Overview
- Presents a diachronic treatment of life-concepts running from Homer to the present
- Traces the history of vegetable souls
- Defends a Darwinian concept of vegetable souls as useful for modern biology
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Table of contents (20 chapters)
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Front Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book traces the history of life-concepts, with a focus on the vegetable souls of Aristotle, investigating how they were interpreted and eventually replaced by evolutionary biology. Philosophers have long struggled with the relationship between physics, physiology, and psychology, asking questions of organization, purpose, and agency. For two millennia, the vegetable soul, nutrition, and reproduction were commonly used to understand basic life and connect it to “higher” animal and vegetable life. Cartesian dualism and mechanism destroyed this bridge and left biology without an organizing principle until Darwin. Modern biology parallels Aristotelian vegetable life-concepts, but remains incompatible with the animal, rational, subjective, and spiritual life-concepts that developed through the centuries. Recent discoveries call for a second look at Aristotle’s ideas – though not their medieval descendants. Life remains an active, chemical process whose cause, identity, and purpose is self-perpetuation.
Reviews
“Since ancient times, philosophers have attempted to understand what animated matter and distinguished the living from the non-living. For the Greeks, this principle of life was psyche, for the Romans anima, and in the Germanic languages soul. In his deeply learned book, Lucas Mix traces the more than two-thousand-year history of life concepts in philosophy, theology, and the emerging science ofbiology. In this history, concepts of mortal and material souls rub shoulders with immortal and immaterial souls, and a vegetable soul shares the human body with a rational soul. In the process, we are lead to question who we are and our connections with animal and vegetable life.” (David Haig, Harvard University, USA)
“This an amazing tour de force, almost everything one would want to know about Western thought, from before Aristotle up to now as it bears on the still puzzling question: what is life? Much of philosophy and theology has been a debate about the meaning of “vegetable souls” (life) and modern biology, reductionist and mechanistic as it takes itself to be, still lacks a coherent answer. Mix’s book will be the definitive source from now on.” (W. Ford Doolittle, Dalhousie University, Canada)Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Lucas John Mix is an associate of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, USA. He works at the intersection of biology, history, philosophy, and theology and has worked with NASA Astrobiology programs for the last 20 years on understanding the meaning and extent of life.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin
Book Subtitle: On Vegetable Souls
Authors: Lucas John Mix
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96047-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-96046-3Published: 14 September 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07139-4Published: 25 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-96047-0Published: 29 August 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 273
Topics: Philosophy of Nature, Evolutionary Biology, Religion and Society