Médecin‐philosoph: Persona for Radical Enlightenment

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Notes

¹ E. Platner, Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise (1772; reprint: Hildesheim: Olms, 2000); on the phrase ‘royal science’, see H. Pfotenauer, Literarische Anthropologie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), 4.

² R. Mortier, Diderot en Allemagne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), 334, 339.

³ R. James, Dictionnaire universel de médecine, chirurgie, anatomie, French edition by Diderot, Eidous, Toussaint, 6 vols (Paris, 1746–8).

⁴ For his medical fascination, see K. Wellman, ‘Medicine as a Key to Defining Enlightenment Issues: The Case of Julien Offray de La Mettrie’, Studies in Eighteenth‐Century Culture, 17 (1987), 75–89, especially 89, n43: ‘Diderot said of medicine: “It is very hard to think cogently about metaphysics or ethics without being an anatomist, a naturalist, a physiologist, and a physician.”’ She found this passage cited in A. Wilson’s biography, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 93.

⁵ P. Kondylis, Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus (Stuttgart: Klett‐Cotta, 1981), 9–41.

⁶ S. Moravia, ‘The Enlightenment and the Science of Man’, History of Science, 18 (1980), 247–68, citing 252.

⁷ Moravia. As Hatfield puts it, ‘Ontological questions were bracketed in order to concentrate on the study of mental faculties through their empirical manifestations in mental phenomena and external behavior’ (G. Hatfield, ‘Remaking the Science of Mind: Psychology as Natural Science’, in Inventing Human Science, edited by C. Fox, R. Porter and R. Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 184–231, at 188).

⁸ The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, edited by A. Cunningham and R. French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

⁹ J. LaMettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings, edited and translated by Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4.

¹⁰ W. Riedel, Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller: Zur Ideengeschichte der medizinischen Schriften und der ‘Philosophische Briefe’ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1985), 54.

¹¹ K. Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 130.

¹² H.‐J. Schings, ‘Der philosophische Arzt’, in Schings, Melancholie und Aufklärung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977), 11–40; W. Riedel, ‘Influxus physicus und Seelestärke’, in Anthropologie und Literatur um 1800, edited by J. Barkoff and E. Sagarra (Munich: Iudicium, 1992), 24–52.

¹³ C. Zelle, ‘Sinnlichkeit und Therapie: Zur Gleichursprünglichkeit von Ästhetik und Anthropologie um 1750’, in ‘Vernünftige Ärzte’: Hallesche Psychomediziner und die Anfänge der Anthropologie in der deutschsprachigen Frühaufklärung, edited by C. Zelle (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 5–24.

¹⁴ E. Watkins, ‘The Development of Physical Influx in Early 18^th‐Century Germany’, Review of Metaphysics, 49 (1995), 295–339.

¹⁵ K. Figlio, ‘Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the Late 18^th Century’, History of Science, 12 (1975), 177–212, citing 180.

¹⁶ For the crucial role of the medical school of Montpellier, see E. Willliams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

¹⁷ S. Moravia, ‘“Moral” – “Physique”: Genesis and Evolution of a “Rapport”’, in Enlightenment Studies in Honor of Lester G. Crocker, edited by A. Bingham and V. Topazio (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1979), 163–74, citing 170. See also Moravia, ‘Philosophie et médecine en France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 89 (1972), 1089–151.

¹⁸ La Mettrie, Machine Man, 5.

¹⁹ G. Hartung, ‘Über den Selbstmord: Eine Grenzbestimmung des anthropologischen Diskurses im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Der ganze Mensch, edited by H.‐J. Schings (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), 33–51, at 41.

²⁰ And, as I shall discuss, the German. See, esp. ‘Vernünftige Ärzte’, edited by C. Zelle. For the Scottish case, see Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by C. Withers and P. Wood (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell, 2002).

²¹ P. Wood, ‘The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment’, History of Science, 27 (1989), 89–123, citing 92.

²² Wood, 93.

²³ Wellman, ‘Medicine as a Key’, 87, n13.

²⁴ Wood, 96. The last citation is from Locke himself, Essay, i.61.181–2.

