Reading Response QuestionsWeek 3, Precepts February 17-19
Email: creager@princeton.edu, or manfredl@princeton.edu
Reminder: You may use these content-based questions as a springboard for your e-mail reading response, which should, however, focus on more general issues than the specific items detailed here. The response you send in to your preceptor each week should address all of the required readings (especially the primary source readings, which will be the focus for precept discussion); the text may include questions as well as analysis. A check will be given for summarizing readings, a + for analyzing them, and a - for not electronically mailing at least 250 words to your preceptor by one hour before your section meets. No extensions will be granted or late reports accepted for reading response. The first reading response is due in the second week of class, and one will be due every week of term thereafter except the week of the mid-term exam. The precept portion of your course grade will be based on your attendance and vocal participation in discussion as well as on your ten reading responses.
Week 3
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (especially chapters 3-5) 1° source
Why does the narrator say he created the creature? How did he bring him to life?
What is "the moral of the story"? What is responsible for the tragedy? In what respects are Frankenstein's activities unnatural?
Why is the novel subtitled "the Modern Prometheus"?
How was Victor Frankenstein educated? Is he a scientist? What does he have in common with experimenters in the Naturphilosophie tradition (cf Coleman chapter)? How is he different?la Mettrie, Man A Machine (1748) 1° source
pp. 54-58 Does la Mettrie believe in God?
p. 59 Does he believe in a soul?
pp. 59-61 What is the point of this list of observations? Where in the body does he think the "motive principle" of animal bodies resides?
p. 62 What "mechanical" functions does ht point to as evidence that the body is a machine?
p. 69 Who is la Mettrie's "new Prometheus"? What is the human body in la Mettrie's analysis?Justus Liebig, from Animal Chemistry (1842) 1° source
p. 86 Note that he contrasts inorganic ("mineral") chemistry with organic.
pp. 86-87 What role is he arguing chemistry ought to have?
p. 94 What limits does he say exist on biological research?
pp. 95-105 What are the primary chemical constituents of organisms, according to Liebig's analysis?Walter Wetzels, "Johann Wilhelm Ritter" 2° source
p. 199 What was seen as objectionable about Newtonian physics by the German Romantics? What metaphor did they favor over the "clockwork"?
pp. 201-2 Note that at this time theories of the nature of electricity still held it to be some kind of a very subtle fluid that could be transferred from one object to another. Hence, the question for Ritter of whether it might be identical with the "nervous fluid" responsible for muscle contractions and other nerve activity. Do you think this is a vitalistic idea? Recall that Wetzels says that the Romantic movement is not anti-science.
pp. 203-4 If Ritter's idea of the "cosmic-animal" seems strange, what important theoretical progress did it lead him to? Wetzels emphasizes (p. 205) that his new "empirical findings by themselves are sound and of undeniable importance." Is this the most important criteria for a good scientific theory: that it leads productively to new empirical discoveries? What other important discoveries did it lead him to? (p. 208)Coleman, "Function: The Animal Machine" 2° source
pp. 118-19 Why does Coleman describe some researchers as being "of the mechanistic faith"? Why is it significant that "their hopes long sounded more loudly than their concrete accomplishments"? Why does he choose respiration as an important area in which to explore the mechanistic approach?
pp. 120-21 What is the Cartesian dualism? How was it connected to a model of matter as "hard, impenetrable, insensitive and passive particles"? Recall again how Trembley's polyp suggested to some, including la Mettrie, that matter must be self-active.
pp. 122-23 What was the effect on the debate caused by the establishment of the doctrine of the conservation of energy in the 1840s? Why?
pp. 124-27 What did Lavoisier's work show about energy production in animals?
pp. 150-51 What was the relationship between German materialism in the 1840s and the revolution of 1848? How did the group of Moleschott, Buchner and Vogt differ from the physiological reductionists? (note that the " nature philosophers" or Naturphilosophen referred to here include those who had been enthusiastic about the work of Ritter.)
p. 153 What does he say both nature-philosophy (Naturphilosophie) and the rigid reductionist program shared in common?
pp. 153-54 What does he mean that "their appeal to the modern physiologist and molecular biology… requires no emphasis."
