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The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy
  • Edited by Justin E. H. Smith
  • Published online:
    06 August 2009
    Print publication:
    22 May 2006
  • In this volume Smith examines the early modern science of generation, which included the study of animal conception, heredity, and fetal development. Analyzing how it influenced the contemporary treatment of traditional philosophical questions, it also demonstrates how philosophical pre-suppositions about mechanism, substance, and cause informed the interpretations offered by those conducting empirical research on animal reproduction. Composed of essays written by an international team of leading scholars, the book offers a fresh perspective on some of the basic problems in early modern philosophy. It also considers how these basic problems manifested themselves within an area of scientific inquiry that had not previously received much consideration by historians of philosophy.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Justin E. H. Smith, Concordia University, Montréal
  • Book:
    The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy
    Published online:
    06 August 2009
    Print publication:
    22 May 2006, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    πῶς δ΄ ἄν΄ κε γένοιτο; εἰ γὰρ ἔγεντ΄, οὐκ ἔστ΄, οὐδ΄ εἴ ποτε μέλλει ἔσεσθαι. τὼς γένεσις μὲν ἀπέσβεσται καὶ ἄπυστος ὄλεθρος.

    (How could [what is] come to be? For if it came into being, it is not: nor is it if it is ever going to be in the future. Thus coming to be is extinguished and perishing unheard of.)

    Parmenides, from Simplicius, In Phys. 78, 5; 145, 5, 19–21.

    οὐσια δε ἐστιν ἡ κυριώτατά τε καὶ πρώτως καὶ μάλιστα λεγομένη, ἣ μήτε καθ΄ ὑποκειμένου τινὸς λέγεται μήτ΄ ἐν ὑποκειμένῳ τινί ἐστιν, οἷον ὁ τὶς ἄνθρωπος ἢ ὁ τὶς ἵππος.

    (Substance in the truest and strictest, the primary sense of that term, is that which is neither asserted of nor can be found in a subject. We take as examples of this a particular man or a horse.)

    Aristotle, Categories 2a 11–14.

    At first glance, the unifying theme of the essays collected here may easily appear to the historian of philosophy to reside in one of the narrower alleyways of this history and certainly not along one of its grand avenues. By the nineteenth century, to be sure, embryology had come into its own as an area of scientific investigation, one whose questions were to be answered by experiment and whose answers were not seen as granting insight into any deep and timeless philosophical mysteries.

    The perception could not have been more different in classical Greek thought.

  • 4 - Imagination and the Problem of Heredity in Mechanist Embryology

  • Edited by Justin E. H. Smith, Concordia University, Montréal
  • Book:
    The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy
    Published online:
    06 August 2009
    Print publication:
    22 May 2006, pp 80-100

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    It may seem improper to propose to speak of theories of heredity in seventeenth-century science. The transmission of traits through material units did not become a central topic of concern until the eighteenth century, in, for example, the work of Charles Bonnet and others impressed with Abraham Trembley's discovery in 1741 of the freshwater polyp's ability to regenerate itself from amputated bits – evidence that each bit of an organism carried in it some sort of plan for the organism as a whole. Indeed, in the early seventeenth century the idea of a program or a blueprint that specifies what a developing creature must become is precisely what the prevailing anti-Aristotelian spirit compelled researchers to reject in their accounts of animal development.

    “Heredity,” in the narrower sense that this term has today, refers only to those theories of the acquisition of traits by creatures that account for the mechanism by which information-bearing material causes a new creature to acquire the traits it does. But by “heredity” in a broader sense we may also understand any number of different kinds of transmission in sexual reproduction, all of which were clearly on the minds of early modern generation scientists. Generation theorists in the seventeenth century were, namely, intensely interested in determining the following:

    1. How it is that parents generate offspring with traits similar to their own. Any creature is more than just a perfect blend of equal parts of father and mother. It also bears resemblance to more distant relatives and frequently appears to have traits altogether dissimilar to those of any known ancestors. All copy is to some extent bad copy. Without knowledge of the mechanism of dominant and recessive genes, this fact presented a number of problems.

    2. […]

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