²⁵ Wood, 96. ‘From Bacon to Locke through Descartes and the Port Royal “Logic,” a new conception emerged according to which logic ought to be based on the empirical study of the understanding’ (F. Vidal, ‘Psychology in the Eighteenth Century’, History of the Human Sciences, 6 (1993), 89–119, at 93). See also J. Buickerood, ‘The Natural History of the Understanding’, History and Philosophy of Logic, 6 (1985), 157–90.

²⁶ Vidal, ‘Psychology in the 18^th Century’, 89–90.

²⁷ Two of the greatest thinkers in this vein made this point explicitly. Adam Ferguson insisted that in emphasizing human artifice it should never be forgotten that in humans, art is nature. Johann Blumenbach similarly insisted that the history of man was a natural history.

²⁸ Moravia places special emphasis, in this connection, on Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (Moravia, ‘The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man’, 256.) See P. Wood, ‘Buffon Reception in Scotland: The Aberdeen Connection’, Annals of Science, 44 (1987), 169–90.

²⁹ R. Wokler, ‘Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment’, in Inventing Human Science, 31–52, citing 32. See there too, R. Smith, ‘The Language of Human Nature’, 88–105.

³⁰ Moravia developed this idea in ‘From homme machine to homme sensible: Changing Eighteenth‐Century Models of Man’s Image’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978), 45–60.

³¹ ‘Anthropology sprang from a great thought of Buffon. Up to his time, man had never been studied, except as an individual; Buffon was the first who, in man, studied the species’ (M. Flourens, ‘Memoir of Blumenbach’, in J. Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises (London: Longman, 1865), 55).

³² He began his career as a mathematician, the translator and commentator of Newton’s Fluxions (1740). He took to heart the powerful criticisms of the conflation of mathematics and metaphysics in Newton’s natural philosophy regarding absolute space and time, especially as these were formulated by Fontenelle and Berkeley. (P. Sloan, ‘From Logical Universals to Historical Individuals: Buffon’s Idea of Biological Species’, in Histoire du Concept d’Espace dans la science de la vie, edited by J.‐L. Fischer and J. Roger (Paris: Singer‐Polignac, 1985), 101–40.)

³³ As Sloan puts it, ‘Mathematical truth, at least in the sense of the reasoning of geometry is only “abstract” and concerns only the relation of ideas. Such abstractions have no immediate contact with reality. Reality is reached by what Buffon terms “physical” truth’ (P. Sloan, ‘The Gaze of Natural History’, in Inventing Human Science, 112–51, citing 129.)

³⁴ Cited in Inventing Human Science, 129.

³⁵ Inventing Human Science, 129.

³⁶ Sloan, ‘From Logical Universals’, 123. ‘The location of human beings among the animals was combined with a radical historicizing and naturalizing of the human species that would pursue zoogeographical analysis of humanity in connection with a gradually developing schema of a naturalized account of cosmological and geological history’ (Sloan, ‘The Gaze of Natural History’, 126).

³⁷ Sergio Moravia has documented the shift in medical thought from the ‘iatromechanical’ to the ‘vitalist’ orientation in the school of Montpellier and in the thought of men such as Maupertuis, Buffon, Bordeu and Diderot (S. Moravia, ‘From homme machine to homme sensible’, 45–60). A. Vartanian has conceptualized the impetus of these crucial years in terms of the transformation in Denis Diderot: ‘From deist to atheist’, Diderot Studies, 1 (1958), 46–63. ‘Man considered as a machine gave ground for the hope that one could unlock the mystery of the wholeness of man via insight into his physical organization’ (Hartung, ‘Über den Selbstmord’, 41).

³⁸ Maupertuis and the Comte de Buffon became close friends starting in the early 1740s. This very important relationship deserves further study, and without the presupposition that Buffon was the senior partner, as in J. Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armin Colin, 1963), 475–6.

³⁹ P. Maupertuis, The Earthly Venus (1746), translated by S.B. Boas, Sources of Science, 29 (New York and London: Johnson Reprint, 1966).

⁴⁰ D. Beeson, Maupertuis: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992), 176; M. Hoffheimer, ‘Maupertuis and the Eighteenth‐century Critique of Preexistence’, Journal of the History of Biology, 15 (1982), 119–44, citing 125; B. Glass, ‘Maupertuis, Pioneer of Genetics and Evolution’, in Forerunners of Darwin, 1745–1859, edited by B. Glass, O. Temkin and W. Strauss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 51–83, citing 67.

