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.
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 mens 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 Helmonts theory of
digestion and nutrition.-
16. Concoction, Transmutation, and Living Spirits:
Francis Bacons Experiments with Artificial Life.-
17. The Vegetative
Functions of the Soul in Descartess Meditations.-
18. (Failed) Ontological
Revolutions. The Vegetative Soul in Guy de La Brosse, René Descartes, and
Pierre Gassendi.-
19. Marin Cureau de la Chambres 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? Mores Spirit of Nature and
Cudworths 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 VegetativeSoul in Glissons
Natural Philosophy.-
26. Life as Vegetation. Limiting Cases and Theological
Problems for Seventeenth-century Thinkers.-
27. An Alternative to the
Vegetative Soul: Galens Natural Spirit in the Late 17th-Century Medical
Conception of Digestive Functions.-
28. The Notion of Vegetative Soul in the
Leibniz-Stahl Controversy.-
29. Newtons Vegetative Spirit.-
30. Beyond
Structure: Vegetative Powers from Wolff to Hanov.-
31. The Role of Vegetative
Powers in Animal Physiologies: Bichats Order of Two Lives.
Fabrizio Baldassarris 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 Skodovska 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, Beer-Sheva, and held Visiting Associate Professorships at the University of Hamburg and Bard College Berlin.
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