Galen and the Early Moderns (eBook)

This book explores the presence of Galen of Pergamon (129 - c. 216 AD) in early modern philosophy, science, and medicine. After a short revival due to the humanistic rediscovery of his works, the influence of the great ancient physician on Western thought seemed to decline rapidly as new discoveries made his anatomy, physiology, and therapeutics more and more obsolete. In fact, even though Galenism was gradually dismissed as a system, several of his ideas spread through the modern world and left their mark on natural philosophy, rational theology, teleology, physiology, biology, botany, and the philosophy of medicine. Without Galen, none of these modern disciplines would have been the same. Linking Renaissance with the Enlightenment, the eleven chapters of this book offer a unique and detailed survey of both scientific and philosophical Galenisms from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Figures discussed include Julius Caesar Scaliger, Giambattista Da Monte, Hyeronimus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Andrea Cesalpino, Thomas Browne, Kenelm Digby, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Guillaume Lamy, Jean-Baptiste Verduc, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, and Kurt Sprengel.

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero is Associate Professor at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on early modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant with a special interest in metaphysics, logic, rational theology, the philosophy of biology and medicine, the mind-body problem, and the theories of knowledge, language, and modalities. His publications include two books, Filum cogitandi: Leibniz e la conoscenza simbolica (Milan 2007) and Conoscenza simbolica: Pensiero e linguaggio in Christian Wolff e nella prima età moderna (Hildesheim 2009), five co-edited volumes, and several articles and book chapters on Leibniz, Wolff, their sources, and their influence.

Emanuela Scribano is Professor Emeritus of the History of Philosophy at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her main research interests are in the history of early modern philosophy. She has published widely on early modern metaphysics, epistemology, rational theology, and philosophy of science, with a focus on Descartes and Spinoza. She has recently investigated the relation between metaphysics and physiology in Cartesian thought. Her publications include L'existence de Dieu. Histoire de la preuve ontologique de Descartes à Kant (Seuil, 2002); Macchine con la mente. Fisiologia e metafisica tra Cartesio e Spinoza (Carocci 2015); A Reading Guide to Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy (St. Augustine's Press, 2016); Anges et bienheureux (Vrin, 2021).