action will be more indirect than that described here. For example, Aristotle distinguishes between boulesis, desire for an end such as health, and prohaeresis, desire for something in our power |
Perhaps we now have the materials for conjecturing what Aristotle might say, if asked for the formal description of desire. Would part of his answer be that desire is, in certain conditions, a necessitating efficient cause of action? By 'action' I mean not merely praxis, deliberate action, which is confined to humans, but the various doings of humans and animals. The statement of conditions would include such provisos as that action is in our power, and that we are fully aware of the relevant observational facts. This could not be more than part of Aristotle's answer.52 Another part would be 50 It would be an |
that every desire has a final cause (DA 433aI5). This is the object of desire. And desire, like other activities of the soul, must presumably be defined by reference to its final cause (DA 403a27), and its objects (DA 4I5a2o-22; 4I8a7-8). Putting this together, we get a fuller, though no doubt still an incomplete, answer to our question, 'what else is desire, besides a process of heating or cooling?' The answer is that desire has an end, and is, in certain conditions, a necessitating |
Our expectation that loving will be connected with action is confirmed in the Rhetoric passage. For Aristotle describes loving not only as wishing good to another person, but also as being a doer of good to him, so far as possible (I38ob35).53 But there is something here that we did not quite expect. Aristotle does not say that loving is an efficient cause of doing good to someone. He says that it is being a doer of good to him, i.e. presumably, it is a tendency to do good to him. Modern discussions have suggested that there is a big difference between a mere tendency to do |
Though loving is classed as a pathos in the Rhetoric, friendship is assimilated to a hexis, or long-term state, in the Nicomachean Ethics (ii57b29). For the difference between pathos and hexis, see note 21. It need be no less true of hexeis than of pathe that some are connected with action. Examples of hexeis are the virtues and vices discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics. And these are connected not only with pathe, but also with action, according to NE IoI6b23-28. For example, |
If we have not gone too far beyond Aristotle's text, in our speculations, we now have some sort of answer to our question. The answer will only apply to desire and to some pathe or hexeis of the soul. For Aristotle shows no interest in connecting all pathe or hexeis with action towards an end. But at least for desire we can suggest a formal description which is not merely the name of another pathos.56 The description is that desire has an end and is (with appropriate qualifications) an efficient cause of action towards that end. If this is the sort of thing that Aristotle would say, |
By the time he came to write the De Anima, Aristotle would have had the means for showing how the stronger contact requirement is satisfied. And he might also have been in a position to answer modern perplexities about the mind moving the body, if he had further exploited his semi-physiological analysis of desire. Desire, as we have seen, is a physiological process of heating or cooling. And it is not philosophically puzzling how heating or cooling, by causing expansion or contraction, can lead to bodily movement. The details of the mechanism are given in Mot. chh. 6-Io. At no stage does the |
Admittedly, in appealing to heating or cooling, we have not given a complete account of how the body is moved. For all non-compulsory animal motion is for an end (DA 432bI5). If we want a full explanation of animal motion, we shall have to appeal to this end, which is the object desired. But the end is a final, not an efficient, cause. So it does not raise the Cartesian problem of one thing acting as efficient cause upon another with which it has no affinity. Nor does it violate Aristotle's contact requirement, for this requirement too applies only to efficient causation ( |
(ii) We have been talking about how the soul acts on the body. But there is also a problem for modern Cartesians about how the body acts on the soul. How can a physical process in the eye lead to seeing? W. D. Ross (loc. cit., see above n. 6), speaking of the physical process in the eye, says, 'it does nothing to explain the essential fact about perception, that on this physical change supervenes something quite different, the apprehension by the mind of some quality of an object'. Earlier on the same page, he speaks of 'the distinctively mental, non |
(iv) Throughout the discussion so far, we have been guilty of an oversimplification. For we have spoken as if Aristotle were giving a purely physiological description, with no implications for the mind, in his talk of the boiling of the blood around the heart. But in fact he is so impressed by the importance of a thing's function, that he believes a non-functioning heart, or non-functioning blood, is not a heart, or blood, in the proper sense of the word. This theory is applied to the body as a whole, and to many of its components.67 So his description of the physiological process 65 |
Aristotle thus gives to the heart or eye a treatment that would be more appropriate for a scrap of paper used as a bookmarker. The scrap becomes a bookmarker, when so used, and ceases to be a bookmarker, when discarded. When it lies in the wastepaper basket, there is nothing distinctive to connect it, rather than thousands of other objects, with bookmarking; its use alone made it a bookmarker. Contrast the severed hand or eye. This still has a distinctive structure to connect it with its former activities, and so it should still (pace Aristotle) qualify as a hand or eye in the |
For Aristotle, seeing is, among other things, a physiological process, the coloration of the eye-jelly. And this process can in principle, even if not in practice, be observed by others. So there is an answer to the question how one can possibly know that another person is seeing. One can in theory observe the fact. Perhaps it will be objected that to observe the coloration of another man's eye-jelly is to observe only the material cause of his seeing, not the seeing itself. But this objection fails to do justice to Aristotle's position in two ways. First, in Aristotle's view, it is by |
In 1974 an image featured for the first time on the cover of the Swedish medical journal Läkartidningen, a space that earlier had been exclusively reserved for the index of its contents (Fig. 1 ). It was a scanning electron micrograph of a human embryo produced by the photographer Lennart Nilsson. Although photographs taken through scanning electron microscopes (SEM) had been around in the biological research literature for some years, they were still a novelty to the wider medical community. Moreover, Nilsson's cover image was bright blue whereas the majority of scanning electron micrographs were in black-and-white. 1 Clearly |
