Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Trade Review“Life Concepts, Mix (Harvard) provides a comprehensive treatise of the soul, emphasizing nutritive or vegetable souls, from the concept's beginnings with Homer and pre-Socratic philosophers to significant development of the disparate views of Plato and Aristotle. … As a philosophical and theological work, Mix provides a meaningful and engaging account of a deep, enduring subject.” (Z. B. Johnson, Choice, Vol. 56 (8), April, 2019)
Table of Contents1. Vegetable Souls?
2. Greek Life – Psyche and Early Life-Concepts
3. Strangely Moved – Appetitive Souls in Plato
4. Three Causes in One – Biological Explanation in Aristotle
5. Life in Action – Nutritive Souls in Aristotle
6. Plants versus Animals in Hellenistic Thought
7. The Breath of Life – Nephesh in Hebrew Scriptures
8. Life after Life – Spiritual Life in Christianity
9. Invisible Seeds – Life-Concepts in Augustine
10. Aristotle Returns – A Second Medieval Synthesis
11. Life Divided – Vegetable Life in Aquinas
12. Mechanism Displaces the Soul
13. Divided Hopes – Physics versus Metaphysics
14. Ghosts in the Machine – Vitalism
15. The Same and Different – Early Theories of Evolution
16. Vegetable Significance – Evolution by Natural Selection
17. “Vegetables” versus Modern Plants
18. Counting Lives- Regulators and Replicators
19. What Can Be Revived (and What Cannot)
