EIGHTEENTH‐CENTURY DEPARTURES FROM DUALISM: FROM MECHANISM AND ANIMISM TO VITALISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

This essay discusses the contribution to overcoming dualism made by eighteenth‐century anthropology. Anthropology in this period is a hybrid discourse comprising elements of popular philosophy, physiognomy, and psychology, which among other things aims to fill the gap left by the perceived failure of abstract, a priori , and transcendental approaches to philosophy either to ground knowledge in any absolute sense or guide us in more everyday questions of knowledge and action. It is associated with a holist approach to the ‘whole man’ and with a naturalist epistemology that prefers description to speculation. This article argues that an important strand of anthropology's holism involves consciously turning away from dualist ontologies. In a way that is anticipated in animist and vitalist approaches to human ontology (which are important aspects of medical science in the period), this dualism is displaced by, firstly, an attitude that is motivated by practical concerns, reflecting the close relationship between anthropological thinking and medicine in the late eighteenth century, and, secondly, a heuristic focus on effects rather than absolute definitions and ultimate causes. This heurism is thus at odds with an understanding of anthropology as adhering simply to naturalist positivism.