[New Book] Vegetative Powers: The Roots of Life in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Natural Philosophy

Editors: Andreas Blank (University of Klagenfurt) & Fabrizio Baldassarri (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

Publisher: Springer, 2021

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

  • Front Matter
  • Missing a Soul That Endows Bodies with Life: An Introduction – Fabrizio Baldassarri, Andreas Blank
  • Soul, Parts of the Soul, and the Definition of the Vegetative Capacity in Aristotle’s De anima – Klaus Corcilius
  • Embodied Intelligent (?) Souls: Plants in Plato’s Timaeus – Amber D. Carpenter
  • The Vegetative Soul in Galen – Robert Vinkesteijn
  • Avicenna on Vegetative Faculties and the Life of Plants – Michael Fatigati
  • Can Plants Desire? Aspects of the Debate on desiderium naturale – Marilena Panarelli
  • Disclosing the Hidden Life of Plants. Theories of the Vegetative Soul in Albert the Great’s De vegetabilibus et plantis – Amalia Cerrito
  • On the Natural Generation of Human Beings: The Vegetative Power in a Thought Experiment by Some Masters of Arts (1250-c. 1268) – Paola Bernardini
  • Thomas Aquinas on the Vegetative Soul – Martin Pickavé
  • The Vegetative Powers of Human Beings: Late Medieval Metaphysical Worries – Martin Klein
  • The Jesuit Cultivation of Vegetative Souls: Leonard Lessius (1554–1623) on a Sober Diet – Cristiano Casalini, Laura Madella
  • Nicolaus Taurellus on Vegetative Powers and the Question of Substance Monism – Andreas Blank
  • Vegetal Analogy in Early Modern Medicine: Generation as Plant Cutting in Sennert’s Early Treatises (1611–1619) – Elisabeth Moreau
  • Vegetative and Sensitive Functions of the Soul in Descartes’s Meditations – Igor Agostini
  • Failures of Mechanization: Vegetative Powers and the Early Cartesians, Regius, La Forge, and Schuyl – Fabrizio Baldassarri
  • Marin Cureau de la Chambre on the Vegetative Powers – Bálint Kékedi
  • Re-inventing the Vegetable Soul? More’s Spirit of Nature and Cudworth’s Plastic Nature Reconsidered – Sarah Hutton
  • Margaret Cavendish and Vegetable Life – Justin Begley
  • Plantanimal Imagination: Life and Perception in Early Modern Discussions of Vegetative Power – Guido Giglioni
  • “Vegetative Epistemology”: Francis Glisson on the Self-Referential Nature of Life – Dániel Schmal
  • Life in the Dark: Corals, Sponges, and Gravitation in Late Seventeenth Natural Philosophy – Raphaële Andrault
  • Vegetable Life: Applications, Implications, and Transformations of a Classical Concept (1500–1700) – Fabrizio Bigotti
  • The Notion of Vegetative Soul in the Leibniz-Stahl Controversy – François Duchesneau
  • Vegetation and Life from Wolff to Hanov – Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero
  • Bichatʼs Two Lives – Tobias Cheung

Source: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-69709-9