with an extensive network of connections in the scientific world as well as in the media industry. He started off in the 1940s as a freelance photographer working mainly for Bonnier AB, the largest media company in Sweden. In the early 1950s he took a series of photographs of embryos and foetuses for a magazine article about the opposition to abortion among gynaecologists at the Women's Clinic of Sabbatsberg Hospital in Stockholm. 2 This article was the first publication in an extensive photographic project undertaken by Nilsson in collaboration with gynaecologists and researchers that culminated with the photo essay "Drama |
Drawing on these studies, I suggest that Nilsson's engagement with SEM did not follow a straight route from the laboratory to the market. Rather, commercial interests and considerations infused his work from the start. 12 In particular, this article will investigate three aspects of the interaction between Nilsson's SEM images and commerce. First, it will highlight how the complex and sometimes conflicting interplay between the photographer and various actors in science, industry and the media shaped his pictures and their trajectories. Above all it will explore the formal and informal organisation of Karolinska Institutet through which Nilsson could gain access to and exchange knowledge, technical resources |
David Scharf, an American engineer and photographer, started to produce SEM images that were presented as contributions to both art and science. 22 There seems, however, to have been no direct contact between Nilsson and these international artists and photographers. In contrast to the optical microscopes that Nilsson was familiar with, this instrument depended not on radiant energy but on electrons as its light source, which meant that many of the qualities that usually gave life to the surface studied (such as colour and reflections) ceased to exist. The world of the SEM was in black and white, even if the screen emitted a blue glow that lent a |
Some of these were new acquaintances made at the villa, such as the members of the research group from the Gustav V Research Institute who were working on a project on the inner ear. when it was time to press the camera button, which he himself did. After many years of working with the SEM, Nilsson became more skilled at producing the images, but he was always reliant on technical support to prepare the specimens and maximise the performance of the instruments. 28 Several of the images that Nilsson made at Analytica were published in 1970 in a photo essay in Life entitled "The Worlds Within Us." (Fig |
From about 1970 Nilsson's SEM images of biological structures and entities started to circulate back and forth between different media and contexts. It is interesting to note that the making of the micrographs did not follow a simple path from the laboratory to the marketplace. Rather, there was intense traffic in both directions. As I will show, the content of the images was "remediated", or modified, in collaboration or independently by actors in various areas. 34 In a large part of these activities Lindberg acted as Nilsson's co-worker and, like most of his collaborators, helped him without any financial recompense. |
It would however be a serious mistake to claim that colour had no particular relevance in scientific image making before the 1970s. On the contrary, as has been shown by several scholars, the skilful handling and appreciation of colours were characteristic of, for instance, scientific atlases during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Anatomical wax models and moulages of skin diseases were also both three-dimensional and in colour. Not least of all, in the field of optical microscopy colour played a crucial role in enhancing contrast and highlighting details. From the mid-nineteenth century colour was added to black-and-white photographs either |
The use of colour in brain imaging has also been highlighted in recent research. 52 At the same time it is crucial to note that the majority of the pictures in Läkartidningen and other medical publications around 1970 were still being printed in black-and-white. In contrast, the commercial domain was ablaze with colours. Since the late nineteenth century colour had slowly moved into a series of media that until then had been dominated by blackand-white: first chromolithography, then still photography, cinema, and finally television. presented his photo essay on human development as an "Unprecedented photographic feat in color." 54 The |
Häägg used this process, for instance, to colour the image of a staphylococcus bacteria being approached by white blood cells. (Fig. 6 ) In the darkroom an unexposed colour slide film was mounted in a print frame, and over this film the tone line, a mask that covered a part of the entire image -the part showing the staphylococcus -and one positive lith film were placed, and the composite was exposed to blue, green and red light in turn, with a different exposure time for each colour. During the exposures Häägg's son, who was almost ten |
This method allowed Häägg to make subtle changes in the hues and contrasts of the individual print by changing the acidity of his dye baths. He could alter the background, highlight a detail, compose montages and retouch the image. Several of the pictures in The Body Victorious were made using this process. 62 ( Fig. 7) Thus, in the 1970s and 1980s carbro and dye transfer provided Häägg with the tools to convert Nilsson's black-and-white images into colour images with the precise shades of hue that he wanted them to have. These techniques were creative adaptations of processes |
Häägg, in contrast to the forensic physician Lindberg, had signed a contract with Nilsson and was compensated financially for his work, but he was seldom given much credit in the publications. This did not undermine their professional relationship and they continued to collaborate on various projects for many years. But when a new edition of A Child Is Born was prepared in the late 1990s, the editors at Bonnier wanted to use digital techniques to colour the material instead of Häägg's meticulous process. 66 Nilsson agreed and a company in central Stockholm worked for two years with both a series of new SEM images and some of |
As observed by the film historian Tom Gunning, colour played a contradictory role for most of the first period in the history of photography and the cinema, from 1860 to 1960. From one perspective, the development of colour technology was necessary to attain the ideal of producing realistic images of the visual world. But colour was applied much more often for its sensuous and spectacular effects. Gunning also stresses that the proliferation of colour in everyday life threatened the conceptions of elitist high culture. Colour was thought by many critics and intellectuals to be dangerous because it represented the emerging commercial culture, which addressed the senses and emotions rather than |
