After some solitary notes on empiricism here a little while back ... another interesting episode in the Internationale of early modern medicine and natural philosophy: new blog posts here by Benny Goldberg (Pitt HPS) on William Harvey as 'medical Aristotelian'. While I think the Aristotelian reading is overdone (and it's also the old-fashioned view in history of medicine from before WW II), some interesting things are happening here. I'd say: if he was such an Aristotelian, why did Descartes give him pride of place in the Discourse on Method? If he was such an Aristotelian, why does he sometimes say that final causes may have no explanatory power whatsoever? Of course he speaks of 'office', of ends, which doesn't quite make him an Aristotelian, and (just sayin'), might the design language just be English bourgeois cultural standards?
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