The recent historiography of philosophy and of the sciences displays a growing interest in the dialogue between philosophy and medicine. New attempts are made to overcome the tendency toward the “atomization” of the early modern period and to inquire into longue-durée processes between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
The present workshop takes into account these recent historiographical perspectives in order to explore concepts of human nature and conceptual changes occurring between the late Medieval period and 1800. It examines how the young discipline of anthropology, which was constituted within the disciplinary fields of philosophy, medicine, theology, ethics and natural law during the 16thand 17thcenturies – was further developed and critically discussed between 1670 and 1800. These conceptual changes in anthropology occur within a epistemological shift towards empiricism, around 1700, manifest in the flourishing of the sciences of life, ethnology, natural history, and triggered by new scientific practices and the encounter with non-European cultures. This shift in turn shaped the interpretation of the relationship between nature and history in a more general sense. Within Enlightenment anthropology, a domain combining sciences of life, natural and cultural history, the natural history of man, and the history of humankind, the focus was on the history of the human species as such, and the aim was to explore the civilization process from prehistory to the current day. In this context, questions concerning human upright posture or the natural basis of inner-worldly actions (as well as the interior motives and exterior circumstances determining such actions) arouse. They were discussed not only through the comparison of humans to other living entities and their geographical distribution on earth, but also in the context of a debate on human diversity, race, history and geography. In addition, geology and ethnography (studies of volcanism or of the Chinese people’s history) broke the biblical chronology, which led to new conjectures on the presumed age of the earth and of humanity. These articulations between geographical spaces and historical times, between the present and the past, in turn influenced the concepts of history and the history of humanity as they emerged in the later Enlightenment, and they shaped the historical consciousness of proto-globalised societies in the early modern era. This international workshop will provide us with an opportunity to inquire into the relationship between philosophy and medicine and related disciplines such as physiology, anatomy, psychology, aesthetics, history, geography within the Early modern period and to discuss individual and collective projects on these topics.