Misek, has pointed out, colour images were frequently perceived as a format of the present, whereas black-and-white images documented the past, or else signified'realism'. In the 1970s such uses of monochrome were most apparent in documentaries and news reports. 70 Nilsson's editors and co-authors seldom commented on the colouring of his SEM images, and when they did so it was only in vague, generalized terms with the assumption that the objective was to achieve complete realism. For instance, in the 1970 issue of Life magazine, it was stated that after Nilsson had produced his black |
Nilsson's micrographs. His ambition was to add colour that looked natural so the viewer did not have the impression that the images had been colourised. In consultation with Nilsson, he created a kind of standardised palette based on the notion that some colours matched the biological objects in the images more closely than others. Although not applied consistently, this idea was put into practice in Behold Man, as well as in The Body Victorious and The Incredible Machine. Red, brown and pink were linked to what was "human", while to the "alien" were assigned "non-organic" colours. Red blood cells became red, |
Thus, the standardised colour scheme further accentuated Nilsson and Häägg's rendition of the inner body as landscape. It emphasized the sense of depth in the SEM images and created an impression of vast terrains waiting to be explored. The reds, blues, yellows and greens made it possible to distinguish different elements in the image and thereby assign to them roles in a drama featuring valiant sperm fighting their way to the waiting egg or a story about the body's defence forces combating hostile invaders. 74 But at the same time the colours performed something more than a narrative function. The astonishing brightness of the pictures in The Body |
Nilsson's images were not considered to be true, but manipulated or in some cases fake. Even some of his collaborators remained sceptical and dismissed them as "pseudo". 79 Significantly, the images appearing in Patek's dissertation were in black-and-white. 80 This critique reminds us of the hierarchical distinction that was made between "pretty pictures" and "scientific images" by the astronomers who shortly afterwards introduced colours into their digital images. 81 Although the motivation for rejecting colour was declared to be scientific, it is possible to detect a cultural dimension in this attitude. As already indicated, the use of black-and-white in |
had come to stay in the medical world, as suggested by the cover of Läkartidningen. After the 1974 issue with the spectacular blue SEM image of a human embryo on its cover, the journalwhich was the official organ of the Swedish Medical Association -began to regularly feature colour images by Nilsson, as well as other photographers, on its front cover. 88 Nevertheless, as his national and international reputation grew, Nilsson gained more acceptance even among his critics at the institute. In 1976 Karolinska Institutet awarded him an honorary medical degree, stating among his achievements that he "had made |
Jan. the minds of many medical men, and in the public opinion, as it has been of late in various parts of this kingdom. Since the epidemic revolution of the small-pox has pervaded the country, the most confiding of the advocates of the Jennerian system must have remarked some phenomena they did not anticipate, and which would tend to puzzle a little the enthusiasm of their minds. Nosology has been again revised, and found unsatisfactory, and at some variance with observation ; while a definite description of these genera of exanthemata has in vain been looked for, as a sure guide to diagnosis. Amid a |
The insulated practice of a country practitioner, excluding liim for a while from the immediate knowledge of all that is happening around him relating to the nascent epidemics of a season, he had, at first appearance of this anomaly of the smallpox, much to recollect, daily doubts to resolve, and the staggering faith of others to uphold; while his own was perhaps any thing but confirmed by all he witnessed and heard rumoured ; and ifit was of recent adoption, and unpropped by personal experience, it perhaps would unsettle in the current that clamoured around him; until the reported observations of his brethren began to |
11/13/08 11:41 AM destroy pathogens by releasing soluble molecules or by engulfing (phagocytosing) them. In taxa as diverse as snails, moths, mosquitoes, and fruit flies, artificial selection in the laboratory for increased ability to resist parasite attack has been associated with reductions in at least some components of fitness (8). Moret and Schmid-Hempel (2) now report substantial fitness costs associated with activating an innate immune response in bumblebees. They found that immunologically challenging bees by exposing them to lipopolysaccharides or microlatex beads elic |
There may also be fitness costs associated with immune responses in vertebrates. In addition to innate immunity, vertebrates possess an adaptive immune system in which different types of cells carry a highly diverse array of receptors that recognize an almost unlimited range of foreign antigens. One example of the fitness costs associated with mounting an adaptive immune response comes from immunizing wild birds with a human diphtheria-tetanus vaccine. Immunized birds fledged fewer and lighter offspring than nonimmunized birds (9). The mechanistic basis of these reductions in fitness remains to be determined for both the birds and the bees. In both sets of experiments |
If immunity proves to be costly, natural selection ought to favor enhanced resistance to pathogens or immunoresponsiveness only when it is beneficial. Is investment in immune protection greater in species that are exposed to a larger number of pathogens? If so, this could explain natural variations in pathogen resistance or immunoresponsiveness. Analogous arguments underpin adaptive explanations of diversity in a wide range of animal traits. For instance, there is variation among mammalian species in regions of their bodies that have pronounced skin thickening. These regions correlate closely with those areas that are most likely to be severely damaged when males fight each other: Mountain goats use their |
Nunn et al. (3) claim to have done just that in 41 species of primates. They gathered baseline white blood cell counts for captive female primates from zoo veterinarians (who considered these values typical for healthy animals). They discovered that total white blood cell counts, as well as numbers of the different types of white cells (neutrophils, lymphocytes, and monocytes), are higher in promiscuous primate species than in closely related monogamous species (see the figure). Nunn and co-workers argue that these results are evidence for greater investment in immune defenses by primate species more at risk |
The authors' assertion that species differences in white blood cell numbers recorded in zoos reflect evolutionary differences in immune defense investment provokes some difficult questions. Most important, are baseline white blood cell counts reliable measures of species differences in immune system preparedness? One argument might be that higher steady-state numbers of phagocytic cells such as neutrophils would enable these cells to reach points of infection in tissues more quickly. But the species differences in white blood cell numbers--which are often small compared to the health-related fluctuations observed in single individuals--will be rapidly swamped by the influx of bone marrow neutrophils into the blood in response |
