Overview
- Analyzes philosophical accounts from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries on vegetative powers
- Connects valuable philosophical writings with the past and shows their influence on those that followed
- Outlines a crucial section of early modern sciences of life
Part of the book series: International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées (ARCH, volume 234)
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Table of contents (25 chapters)
Keywords
- Aristotelian Vegetative Soul
- Galen Natural Spirit
- Mechanics and Vitalism
- Medieval natural philosophy
- Neoplatonic Tradition
- Galenic Anatomo-Physiology
- Parva Naturalia-Project
- Lessius and the Conimbricenses
- Van Helmont’s theory
- Cudworth’s Plastic Nature
- Vegetative Epistemology
- Glisson’s Natural Philosophy
- Leibniz-Stahl Controversy
- Vegetative Spirit
- Scholastic Cartesianism
- Intellectualistic Tendencies
- Vegetation in Aristotle
- Medical Conception of Digestive Functions
- Francis Bacon
- Ontological Revolutions
About this book
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.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Vegetative Powers
Book Subtitle: The Roots of Life in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Natural Philosophy
Editors: Fabrizio Baldassarri, Andreas Blank
Series Title: International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69709-9
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-69708-2Published: 26 May 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-69711-2Published: 27 May 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-69709-9Published: 25 May 2021
Series ISSN: 0066-6610
Series E-ISSN: 2215-0307
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 459
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 9 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Philosophy, History of Science, History of Medicine, Philosophical and Historical Foundations of Science, Life Sciences, general