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

Abstract

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