Even more difficult to explain are the higher numbers of lymphocytes in the promiscuous primates. It is the diversity of these antigen-specific cells and their capacity to make an effective memory response, rather than their overall numbers per se, that will determine the effectiveness of the immune response and the outcome of infection. Indeed, why are the numbers of all three types of immune cell (neutrophils, lymphocytes, and monocytes)--which have very different functions, life-spans, and evolutionary histories--elevated in promiscuous primate species? Perhaps the elevation of all three cell types reflects some other difference between prom |
What of Nunn et al.'s argument that their findings point to a role for selection 11/13/08 11:41 AM imposed by STDs? Certainly these diseases are very widespread in nature and, although they typically have longer asymptomatic periods than other infectious diseases and cause chronic rather than acute infections, they can nonetheless cause substantial reductions in fitness--principally through sterility (11). Implicit in Nunn et al.'s argument (3) is the assumption that this selection pressure is strong enough to favor increases in costly immune machinery, but not strong enough to select for monogamy. That may be |
As is true for much comparative biology, the correlations reported by Nunn et al. are relatively weak. We will be delighted if their findings turn out to be an example of successful extraction of evolutionary signal from biological noise--indeed, many of the difficulties we have discussed would obscure rather than artifactually produce the correlation they report. Certainly, the idea that immune response variations in nature can be understood in terms of fitness costs and benefits is intuitively appealing (6). The principal challenge is to marry this idea with our detailed understanding of how immunity works. This may be difficult given the complexity and redundancy of the vertebrate immune system. |
Irrespective of the specifics of Nunn et al.'s argument, the species differences in baseline immune cell numbers highlighted by their study demand explanation. Extension of their analyses to other orders of mammals could be telling. Hopefully, attempts to test Nunn et al.'s interpretation will investigate fitness trade-offs between immunity and other competing demands on an animal (13). Used carefully, cost-benefit analyses should help to make sense of variations in immunity (6, 7)--not only variations between species, but also those associated with pregnancy, age, sex, and season of the year. They should also help to explain (and even |
The second source of uncertainty is dose extrapolation. A-bomb risks are based on excess cancer deaths in people exposed to doses greater than 200 mSv (D. A. Pierce et al. Radiat. Res. 146, 1-27; 1996). Below this dose the total excess number of cancer deaths is too small to be used reliably in risk estimation. Accordingly, risks calculated from high-dose data are extrapolated using the linear non-threshold theory to predict risks at small doses. Assuming that occupational and environmental doses are around 2 mSv per year, dose extrapolation is significant |
Mark Little replies -I am grateful for Dr Mossman's comments on my article. As I stated in the penultimate paragraph, sources of uncertainty other than the dosimetry have to be taken into account in deriving risk estimates from the A-bomb data. Constraints of space did not allow me to go into these in detail. I would concur with Dr Mossman that extrapolation of risks to low doses and low dose rates is one of the more substantial of these, others being the extrapolation of risks to the end of life and across populations, for example from a Japanese to a UK population (NCRP Report No. |
The various sorts of bias (selection, ascertainment and so on) to which epidemiological studies are prone should also be considered. As discussed in my article, selection bias in A-bomb survivors may be significant, and as with the problems of extrapolation of dose and dose rate, may largely invalidate the A-bomb risk estimates. However, as noted previously, cancer risks derived from A-bomb survivor data are statistically consistent with those observed in groups exposed at moderate-to-low doses and dose rates (M. P. Little et al. Radiat. Res. 151, 218-224; 1999; R. |
Sir -J. M. Gordon and colleagues, in their Brief Communication "Surgery by sunlight on living animals" (Nature 424, 510; 2003), describe the use of a solar photocoagulator to necrose a rat liver lesion in what they believe to be "the first time that intense incoherent light has been applied successfully in an interstitial medical procedure". They may be surprised to learn that such a technique played a significant role in the development of a modern clinical ophthalmic practice: retinal photocoagulation. The German ophthalmologist Gerhard MeyerSchwickerath (G |
It was, however, with the discoveries of bacteriology towards the end of last century that the greatest contribution to this problem was made. As soon as causative germs were found associated with enlarged glands, the diseases could be named more In the spleen the follicular hyperplasia may be obvious to the naked eye (Plate I, Fig. 3 ), but I cannot say that that is always characteristic because it was not so in two of the three post-mortem specimens, but in all of them irradiation treatment had been given. Plate II, Fig. 4 shows what I believe to be the characteristic lesion in the |
As we know, the 2010 article by Robert Lerner, New Light on The Mirror of Simple Souls, re-opened scholarly debate concerning the reliability of the different versions of Marguerite's supposedly heretical book 3. What seems clear following Dr. Lerner's observations about some suspicious variants in the only complete French version that we have (traditionally known as the Chantilly manuscript) is that we must now 2 S. Nichols, Sociology of Medieval, p. 47. 3 R.E. Lerner, New Light,, article based on the earlier discoveries by G. Hasenohr, |
Mirouer des simples ames; Marguerite Porete; marginalia; annotation; heresy; history of reading; manuscript culture. return to the origins of the Mirror and focus our efforts both on how the manuscripts developed in relation to each other, and on the materiality of the codices 4. We align ourselves with this philological revival: we have already published the results of our research on the materiality of Ch 5 and in the next pages we will move forward to compare the manuscripts in the French and Latin traditions through a close study of their margins. Essentially, we intend to highlight the importance of |
