Seeking Intellectual Evidence in the Sciences: The Role of Botany in Descartes’ Therapeutics

摘要: While improving medicine through physics had the capacity to liberate seventeenth-century thinking from traditional beliefs about souls and spirits, mechanics generated complications. Descartes’ mechanical is a perfect example, for his efforts bridge gap between theoretical practical medicine, steering intellectual evidence into this second field, were ultimately unsteady. His view of biomechanics reduced living bodies automated machines, thereby making definitions life health active treatment diseases difficult. However, rarely-studied notes on botany reveal new scenario, wherein he understood bodily therapeutics be connected physiology, lever introduce its counterpart. These documents enable greater comprehension functional unity within bodies, instance refined individualities, use disease define produce therapeutics, thus demonstrating strong relationship sciences philosophy.