Somatology: notes on a residual science in Kant and the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Somatology is an ‘invention’ of early modern Protestant Scholasticism and is mentioned by Immanuel Kant. Consistently with the way in which this discipline was considered in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, somatology is for Kant the discipline that has to do with material physical objects and therefore with ‘bodies’ conceived in a broader sense. But somatology is also for him the counterpart of pneumatology or psychology, as sciences dealing with the spirits of the soul. Therefore, somatology is for Kant also a part of anthropology and specifically of the part regarding human bodies: This feature is also typical of somatology in general at that time. So somatology is for Kant a science concerning physical matter in general and a science concerning animal and specifically human bodies in particular. This duplicity is constitutive of somatology since its very beginning and constitutes its central problem. Kant is therefore paradigmatic of a central problem affecting this discipline. This problem seals the fate of somatology, its short life in the tree of sciences and of its final failure.