⁴¹ ‘These active properties allow for many possible outcomes, within certain parameters, and they locate the capability to produce order in matter itself’ (M. Terrall, ‘Salon, Academy, and Boudoir: Generation and Desire in Maupertuis’s Science of Life’, Isis, 87 (1996), 217–29, citing 223.)

⁴² That is, it embraced ‘the idea that matter contained a plastic, vital, even divine principle continuously at work’, in the terms of C.U.M. Smith, The Problem of Life (New York and Toronto: Wiley, 1976), 268.

⁴³ M. Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), n 209.

⁴⁴ Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 2 (1749), cited in Hoffheimer, ‘Maupertuis and the Eighteenth‐century Critique of Preexistence’, 129.

⁴⁵ Sloan, ‘The Gaze of Natural History’, in Inventing Human Science, 133.

⁴⁶ P. Maupertuis, Système de la nature, in Maupertuis, Essai de cosmologie; Système de la Nature; Réponse aux Objections de M. Diderot, edited by F. Azouvi (Paris: Vrin, 1984), 166.

⁴⁷ Hoffheimer, ‘Maupertuis and the Eighteenth‐century Critique of Preexistence’, 126. Hoffheimer observes, very strikingly, that this ‘hylozoism converges with various forms of the Leibniz–Wolffian philosophy’ then current in Germany (‘Maupertuis and the Eighteenth‐century Critique of Preexistence’, 136). Terrall makes the important point that Maupertuis endeavoured to make this theologically and scientifically palatable (The Man Who Flattened the Earth, 329).

⁴⁸ Maupertuis, Système de la nature, 167. Already in Vénus physique Maupertuis developed this idea of self‐formation in inorganic forms and offered the example of the ‘tree of Diana’ from crystallography (Maupertuis, Vénus physique, 119; translation 54).

⁴⁹ Maupertuis, Système de la nature, 166–7.

⁵⁰ On the centrality of Maupertuis’ debate with D’Alembert, see M. Terrall, ‘The Culture of Science in Frederick the Great’s Berlin’, History of Science, 28 (1990), 333–64. In Germany both Mendelssohn and Kant were thoroughly embroiled with Maupertuis’s thought. So was the crucial young physiologist at Halle, Caspar Friedrich Wolff.

⁵¹ Diderot, De l’interprétation de la nature, in Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1998); Maupertuis, Réponse aux objections de M. Diderot.

⁵² See A. Vartanian, ‘Diderot and Maupertuis’, Revue internationale de philosophie, 38 (1984), 46–66. I do not agree with much in this essay, but it raises the right issues; see also, for a more persuasive account, A. Robinet, ‘Place de la polémique Maupertuis‐Diderot dans l’oeuvre de Dom Deschamps’, Actes de la journée Maupertuis (Créteil, 1er décembre 1973) (Paris: Vrin, 1975), 33–46, and the discussions in Beeson and Terrall.

⁵³ J. Zammito, ‘“The Most Hidden Conditions of Men of the First Rank” – The Pantheist Current in Eighteenth‐Century Germany “Uncovered” by the Spinoza Controversy’, Eighteenth‐Century Thought, 1 (2003), 335–68.

⁵⁴ P. Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution, 2 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), 544–5. See A. Thomson, Materialism and Society in the mid‐Eighteenth Century: La Mettrie’s Discours préliminaire (Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1981).

⁵⁵ Despite his enormous erudition, Jonathan Israel seems tone‐deaf to this difference between the original thought of Spinoza and its eighteenth‐century reception and revision as ‘Spinozism’. See Israel, The Radical Enlightenment (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. 704–14.

⁵⁶ See Condillac’s dissertation on the monad, submitted to the Berlin Academy for the contest of 1747 and published together with the winning entry for that prize contest shortly thereafter (Condillac, Les Monades, edited by L. Bongie (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1980)); see also Diderot, ‘Leibnizianisme’, in the Encyclopédie, vol. 5 (1765); and W. H. Barber, Leibniz in France, from Arnauld to Voltaire; A Study in French Reactions to Leibnizianism, 1670–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).

