Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Introduction

   • Justin E.H. Smith, Ohad Nachtomy

   Pages 1-9

3. Leibniz Versus Stahl on the Way Machines of Nature Operate

   • François Duchesneau

   Pages 11-28

4. Leibniz’s Animals: Where Teleology Meets Mechanism

   • Glenn A. Hartz

   Pages 29-37

5. Monads and Machines

   • Pauline Phemister

   Pages 39-60

6. Leibniz on Artificial and Natural Machines: Or What It Means to Remain a Machine to the Least of Its Parts

   • Ohad Nachtomy

   Pages 61-80

7. The Organic Versus the Living in the Light of Leibniz’s Aristotelianisms

   • Enrico Pasini

   Pages 81-94

8. The Machine Analogy in Medicine: A Comparative Approach to Leibniz and His Contemporaries

   • Raphaële Andrault

   Pages 95-114

9. Sennert and Leibniz on Animate Atoms

   • Andreas Blank

   Pages 115-130

10. Continuity or Discontinuity? Some Remarks on Leibniz’s Concepts of “Substantia Vivens” and “Organism”

    • A. M. Nunziante

    Pages 131-143

11. “The Organism, or the Machine of Nature”: Some Remarks on the Status of Organism in the Substantial Composition

    • Jeanne Roland

    Pages 145-156

12. Action, Perception, Organisation

    • Anne-Lise Rey

    Pages 157-173

13. Perceiving Machines: Leibniz’s Teleological Approach to Perception

    • Evelyn Vargas

    Pages 175-186

14. Back Matter

    Pages 187-206

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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.

• Body
• Corporeal substance
• Leibniz
• Metaphysics
• Organism

From the reviews:

“This probing collection of essays paints a fuller picture of Leibniz’s natural philosophy by exploring various facets of his views on natural machines and organisms. … This book goes a long way towards filling a lacuna in existing Leibniz scholarship.” (Michael Futch, Metascience, October, 2012)

• , Department of Philosophy, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

  Justin E. H. Smith

• Faculty of Humanities, Department of Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

  Ohad Nachtomy

Justin E. H. Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is the author of Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (Princeton University Press, 2010). In 2011 he will be a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Ohad Nachtomy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He is the author of Possibility, Agency, and Individuality in Leibniz's Metaphysics (Springer, 2007).

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