Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin: On Vegetable Souls

by Lucas John Mix

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319960463
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/29/2018
Edition description:	1st ed. 2018
Pages:	273
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

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.

Table of Contents

1. 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).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“While ‘vegetable souls’ might sound like an oxymoron, the notion has had a long and venerable history in philosophy, theology, and science, depending, of course, on what is meant by the phrase. With precision and a passion for inquiry, astrobiologist Lucas Mix sorts it all out historically, philosophically, and, yes, biologically. From the pre-Socratics to Charles Darwin and current trends in evolutionary biology, Mix’s engaging survey invites the reader to ponder anew the ultimate mystery of life’s origin and purpose.” (William P. Brown, Columbia Theological Seminary, USA)

“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)

Editorial Reviews

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)​

From the Publisher