Justin E. H. Smith

Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz

Justin E. H. Smith and Ohad Nachtomy, Editors

(Under consideration at Springer)

Table of Contents

Justin E. H. Smith and Ohad Nachtomy
Introduction

1. Glenn Hartz (Ohio State University)
“Leibniz’s Animals: Where Mechanism Meets Metaphysics”

2. François Duchesneau (Université de Montréal)
“Leibnizian Hypotheses concerning the Functioning of Machines of Nature”

3. Pauline Phemister (University of Edinburgh)
The Dominating in the Machine”

4. Ohad Nachtomy (Bar-Ilan University)
“Leibniz on Artificial and Natural Machines; or, What it means to
'remain a machine to the least of its parts'”

5. Enrico Pasini (Università di Torino)
“Leibniz on the Organic and the Living”

6. Raphaële Andrault (ENS-LSH, Lyon)
“The Machine Anatomized: A Comparative Approach to Steno, Malpighi, and
Leibniz”

7. Andreas Blank (Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel)
“Sennert, Boyle, and Leibniz on Composite Substances and Subordinate Forms”

8. Michel Fichant (Université de Paris-IV, Sorbonne)
“Monadology 62-77: Outline of a Research Programme”

9. Antonio Nunziante (Università di Padova)
“Continuity or Discontinuity? Some Remarks on Leibniz's Concepts of
‘substantia vivens’ and ‘Organism’”

10. Jeanne Roland (Université de Paris-X, Nanterre)
“The Organism, or the Machine of Nature: Some Remarks on the Status of Organism in the Substantial Composition.”

11. Anne-Lise Rey (Université de Lille)
“Action, Perception, and Organisation”

12. Justin Smith (Concordia University)
“A Role for Physiology in the Development of Leibniz’s Mature Metaphysics?”

A Role for Physiology in the Development of Leibniz's Mature Metaphysics?

(Submitted for publication in Smith and Nachtomy (Eds.), Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz, under consideration at Springer)

In the little known text entitled "De novis scribendis Medicinae elementis," conclusively dated by lexical and watermark evidence to the very beginning of the 1680s, Leibniz hopes to account for 'life' (that is, perception and motion), in terms of the 'economy' of the animal body alone. Decades later, in contrast, he will decouple the faculty of perception --in view of which a substance may be said to be living-- from the body, and will root it in the simple immaterial substance. In his later writings, life is just perception, and perception is a non-bodily, spiritual faculty. What early physiological texts such as the "De novis scribendis" (or the "Machina animalis" of 1677, or the "Corpus hominis" of 1680-82) strongly suggest is that Leibniz's mature metaphysical elaboration of just how perception, and the complementary notion of appetite, work in the non-bodily monad seems to have first been worked out in the course of explaining the perception and appetite of animal bodies in straightforwardly physiological or 'animal-economical' terms.

Paragraphs 4-7 of the text (see below) constitute its philosophical core.  Here he says that perception is the primary function of the human body; and the "procuratio" of perception, which I've translated as "ordering", is the secondary function.  Here, in sharp contrast with the later writings, perception is dependent on the organs of sense; and the ordering of perceptions is dependent on the motion of the body.  The greater facilitation of perceptions is the greatest end for an animal or human, and is experienced as an agreeable perception.

In this text, the organs of generation are included among the organs of motion, as generation itself is the procuring of a most agreeable perception through motion. The organs of nutrition, which humans and animals have in common with plants, must already be functioning in order for motion, and then sense, to arise. While Leibniz distinguishes these from the organs of motion, he also describes both the organs of motion and of nutrition as facilitating conditions for the procuring of perceptions (and thus as requisites for the achievement of the greatest human end), indeed describing nutrition as the greatest facilitator of perceptions, insofar as the particles of the body are continually in flux, and without nutrition neither the organs of motion nor of sense could continue to cohere for very long.

In early, physiological texts such as this one or the "Machina animalis," Leibniz believes in the possibility of 'perceiving machines', and that perception is a faculty of the organs of sense, which rely on the organs of motion for the procuring of more perceptions, which in turn rely on the organs of nutrition for their initial formation and for their enduring existence.  Later, Leibniz would attribute everything but perceiving to the ordinary functioning of the machine, and would take this faculty to be the one thing that an animal does that cannot be explained mechanically.  In Leibniz's most mature work on physiology, as one would expect from the philosophical texts of the same period, the perception that is identified with life is no longer seen as a bodily process at all, and the body's motion is something Leibniz now hopes to derive, as he writes to Stahl in 1709-10, from the body's "vegetative structure alone."  Vegetation or nutrition, in turn, neither gives rise to motion and perception, nor is it any longer something that need be explained in terms of the inherence of a soul-like substance, which is to say in terms of perception.

I will accordingly argue in this paper that one of the great innovations of the mature philosophy, an innovation which enables the mature theory of monads to take shape, is the separation of perception from the organs of sense, and the separation of appetite or procuratio from the organs of motion.  The mature analysis of these faculties, though, seems unmistakably to be rooted in Leibniz's early physiological interests, and only subsequently transferred out of the domain of physiology, all the while retaining its original structure. It will thus be argued that this is a case in which Leibniz works out a general account of what's going on fairly early on, but then eventually changes his idea as to what sort of entity this is to be an account of.

Letter to A. C. Gackenholtz, Doctor of Medicine. On Botanical Method.

(Dutens II ii 169-174. For the original Latin text, please go here.)

