The volume analyzes the natural philosophical accounts and debates concerning the vegetative powers, namely nutrition, growth, and reproduction. While principally focusing on the early modern approaches to the lower functions of the soul, readers will discover the roots of these approaches back to the Ancient times, as the volume highlights the role of three strands that help shape the study of life in the Medieval and early modern natural philosophies. From late antiquity to the early modern period, the vegetative soul and its cognate concepts have played a substantial role in specifying life, living functions, and living bodies, sometimes blurring the line between living and non-living nature, and, at other moments, resulting in a strong restriction of life to a mechanical system of operations and powers. Unearthing the history of the vegetative soul as a shrub of interconnected concepts, the 24 contributions of the volume fill a crucial gap in scholarship, ultimately outlining the importance of vegetal processes of incessant proliferation, generation, and organic growth as the roots of life in natural philosophical interpretations.
Table of Content
1. Introduction: Missing a Soul that Endows Bodies with Life.- 2. Souls, Parts of Soul, and Vegetation in Aristotle.- 3. The Vegetative Soul in the Neoplatonic Tradition.- 4. Galenic Anatomo-Physiology of the Vegetative Soul.- 5. Expanding the
Parva Naturalia-Project: Albertus Magnus on nutrition.- 6. How to Explain Vegetative Functions of an Immaterial Soul?.- 7. Jesuit Vegetative Souls: Lessius and the Conimbricenses on men’s ‘lowest’ functions.- 8. Towards the Elimination of the
Anima Vegetativa: Some Intellectualistic Tendencies in the Jesuits Suárez and Arriaga.- 9. Daniel Sennert on the Vegetative Soul and its Powers.- 10. Nicolaus Taurellus on Forms, Vegetative Souls and the Question of Emergence.- 11. Generation and the Vegetative Soul: A ‘Hermetic’ Perspective from Marburg (1612).- 12. The Galenic soul in the Renaissance.- 13. Anatomy and faculties of the soul in Servetus and Columbus.- 14. The Matter of Life. Theories of Spontaneous Generation in the Late Sixteenth-Century Italy.- 15. Van Helmont’s theory of digestion and nutrition.- 16. Concoction, Transmutation, and Living Spirits: Francis Bacon’s Experiments with Artificial Life.- 17. The Vegetative Functions of the Soul in Descartes’s
Meditations.- 18. (Failed) Ontological Revolutions. The Vegetative Soul in Guy de La Brosse, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi.- 19. Marin Cureau de la Chambre’s Conception of the Vegetative Soul.- 20. Scholastic Cartesianism. Juan Caramuel and the Negation of the Vegetative Soul in his Cartesian Manuscript.- 21. Cartesianising Vegetative Souls: Hylarchic Principles and Plastic Natures in More and Cudworth.- 22. Re-Inventing the Vegetable Soul? More’s Spirit of Nature and Cudworth’s Plastic Nature Reconsidered.- 23. Vegetative Epistemology: the Cognitive Principles of Life in William Harvey and Francis Glisson.- 24. Plants and Brains: The Vegetative Soul and Its Links with the Imagination in Early Modern Medicine and Philosophy.- 25. The Vegetative Soul in Glisson’s Natural Philosophy.- 26. Life as Vegetation. Limiting Cases and Theological Problems for Seventeenth-century Thinkers.- 27. An Alternative to the Vegetative Soul: Galen’s Natural Spirit in the Late 17th-Century Medical Conception of Digestive Functions.- 28. The Notion of Vegetative Soul in the Leibniz-Stahl Controversy.- 29. Newton’s ‘Vegetative Spirit’.- 30. Beyond Structure: Vegetative Powers from Wolff to Hanov.- 31. The Role of Vegetative Powers in Animal Physiologies: Bichat’s Order of Two Lives.
About the author
Fabrizio Baldassarri’s research focuses on early modern natural philosophy, especially dealing with the naturalistic studies of Descartes, the study of plants, and the early modern life sciences. He has been post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bucharest, at Gotha Centre, at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, at Utrecht University, at HAB in Wolfenbüttel, and now he has a Marie Skłodovska Curie fellowship at Ca’ Foscari and Indiana University Bloomington. He has widely published on the early modern natural philosophy, botany, medicine and sciences.
Andreas Blank specializes in early modern philosophy, especially the metaphysics of Leibniz, early modern Aristotelianism and the life sciences, and early modern moral and political philosophy. He has been visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, the Cohn Institute for the History of and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University, and the Jacques Loeb Center for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at Ben-Gurion University, Be’er-Sheva, and held Visiting Associate Professorships at the University of Hamburg and Bard College Berlin.
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