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

470 Pages·2021·5.369 MB·English

by  Andreas Blank and Fabrizio Baldassarri

International Archives of the History of Ideas 234
Archives internationales d'histoire des idées
Fabrizio Baldassarri
Andreas Blank  Editors
Vegetative
Powers
The Roots of Life in Ancient, Medieval
and Early Modern Natural Philosophy
Vegetative Powers
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDÉES
234
VEGETATIVE POWERS
Fabrizio Baldassarri
Andreas Blank
Board of Directors:
Founding Editors:
Paul Dibon† and Richard H. Popkin†
Director:
Sarah Hutton, University of York, United Kingdom
Associate Directors:
J. C. Laursen, University of California, Riverside, USA
Guido Giglioni, University of Macerata, Italy
Editorial Board:K. Vermeir, Paris; J. R. Maia Neto, Belo Horizonte;
M. J. B. Allen, Los Angeles; J. -R. Armogathe, Paris; S. Clucas, London;
P. Harrison, Oxford; J. Henry, Edinburgh; M. Mulsow, Erfurt;
G. Paganini, Vercelli; J. Popkin, Lexington; J. Robertson, Cambridge;
G. A. J. Rogers, Keele; J. F. Sebastian, Bilbao;
A. Thomson, Paris; Th. Verbeek, Utrecht
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5640
Fabrizio Baldassarri • Andreas Blank
Editors
Vegetative Powers
The Roots of Life in Ancient, Medieval
and Early Modern Natural Philosophy
Editors
Fabrizio Baldassarri Andreas Blank
Institute for Research in the Humanities Institute of Philosophy, Universitätsstr
University of Bucharest Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt
Bucharest, Romania Klagenfurt, Austria
ISSN 0066-6610 ISSN 2215-0307 (electronic)
International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées
ISBN 978-3-030-69708-2 ISBN 978-3-030-69709-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69709-9
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v
Acknowledgments
This volume is the result of a combination of different projects and the suggestions
of many people. Fabrizio Baldassarri came up with a first idea in Israel in 2016,
organized a panel at the annual meeting of RSA 2017 in Chicago and a symposium
at the conference of the BSHP 2017 in Sheffield. Andreas Blank joined the project
in 2017, when we started to plan a volume, inviting several contributors to explore
this notion in seventeenth century philosophy, sharing ideas, and later submitting a
proposal happily welcomed by the editors of this series.
In 2018, thanks to the help of professors Gianluigi Baldo, Pierdaniele Giaretta
and Fabio Zampieri, we have received generous funds from the University of Padua
and the Department of Cardiac, Thoracic and Vascular Sciences of the University of
Padua to set up a two-day conference on vegetative powers. For this task, we have
also benefitted from a grant of the Society for the Social History of Medicine
(SSHM) and the support of the Società Italiana di Storia della Scienza (SISS), all of
whom we need to thank heartily. Without all this important help, we would have
been unable to have the workshop, which took place in Padua on September 12–13,
2018.1 On this occasion, the lovely encounters, rich presentations, and productive
discussions led us to the conviction that the discussions over vegetative powers
could not be merely restricted to the seventeenth century, and deserved a bigger
picture. Subsequently, the enterprise of the volume grew unexpectedly—we would
have loved to include more contributions to fill as much gaps as possible, but in the
end, this has not been possible for many reasons.
The volume we have put together profited from the help of professors at the
University of Padua, discussions at seminars, conferences, and the discussions with
colleagues at Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, at ICUB-Humanities in
Bucharest, but also the passion and expertise of all contributors, the experience of
the editors, and the support of a grant of the Romanian National Authority for
Scientific Research and Innovation (CNCS  – UEFISCDI), project number
1 See the website for more information: https://vegetativepowers.wordpress.com/ (last access
15/11/2019).
vii
viii Acknowledgments
PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2016-1496, “The Overlooked History of Vegetal Life. From the
Vegetative Soul to Metabolism in Early Modern Philosophy and Biomedicine”. We
would especially thank Guido Giglioni, Hiro Hirai, Sarah Hutton, Christoph Lüthy,
Ohad Nachtomy, Carla Rita Palmerino, and Theo Verbeek, with whom we discussed
the subject matter which comprises this volume at different stages.
Finally, a special thank goes to Ilaria Carrino, whose patience and lovely support
have been a fundamental root of life for Fabrizio Baldassarri.
November 2019 Fabrizio Baldassarri
Andreas Blank
Contents
1 Missing a Soul That Endows Bodies with Life:
An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Fabrizio Baldassarri and Andreas Blank
2 Soul, Parts of the Soul, and the Definition
of the Vegetative Capacity in Aristotle’s De anima . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Klaus Corcilius
3 Embodied Intelligent (?) Souls: Plants in Plato’s Timaeus . . . . . . . . . 35
Amber D. Carpenter
4 The Vegetative Soul in Galen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Robert Vinkesteijn
5 Avicenna on Vegetative Faculties and the Life of Plants . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Michael Fatigati
6 Can Plants Desire? Aspects of the Debate
on desiderium naturale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Marilena Panarelli
7 Disclosing the Hidden Life of Plants.
Theories of the Vegetative Soul in Albert the Great’s
De vegetabilibus et plantis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Amalia Cerrito
8 On the Natural Generation of Human Beings:
The Vegetative Power in a Thought Experiment
by Some Masters of Arts (1250-c. 1268) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Paola Bernardini
9 Thomas Aquinas on the Vegetative Soul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Martin Pickavé
ix
x Contents
10 The Vegetative Powers of Human Beings:
Late Medieval Metaphysical Worries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Martin Klein
11 The Jesuit Cultivation of Vegetative Souls:
Leonard Lessius (1554–1623) on a Sober Diet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Cristiano Casalini and Laura Madella
12 Nicolaus Taurellus on Vegetative Powers
and the Question of Substance Monism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Andreas Blank
13 Vegetal Analogy in Early Modern Medicine:
Generation as Plant Cutting in Sennert’s Early
Treatises (1611–1619) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Elisabeth Moreau
14 Vegetative and Sensitive Functions of the Soul
in Descartes’s Meditations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Igor Agostini
15 Failures of Mechanization: Vegetative Powers
and the Early Cartesians, Regius, La Forge, and Schuyl . . . . . . . . . . 255
Fabrizio Baldassarri
16 Marin Cureau de la Chambre on the Vegetative Powers . . . . . . . . . . 277
Bálint Kékedi
17 Re-inventing the Vegetable Soul? More’s Spirit of Nature
and Cudworth’s Plastic Nature Reconsidered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Sarah Hutton
18 Margaret Cavendish and Vegetable Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
Justin Begley
19 Plantanimal Imagination: Life and Perception
in Early Modern Discussions of Vegetative Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
Guido Giglioni
20 “Vegetative Epistemology”: Francis Glisson
on the Self-Referential Nature of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
Dániel Schmal
21 Life in the Dark: Corals, Sponges, and Gravitation
in Late Seventeenth Natural Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
Raphaële Andrault