BOOK OF

KNOWLEDGE
ARLENE P. YUSON, PhD in Science Ed Student
•Science Incarnate is a collection of
innovative and rigorously argued
essays which explores the body’s
involvement in the production and
representation of knowledge in the
early modern and modern periods.
 ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
• How did scientists in the past understand the
relationship between their bodies and the
process of knowledge-making?
• How did these individuals then manage their
bodies to both generate knowledge and to
present themselves as credible and authentic
discoveries of truths?
 WHY THE BODY OF SCIENCE IS A
FUNNY BUT IMPORTANT TOPIC?
• In the 17th century Descartes argued that the
world contained two qualitatively distinct sorts
of stuff – mental and material – mysteriously
placed near in the brain’s pineal gland.
• The passions, considered as physiological
states of the body, might influence mental
states, and the passions, in turn, might be
brought under rational control.
• Descartes's scheme was one of many ancient
and early modern frameworks for
understanding the reciprocal influence of
bodily and mental states, but it was not
considered that the corporeal circumstances
that bore upon the processes of thinking were
attached to the products of rightly conducted
rational thought.
• The disembodiment of "knowledge itself" was
understood to make that knowledge what it
was and to give it value.
• the embodied processes of knowledge-
making and knowledge-portraying are
legitimate ways of getting at aspects of what
might plausibly be meant by "knowledge
itself."
 JOHN DEWEY
• the age-long association of knowing and
thinking with immaterial and spiritual principles,
and of the arts, of all practical activity in doing
and making, with matter. For work is done with
the body . . . and is directed upon material
things.
 THE EMBODIMENT OF KNOWLEDGE
AS AN ACADEMIC TOPIC
• Frank Parkin's brilliant 1980s satire of the modern British
university was aptly titled The Mind and Body Shop.
• The title referred to the academy's rough division into
two camps:
a. those dedicated to the explication of body (the
natural sciences and their engineering associates)
and;
b. those whose objects of study are the productions
of mind (the humanities and of the human and
social sciences)
• the body as part of a developing twentieth-
century reaction against philosophical
rationalisms and idealisms.
• the problem of the body in society will be seen
to have dominated the development of
Western philosophy throughout this century."
• “Wet philosophy”
• body as part of a developing twentieth-century
reaction against philosophical rationalisms and
idealisms.
• the problem of the body in society will be seen to have
dominated the development of Western philosophy
throughout this century."
• influence on work done from the 1970s by sociologists of
scientific knowledge and historians concerned with the
mundane (ordinary) details of scientific and
technological practice
 MICHAEL POLANYI
• scientific instruments as extensions of the body
• regard scientists' bodies as part of an instrumental
exploration of the world
• Our body is always in use as the basic instrument of
our intellectual and practical control over our
surroundings
• Our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external
knowledge.
 FOUCALT

• The body expresses power and has power

inscribed upon it
• Prisons, asylums, clinics, and schools are places
where power is performed by disciplining the body.
 JOHN CASEY

• Our experience of the human body is

necessary to our sense of ourselves as persons;
and our sense of ourselves as persons is
necessary to our perception and
understanding of the human body
 EMBODIMENT OF KNOWLEDGE AS
A HISTORIANS’ TOPIC

•traditional engagement with

ideas about the human body was
importantly supplemented by a focus on
the lived experience of the body
• Durkheimian interprets the human body as a
pattern for members' social and cosmological
ideas and, more generally, to regard the body
as a culturally resonant expressive resource.
• Mary Douglas says that “Human body is
always treated as an image of society and
there can be no natural way of considering
the body that does not involve at the same
time a social dimension.
• Malinowski’s said “an instrumental
enhancement of human anatomy, which refer
“directly or indirectly to the satisfaction of a
bodily need.
• Human biological functions provided culture
with both its instrumental purpose and its
metaphorical base.
 HOW BODY SIGNALS KNOWLEDGE

• Newton's identity as the greatest of natural

philosophers, and that of the knowledge he
produced, was assembled from preexisting
cultural resources, including those that
allowed the genuineness of knowledge to be
read off the special constitution of the
philosopher's body.
• Simon Schaffer traces an early modern cultural
nexus that linked the authenticity of
experiential testimony to the credibility of
philosophical knowledge by way of
philosophers' exceptional bodily constitutions,
including their special sensory capacities.
• Peter Dear's attempts to make historical sense of
specifically Cartesian relationships between early
modern norms of bodily comportment and criteria
of intelligibility in natural philosophy. He shows how
mechanized natural philosophy—and its version of
an intelligible nature— "constrained (or expressed)
the structure of human behavior so intimately
connected to it."
• Dear argues that the intelligibility of Cartesian
accounts of the passions and the mechanical human
body was shaped by substantial realities of early
modern social life: "Social life, formalized through
manners, meant letting people see each other as
automata under the control of reason; so automata
is what they became.
 CHRISTOPHER LAWRENCE:
• Interested in long-standing traditions of bodily
presentation and their uses by physicians and
surgeons
• Mind – body dualism takes a particularly concrete
and vivid form.
• Bodily techniques by which the archetypal roles of
scholarly physicians and manually working surgeons
were made visible and justified.
• The bodily identity of the truth-seeker undoubtedly varies
from culture to culture and from time to time within a
culture.
• The body is indeed a culturally embedded, and culture-
constituting, signaling system, and one of the things the
body can signal is the possession and reliable
representation of truth.
• Knowledge is link to body by the way of the historical
identifies of knowledge-makers
• The bodily identity of the truth-seeker undoubtedly varies
from culture to culture and from time to time within a
culture.
 WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT THE
SCIENTIFIC BODY?
• late modern culture science counts as Truth
and how science is interpreted counts as a
story about truth
• There is no present-day body of culture that
competes with science in any significant way
for the mantle of Truth.
• The content of Truth significantly varied but the
approved stories told about the nature of true
knowledge and the authentic knower remained
interestingly stable over a great span of time. Nor has
science been the only form of culture to clothe its
knowers in garments originally cut to fit the religious
ascetic and to adapt to its purposes religious tropes
of otherworldliness and self-denial.
• Speaking of scientific knowledge-making in
relation to body – shock people before. This
shock is an indication that our culture’s official
attitudes may have changed very significantly
from what they were in the early modern
period, or even, perhaps form what they were
in the late nineteenth century.
 REFERENCES
Lawrence, Christopher, and Steven Shapin. "Introduction. "In Science
Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. University
of Chicago Press, 1998, pp.1–19. ISBN:9780226470146. from: