Peter Distelzweig

Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente [Girolamo Fabrici, c. 1533–1619] was a long-time professor of anatomy at Padua and a participant in and contributor to the renaissance of anatomical studies in the 16th century. While still deeply influenced by the Galenic medical tradition, Fabricius’ approach to anatomy was especially Aristotelian and natural philosophical. The goal of Fabricius anatomy was scientia of the part of animals articulated using Galenic concepts of action and use. Interestingly, in his works on muscles and joints Fabricius also employs mathematical mechanics. Here I argue that Fabricius aims to integrate mathematical mechanics into his characteristic Galeno-Aristotelian teleological explanations of muscle and bone anatomy. I argue further that Fabricius’ use of mechanics is Aristotelian in two senses: (1) the (pseudo-)Aristotelian Quaestiones Mechanicae serve as his primary reference point; and (2) he thinks of mechanics as an Aristotelian subordinate science. His is an Aristotelian, teleological, and non-reductive use of mechanics.

rené descartes famously and explicitly rejects appeals to final causes in natural philosophy, suggesting that such appeals depend on knowledge of God’s inscrutable ends.For since I now know that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge. And for this reason alone I consider the whole kind of causes, customarily sought from an end, to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating God’s ends.1This rejection did not go unnoticed nor without controversy. In the Fifth..