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Explaining the generation of any living thing involves answering any number of difficult questions. Historically, two very prominent questions have been how to account for the life or vitality of the new living thing, and how to account for the specific features that make the new living thing into the ...

In the past decade, several Descartes scholars have gone on record claiming that, for biological purposes, Descartes likely accepts the practical scientific necessity of the existence of “physical natures,” even while his official substance-mode ontology and his characterization of matter in terms of extension do not license the existence of physical natures. In this article, I elaborate on the historical context of Descartes’s biology, the “practical scientific necessity” just mentioned, and argue, contrary to other interpretations, that Descartes does offer a philosophical justification for the existence of physical natures, albeit not by appeal to the categories of substance and mode, or matter as such, but by appeal to our “nature” as a union between mind and body.

Howard Adelmann’s majestic five volume Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology was published nearly 50 years ago. A mix of paraphrase and translation, as well as extended commentary, Adelmann described Malpighi as “one of the cardinal figures in the history of biology. As we look back over the three centuries that separate him from us, he may, for all his towering stature, at first glance seem a distant figure. And yet he and his work are not so remote after all” (Vol. 1, xxii). Much has changed in the history of biology since Adelmann’s groundbreaking work, and among the many lessons to be taken from Domenico Bertoloni-Meli’s carefully researched, persuasive and, at times, beautifully rendered book is that the life sciences in the early modern period must be studied with an eye to the history of science, medicine and philosophy—i.e., calling Malpighi simply a “biologist” is very liable to mislead. This point, though only implicit in Meli’s choice to study Malpighi “in relation to the medico-anatomical world of his time” (4), indicates the interdisciplinary character of Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy.

The origin of the term “hylomorphism” is shrouded in mystery in spite of its being used to distinguish Aristotle and the Peripatetics from competing traditions in science and philosophy. This paper details the history of “hylomorphism” from its nineteenth-century German origins in the correspondence between Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Jacobi to its first appearance in English in 1860, to its eventual use to refer to the Peripatetic commitment to matter-form thinking. Utilizing this history, the paper specifies the obstacles the term has created for scholars and concludes with a suggestion to use “hylomorphisms” when exactness is required.

In this paper I address Descartes’ use of analogy in physics. First, I introduce Descartes’ hypothetical reasoning, distinguishing between analogy and hypothesis. Second, I examine in detail Descartes’ use of analogy to both discover causes and add plausibility to his hypotheses—even though not always explicitly stated, Descartes’ practice assumes a unified view of the subject matter of physics as the extension of bodies in terms of their size, shape and the motion of their parts. Third, I present Descartes’ unique “philosophy of analogy”, where the absence of analogy serves as a criterion for falsifying proposed explanations in physics. I conclude by defending Descartes’ philosophy of analogy by appeal to the value scientists assign to simplicity in their explanations.

Highlighting early modern medicine's program of explanation and intervention, I claim that there are two distinctive features of the physician's naturalism. These are, first, an explicit recognition that each patient had her own individual and highly particularized nature and, second, a self-conscious use of normative descriptions when characterizing a patient's nature as healthy (ordered) or unhealthy (disordered). I go on to maintain that in spite of the well documented Cartesian rejection of Aristotelian natures in favor of laws of nature, Descartes and his most important medical disciple accepted both features of the physician's naturalism where human medicine was concerned. Thus, in this article I critically engage with standard portraits of Cartesianism and naturalism by integrating the histories of science, medicine and philosophy, but especially medicine and philosophy.

Descartes is well known as a mathematician and natural philosopher. However, none of Descartes's biographers has described the invitation he received in 1633 to fill a chair in theoretical medicine at the University of Bologna, or the fact that he was already sufficiently known and respected for his medical knowledge that the invitation came four years before his first publication. In this note I authenticate and contextualize this event, which I refer to as the ‘Bologna affair’. I transcribe the letter written to the Bolognese Senate announcing efforts to bring Descartes to the university and explain the events that led to Descartes receiving the invitation. While many questions about the Bologna affair cannot be answered because of the paucity of the historical record, I conclude that the event invites us to consider again the larger historiographical issue of how best to integrate the history of medicine with the history of science and philosophy during the early modern period.

