Article ID: CBB534950714

William Harvey on Anatomy and Experience (2015)

unapi

The goal of this essay is to explore the meaning of experience in William Harvey’s work. I begin by expanding on Andrew Cunningham’s argument (2002, 2003) that for Harvey, anatomy was an experience-based science of final causes. Observation and reason are united through experience (experientia) for Harvey, that is, by the repeated exercise of these capacities. Thus through the training and use of these abilities, Harvey thinks he can learn the final causes of living things and their parts. Harvey thinks that anatomy is the skill (facultas) by which one is able to make justified inferences to these causes. Finally, such inferences are based on a large set of rationally organized anatomical observations (historia), not upon direct, singular observations alone.

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Authors & Contributors
Shillito, Alex Benjamin
Baldassarri, Fabrizio
Wang, Xiaona
Demarest, Boris
Distelzweig, Peter
Zampieri, Fabio
Concepts
Anatomy
Natural philosophy
Biology
Medicine
Physiology
Soul (philosophy)
Time Periods
17th century
16th century
18th century
Early modern
Renaissance
19th century
Places
Italy
Europe
England
London (England)
France
Great Britain
Institutions
University of Padua
Experimentalists
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