Raffaele Carbone

The aim of my project is to examine the links between medical research, its philosophical basis and the new idea of the science de l’homme, emerging from the works of the Montpellieran and Neapolitan physician-philosophers in the second half of the 18th century, with a view to stressing the influence of the former on the latter, as well as the critical reworking to which the Neapolitan medical school subjected the theories formulated in France in the light of the peculiarity of the local context. My project is formulated on two planes, one historical, the other more theoretical. On the one hand, it will examine the flow of medico-philosophical ideas between Montpellier, Paris and Naples, while on the other, it will, by means of this reconstruction, analyse the new idea of the science of man that emerged in the above-mentioned Euro-Mediterranean cultural centres in the second half of the 18th century and which, by opposing certain metaphysical tendencies of Cartesianism, was based on physiology and the enrichment of medicine from an anthropological perspective. The research will take in the period between the publication of La Caze’s Idée de l’homme physique et morale (1755) and Bordeu’s Recherches sur le pouls (1756), both well-known to the Neapolitan authors, and the execution of Domenico Cirllo (1799) at the tragic end of the Neapolitan Republic, the end of an important period for the South, both culturally and politically.