Fabrizio Baldassarri

Shedding new light on the understudied Italian Renaissance scholar, Andrea Cesalpino, and the diverse fields he wrote on, this volume covers the multiple traditions that characterize his complex natural philosophy and medical theories, taking in epistemology, demonology, mineralogy, and botany. By moving beyond the established influence of Aristotle's texts on his work, Andrea Cesalpino and Renaissance Aristotelianism reflects the rich influences of Platonism, alchemy, Galenism, and Hippocratic ideas. Cesalpino's relation to the new sciences of the 16th century are traced through his direct influences, on cosmology, botany, and medicine. In combining Cesalpino's reception of these traditions alongside his connections to early modern science, this book provides a vital case study of Renaissance Aristotelianism.

In the history of ideas, innumerable attempts to explain life and to define living activities have invoked the notion of the soul. Yet this theoretical entity seems to be an unfathomable thing. Difficulties beset the mere definition of it, and controversies span from whether the soul is a material body or an immaterial form, an immortal or a mortal thing, a subject of experiential or of theoretical knowledge, to the question of whether it is the subject of a specific discipline or rather of a scientia de anima that, in the Aristotelian tradition, was also regarded as a part of natural philosophy—the field of philosophy that deals with natural particulars. Not only was the soul thought, from a theological angle, to define the unity and unicity of living beings, but it was also seen as the source of several bodily activities such as nutrition and growth in living beings. And since some of the beings that grow and nourish themselves also sense and think, the relation of the origin of vegetative powers to the origin of perceptual and intellectual powers has always been an object of debate. In this sense, the soul has not just been a topic of one specific field, but has rather drawn upon many disciplines, combining the work of philosophers, religious thinkers, physicians, naturalists, chymists, and so on, thereby blurring the boundaries between different fields of knowledge. Botanical treatises of the Renaissance, for example, begin with the definition of the soul of plants and its primary role in bringing forth vegetal activities. Indeed, the presence of the soul was thought to be involved also in the life of animals, human beings, and, in some cases, it was even ascribed to minerals and stones, not to speak of the world-soul, the latent idea that the entire cosmos is animated with a soul. Furthermore, the theory of the materiality of the soul was developed since Antiquity and found new momentum in early modern times, in the reappraisal of Epicurean ideas by thinkers such as Guillaume Lamy, Pierre Gassendi, and Julian Offray de La Mettrie. Yet, with the Cartesian Henricus Regius, the understanding of vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls as material importantly surfaces as a peculiar attempt to mechanize the living functions of bodies.

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.

Starting from Gaukroger’s monograph, Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy, in this chapter I deal with four dilemmas that arise in Descartes’s natural philosophy from the differences between the early physics of Le Monde and the Principia philosophiae. These dilemmas concern the definition of physics, the role of metaphysics, the role of experimentation and particular bodies, and living beings, ultimately showing—once more—the importance of Gaukroger’s work in paving the way to renew studies on Descartes’s philosophical programme.

Since the late 1620s, Descartes engaged with the study of stones, rocks, minerals, and metals, performing several observations and experiments to establish his knowledge of nature consistent with his philosophical program. In this sense, he firmly rejected alchemy for its ungrounded principles, false notions, and uncertainty, although he praised chymical experimentation, which he performed in order to achieve some knowledge of particular bodies. Throughout the time, he not only studied the qualities of mixtures such as salt, minerals, metals, and magnet, but also dealt with particular, strange cases, such as fossils, miraculous and floating rocks, or the Bologna stone, ultimately producing a sound mechanization of mineral bodies in Part 4 of his Principia philosophiae. In this chapter, I disclose several diverse cases that emerge in both his correspondence and works, especially laying bare the limitations and riches of the reduction of chymistry to his mechanical physics. While observations and hypotheses play an eminent role in Descartes’s investigations of metals and minerals, the metaphysical and physical principles of the Principia allow him to provide a more philosophically established mineralogy.

Despite the efficacy of Descartes’s animal-machine analogy, a crucial issue affects his mechanization of animal bodies. This reduction works for the animal in general, that is an abstract representation of the animal body, while the higher functions and behaviors of animals (and men) in particular cannot be entirely mechanized. In this chapter, I tackle this asymmetry, showing that Descartes used the analogy with machines as a heuristic model to explain living functions but stopped the analogy when necessary to expound animals as a system or to illustrate life. This especially surfaces as he focused on particular animals, as a sort of scale of bodies emerges in his biomedical manuscripts. In the last section of this chapter, I disclose Descartes’s exploration of animals as a coherent organic unity of functions, as his study of particular bodies allowed him to produce a more complex investigation of animal beings, which, however, retained plenty of puzzles.

