Tag: Descartes
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The Courtiers’ Anatomists
What did it mean to experiment with animals in the seventeenth century? There is much ambiguity surrounding the terms “demonstration,” “experience,” and “experiment” in this period, further complicated by linguistic ambiguity: “expérience” in French and “experientia” in Latin could mean what we know in modern English as either experience or experiment. The medieval term “experimentum”…