Peter M. Distelzweig

Basic Information

Helpful links

• CV
• Drafts of publications can be found here.
• Other examples of my writing, on teleology in Descartes,  preliminary work on universality in Hobbes' philosophy of language, on 'teleomechanics' in anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente.

• Teaching Letter of Recommendation from an unusual student (a recently retired professor in the School of Pharmacy)
• Teaching Letter of Recommendation from a Chancellor's Undergraduate Teaching Fellow
• Summary of Teaching Effectiveness
• Past Syllabi and Teaching Evaluations

• I am a coorganizer of the "Medicine, Philosophy and the 'Scientific Revolution' Initiative"

About me as a job candidate

   -   My work   -   Its significance   -   Research plans   -   Colleague and teacher   -

My work 

My work brings an understanding of lesser known figures and texts to the task of addressing philosophical issues arising in the work of central figures in early modern philosophy. 

In my dissertation, I examine a cluster of themes in importantly related thinkers: Aristotle, Galen, Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, William Harvey and René Descartes. I focus on the relation between material-efficient (often mechanical) explanation on the one hand, and teleological explanation on the other. Attention to this relation raises questions about reductionism, the nature of teleological explanation, and the applicability of mathematics to living things. I examine an important, but understudied post-humanist tradition of medical Galeno-Aristotelianism (exemplified by William Harvey and his teacher at Padua Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, himself an important anatomist working in the late 16th and early 17th centuries). This tradition represents a methodologically and conceptually sophisticated approach to investigating and explaining animal physiology, and a non-reductive integration of mathematical mechanics into teleological explanations. This important tradition does not fit cleanly into historiographies of the rise of physico-mathematics and the mechanical philosophy centered on, e.g., Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. In this way I add to the complexity of our picture of Aristotelianism and the mathematization of nature in early modernity. Besides its intrinsic interest, this work is also valuable because it provides essential context for Descartes’ highly influential project for a mechanistic physiology. Focusing on the medical context of Descartes’ work allows me to provide a new and better interpretation of Descartes’ physiological project and his employment of apparently teleological language like usus and functio. I interpret the latter in light of its early modern medical context, while relating it to contemporary analyses of function in philosophy of biology, and of mechanistic explanation in philosophy of science. This work is a part of an important trend toward contextualist history of early modern philosophy, already robustly developed in the case of the physical sciences, but more recently developing in the case of the life sciences. 

My dissertation reflects my general approach to philosophy. I explore philosophical issues by examining the relationship between thinkers’ concrete scientific practice and substantive scientific theory on the one hand, and their more methodological and philosophical discussions on the other. I aim to revise our understanding of philosophers by bringing their more central (to us), well-studied, ‘philosophical’ texts into dialogue with their less central (to us), lesser-known, more ‘scientific’ works. In work on Aristotle, I bring together the Posterior Analytics, Metaphysics, and Physics with the Meteorology and De Caelo. In work on Descartes, I bring together the Meditations and Principles with his physiological writings. In work on William Harvey, I bring together his De motu cordis and his unpublished working notes for a work on muscle anatomy and his lecture notes for general anatomy. This approach sheds important light on both kinds of texts. Careful attention to the specific practices and concrete scientific views of a thinker illuminates his sometimes obscure or highly abstract methodological discussions, and these in turn provide useful tools for interpreting practice and theory as understood by the historical actor. This new understanding, itself, often leads us to examine less well-known (to us) figures (like Fabricius), who were, nonetheless, well-known and important at the time. 

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The significance of my work 

The ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the 16th to early 18th centuries has been characterized by historian Herbert Butterfield as the most important intellectual development in western history since the rise of Christianity. Relatedly, the developments traced in a history of 17th century philosophy course are often understood to constitute the birth of characteristically modern philosophy. Regardless of whether we want to reify these developments as the ‘Scientific Revolution’, it is clear that central problems and methods of disciplines were shifting in fundamental ways that cast a long shadow. Furthermore, the already permeable disciplinary boundaries between philosophy, medicine and the physico-mathematical sciences were shifting rapidly. Many early modern thinkers straddled disciplines, and developments in one often came via the importation of values and results from another. 