⁵⁷ Verniére, Spinoza, 530.

⁵⁸ Verniére, Spinoza, 553.

⁵⁹ Verniére, Spinoza.

⁶⁰ Verniére, Spinoza, 529.

⁶¹ Diderot, ‘Spinosiste’, in Encyclopédie, reprinted in Diderot, Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, edited by J. Lough and J. Proust (Paris: Hermann, 1976), vol. 8, 328–9.

⁶² H. Dieckmann, ‘The Influence of Francis Bacon on Diderot’s Interprétation de la Nature’, in Dieckmann, Studien zur europäischen Aufklärung (Munich: Fink, 1974), 34–57, citing 55.

⁶³ Diderot, De l’interprétation de la nature, 180.

⁶⁴ The best articulation of this is P. H. Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 2005). See also T. Brown, ‘From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth‐Century Physiology’, Journal of the History of Biology, 7 (1974), 179–216; and my chapter ‘Kant versus Eighteenth Century Hylozoism’, in The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 189–199, and the literature cited there.

⁶⁵ Dieckmann, ‘The Influence of Francis Bacon’, 37.

⁶⁶ Dieckmann argues that Diderot ‘adopts and follows […] confessedly the ideas of Maupertuis and Buffon’ (39). Diderot cites both authors, but omits any mention of La Mettrie, except in the strange ‘post script’ to the advertisement he inserted into the second edition: ‘Always keep in mind that nature is not God; that a man is not a machine; that a hypothesis is not a fact’ (Diderot, De l’interprétation de la nature, 173). As Wellman observes, Diderot expressed disdain for La Mettrie in other publications: ‘He said of La Mettrie: “Dissolute, impudent, a buffoon, a flatterer; made for life at court and the favor of nobles. He dies as he should have, a victim of his own intemperance and his folly. He killed himself by ignorance of the art he professed”’ (Wellman, ‘Medicine as a Key’, 86, n6).

⁶⁷ Diderot, De l’interprétation de la nature, 186–7.

⁶⁸ Diderot, 187.

⁶⁹ T. Hankins, Science in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 127.

⁷⁰ Letter to Duclos, 10 October 1765, cited in Hankins, Science in the Enlightenment, 130.

⁷¹ Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream in Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew/D’Alembert’s Dream (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Composed in summer 1769, this text circulated in manuscript and was published only in 1784 upon the death of D’Alembert.

⁷² See W. Anderson, Diderot’s Dream (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

⁷³ E. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003).

⁷⁴ ‘Bordeu and the other doctors from the medical school at Montpellier criticized the distinction that Haller made between irritability and sensibility. Bordeu claimed that all living matter was sensible and that irritability was only a special case of sensibility’ (Hankins, Science in the Enlightenment, 125).

⁷⁵ Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, edited by Paolo Quintili (Paris: Champion, 2004). See A. Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Materialism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 7.

⁷⁶ P. H. Reill, ‘Between Mechanism and Hermeticism: Nature and Science in the Late Enlightenment’, in Frühe Neuzeit – Frühe Moderne? edited by R. Vierhaus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 393–421, at 409.

⁷⁷ W. Klever, ‘Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738) oder Spinozismus als rein mechanische Wissenschaft des Menschen’, in Spinoza in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte, edited by H. Delf, J. Schoeps and M. Walther (Berlin: Hentrich, 1994), 75–93, is correct in his description of Boerhaave’s mechanism but fundamentally misguided about the persistence of this mechanism in the later eighteenth century. Holbach’s System of Nature (1770) is, in this light, retrograde, not exemplary relative to the developments in natural philosophy. La Mettrie, by contrast, is far more in step with these developments.

⁷⁸ G. Rudolph, ‘Hallers Lehre von der Irritabilität und Sensibilität’, in Von Boerhaave bis Berger, edited by K. E. Rothschuh, (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1964); S. Roe, Matter, Life and Generation: Eighteenth‐century Embryology and the Haller–Wolff Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). ‘Haller was the one whose religious convictions caused him to insist on the unity and spirituality of the soul’ (Hankins, Science in the Enlightenment, 125). R. Toellner, ‘Hallers Abwehr von Animismus und Materialismus’, Sudhoffs Archiv, 51 (1967), 130–44. See M. Hochdoerfer, The Conflict between the Religious and the Scientific View of Albrecht von Haller (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press).