In doing so, we will consider six of the main manuscripts in the Mirror tradition, paying closer attention to their "virgin" marginalia 6. We will collate the information that we have about Ch, comparing it with the new material that we have collected from the margins of the documents of the Latin tradition, which are preserved in the Vatican Library. In other words, we will compare the main French codex with fi ve of the six manuscripts on which Paul Verdeyen based the standard edition of the Latin text, referring to these following his labels 7. We will attempt to understand them as cultural artifacts that were used in |
In fact, Verdeyen demonstrates the main problem, which is that from a traditional philological point of view, the information contained within the margins of medieval manuscripts has often been treated as if it were of lesser status than the information framed between the margins 12. In addition, the marginal markings tend to be described as mere reader marks. In this sense, editing a medieval book such as the Mirror has frequently been a process of cleaning up the text and, as a result, dissociating it from the immediate historical contexts in which scribes wrote, revised and annotated specifi c manuscripts, that is to say, from its manuscript culture |
Some months ago I went to Rome on a research trip to the Vatican Library, where I set out to fi nish my transcription of the marginalia in manuscript A, which Verdeyen mentions. Afterwards, I undertook further work with the other Poretean codices preserved in the Library and was able to confi rm that every single manuscript in the Latin branch possesses marginalia, but each to a different degree. After several days of study I was convinced of the need to consider all the manuscripts afresh. Two essential questions seemed to arise: a. Why do these marginalia exist? That is to say, is their |
Fig. 16. On the other hand, all of the Latin manuscripts came from Italy: three of them (A, B and C) were circulating in the 14th century, one (D) in the 16th century and the last (F) in the 15th century 17. The majority of the books are small compared to the only one that does not seem to follow the standard format, manuscript F, which is considerably larger than the others. As Justine Trombley describes it, this manuscript 18 is made up of documents relating to the negotiations with the Greek Church at the Council of Florence |
So, except for F, we have here a group of fi ve little manuscripts from the Low Middle Ages. Their size, the evidently cheap materials with which they were made and the lack of sophisticated illumination suggests, as Justine Trombley asserts, that [t] hey were clearly made for practical use 20. This calls to mind how important it is to understand these books as belonging to a period of time in which a series of developments in reading tools permitted readers to read in silence, making use of just their eyes and their intellective faculties 21. We are in front of precious objects which allowed medieval readers to penetrate Marg |
In our research we identifi ed two sets of interrelated functions. In order to illustrate these clearly it will be useful to separate the fi ve codices into two groups: If we accept that both groups represent devotional tools giving access to the same work and that both were produced between the 14th and 16th centuries (a rich period of time in terms of developments of medieval reading practices), then we have to ask ourselves why the margins in the second group are so much cleaner. The answer is related to devotional reading habits during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. The two manuscripts in the second group (B and |
Since it was fi rst published, readers have said that the Mirror is a diffi cult work: doctrinally it is speculatissimus 24, as we read in one of the codices; at least in a silent reading, from the beginning to the end, the structure is more thematic (or rhizomatic) than rational; and, in the codices of the fi rst group, the copy is cheaply produced and reading aids are scarce 25. We fi nd annotations that try to make up for these barriers to legibility: visual interfaces that attempt to facilitate access to the text. Here we classify this |
For a and b let's consider ff. 30v-31r, which contain part of the 30th and 31st Chapters: As we can observe on folio 31v the margins contain one of the typical mnemotechnic images depicted in the Mirror for the mind's eye: a shield divided into four doctrinal parts 28. The notes locate the beginning of the text-image and go on to list each one of the sections: on the one hand, this enables easier access to the text and, on the other, it reinforces its mnemonic structure. In Ch we will see an example in which the |
Since this kind of evaluating note could be used as a reading guide, it suggests specifi c instances of readers accessing the text and it also builds the text, which is to say that the interface in the margins provides a framework for reading the Mirror in a defi nite way. This capacity of the marginalia to transform the main corpus of the Poretean book could be exemplifi ed on folio 22v, as we saw above, in the lower part of its margin. Concerning the "triplici vita" (or the "three deaths") we read: What we have here is the explicit transformation |
Following these kind of reading practices in devotional treatises, in the incunabula period such interfaces were incorporated into the printed book as a part of its reading device 32 : these marginal reading interfaces, printed and manuscript, are pretty much alike and both work in the same way from the reader's point of view. The main problem arising in relation to hermeneutic annotations in Ch, A and D is whether we should interpret them as "mere" reader marks or as an integral part of the manuscript copy. In our current phase of research we are not yet able to confi rm whether one possibility is preferable to |
The case of Ch allows us to observe that the nota bene are distributed from the beginning to the end of the codex, but not with uniform frequency. The fi rst annotation appears on folio 9v and the last one on 117r, but they are clearly concentrated in the fi rst half of the manuscript (up to folio 72r). This uneven spread can be explained following the working hypothesis whose feasibility we are in the process of testing right here. This hypothesis is concerned with the extreme homogeneity which Ch shows as a manuscript. It suggests that its margins might contain annotations that also existed in a previous French version |
These [kinds of] annotations must at one time have been incidental in the sense that they were simply added in the margins because a reader wanted to mark the passage for himself, but they were copied along with the main text into new copies of the book, and in the process became a part of the book itself, instead of remaining strictly marginal and peripheral. adding private notes would have been incorporated into later copies as a part of the reading device of the book 35. In fact, from a synchronic perspective, we can talk about one reading device, because what makes it extremely diffi cult for a modern researcher (as it |
