From From Mechanical Rhetoric as Physiological Principle to the Economic Exploitation of the Body. Harvey, Descartes and the Disciplinary Paradigm in Michel Foucault

Abstract

The history of Modernity as thought as the victorious narrative of the human reason over any form of barbarism and superstition, cannot be properly framed regardless a certainly paradoxal assumption —that the definition of the soul its primarily founded on a problematization of the body. In this paper we examine some medical metaphors of the body from the perspective of the mechanical paradigm, such as a system of joints, gears, fluxes, circuits and so on, with its own inner logic moreover than according with the laws of the universe. The article sketches out an argument between William Harvey and Rene Descartes as seen as a key chapter for the history of the medicine as well as that of the mechanical philosophy. Likewise we follow-up some of Descartes' metaphysical assumptions which according to our reading will give birth to the disciplinary model in modern societies, as such as they’re analysed by Michel Foucault.