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X-WR-CALNAME;VALUE=TEXT:Gideon Manning (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center), “Descartes, Images, and the Iconography of Actions"
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SUMMARY:Gideon Manning (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center), “Descartes, Images, and the Iconography of Actions"
DESCRIPTION:Historians of philosophy often take it for granted that Descartes exercised complete control over his published work, but this is hardly the case.  In several of his publications, specifically his natural philosophical essays, textbook and monographs, Descartes incorporated images—many images—all of which required reliance on artists and complex production techniques not always within his control.  Indeed, significant challenges confront us when grappling with Descartes’s visual legacy, not least because he had little to do with some of the most famous images associated with his work, especially those appearing in the Latin and French editions of the <em>Treatise on Man</em>.  In this talk, I will discuss how Descartes’s texts and images work together to focus our attention on local motion and the forces of nature, both key features of his metaphysics of the natural world.  I will argue that Descartes develops, with the help of his editors, a distinctive iconography of action, the coherence of which relies, at least in part, on the early modern anatomical tradition’s threefold distinction among <em>historia</em>, <em>actio</em>, and <em>usus</em>,<em> </em>which I will call the grammar of anatomical illustration.  If my argument is correct, there are significant lessons to be learned about pictorial knowledge in Descartes’s work, the relationship between image and text, the character of Descartes’s functional analysis of living things, and the unappreciated role of medicine in historian’s early modern cultural competence.
LOCATION:Robbins Library, Emerson Hall 211
STATUS:CONFIRMED
DTSTART:20231128T200000Z
DTEND:20231128T220000Z
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