• 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 r…Read more
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    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 exp…Read more
  • Andrea Cesalpino and Renaissance Aristotelianism (edited book)
    with Craig Martin
    Bloomsbury. 2023.
  •  21
    Introduction: Gardens as Laboratories. A History of Botanical Sciences
    Journal of Early Modern Studies 6 (1): 9-19. 2017.
  •  9
    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 exp…Read more
  •  6
    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 puzzl…Read more
  •  8
    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 sc…Read more
  •  15
    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 pe…Read more
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    Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life by Deborah Brown and Calvin Normore
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 59 (4): 683-684. 2021.
    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 direct…Read more
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    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 s…Read more
  •  9
    Descartes and the Dutch: Botanical Experimentation in the Early Modern Period
    Perspectives on Science 28 (6): 657-683. 2020.
    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 o…Read more
  •  15
    Intended to be a volume accessible to a wide range of readers, the fifty chapters of this sizeable book provide an illuminating overview of seventeenth-century philosophy. Examining Descartes and C...
  •  8
    Q uentin H iernaux & B enoît T immermans , Philosophie du Végétal, Paris: Vrin, 2018, 182 pp., €18 (review)
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 41 (4): 1-3. 2019.
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    The Spirituality of Early Modern Philosophy
    Quaestio 18 595-598. 2018.
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    The mechanical life of plants: Descartes on botany
    British Journal for the History of Science 52 (1): 41-63. 2019.
    In this article, I argue that the French philosopher René Descartes was far more involved in the study of plants than has been generally recognized. We know that he did not include a botanical section in his natural philosophy, and sometimes he differentiated between plants and living bodies. His position was, moreover, characterized by a methodological rejection of the catalogues of plants. However, this paper reveals a significant trend in Descartes's naturalistic pursuits, starting from the e…Read more
  •  12
    Descartes’ treatise on man and its reception
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (6): 1234-1236. 2018.
  •  10
    From Art to Science. Experiencing Nature in the European Garden 1500-1700
    Journal of Early Modern Studies 5 (2): 163-165. 2016.
  •  17
    Manipulating Flora. Gardens as Laboratories in the Renaissance and Early Modern Europe
    Rivista di Storia Della Filosofia 72 (1): 175-178. 2017.