Vegetative powers : the roots of life in Ancient, Medieval and Early modern natural philosophy / Fabrizio Baldassarri, Andreas Blank, editors.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Baldassarri, Fabrizio, editor.

Blank, Andreas, editor.

Series:

Archives internationales d'histoire des idées ; 0066-6610 234.

International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, 0066-6610 ; 234

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plants (Philosophy).

Physical Description:

xx, 459 pages : b illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cham : Springer, [2021]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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 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' Meditations

18. (Failed) Ontological Revolutions. The Vegetative Soul in Guy de La Brosse, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi

19. Marin Cureau de la Chambre 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 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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Current copyright fee: GBP19.00 42\0.

ISBN:

3030697088

9783030697082

OCLC:

1256585011