Article ID: CBB136835699

The Senses of Touch and Movement and the Argument for Active Powers (2021)

unapi

The paper posits a relationship between the sensory modality of touch, including a sense of active movement, and early modern knowledge of active powers in nature. It seeks to appreciate the strength and appeal of knowledge built on the active-passive distinction, including that which was retrospectively labeled animist. Using statements by Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Stahl, rather than detailed new readings of texts, the paper asks whether scholars drew on phenomenal, or conscious, awareness of activity as effort encountering resistance when they reasoned about activity in the world. How were there relations and analogies between descriptions of psyche’s relation to body, of the relation of living forces to matter, of relations among material objects, of God’s relationship to His creation, and of relations involving causal agency generally? It is possible to understand what were later called animistic theories as belonging to the mainstream of the new natural philosophy, not to a residue of unscientific argument. Early modern theories of active and vital powers cannot be dismissed because they were based, in error, on mere analogy to human action. Rather, they had a central position in reasoning grounded in phenomenal awareness of action-resistance when a person is “in touch.”

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Authors & Contributors
Generali, Dario
Boccaccini, Federico
Sacco, Francesco Giuseppe
Shaheen, Jonathan L.
Demarest, Boris
Moshenska, Joseph
Concepts
Natural philosophy
Senses and sensation; perception
Touch; haptic perception
Animism
Observation
Parasitology
Time Periods
17th century
18th century
Early modern
16th century
Renaissance
19th century
Places
Italy
England
Netherlands
Germany
Europe
Great Britain
Institutions
Royal Society of London
Jesuits (Society of Jesus)
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