Article ID: CBB001213348

A Dark Business, Full of Shadows: Analogy and Theology in William Harvey (2013)

unapi

In a short work called De conceptione appended to the end of his Exercitationes de generatione animalium (1651), William Harvey developed a rather strange analogy. To explain how such marvelous productions as living beings were generated from the rather inauspicious ingredients of animal reproduction, Harvey argued that conception in the womb was like conception in the brain. It was mostly rejected at the time; it now seems a ludicrous theory based upon homonymy. However, this analogy offers insight into the structure and function of analogies in early modern natural philosophy. In this essay I hope to not only describe the complex nature of Harvey's analogy, but also offer a novel interpretation of his use of analogical reasoning, substantially revising the account offered by Guido Giglioni (1993). I discuss two points of conceptual change and negotiation in connection with Harvey's analogy, understanding it as both a confrontation between the border of the natural and the supernatural, as well as a moment in the history of psychology. My interpretation touches upon a number of important aspects, including why the analogy was rejected, how Harvey systematically deployed analogies according to his notions of natural philosophical method, how the analogy fits into contemporary discussions of analogies in science, and finally, how the analogy must be seen in the context of changing Renaissance notions of the science of the soul, ultimately confronting the problem of how to understand final causality in Aristotelian science. In connection with the last, I conclude the essay by turning to how Harvey embeds the analogy within a natural theological cosmology.

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Description On Harvey's analogy that conception in the womb is like conception in the brain, and its theological aspects.


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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001213348/

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Authors & Contributors
Baldassarri, Fabrizio
Ekholm, Karin Jori
Shillito, Alex Benjamin
Lenzi, Massimiliano
Horst Steinke
Francesco Fronterotta
Concepts
Natural philosophy
Metaphors; analogies
Mind and body
Philosophy
Medicine
Reproduction
Time Periods
17th century
Early modern
Medieval
16th century
Renaissance
Ancient
Places
England
Italy
Great Britain
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