4.2. Concerning the "hermeneutic annotations" as reading guides, we now have enough material to write a new chapter on Marguerite Porete's reception and in fact it seems essential that we do so. In a case like 35 The idea of annotation as an "invasive process" is developed in R. Hanna III, Annotation as a Social, p. 182. 36 This idea appears to fi nd support in a nota bene in Ch, f. 108v, in which we can read: "Notez bien bonnes pucelles". Cf. my analysis in |
4.3. Finally, it is surprising that the majority of notes evaluate the text in positive terms (it is always essential to remember that, from the point of view of the annotation, the readers seem to have considered them devotional and not heretical books) and that the negative ones are amazingly coincidental across the different copies. This would allow us to answer several questions: what were the topics in which the readers were interested? How were certain passages, which today seem "dangerous" or "heterodox" to us, read in a strictly medieval context? How was the reader guided to read those passages through the notes |
1 One caveat to note is that obesity can be related to the ex post moral hazard problem if insurance coverage encourages people to visit the doctor and they receive and follow advice to lose weight (Dave and Kaestner 2006). However, the extent to which physician advice is given and followed is debatable. Some studies have shown such counseling to be effective in promoting weight loss strategies (Kant and Miner 2007; Loureiro and Nayga 2006), while others have shown physician counseling to have a minimal effect on the actual behavior of patients (Wee et al. 1999; Conway et al |
Obesity is a national and global epidemic and has in its roots many potential causes. A variety of economic causes have been explored including reductions in job strenuousness (Philipson 2001; Lakdawalla and Philipson 2002), technological innovation in food processing and preparation (Cutler et al. 2003), the growing availability of restaurants (Chou et al. 2004; Rashad et al. 2006 ), urban sprawl (Ewing et al. 2003, and time preference for the present (Komlos et al. 2004; Smith et al. |
As discussed in more detail below, the relationship between health insurance and obesity status is complicated by structural endogeneity and the potential influence of other confounding factors such as work status and income. For example, individuals with higher incomes are less likely to be obese yet more likely to have health insurance. Is it the case that these people would be even thinner had they no health insurance, as they would not discount the future heavily when they are without insurance? Or would they instead be heavier without health care, as medical services are believed to improve health outcomes? In this example, the net effect of health insurance on body weight is ambiguous. In general |
The literature examining ex ante moral hazard is somewhat limited, with many of the studies examining the effects of health insurance coverage on the receipt of preventative services (Roddy et al. 1986; Lillard et al. 1986; Cherkin et al. 1990; Card et al. 2004). A few studies have examined health behaviors directly. For example, using data from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, Newhouse (1993) behaviors and insurance by looking at smoking, exercise, and obesity among the near-elderly and the elderly. Eligibility for Medicare at age 65 is used as an |
Zweifel and Manning (2000) describe a model for the ex ante moral hazard and discuss the determinants of the optimal amount of preventive effort exerted by an individual. This effort is determined by the probability of illness, the monetary loss from illness, labor supply, wages, health insurance coverage, sick pay, and insurance premiums. The benefit of engaging in prevention efforts is the decreased probability of suffering losses from illness, while the costs of prevention efforts are the opportunity costs of engaging in prevention. In this model, prevention is measured in time units and monetary costs of these efforts are ignored. However, such monetary costs would be |
The possibility of ex post moral hazard also must be considered in making predictions of the effects of health insurance on obesity status. This may arise if insurance coverage encourages people to visit the doctor, and the treatment they receive (perhaps in the form of advice) encourages weight loss (Dave and Kaestner 2006; Kant and Miner 2007; Loureiro and Nayga 2006). In this case, a negative relationship would arise between insurance coverage and obesity. On the other hand, there is some evidence of the minimal effectiveness of physician counseling on the diet and exercise behaviors of patients (Wee et al. |
where i indexes individual observations, obese represents the probability of being obese, or having a body mass index greater than or equal to 30 kg/m 2, Healthins is a dichotomous indicator for health insurance, and X i represents the vector of other relevant variables such as the probability of illness, the potential monetary loss from illness, labor supply, and wages. As discussed below, we include measures for income and education, but unfortunately, some of the variables that are important in the theoretical model are not available in existing data sets. While demographic and socio-economic variables will help control for some of these unobserved factors, |
Using this information, we create a measure of obesity using the body mass index, defined as Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to construct an adjusted, more accurate measure of obesity. Because NHANES gathers information on both self-reported and actual weight and height, we adjust BMI in the BRFSS using this information. This is done separately by age, gender, and race, and has previously been used (Chou et al. 2004; Cawley 1999 The instrumental variables used in this study are the percentage of each state's workforce employed in firms of different size. The included firm sizes are 5 |
Next, a further restriction is placed in that only individuals who did not visit a doctor in the past year are included in the sample. 6 This restriction represents an alternative way to help mitigate the influence of illness status in determining insurance status (the reverse causality 5 Due to the large sample size, we estimate linear probability models rather than logit or probit models. All regressions apply heteroskedasticity-robust variance estimators. Justification for using linear probability for estimating simultaneous equations with dichotomous dependent variables is provided by Heckman and MaCurdy (1985) and Angrist (200 |
The proportion of the sample that is obese and without health insurance is slightly higher than that of the sample that is obese with health insurance. A similar statement can be made for those with lower levels of income and education. Those who are married, who may receive health insurance through their spouses, are highly likely to have health insurance. Not surprisingly, Table 1 also reveals that those who are healthier are more likely to have health insurance. Table 2 shows results from regressions of obesity on health insurance status. The OLS results suggest that having some kind of health insurance coverage is associated with an increase in obesity of approximately 1.3 |
