Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz (The New Synthese Historical Library Book 67)

Annotation In recent decades, there has been much scholarly controversy as to the basic ontological commitments of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). The old picture of his thought as strictly idealistic, or committed to the ultimate reduction of bodies to the activity of mind, has come under attack, but Leibniz's precise conceptualization of bodies, and the role they play in his system as a whole, is still the subject of much controversy. One thing that has become clear is that in order to understand the nature of body in Leibniz, and the role body plays in his philosophy, it is crucial to pay attention to the related concepts of organism and of corporeal substance, the former being Leibniz's account of the structure of living bodies (which turn out, for him, to be the only sort of bodies there are), and the latter being an inheritance from the Aristotelian hylomorphic tradition which Leibniz appropriates for his own ends. This volume brings together papers from many of the leading scholars of Leibniz's thought, all of which deal with the cluster of questions surrounding Leibniz's philosophy of body Front Matter....Pages i-xv Introduction....Pages 1-9 Leibniz Versus Stahl on the Way Machines of Nature Operate....Pages 11-28 Leibniz’s Animals: Where Teleology Meets Mechanism....Pages 29-37 Monads and Machines....Pages 39-60 Leibniz on Artificial and Natural Machines: Or What It Means to Remain a Machine to the Least of Its Parts....Pages 61-80 The Organic Versus the Living in the Light of Leibniz’s Aristotelianisms....Pages 81-94 The Machine Analogy in Medicine: A Comparative Approach to Leibniz and His Contemporaries....Pages 95-114 Sennert and Leibniz on Animate Atoms....Pages 115-130 Continuity or Discontinuity? Some Remarks on Leibniz’s Concepts of “Substantia Vivens” and “Organism”....Pages 131-143 “The Organism, or the Machine of Nature”: Some Remarks on the Status of Organism in the Substantial Composition....Pages 145-156 Action, Perception, Organisation....Pages 157-173 Perceiving Machines: Leibniz’s Teleological Approach to Perception....Pages 175-186 Back Matter....Pages 187-206