The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy

Ohad Nachtomy is Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan University and at Fordham University. He is the author of Possibility, Agency, and Individuality in Leibniz's Metaphysics (2007); "Leibniz on Nested Individuals"(BJHP 2007); "Leibniz and the Logic of Life"(Studia Leibnitiana 2010); "Leibniz on Artificial and Natural Machines" in Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz (co-edited with Justin Smith) (2010); and "A Tale Of Two Thinkers, One Meeting, and Three Degrees Of Infinity: Leibniz And Spinoza in 1675-78" (BJHP 2011).Justin E. H. Smith is university professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris 7. He is the author of Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (2011) and of the forthcoming Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Early Modern Philosophy and the Concept of Race. He has also recently edited and translated, with François Duchesneau, Georg Ernst Stahl's Negotium otiosum (forthcoming).

• Table of Contents ; 1. Introduction: Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E. H. Smith ; I. The Nature of Living Beings ; 2. Ohad Nachtomy, "What's Infinity Got to Do with Life? The Role of Infinity in Leibniz's Theory of Living Beings" ; 3. Raphaele Andrault, "What Is Life? A Comparative Study of Ralph Cudworth and Nehemiah Grew" ; 4. Thomas Teufel, "The Impossibility of a Newton of the Blade of Grass in Kant's Teleology" ; II. The Structure of Living Beings ; 5. Peter Distelzweig, "Fabricius' Galeno-Aristotelian Teleomechanics of Muscle Anatomy" ; 6. Anne-Lise Rey, "Metaphysical Problems in Francis Glisson's Irritability Theory" ; 7. Francois Duchesneau, "'Organism' in the Leibniz-Stahl Controversy" ; III. The Generation of Living Beings ; 8. Andreas Blank, "Material Causes and Incomplete Entities in Gallego de la Serna's Theory of Animal Generation" ; 9. Karen Detlefsen, "Biology and Theology in Malebranche's Theory of Organic Generation" ; 10. Catherine Abou-Nemeh, "Reaumur's Crayfish Experiment in Hartsoeker's Systeme: Regeneration and the Limits of Mechanism" ; 11. Charles T. Wolfe, "Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot's Biological Project" ; IV. The Order of the Living World ; 12. Lea F. Schweitz, "On the Continuity of Nature and the Uniqueness of Human Life in G. W. Leibniz" ; 13. Brian W. Ogilvie, "Orders of Insects: Insect Species and Metamorphosis between Renaissance and Enlightenment" ; Index

These valuable essays will enrich specialists' understanding of the 17th-century dynamics that produced what has become biology.