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).

Introduction
Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E. H. Smith, editors

Part One. The Nature of Living Beings
1. Infinity and Life: The Role of Infinity in Leibniz's Theory of Living Beings
Ohad Nachtomy

2. What Is Life? A Comparative Study of Ralph Cudworth and Nehemiah Grew
Raphaële Andrault

3. The Impossibility of a "Newton of the Blade of Grass" in Kant's Teleology
Thomas Teufel

Part Two. The Structure of Living Beings
4. Fabricius' Galeno-Aristotelian Teleomechanics of Muscle
Peter Distelzweig

5. Metaphysical Problems in Francis Glisson's Theory of Irritability
Anne-Lise Rey

6. The Organism-Mechanism Relationship: An Issue in the Leibniz-Stahl Controversy
François Duchesneau

Part Three. The Generation of Living Beings
7. Material Causes and Incomplete Entities in Gallego de la Serna's Theory of Animal Generation
Andreas Blank

8. Biology and Theology in Malebranche's Theory of Organic Generation
Karen Detlefsen

9. Réaumur's Crayfish Experiment in Hartsoeker's Système: Regeneration and the Limits of Mechanism
Catherine Abou-Nemeh

10. Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot's Biological Project
Charles T. Wolfe

Part Four. The Order of the Living World
11. On the Continuity of Nature and the Uniqueness of Human Life in G. W. Leibniz
Lea F. Schweitz

12. Orders of Insects: Insect Species and Metamorphosis between Renaissance and Enlightenment
Brian W. Ogilvie