From bodily "humors" to "natural sympathies"

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I am reading a book "The fall of public man" by R. Sennet and he uses a very interesting theory. According to him "Psychology in the 18th Century was replacing the Renaissance notion of bodily "humors"... the newer notion was of natural "sympathies" determined by the functional unity of the human species... these "sympathies" all men shared" (91) I understand that the theory of the bodily "humors" is the inheritance from Galeno and Democrito but, what about the "natural sympathies"? Does anyone knows a little bit about this theory, specially who was the person/group who support the new notion? Thanks for your help, it is very important for my dissertation.

-- Ana Diaz (anisima32@hotmail.com), October 14, 2001

Answers

You might get started by looking at Roger Smith's _Fontana History of The Human Sciences_ (_Norton History..._ in the U.S.), esp. section iv of chapter 8 (on the "Social Sentment"). According to Smith, "sympathy" was held to be the capacity to know the feelings of others, and was considered to be the faculty that separated humans from other animals. Hume seems to have been the major British representative of this school of thought, Rousseau the major French representative (but I suspect you find it was fairly widespread around "enlightenment" philosophers).

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), October 14, 2001.

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