On February 20, 1639, Descartes wrote to Mersenne that he had achieved a more or less satisfactory knowledge of “the animal in general […] and not yet of the man in particular” (Descartes to Mersenne, February 20, 1639, AT II 526 [translation is mine]). Although he referred to this problem in the context of the possibility of treating fevers, this divide implicitly sheds light on the condition of his philosophical program, which fits the knowledge of bodies in general, but not the knowledge of particular, individual, existing bodies.

In this chapter, I focus on Descartes’s physics. According to it, nature is extended matter, a uniform solid body made of moving and arranging corpuscles with some size and shape. Nature is a geometrical space. In Descartes’s early physics, Le Monde, he invented nature as a mathematical equation, and bodies take different figures following the mechanical laws of nature (i.e., the laws of motion). Yet, in both Les Météores and the Principia, external, actually existing bodies play a more central role, and Descartes’s physics starts from the observation of these bodies and the aggregate of corpuscles. In this chapter, I analyze these various interpretations and reconstruct Descartes’s attempts to bridge the gap between the geometrical definition of nature and the actually existing world. Finally, I also examine Descartes’s uses of observation, which in Le Monde serves to confirm his theory while in the later texts appears as the point of departure to know the universe.

In defining a method to know nature, Descartes forms it on the certainty of mathematics and on the operations of the intellect. His epistemology, especially as developed in Regulae ad directionem ingenii, appears quite rationalistic. Yet, as he applied it in the actual investigation of nature, he claimed that one achieves knowledge through a combination of deduction and experimentation, as experience and hypotheses acquired importance through time. In this chapter, I explore Descartes’s attempts to adjust his epistemology to attain a sound knowledge of nature (from Regulae ad directionem ingenii and the correspondence with Beeckman and Mersenne to the Discours and the correspondence with Morin, and finally to the method of Principia philosophiae). As Descartes became involved in actual empirical research to achieve complete physics, his epistemology changed.

The study of plants is problematic in Descartes’s philosophy, as he failed to include a section on vegetation in his Principia philosophiae and rarely wrote about plants in their own right. When he did, problems surfaced: for instance, his definition of plants fluctuated between nonliving and living bodies. Furthermore, Descartes’s interest in plants did not match the widespread enthusiasm for botanical varieties of his contemporaries, but he mostly focused on the internal functioning of vegetal bodies—something that was not entirely uncommon in the Dutch Republic. In this chapter, after discussing Descartes’s fluctuating definition of plants, I investigate several possible collaborations with his Dutch peers, in order to situate Descartes’s botanical study in its context, and I finally disclose his mechanization of plant life, as he reduced plant generation, growth, and fructification to the geometrico-mechanical principles of his physics. A sound natural philosophical section on plants thus consists of studying vegetating as a mechanical activity internal to living bodies, ultimately uncovering a mechanical differentiation between plants and minerals.

While improving medicine through physics had the capacity to liberate seventeenth-century thinking from traditional beliefs about souls and spirits, mechanics generated complications. Descartes’ mechanical physics is a perfect example, for his efforts to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical medicine, steering intellectual evidence into this second field, were ultimately unsteady. His view of biomechanics had reduced living bodies to automated machines, thereby making definitions of life and health and the active treatment of diseases difficult. However, Descartes’ rarely-studied notes on botany reveal a new scenario, wherein he understood bodily therapeutics to be connected to physiology, making botany a lever to introduce the intellectual evidence of theoretical medicine into its practical counterpart. These documents enable a greater comprehension of the functional unity within bodies, instance refined definitions of bodily individualities, and reveal Descartes’ use of disease to define health and to produce therapeutics, thus demonstrating a strong relationship between the life sciences and his philosophy.

In 1682, Nehemiah Grew included An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants as the first text in his Anatomy of Plants. The former consists of a broad programme to study vegetation from a material standpoint. In addition to the mechanical and chymical investigation of plants, generally supported by microscopic observations—a core methodology of the Royal Society—in the text Grew engaged with some more philosophical and theoretical issues. Still, despite Grew's creditable attempt to produce a coherent and comprehensive science of plants, the absence of a definition of vegetable life has an impact on his ability to understand plants in their own right. For instance, a few questions that emerged as Grew addressed zoophytes and other bodies blurred the line between vegetables and animals. Only in the Cosmologia sacra (1701) did Grew propound a definition of vegetable life with a more complete schema. Is the philosophy of plants a bridge between Grew's works? In this article, I contextualize his philosophical approach, explore the features of his text, and advance the possibility of answering this question positively, although the significant distance between Grew's experimental study of plants in the Anatomy and the physico-theology of the Cosmologia makes a connection between the two texts difficult. In the end, this unbridgeable gulf broadly shaped early modern botanical studies.

