Abstract
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 (and in some cases, even their individuality), 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.
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Notes
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See Wilberding 2021.
- 3.
See Wolfe and Esveld 2014.
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- 5.
Mix 2018 gives a general overview of the history of the vegetative soul; Korobili and Lo Presti 2021 focus mainly on development in antiquity. On the Middle Ages, see Paravicini Bagliani 2009; Bakker, de Boer, and Leijenhorst 2012. Pioneering studies on early modern theories of plant generation include Giglioni 1999, 2016; Blank 2009, 2010, 2012. See also Hirai 2011 on the medical side, and Baldassarri 2020 on the relationship between plants and medicine.
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These positions include, just to name a few of them, Pythagorean, Epicurean and Stoic lines; Platonism and Neoplatonism and the vegetative soul; Islamic medicine and natural philosophy; theories of nutrition in Catholic natural philosophers such as the Coimbra Commentators and Francisco Suarez; medical conceptions of vegetative activities in Marcello Malpighi, Girolamo Sbaraglia, and Georg Wolfgang Wedel; theories of immaterial substantial forms in Julius Caesar Scaliger and Daniel Sennert’s accounts of vital powers; the anatomical studies of Michael Servetus and Realdus Columbus; the Marburg hermetic school, in the work of early modern German physicians Heinrich Petrænd and Johannes Hartmann; the transformations of vegetative powers in natural philosophers like Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, and John Locke; the scholastic Cartesianism of Juan Caramuel; the role of vegetation in the vitalist conceptions of matter developed by thinkers such as Joan Baptista van Helmont and Francis Glisson; and the methodological role of vital spirit in the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton—which is to say that there is enough material at least for yet another hefty volume.
- 8.
- 9.
See Polansky 2007.
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- 11.
On the reception of pseudo-Aristotle De plantis, see Giglioni and Ferrini, 2020.
- 12.
See Michael 1992.
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- 14.
- 15.
On the hidden life of plants in the early modern period, see Des Chene 2000.
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Baldassarri, F., Blank, A. (2021). Missing a Soul That Endows Bodies with Life: An Introduction. In: Baldassarri, F., Blank, A. (eds) Vegetative Powers. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 234. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69709-9_1
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