HoP 479 Gideon Manning on Cartesian Medicine

Peter Adamson· Host0:00

[instrumental music] Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview on medicine and science in Cartesianism with Gideon Manning, who is associate professor of history of medicine and humanities at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Hello, Gideon.

Gideon Manning· Guest0:33

Hi, Peter. Long time admirer of the podcast. I'm glad to be here.

Peter Adamson· Host0:37

Thank you very much. Nice to have you here in Munich. We're going to be talking about medicine and Cartesianism in general, but let's start with Descartes himself. In a quote that you like to mention when you're writing about medicine and Descartes, he says, "The preservation of health has always been the principal end of my studies," which sounds very emphatic, so can you elaborate on that?

Gideon Manning· Guest0:58

Sure, I'd be glad to. And it's true, I do like to cite that, although in all honesty, I think it's slightly a bit of an overstatement, I should say, especially when you start to try and look for that kind of content in Descartes. But maybe it'll help to give a broader view of medicine and philosophy in the period and then locate Descartes there and then say something more about his actual views about medicine. And when I think about medicine in the early modern period, I think the thing to emphasize is that true knowledge starts to become