⁷⁹ R. de Saussure, ‘Haller and La Mettrie’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 4 (1949), 431–49. ‘La Mettrie had known perfectly well that his action would undermine the vulnerable position of a man who, in the eyes of all Europe, was one of the most respected personifications of the fusion of scientific eminence and orthodox piety’ (A. Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’homme Machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 104).

⁸⁵ Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, 200.

⁸⁰ Wellman, La Mettrie.

⁸¹ ‘Boerhaave, in La Mettrie’s hands, must be acknowledged as a crucial figure in defining objections to Cartesian physiology and as a primary source for the interpretation of Locke as a materialist and a medical figure’ (Wellman, La Mettrie, 126).

⁸² ‘Haller’s commentary is essentially a series of Latin footnotes explicating particular words or phrases of Boerhaave’s numbered, aphoristic remarks. La Mettrie incorporates much of the content of Haller’s notes, so Haller certainly had grounds for his vehement complaints and outraged charges of plagiarism […] However, La Mettrie’s commentary is different in both style and substance. La Mettrie did not simply replicate a disjointed series of Latin footnotes. Instead he provided a connected commentary written in French in a conversational style’ (Wellman, La Mettrie, 107).

⁸³ Haller, Review in Göttingische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen, June 1745, 377–8.

⁸⁴ Haller, Review in Göttingische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen, June 1747, 413–15.

⁸⁶ La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, translated by Richard Watson and Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 20n.

⁸⁷ La Mettrie, Machine Man, translation, n2.

⁸⁸ Haller, Review in Göttingische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen, December 1747, 907.

⁸⁹ Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, 87.

⁹⁰ Vartanian, 200.

⁹⁴ L. Rosenfield, From Beast‐Machine to Man‐Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (New York: Octagon, 1968), 192.

⁹¹ ‘LaMettrie represented human nature as the organizing power of living matter, deliberately earning himself a shocking reputation as a materialist’ (Roger Smith, ‘The Language of Human Nature’, 99). ‘Man a machine’ – is the title La Mettrie’s argument? His contemporary respondents (as well as subsequent scholars) often read the title rather than the book. ‘Scholarly attention has focused almost entirely on the text of L’Homme machine and even more narrowly on its title’ (Wellman, La Mettrie, 172). Wellman aptly notes ‘the independent status of “l’homme machine” as a term that has taken on a life and a history of its own’ (Vartanian, 171). LaMettrie’s title and LaMettrie’s text are two quite different things: there is a great deal more vitalism in LaMettrie’s materialism than there is mechanism.

⁹² Wellman, La Mettrie, 172.

⁹³ Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, 109.

⁹⁵ Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes, 75.

⁹⁶ Wellman, La Mettrie, 138.

¹⁰¹ La Mettrie, Machine Man, 5.

⁹⁷ Wellman, La Mettrie, 186.

⁹⁸ Wellman, La Mettrie, 137.

⁹⁹ Wellman, La Mettrie, 136.

¹⁰⁰ La Mettrie, Machine Man, 4.

¹⁰² Wellman, La Mettrie, 166.

¹⁰³ La Mettrie, Dedication to Haller, in Man a Machine and Man a Plant, translated by Watson and Rykalka, 26.

¹⁰⁴ La Mettrie, Machine Man, 5.

¹⁰⁵ La Mettrie, Machine Man, 38.

¹⁰⁶ La Mettrie, Machine Man, 39.

¹⁰⁷ Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, 95. Debate about the text in Holland centred around freedom of the press (97).

¹⁰⁸ Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, 7.

¹⁰⁹ Robert Young, ‘Animal Soul’, Encyclopedia of Philosophy vol. I, 122–7.

¹¹⁰ ‘Irritability seemed to be a property of the material of the muscle itself and did not depend on the action of the soul. Stretched muscle fibers contract spontaneously to their former length. Irritability could not be a vital force because it continued for some time after death’ (Hankins, Science in the Enlightenment, 125). Yet Haller himself developed the idea of ‘sensibility’, which, if associated physiologically with the nervous system, nevertheless allowed for the ‘spiritual’ intervention in the physical world which all these figures recognized as an empirical fact (Figlio, ‘Theories of Perception’, 177).