Those who are obese might sort themselves into health insurance plans due to the higher probability of needing medical care. Once we account for the endogeneity of health insurance using IV techniques in columns 2 and 4, the positive effect of health insurance on obesity disappears. In the full sample (column 2), health insurance coverage is associated with a statistically insignificant 8 percentage point reduction in the probability of being obese and a marginally significant 32.6 percent reduction in obesity in the healthy sample of column 4. The magnitude of this latter effect is implausibly large, which may be indicative of problematic instruments. Statistics evaluating the validity |
More proactive measures such as subsidizing other inputs in the health production function have been proposed. Our aim in this paper has been to address the potential moral hazard problem that might arise through the presence of health insurance, in that persons might engage in riskier behaviors that lead to poor health or obesity. This may have implications in terms of proposals suggesting limitations on health insurance in efforts to encourage people to lead a healthier lifestyle. Using the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 1993 to 2002 and taking the endogeneity of the health insurance variable into account, we do not find overwhelming evidence of this type of behavior. In particular, taking |
too have used the rubric of the "interpretation of nature" to characterize their accounts of late Renaissance natural knowledge. 1 Though these historians use the slogan of the "interpretation of nature" to characterize Renaissance natural science as a whole, it is a concept that is particularly associated with the English author Francis Bacon (1561-1625): a lawyer who rose to the pinnacle of his profession to become Lord Chancellor in 1618, but who devoted his vacations, and later his enforced retirement, to the reform of natural philosophy. "Interpretation of nature" appears in the title of almost all of Bacon's unpublished writings |
The purpose of this study is accordingly to scrutinize this elusive idea of the "interpretation" of nature in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Is it the case that Renaissance investigators of nature prior to Bacon subjected it to "interpretation," or was his use of the idea instead as original as he liked to suggest? More generally, what sort of things were in fact "interpreted" in the late Renaissance? To answer these questions, the first half of this study investigates whether the idea of "interpreting" nature can be found across the various different late Renaissance natural sciences. The second half then turns to consider the significance |
I begin, however, with an account of Bacon's conception of the "interpretation of nature." The close association of the idea of the "interpretation of nature" with Bacon should immediately present us with a puzzle. For, far from acknowledging its deep roots in contemporary forms of natural knowledge, Bacon himself insisted that his idea of interpretatio naturae was entirely novel. He first introduced the idea in print in The Advancement of Learning (1605), where he says that he will "propound" it "hereafter" but that he will not there "dwell too long, nor speake too great vpon a |
14 In another treatise on the theme of "interpretation," the eloquent but unpublished Prooemium de interpretatione naturae ("A Preface on the Interpretation of Nature" [date uncertain]), Bacon counters the objection that he has no discoveries to show for himself with the assertion that "the legitimate interpretation of nature... ought to be kept separate and pure from all application to works." 15 He also makes the slightly desperate claim that "the formula of interpretation itself and the discoveries made by it will be more vigorous and better secured if confined among proper (legitima) and chosen people." 16 A related |
1607?]). Again Bacon explicitly shies away from explaining in detail the work he proposes "on the interpretation of nature and on nature herself." 17 But he does explain that in its place he has decided to "set forth Tables of Discovery," or "formulae" (that term again), "of a legitimate Inquisition." 18 The association set up here between interpretatio naturae and inquisitio legitima is reinforced in a number of other places, notably in the memorandum headed "Inquisitio Legitima" that Bacon made for himself in July 1608, and by several further unpublished inquisition |
Let us therefore begin to explore the historical significance of Bacon's idea of the "interpretation of nature" by focusing on the question of "nature"-that is, on the disciplines that took nature as the object of their investigations. In our period these were, above all, natural philosophy and medicine, but they also include a range of less institutionally secure pursuits, including natural magic and natural history. The question to be asked is whether the different sorts of people who studied nature in the generation before Bacon conceived what they were doing in terms of its "interpretation." It is true that to tackle a question as broad as this one risks |
The most ambitious and prolific English Aristotelian in the generation before Bacon was the Oxford philosopher John Case (1539/1546 -1600). In his treatise entitled The Handmaid of Philosophy (1599), Case offers a straightforward account of what he takes to be the goal of natural philosophy. Articulating a rather commonplace kind of account, Case asserts that the "general definition of philosophy" is simply "the fullest knowledge of all things, both human... and divine." 25 More specifically, natural philosophy in particular is the "science of natural bodies... together with their principles, accidents, and effects |
26 Charles Schmitt has offered some interesting suggestions about some ways in which Case's views on art and nature might be considered in a comparable light to Bacon's. But in respect of the goal of philosophy the two authors are quite different: neither in the Handmaid nor in Case's much more ambitious and interesting Philosophical Touchstone (licensed 1602) can I find any appeal to the "interpretation" of nature. 27 We can confirm this preliminary impression that Aristotelian natural philosophy did not extend to the "interpretation" of nature by considering Case's much more influential contemporary, the Paduan professor Jacopo Zab |
One reason why Bacon was so hostile to this kind of account is precisely because it was an Aristotelian model, reinforced above all by the demonstrative logic of the Posterior 24 Analytics. This was the most important part of Aristotle's logical Organon for many Renaissance natural philosophers, and it was worked over extensively in commentaries and monographs in the period. In this tradition, natural philosophical knowledge involved demonstrating a relationship between a cause and its effects and between effects and their cause, a procedure known as regressus. 30 The model of discovery in this central tradition of Renaissance natural philosophy involved no appeal to an idea of "interpret |