For this reason, a history of early modern philosophy that does not consider developments in these sciences will be prone to misunderstanding the claims, methods, and motivations of philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Locke. Correcting such misunderstandings will, in turn, improve our understanding of the later reception and development of important 17th century intellectual transformations. Although a welcome trend towards contextualist history of philosophy has greatly increased our understanding of this broader intellectual landscape, much work remains to be done, particularly in understanding developments in early modern medicine and their impact on early modern philosophy. My work is designed to contribute to this effort. 

I believe that philosophically astute work integrating the history of philosophy, science, and medicine is philosophically fruitful because (i) it can correct (often implicit) genealogies of current debates that distort and mislead philosophical investigation and (ii) because the conceptual resources developed and philosophical perspectives examined in the course of such integrative work can provide new (or rediscovered) tools with which to address those debates. Descartes warns that studying too much history can make one a stranger in one’s own time. However, (as he also suggests) ignorance of history puts one at risk of a certain kind of intellectual parochialism. My interest in careful contextualist history of philosophy does not reflect a disengagement from issues in contemporary philosophy, but rather a strategy for addressing them. 

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Long-term research plans 

My research plans include continuing these ongoing projects.

• Hobbes on phantasia and universality in language.  I'm interested in understanding how Hobbes' nominalism relates to his understanding of human cognitive faculties, particularly his reduction of all thought to sensory modalities--and how this differs from late scholastic nominalisms. Draft of preliminary work.

• Hobbes and Descartes on ideas, language, and existence.  Here I'm working on unpacking the differences between Descartes and Hobbes on the relationship between language and human cogntive faculties that help explain some of the terse exchanges and talking past each other found in the Third Objections and Replies.

• Teleology and the Physiology of Sensation and Locomotion in Aristotle, Fabricius and Harvey (WithJim Lennox).  We are working on the place of teleology and interspecific variation in relating the physiology of sensation and locomotion in the research projects of Aristotle and these two later Aristotelian anatomists.  We have presented on this at a recent conference at the Humboldt in Berlin.

The metaphysics of living things and scientific methodology
In addition, my dissertation research fits into a larger-scale research project focused on the history of analyses of the metaphysics of living things and related questions concerning methodological and explanatory norms. This project can be given the following articulation.

1. Violent or Natural? The ontology of animal parts and their interactions in Aristotle. Understanding the metaphysics of parts (organs) in Aristotle’s philosophy of biology and the explanatory role of material principles (e.g., elemental constitution and the properties derived from it) in his physiology. I plan on approaching the issue by focusing on the role of material principles in understanding the status of the motions that one part brings about in another in a properly functioning animal: in what sense, for Aristotle, is such a part’s motion violent, having a principle of motion external to the moved part (i.e., one in the active part), and in what sense natural, being a contribution to the characteristic activities of a natural substance (the animal)? This work will bring together Aristotle's account of substance (Metaphysics), cause and motion (Physics), and scientific understanding (Posterior Analytics), with his matter theory (De Caelo, Generation and Corruption and Meteorology IV) and study of animal parts (Parts of Animals and On the Progression of Animals).
2. Medieval matter theory and the metaphysics of life. Identifing and examining 13th-16th century natural philosophical and medical analyses of the role of material principles in the metaphysics of living things, focusing especially on the nature of organic parts and their functional interactions.
3. Scientia and Medical Empiricism:  Scholastic responses to Renaissance Anatomy. Tracing the range of scholastic reactions to and criticisms of the anatomy-centered investigations and explanations of living things growing out of Renaissance medical (Galenic) humanism. I will begin by focusing on responses by Giacomo Zabarella and Cesare Cremonini at Padua, an important center of anatomy. 
4. Descartes vs. Harvey Revisited. Reexamining the nature of the agreement and disagreement between Harvey and Descartes on the heart, lungs and circulation, with special attention to how their broader natural philosophical and methodological commitments justify or undermine the use of animal dissection and inter-species comparison to provide evidence for their understanding of the human cardiopulmonary system.
5. Integrated History and Philosophy of the Organism. Exploring how recent work on grounding relations connects to work on reduction, emergence, and kinds and levels of explanation in philosophy of science (especially biology), and to the thought of the philosophers and physicians explored in (1) through (4). 