¹¹¹ The distinction between the vitalism of Haller and the animism of Stahl is one of the linchpins for an effective understanding of what was taking place in the life sciences in the late eighteenth century. K. Dewhurst and N. Reeves, Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology and Literature (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1978), 98, stress ‘a significant difference between Hallerian vitalism and Stahlian animism’.

¹¹² P. Sloan, ‘Buffon, German Biology, and the Historical Interpretation of Biological Species’, British Journal for the History of Science, 12 (1979), 109–53; Roe, Matter, Life and Generation.

¹¹³ Bonnet, Considérations sur les corps organisés (Amsterdam, 1762).

¹¹⁴ It is hard to reconcile Buffon’s extensive, published formulation of the immateriality of the soul with Jacques Roger’s claim that Buffon was a closet atheist‐materialist (J. Roger, ‘Buffon et Diderot en 1749’, Diderot Studies, 4 (1963), 221–36). Claude Blanckaert has developed a strong case that Buffon’s main philosophical commitments were uncongenial to the ‘research programme’ for anthropology that emerged in his name at the end of the century, and so these parts of his thought were simply suppressed (C. Blanckaert, ‘Buffon and the Natural History of Man’, History of the Human Sciences, 6 (1993), 13–50, at 20, 26, 40).

¹¹⁵ H.‐W. Ingensiep, ‘Der Mensch im Spiegel der Tier‐ und Pflanzenseele: Zur Anthropomorphie der Naturwahrnehmung im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Der ganze Mensch, edited by Schings, 54–79, at 61.

¹¹⁶ That explains the centrality of the controversy over the origins of language, from Condillac to Herder. See H. Aarsleff, ‘The Tradition of Condillac: The Problem of the Origin of Language in the Eighteenth Century and the Debate in the Berlin Academy before Herder’, in Studies in the History of Linguistics, edited by D. Hymes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 93–156.

¹¹⁸ G. Hatfield, ‘Remaking the Science of Mind: Psychology as Natural Science’, in Inventing Human Science, 206.

¹¹⁷ Especially Bonnet, Essai de psychologie ou Considérations sur les Opérations de l’âme, sur l’Habitude et sur l’Education (London, 1755). (C. Kersting, Die Genese der Pädagogik im 18. Jahrhundert (Weinheim: Deutsche Studien Verlag, 1992), 117).

¹¹⁹ Hatfield, 206.

¹²⁰ Indeed, Bonnet is a regular target of Kantian disparagement. See I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A668/B696; ‘Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie’, (Berlin: Akademie Ausgabe/de Gruyter, 1910), vol. 8, n80.

¹²¹ I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 91–196.

¹²² M. Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bern and Frankfurt: Lang, 1976), 27–9.

¹²³ Krüger ‘wanted to show philosophers that medicine could make a contribution to philosophical knowledge of the soul, and that mathematics could be applied to this subject matter’ (Hatfield, ‘Remaking the Science of Mind: Psychology as Natural Science’, 201). Through clinical case histories and quantitative brain physiology, Krüger hoped not only to make observations but to develop a rigorous experimental methodology. His approach to brain physiology ‘adopted a vibratory conception of nerve activity’, and he sought to quantify this (Hatfield, 201–3).

¹²⁴ ‘Unzer was one of the most important physiologists of the eighteenth century. His specialty was in showing the lines of connection between medical science and philosophy’ (Hartung, ‘Über den Selbstmord’, 43).

¹²⁵ Hartung, 43.

¹²⁶ Kant made fun of him in this capacity in his newspaper article, ‘Versuch über die Krankheiten des Kopfes’ (Berlin: Akademie Ausgabe/de Gruyter), vol. 2, 257–72.

¹²⁷ Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff, 36–7.

