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I’m a philosopher and director of the publisher Urbanomic, which aims to engender
interdisciplinary thinking and production.

As well as directing Urbanomic, I have written and spoken on art and philosophy and
have also worked with a number of artists developing cross-disciplinary projects. I
have also translated innumerable essays and various book-length works of French
philosophy, including Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, François Laruelle’s The
Concept of Non-Photography and Anti-Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and
the Siren, and Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye.

My research interests are wide ranging, but generally emerge from the ‘gap’ between
the scientific worldview and humans’ spontaneous experience and self-understanding,
exploring the philosophical, aesthetic, and political ramifications of attempts to
negotiate this disparity—in particular, new variants of ‘geophilosophy’, which
examine the relationship between philosophical thought and the contingent history
of the earth, in dialogue with geology, psychoanalysis, myth, and other hybrid
modes of knowledge and narrative.

I’m available for editorial, proofreading, copy-editing, and translation (FR>EN)

work, and commissions. Or you could just buy me a coffee.

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TOPICS

ROBIN MACKAY

Biohorrors of Scholasticism

2006

Topics:
Decay Henry Of Hesse Intensity Philosophy Scholasticism

Notes toward a history of intensity

Henry of Hesse (1325–1397) was one of the schoolmen of 14th Century Paris who,
together with those of Merton at Oxford, began seriously—albeit by stealth—to
challenge Aristotelian doctrine. As Pierre Duhem has shown, in questions such as
the latitude of formswhich proposed quantitative and comparative treatment of
‘virtues’ or ‘forms’ such as heat, brightness, etc. many of the concepts of early
modern science developed ‘under cover’ of scholasticism. They are difficult to
recognise as such since they often appear in the guise of horrendously convoluted
and apparently fatuous debates on Christian virtues: Does a person’s charity
increase by one charity being added to another, or by a single charity increasing,
or by an infinite series of charities each of which disappears to make way for a
greater?

Henry of Hesse advocated the view that the indwelling ‘occult virtues’ of things
must be dispensed with altogether and that an infinite number of variations in form
(intensity), combination and variable proportions of four primary qualities could
account for all things in nature; thus each part of a body would have its degree of
heat or cold, dryness and wetness, etc. and the whole could be described as a
complex (complexio) of measurable elements in certain ratios with each other.

This not only anticipated a science for which meaning and proper place would be
subordinated to position and measure (just as the mathematical treatment of
movement by ‘The Calculator’ (Suisset) at Merton challenged the Aristotelian idea
of moving objects having inbuilt tendencies) but also opened the possibility of
infinite new, unknown combinations occuring within nature: Nature would thus no
longer be a bounded, taxonomically-delimitable field but a combinatorial pool
itself composed of sub-individual elements varying continuously along multiple
parameters.

According to this incipient substitution (anticipative of the violence of

scientific reason) of ‘functional’ criteria for the Aristotelian categories
descended from banal intuition, rather than being explained by indwelling
properties the nature of an object or creature would be referred to its
characteristic complexio or proportional combination of elements each with a
certain latitude of form (i.e. the range of heat and cold, or wet and dry, that it
could withstand without being corrupted). Medicine would be the ‘art of latitudes’,
the art of knowing the range (latitude) of forms (qualities) that each organ of the
body could tolerate: and different creatures would be defined by their
particular complexioof such latitudes:

Man, because of the lesser latitude of his complexio, is more liable to disorders
than a beast, and the beast is more easily put out than a plant. When the latitude
of the complexio is exceeded, recovery is impossible.

Thus the supposed fact that the poisonous herb mandragora has a figure and material
organization like that of man, and yet its form differs in species from that of
man, raises the question whether the soul of man can have a like proportion and
intensive configuration of elemental qualities to that of the form of the
mandragora. It is suggested that during the corruption of the human body the first
qualities might be altered to the proportions in which they occur in some other
living being, although it would seem that the vast number of possible permutations
and combinations would render this very unlikely. That a fox might be generated
from a dead dog is also seriously considered. This in its turn soon merges into a
discussion of the relation between the form of the living man and of his corpse,
and the question whether, and if so how soon, a plant or animal of another species
can be generated from a dead body, human or animal. Henry furthermore credulously
tells of the body of a dead saint in England that has to be shaved regularly. His
explanation of the marvel is that some vital form, only vegetative in character
however, has been introduced into the matter of the corpse, and has kept the hair
growing. In the twentieth chapter he discusses the difference between substance and
accidental forms. It is asserted that another living substantial form never
immediately succeeds to the corruption of a living being, and that between
the complexio of a living man and that of his corpse there intervene innumerable
species, and yet in fact there is always made immediately the jump from the one
extreme to the other.1

If this doesn’t yet disabuse you of the notion that scholasticism is so much
arguing about angels, read on: for this new conception had even greater psychedelic
horrors to unveil…

corpses which had been of the same species when living might differ in species from
one another when corrupted.2

L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Vol III (New

York:Columbia University Press, 1934.)Ibid. Emphasis mine.