During the mid-18th century, when electricity was coming into its own, natural philosophers began to entertain the possibility that electricity is the mysterious nerve force. Their attention was first drawn to several species of strongly electric fish, namely torpedoes, a type of African catfish, and a South American "eels." This was because their effects felt like those of discharging Leyden jars and could be transmitted along known conductors of electricity. Moreover, their actions could not be adequately explained by popular mechanical (...) theories. Many of the early documents supportive of the hypothesis of animal electricity were associated with the Dutch colonies in South America. This article presents and examines those documents, and shows how Dutch scientists on both sides of the Atlantic conducted experiments and communicated with each other in the 1750s and 1760s. It reveals the important roles played by inquisitive physicians and lovers of nature in South America, and by natural philosophers and collectors of exotic specimens in the Netherlands—learned men who began to make a credible case for animal electricity in some exciting places at a pivotal moment in time. (shrink)

Galvani's discovery provoked an animated debate that lasted for about a decade. So far, historians have studied only the controversy between Volta and Galvani. I show that a more extensive examination of the response to Galvani's treatise reveals a number of important issues that were characteristic of the contemporary physics and physiology but have not much attracted the attention of historians. In particular, the analysis shows the need to reappraise Galvani's role in establishing animal electricity.

Benjamin Franklin's enunciation of his so-called ‘one-fluid’ theory of electricity in the period 1747–55 nas often been hailed as an important milestone in the history of physics. So indeed it was, for, with the rapid and widespread acceptance of the new theory, the science of electricity became based for the first time on the view that the electrification of a body involved the accumulation of a ‘charge’ from elsewhere, rather than the excitation of matter already present in the body. Only (...) a little more remotely, the triumph of Franklin's theory over the rival ‘excitation’ theory espoused by the Abbé Nollet paved the way for the more sophisticated fluid theories propounded by Aepinus, Cavendish, and Coulomb in the years that followed. (shrink)

A brief survey of the development of some techniques from antiquity to recent times reveals that their initial phase was stimulated not by perspectives of exploiting their outcome, as is usually expected for technology, but by the valorization of the process itself. This initial phase, defined here as technopoiesis, is conceptually and practically distinct from what subsequently becomes technology in respect of inventiveness, standardization, technical skill, level of ornamentation, practical use, integration into systems of exchange, and ritualized versus secular uses. (...) It is shown that technopoiesis may profoundly modify the cultural environment by shaping the universe of beliefs, rituals, and values and that this influence may persist even after the transition to technology. It makes the distinction between technology and technopoiesis essential for evaluating the cultural influence of techniques, from the Paleolithic era to modern times. (shrink)

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control (...) of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)