It is my expectation that this research project will produce a series of articles as well as a monograph on William Harvey's Galeno-Arisotelian anatomical project.

Scholastic philosophy of language and natural philosophy and their intertwined fates in the 16th and 17th centuries. Building on some preliminary work I have done on Hobbes’ philosophy of language and its relationship to scholastic thought, I hope to explore the philosophical developments motivating and reflected in Renaissance and early modern criticisms of the use (typically, they claim ‘abuse’) of language in scholastic philosophy. I wish to focus especially on the interplay between changing accounts of human cognitive capacities, philosophy of language and calls for the reform of ‘method’ in the 16th and 17th centuries. I also hope to bring this research into fruitful interaction with contemporary work on scientific empiricism, theory (and model) development, and explanation in the sciences. 

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A colleague and teacher 

I combine a broad interest in ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern philosophy and science with philosophical rigor and conceptual focus. I am interested in issues in the philosophy of science at the interface of metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language today and as they varied across a range of time periods. For example, my interest in the interplay between the material constituents and principles of unity in understanding living things in early modern philosophy touches on metaphysical issues in mereology, composition, grounding, and reduction, as well as issues about inter-theory relations. Because of my robust curiosity and broad interests, I will compliment and connect with a wide range of potential colleagues in the history of philosophy, philosophy of science, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. 

I have significant experience as an organizer and collaborator. While at the University of Pittsburgh I have co-organized (often as principle organizer) two conferences, two reading groups, an afternoon workshop, and two conference sessions on early modern philosophy and medicine. I served as the department graduate representative for almost two years, and, for two years I served as a member of the Annual Lecture Series nomination committee for the Center for Philosophy of Science. I also organized a translation group on parts of Suarez’s De anima and a reading group on medieval logic attended both by graduate students with more historical interests and by some specializing in philosophical logic.  

I enjoy teaching a broad range of introductory and advanced courses in the history of philosophy (ancient, medieval and early modern), often—but not exclusively—with a special emphasis on the interplay between philosophy, science and theology. I can happily teach introductory courses like Philosophical Problems, Logic, and Critical Thinking, as well as Introduction to Philosophy of Science and advanced seminars on a variety of topics in general philosophy of science. I am excited to expand my teaching into areas of metaphysics and epistemology. I have also taught bioethics.

I find great satisfaction in teaching and combine high standards, a passion for the subject matter, clear lectures, and carefully designed small-group discussions. I work hard to cultivate a good rapport with students and a supportive environment in the classroom. The following comments in student evaluations are not unusual: 

‘- extremely organized. - presented all material in a very organized manner and clarified examples and related work to us so we could follow. –clearly passionate and has a love for the material. – clear lecturer—no hidden agenda and kind towards the students and the pace we work at.’ 

‘Excellent pacing. Peter’s energy & excitement for the material made me excited for classes and genuinely proud to learn the harder material myself. Great job explaining hard to understand passages from primary sources while still using the same language.’ 

'Although it is certainly not a weakness, Peter has very high expectations of his students. It would be intimidating if he weren’t so approachable and helpful.’ 

In Fall 2010, I worked with an advanced undergraduate (Neuroscience, HPS double major; Chemistry minor) in the Honors College in the context of a Chancellor’s Undergraduate Teaching Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. I helped this student (now in medical school) develop five lectures and supplementary papers on the history of theories of respiration from antiquity to the 17th century. These he then presented in the context of one of my courses. I have also been invited to teach seminars for the New Teaching Assistant Orientation for the College of Arts and Sciences. 

Our graduate course work is regularly structured around graduate students running various seminar meetings; in addition I was invited to lead a seminar meeting on medieval nominalism in an English Literature graduate seminar (Genealogies of Modernity, Prof. Ryan McDermott) here at the University of Pittsburgh, and, with two others, to run a seminar meeting on the reception of Aristotle’s teleology in the 16th and early 17th centuries for an HPS graduate seminar on Aristotle’s teleology. I am well prepared to teach at the graduate level. 

I will be an active, collegial, interested and reliable member of a department and a committed teacher. 

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