This book explores René Descartes’s attempts to describe particular bodies, such as rocks, minerals, metals, plants, and animals, within the mechanistic interpretation of nature of his philosophical program. Despite his early rationalistic epistemology, Descartes’s increasing attention to collections, histories, lists of qualities, and particular bodies results in a puzzling ‘short history of all natural phenomena’ contained in the Principles of philosophy (1644). The present book outlines the role of Descartes's observations and experimentation as he aimed to construct a universal science of nature, ultimately revealing the mechanization of nature in detail, and for curious bodies such as the Bologna Stone or the sensitive herb. What results is a theoretical natural history consistent with the mechanical principles of his philosophy, ultimately shedding new light on his attempt to produce a complete philosophy of nature.

This volume provides a more exhaustive interpretation of Rene Descartes' medical views and its reception in the seventeenth century. Filling the gap in the recent scholarship, the contributions in the volume follow four axes: exegetical, textual, philosophical, and contextual. Authors in this book deal with Descartes' physiology, anatomy, and therapy by reconstructing Cartesian texts, detailing possible medical and philosophical sources, discussing medical collaborations and oppositions, and exploring obscurities and failures in Descartes' medicine. In laying bare the more promising issues of Cartesian programme and discussing the reception and opposition in the seventeenth century, the volume also uncovers the limitations within his interpretation, ultimately revealing a more nuanced application of his methodology to a field of natural philosophy. While medical studies play a not secondary role in Descartes' entire work, the volume aims to discuss in detail the importance of medicine as a suitable field to understand Cartesian philosophy from a significant perspective in seventeenth-century Europe.

René Descartes’ mechanization of living activities lays bare a glaring lacuna that concerns vegetative functions, such as nutrition, generation, and growth: his cardiovascular framework affects any exhaustive explanation of these activities. When he mentions a mechanical vegetative power in his 1641 correspondence with Henricus Regius, this definition is unspecified, although it may be correlated to a few posthumous bio-medical notes. Descartes’ mechanization of the vegetative soul remains puzzling. Early Cartesian scholars were thus obliged to fill this lacuna to produce a more exhaustive physiology. In this chapter, after reconstructing Descartes’ own position in L’Homme and in his manuscripts, I explore the positions of Regius, Louis de La Forge, and Florent Schuyl, who dealt with Descartes’ medical texts and physiological doctrine through various perspectives. Yet, while building a mechanization of vegetation upon Descartes’ philosophy, their interpretations of a mechanical vegetative power uncover shortcomings, weaknesses, and failures.

In a recent poem, Vom Schnee, oder Descartes in Deutschland, German writer Durs Grünbein suggests that a snowy, white landscape inspired the young René Descartes to theoretically define nature. Indeed, Descartes's reduction of nature to extended matter composed of particles in movement and abiding by the laws of nature entails a reduction of all bodies' diversity to a mechanistic system in which all secondary qualities are mathematically framed. The description of colors in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii exemplifies this reduction of nature to a geometrical grid with no differences—Jean-Luc Marion (Sur...

In René Descartes' works there are four major references to living bodies as objects of his natural philosophy. The first is contained in the Fifth part of the Discours de la Méthode, published in June 1637, where Descartes provides a mechanical explanation of the heartbeat and other living functions of the body. The second is in a bio-medical note collected in the Excerpta anatomica dated November 1637, where he discusses nutrition and growth. The third is the famous claim on the absence of a section on living bodies in the Principia philosophiae, published in 1644. The fourth is in La Description du corps humain, Descartes' late physiology likely dated 1647-1648. In this article, by exploring these passages and contextualizing his physiological observations of animals and plants, I reassemble Descartes' science of life: his dismissal of soul, his mechanical framework, his interpretation of bodily self-maintenance and growth, his understanding of living bodies as integrated and organic systems, and the role of a power such as the immutatio and forces such as the impetus.

Early modern study of plants blossomed in a network of observation, exchanges, collaborations, and epistolary discussions. Following Baconian methodology, Dutch scholars combined the labor of listing and describing plants with botanical experimentation. This empirical approach was a suitable context for Descartes, who exchanged information and performed observations on plants in collaboration with Dutch experimenters. In this article, I focus on (1) the reception of a few botanical experiments of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum in Huygens and Reneri, with whom Descartes was in contact, and (2) Descartes’ collaboration with Reneri. While performing observations on plants together, Reneri acquired Descartes’ theoretical framework (as it arises in his disputations) and influenced the latter with a Baconian approach to the study of living nature. This combination of experimental knowledge and a theoretical framework shaped a Cartesian study of plants, as it later surfaced in Regius and ultimately paved the way to a modern science of plants.