¹²⁸ Platner was born in Leipzig in 1744, the son of a surgeon. His father’s early death left his education under the care of the great Leipzig philologist, Johann August Ernesti, a pioneering advocate of popular philosophy in Germany. In Platner the two currents of popular philosophy and philosophical medicine were fused from the outset. His university studies fused medicine and philosophy and he became extraordinary professor of medicine at Leipzig in 1770 (A. Kosenina, Ernst Platner (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1989), 12–13). He was a brilliant teacher, ‘an unconventional, witty‐ironic scholar who encouraged his students to make use of their own understandings’ (Kosenina, 13). He was, as one of his students observed, a philosopher for the world, not a speculative metaphysician. Eventually, however, Platner sought accommodation to Kantian philosophy, not least out of anxiety that his former student, Karl Reinhold, head of the Kantian circle at the University of Jena, would beset him with the same polemical vigour with which Reinhold and the Kantian circle assaulted the popular philosophers at Göttingen, whom Platner long admired, but whose reputations, he saw, were permanently destroyed by the polemic (Kosenina, 22–3).

¹²⁹ Platner, Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise, ix–x; the metaphysics of soul–body relations was an ‘impenetrable mystery’, yet understanding it was indispensable for human well‐being (Platner, xii).

¹³⁰ Platner, viii.

¹³¹ Platner, xv.

¹³² Riedel, Anthropologie des jungen Schiller, 15.

¹³⁷ Platner, Anthropologie, 94, 191.

¹³³ Kersting, Die Genese der Pädagogik, 122.

¹³⁴ Platner, Anthropologie, 93. ‘Platner’s “Anthropology” follows Haller’s neurological model in all its parts: brain and nerves are a “system of canals” in which a “fluid material” called “nerve fluid” or “spirit of life” moves’ (Riedel, Anthropologie des jungen Schiller, 98).

¹³⁵ Riedel, 44. This was the sort of thing Kant could never tolerate, either in Platner in 1772 or in Thomas Soemmerring in 1795.

¹³⁶ Platner, Anthropologie, x. ‘The great difficulty for Platner […] lay in the question how one could describe the mediation of the physical with the psychic domains. The physician spoke of an inner movement of the nervous fluids in the brain and a setting of itself in motion by the powers of the soul. The reaction of the soul on the physical mechanism evaded all explanation’ (Hartung, ‘Über den Selbsmord’, 45). See H. Schöndorf, ‘Der Leib und sein Verhältnis zur Seele bei Ernst Platner’, Vierteljahresschrift für Theologie und Philosophie, 60 (1985), 77–87; J. Lachelier, ‘L’Observation de Platner’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 11 (1903), 679–702.

¹³⁸ (J. Feder), ‘Ernst Platner, Anthropologie für Ärtze und Weltweisen’, Göttingische Anzeigen (4 June 1772), 571–4; (C. Garve) ‘Dr. Ernst Platners, der Arzneykunst Professors in Leipzig, Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweisen. Erster Theil. Leipzig in der Dykischen Buchhandlung 292. Octavseiten’, Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, 14:2 (1773), 214–47; (M. Herz), ‘D. Ernst Platner, der Arzneykunst Professors in Leipzig, Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweise. Erster Theil. Leipzig, in der Dyckischen Buchhandlung, 1772. 8. 292 Seiten’, Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (1773), 25–51.

¹³⁹ Much to the only somewhat circumspect disgruntlement of Kant. See Kant to Herz, end of 1773 in Briefwechsel ‐ Gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols to date (Berlin: Akademie Ausgabe/de Gruyter, 1910), vol. 10, 145–6.

¹⁴⁰ Herz, Review of Feder, 27.

¹⁴¹ Herz, 29.

¹⁴² Linden has surveyed this material in detail, pointing especially to such key figures as Johann August Ulrich, Christian Erhard Schmid, and Johann Karl Wezel (Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff, 53, 82ff, and passim).

¹⁴³ Dewhurst and Reeves, Friedrich Schiller, passim.

¹⁴⁴ R. Bezolt, Popularphilosophie und Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1984).

¹⁴⁵ M. Davies, ‘Karl Philipp Moritz’ Erfahrungsseelenkunde: Its Social and Intellectual Origins’, Oxford German Studies, 16 (1985), 13–35.

¹⁴⁶ Davies, 21.

¹⁴⁷ Zelle, ‘Sinnlichkeit und Therapie’, 11.

¹⁴⁸ See my Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

¹⁴⁹ J. G. Herder, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, edited by W. Pross (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002).