It may justly be objected, however, that-with the exception of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484 -1558), from whom he borrows in the Sylva sylvarum (1626) 31 -Bacon was largely uninterested in Aristotelian natural philosophy, which had, in his view, been corrupted by logic and which left nature "well-nigh untouched and intact." 32 Bacon was much more positively engaged by his anti-Aristotelian predecessors and contemporaries. Of these, two of the most important were Bernardino Telesio and William Gilbert. Do either of these authors, the reading |
Bernardino Telesio (1509 -1588) has the honor of being the philosopher with whom Bacon engaged most extensively, above all in his unfinished manuscript treatise De principiis atque originibus ("On Principles and Origins" [ca. 1612?]). Bacon "thought well" of Telesio and acknowledged him "as a lover of truth, a man useful to the sciences, a corrector of certain doctrines, and the first of the new men [novorum hominum primum]." 33 But Bacon also notoriously regarded Telesio's work as "a kind of pastoral philosophy which cont |
Among his English contemporaries, William Gilbert (1544 -1603) was the natural philosopher with whom Bacon engaged most explicitly, to the extent of obtaining a copy 30 of, and critiquing, Gilbert's then-unpublished treatise On the World. 36 Gilbert's conception of natural philosophy emphasized both reasons and experiments (rationes et experimenta). He characterizes the endeavors of his predecessors in his treatise On the Loadstone (1600) in terms of their philosophizing "with a few vague and uncertain experiments" and "with reasons drawn from the hidden causes of things," and he speaks at the end of |
A further form of evidence will help press the case that, at this point, "interpretation"-though certainly preparative to philosophy-was not in fact regarded as being part of it. If we consult (as one may doubt that Bacon ever did) the comprehensive Philosophical Lexicon (1613) of the Marburg philosopher Rudolph Goclenius (1547-1628), we may be struck by the absence of any lemma for the term "interpretation" or its cognates; the same holds true for Goclenius's Herborn neighbor Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588 -1638), in |
This question is in fact a more plausible one than it was for natural philosophy, for the reason that, though Galenic physicians were no less concerned to identify causes (in their case the causes of disease) than their philosophical counterparts, they were also extremely 36 conscious that these causes were-in Jean Fernel's term-"hidden" (abditus). The only way to know the causes of disease was, accordingly, to analyze the symptoms, or signs, that they produced. For this reason semiology was a central part of Renaissance medicine, and in the work of Ian Maclean we have an outstandingly thorough account of this far |
44 A confirmation of this is that where Fernel does speak of "interpretation," in his treatise On the Hidden Causes of Things (1548), it is in the context of interpreting a textual authority, such as Aristotle. 45 There is, nonetheless, an interesting and potentially rather significant point to be made here about how Bacon proposes his vision of the interpretation of nature. Fernel speaks of the doctor as the servant (minister) of both art and nature. This seems to be a development of the then well-known sentiment in Hippocrates' Epidemics that the doctor was the "servant of the art" of medicine |
We cannot do better than to take as a witness to Paracelsian ideas about nature the Danish physician Petrus Severinus (1542-1602)-the author who, in Bacon's words, "eloquently reduced into an harmonie" the philosophy of Theophrastus Paracelsus. 49 As part of his Idea of Philosophical Medicine (1571), Severinus considers the duty of the physician and the scientia he practices. The physician should "investigate" (investigare) all the materials that nature provides to cure diseases and preserve health. Moreover, he "scrutinizes the |
Della Porta also contributed to another form of natural knowledge for which Bacon had a guarded respect: physiognomy. Unlike its sister doctrine-the interpretation of natural dreams-Bacon did not explicitly speak of physiognomy in terms of the "interpretation" of the natural signs furnished by the body. Nor, it appears, did Della Porta. 56 One physiognomic work in the sixteenth century did, however: a Latin version of a treatise by the second-century Sophist Marcus Antonius Polemo. The second edition of this treatise was published in Venice in 1552 in a collection |
There remains one prominent form of Renaissance natural knowledge to consider: natural history. Natural history plays a crucial role in Bacon's Great Instauration. Furthermore, it might justly be thought to have a privileged place in any investigation of the idea of "interpreting nature" in the Renaissance, since it played that role in Michel Foucault's influential 1966 ébouch of that period as one in which "resemblance" (ressemblance) both "largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts" and also "made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible." 59 Such sentiments perhaps still stand behind |
A Baconian fragment of uncertain status rejects the important natural histories of Conrad Gessner (1516 -1565) as arising "from many parts of Philology" but "few of Philosophy," 60 and Gessner's desire to identify God's "solicitude and providence" (cura et providentia) for his animal creation within the book of Job may also have been a target in the Novum organum. 61 generally, how he has used his authors. Gessner even explicitly explains that, of the two interpretative tasks of "revealing an author's words and meaning" and " |
Whatever it was that informed Bacon's vision of the "interpretation" of nature, however, there may be a reason why we should not in fact expect natural history to have done so. For though historia naturalis in its specifically Baconian conception came to be fundamental "for the building up of philosophy," Bacon did not count it among the operative natural disciplines, and this, together with natural history's rather precarious disciplinary existence in the Renaissance, may be why he does not include it in his critical surveys of existing natural disciplines in the early Temporis Partus Masculus and Cogitata et visa. 74 Nor did he include |
The result of this investigation into the late Renaissance study of nature, for all that it has necessarily been partial and selective, is nonetheless striking. In our forays across all the forms of natural knowledge we have considered-natural philosophy, medicine, natural magic, physiognomy, natural history-we have largely drawn a blank. Not even in Renaissance alchemy, it seems, was "interpretation" a recognized term of art. 77 None of these modes of late Renaissance natural knowledge, at least as represented by the limited (though not arbitrary) selection of authors we have considered, precisely invokes a notion of the "interpretation of |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.