In responding to Libertus Fromondus’ criticism of Les meteores as “excessively gross and mechanical [mechanica],” Descartes made the now-famous concession that in natural philosophy he utilized “shapes, sizes and motions, as happens in mechanics [Mechanica],” and even went so far as to characterize his work as a “mechanical philosophy [mechanica philosophia].” On reflection it seems likely that Fromondus and Descartes were speaking past one another in their exchange, as Alan Gabbey has persuasively argued, with each meaning something rather different by mechanica. Still, one wonders why, notwithstanding Descartes’ concession, the medical claims from Discourse Five did not prompt Fromondus’ “mechanical” accusation. In Discourse Five we are told, for example, that (1) “laws of mechanics are … the same as those of nature,” (2) we should regard the human body—a natural object—“as a machine” and (3) the heart beat follows “just as necessarily as the motion of a clock from the force, position and shape of its counterweights and wheels.” Although Discourse Five does not draw equally on these three claims, their presence surely warrants calling Discourse Five “mechanical.” It may even be the most mechanical of all the parts of the Discours and its companion essays.

Preface List of Contributors List of illustrations Three Biased Reminders about Hylomorphism in Early Modern Science and Philosophy, Gideon Manning Body, Soul and Anatomy in Late Aristotelian Psychology, Michael Edwards Living Atoms, Hylomorphism and Spontaneous Generation in Daniel Sennert, Hiro Hirai Elective Affinity Before Geoffroy: Daniel Sennert's Atomistic Explanation of Vinous and Acetous Fermentation, William R. Newman Substantial Forms as Causes: From Suarez to Descartes, Tad Schmaltz Mechanizing the Sensitive Soul, Gary Hatfield Descartes and His Critics on Matter and Form, Atomism and Individuation, Roger Ariew Spirit is a Stomach: The Iatrochemical Roots of Leibniz's Theory of Corporeal Substance, Justin Smith Leibnizian Hylomorphism, Daniel Garber Index

This chapter argues that Descartes does not unambiguously embrace; rather he blocks the chain of inferences by hesitating about psychology’s independence from physics. Descartes does this in a way that parallels a common Peripatetic hesitance on display in the commentary tradition on Aristotle’s De anima. The chapter defends the following claim: that it was De la Forge, and not Descartes, who first made the mind un-natural. To substantiate this claim, the chapter shows that the mind was considered part of the natural world by Aristotle and a number of Renaissance De anima commentators. The chapter argues that one must resist efforts to portray him as rejecting the natural scientific study of the mind. It identifies the presence of two types of arguments in Descartes and traces these arguments into Louis de la Forge’s work. Finally, the chapter explains why De la Forge puts psychology in the hands of the metaphysician. Keywords:Aristotle; De anima ; Descartes; Louis de la Forge; psychology

"Hylomorphism" is, literally, "matter-form-ism" and an appropriate label for Aristotle's account of matter-form thinking. This chapter first explores the origin of "hylomorphism" in the early nineteenth-century, further showing that the term did not come to refer to the Peripatetic doctrines of matter and form before the final two decades of the century. Next, it surveys a wide range of seventeenth-century authors, all of whom utilized these terms or their cognates toward various purposes, and the plurality of meanings for "matter" and "form" will quickly become apparent. Finally, the author argues that even as certain aspects of matter and form were discarded, the terms remained central in accounting for change in the natural world. He compares Aristotle's position in Physics I with the seventeenth-century Peripatetic Scipion Dupleix and the Cartesian Jacque Rohault. The chapter contributes to changing the entrenched conceptions about matter and form in Early Modern science and philosophy. Keywords:Aristotle; Dupleix; Early Modern science; hylomorphism; matter-form; philosophy; Physics I; Rohault

In the final paragraph of the Discours de la Methode published in 1637, Descartes "resolved to devote the rest of [his] life to nothing other than trying to acquire some knowledge of nature from which we may derive rules in medicine."' In 1645, with a retrospective air, Descartes wrote to the Marquess of Newcastle, "the preservation of health has always been the principal end of my studies"; and the following year he wrote to Hector-Pierre Chanut that his practical interests resulted in his having "spent much more time" in medical pursuits than most other subjects.2 Descartes' sincerity on these points seems guaranteed by a number of facts surrounding his life. For one, in 1633 the University of Bologna sought him out to fill a vacant chair in theoretical medi cine. Even more impressive, without ever having produced a proper medical text, Descartes generated a school of medical thought promul gated by Dutchmen like Regius, de Raey, Schuyl, and Sylvius. Yet, in spite of Descartes' own declarations and his conspicuous influence on