HoP 495 Comedy of Errors: Molière

Peter Adamson· Host0:00

[classical 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, Comedy of Errors: Molière. The relevance of Molière to philosophy is usually reduced to a single scene in his play The Imaginary Invalid. To be fair, it's a pretty great scene. It sends up the scholastically trained doctors by depicting an examination of expertise in medicine. When the candidate is asked to explain the sleep-inducing effect of opium, he confidently replies that it is because opium has a dormitive power, that is, a power to induce sleep. This empty triviality is acclaimed by the examiners as a perfect answer. Molière's characteristically incisive bit of mockery has become a standard reference point in philosophy. Still today, one need only say dormitive power to evoke the problem of circular or uninformative explanations, something that philosophers often find themselves accused of offering. It's such a familiar example, in fact, that I couldn't resist mentioning it myself about 100 episodes back when I was talking about French medicine and Jean Fernea's defense of Aristotelian powers as crucial for science.