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

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.

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.