Human nature cannot be reduced to our biology:

2. Human nature cannot be reduced to our biology: Who holds these ideas? Why has the suggestion that ‘we are our biology’ taken hold? Does scientific knowledge stand outside of culture and society? Is scientific knowledge purely objective? 2. The construction of knowledge about ‘human nature’: Scientific knowledge about ‘human nature’ is always produced in a specific culture at a specific moment, and asa result, reflects many of the values of the culture in which it is practiced. Therefore, the notion that science and scientific knowledge is purely objective and stands outside of culture and society is very problematic.

3. 3. The precise contexts in which knowledge about ‘human nature’ is produced The socio-cultural and economic context in which particular ideas about human nature come to the fore is an important subject that warrants careful reflection, and it’s a subject that requires a historical perspective. If ‘human nature’ is entirely dependent on the specific context in which it is thought about it cannot be transhistorical or universal. It is not some ‘thing’ out there which stays the same throughout time and is successively discovered. Rather, human nature is relative, it is relative to a specific culture at a particular moment. Therefore, there is no universalism, no successive discovery of ‘human nature’. Rather, human nature is a product of human reflection about the human condition, and of course these reflections continually change over time depending on the precise context in which they are discussed. We must not forget that this process is still going on today, i.e. it includes discussions going on today in the natural sciences, and the conversation is not and never will be fixed.

4. Stephen Greenblatt, 1943 Jacob Burckhardt, 1818-1897

5. When I first conceived this book … it seemed to me the very hallmark of the Renaissance that middle-class and aristocratic males began to feel that they possessed … a shaping power over their lives, and I saw this power and the freedom it implied as an important element in my own sense of myself. But as my work progressed, I perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions – family, religion, state – were inseparably intertwined. In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society. Whenever I focused sharply upon a moment of apparenty autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artefact.’ (Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 256-7)

7. Galen of Pergamon, 130 AD – 200 AD Hippocrates of Cos, c. 460 – c. 370 BC Avicenna (Latinate form of Ibn-Sīnā), c. 980 AD – 1037 AD Rhazes, 854 AD – 925 AD

8. What do natural philosophers do? • Collecting and cataloguing the wonders of God’s Creation – all the things we • have forgotten due to the Fall. • To explain why things are the way they are (why does the sun rises and sets every day); Natural philosophers did not aim to discover something (as we wish to do!) because in a world created and run by God, there is nothing new to discover by humans. • Their enterprise is thus closely linked to theological questions; it is a spiritual exercise. • The method is ‘deductive’ – from what we know to why it is the way it is

9. ‘Let them use their hands…as the Greeks did and as the essence of the art demands’ Book 1: skeleton Book 2: myology, all the muscles and their relations Books 3 and 4: venous, arterial and nervous systems Books 5-6: organs of the abdominal and thoracic cavities and the brain Book 7: he reports own experiments and vivisections

10. Souls and the organs where they were believed to reside relied for the operation on ‘spirits’ - goes back to medical ideas of Galen spirit/pneuma: means ‘air’ or ‘breath’, and is imagined as a sort of hot vapor fused in blood 1. natural spirit:resided in the liver, the center of nutrition and metabolism. 2. vital spirit was located in the heart, the center of blood flow regulation, heart beat, respiration, and body temperature. 3. animal spiritwas created in the brain, the center of sensory perceptions and movement. Galen’s idea of body and spirits

11. Waldseemüller, Martin, UniversaliscosmographiasecundumPtholomæitraditionem et AmericiVespuciialiorv. quelustrationes, 1516 Map depicts the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean separating Asia from the Americas.

12. Augustinus of Hippo (354 – 430 BC) The Confessions: autobiography in 13 volumes written by Augustine when he was around 40 years old. It outlines his sinful youth and eventual conversion to Christianity. It is considered to be the first autobiographical work in the West and became a model for many other autobiographical writers during the Middle Ages until roughly the 17th century.

13. Problem: How to align the vice of curiosity with interests in Aristotelian natural philosophy? Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), Dominican friar and priest. He is was known for his attempt to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity. Albertus Magnus (before 1200 –1280), also known as Albert the Great, was a Catholic bishop and became a Catholic saint First important commentaries on all of Aristotle’s writings. ‘…however, much it abounds, knowledge of the truth is not bad, but good. The desire for good is not wicked. Therefore no wrongful curiosity can attend intellectual knowledge’ (Thomas Aquinas)

14. Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626) Lord Chancellor. He challenged the most common biblical objections to the promotion of learning by providing a re-reading of the narrative of the temptation in the Garden. Empiricism: a philosophical stance that holds that all knowledge is rooted in the senses and the experience that they provide. Bacon is celebrated as ‘the father’ of the modern scientific method.

15. Cartesianism 1637. Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method) 1641. Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy), also known as Metaphysical Meditations 1648. La description du corps humaine (The Description of the Human Body) 1649. Les passions de l'âme (Passions of the Soul). Dedicated to Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate. René Descartes, 1596-1650