I. On the optimal method of classifying plants. II. On the optimal method of classifying in general. III. On the method of classifying of recent Botanists. IV. On the uses of plants. V. On a different method of classifying plants. VI. On Joachim Jungius’s method. VII.  On comparisons on plants made not only on the basis of their flowers. VIII. IX. X. On various important criteria in distinguishing plants. XI. On promoting the advancement of medicine, and on Ramazzini and Hoffmann’s achievements in this. 

23 April, 1701

I.I have well received your letters, which testify to a knowledge and an experience that are not vulgar, as well as to the affection you show for me.  I wanted moreover to respond from where I am, first of all in order to thank you, and second of all in order to explain my thoughts on certain points at somewhat greater length.  Clearly,from your arguments, you fully agree with me that we should not be obliged to classify plants from their flowers alone; you show, by the example that I mention of the roots, that they are capable of a great variety: and to these differentia can be added the juices of certain roots that you mention; and [of this sort] it is noteworthy what they say, that the genus of camphor is obtained from the root of the cinnamon tree. Certainly, I do not disapprove of the ingenious diligence of eminent men in botany, who have developed a method of classifying plants from their flowers; however, I wanted it to be considered that from the singular foundation of a division the matter is not acquitted, nor is the recess [?] of the botanical doctrine sufficiently explained by this one method. 

The Death of Nature?

Science, Tradition, and Development in Indigenous Cultures

In a series of important essays, Marshall Sahlins has brought together a number of important questions for our understanding of the relationship between indigenous cosmologies, cultural change, and development. Sahlin's argument is that every culture is a global culture, and incorporates new goods into its global cosmology. I would like to argue here that this incorporation functions not just at the level of goods, but also at the level of 'the commerce of light'.  That is, in our study of indigenous cosmology, just as in our study of indigenous incoporation of imported goods, we must be careful not to insist on imagining the indigenous people in some pristine pre-contact state; we must instead think of indigenous science, even where it incorporates elements of Western science, as nonetheless 'traditional'.  The general tendency however has been to acknowledge the technological adaptability of indigenous cultures -- e.g., the ability to replace bows with rifles without thereby transforming the cosmological understanding of hunting -- while at the same time seeing the knowledge systems underlying such activities as hunting as being perfectly pristine, unchanged by contact.

I would like to focus on the question of indigenous theories of reciprocity in contrast with the Western mechanical model of nature.  What I hope to show is that Sahlins's approach to the cosmologies of capitalism needs to be extended to the comparison of cosmologies in general, that is, that any contrast between, say, 'the' Cree world-view and Western science needs to be made in the light of the long history of structural complimentarity between the two.  What we find on this approach is that the differences between the two are not nearly so great as they've been made out to be: both turn out to be adaptive.  'The' Western world-view is an adaptation to particular political and social exigencies that emerged in the 17th century, while 'the' Cree world-view is in turn an effort to absorb into a preexisting cultural schema the subsequent global impact of the world-view that had emerged in response to local European developments in the 17th century. 

The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics

Brad Inwood (Ed.)
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 
ISBN 052177005x (hardback), 0521779855 (paperback).
438 pages.
$70.00 (hardback), $27.99 (paperback).

As with most of the volumes in this series, the new Cambridge Companion to Stoic philosophy is a fine and comprehensive collection of essays on the most important aspects of the movement by the leading scholars in the field.  It should, at a minimum, be noted on the reading list of any upper-division undergraduate or graduate course concerned with post-Aristotelian ancient philosophy. 

This volume does a better job than many others in the series, moreover, of avoiding an anachronistic imposition of our own era’s conception of how to carve philosophy up into its various subdisciplines.  Much effort is made, indeed, to impart a conception not of how some reconstructed version of the Stoics conceived, e.g., ‘philosophy of mind’, but of how they conceived philosophy itself, and of the ways in which this is both continuous and discontinuous with today’s taxonomy of topics. 

Genealogy or Convergence?

Leibniz and the Spectre of Pagan Rationality

(Published in Leibniz: What Kind of Rationalist? Ed. Marcelo Dascal. Springer Verlag, 2008).

In his early years, Leibniz was influenced by the tradition of prisca theologia, a vestige of Renaissance humanism according to which all wisdom must flow from the same source— namely, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, who eventually passed it on to the Greek philosophers.  Because the events of the Gospels were prefigured or intimated by way of typologies in the Old Testament, moreover, it was often thought that the Hebrew prophets were able to share in the evangelion of the New Testament, and in this way Judaism was effectively elided with Christianity, at least in comparison with straightforwadly infidel faiths.  As an apologetic project, this tradition effectively baptized any would-be pagan or infidel one might wish to admire or emulate by positing a hidden connection to revealed truth.

In his mature period Leibniz would look at this tradition with a great deal of skepticism.  For him, if all knowledge is one, and texts from different traditions share in the same truth, this is not because they have the same historical source, but because God gave all men the same ability to rationally comprehend the order of nature and so to know Him through his works.  As Daniel Cook has rightly noted, Leibniz “believed that the superiority of Christianity over other religions was not based on revelation, but on its proximity to natural, rational religion.”  Even if Leibniz believes, as he writes in the Nouveaux essais, that “[w]ith regard to ancient writings . . . we need to understand Holy Scriptures above all things,”  he anticipates that the day will come when "the Romans, Greeks, Hebrews and Arabs have been used up,” and at this point “the Chinese will come to the fore with their ancient texts.”   Scripture, then, is a valuable, but not exclusive, source of ancient wisdom.

Note on Gout and 'the Vapors'

LH III 5, 56. To see the original French text, please go here. To see the original manuscript, please go here.

25 January 1676

Having come one morning to the home of Mons. the Abbey de Gravel, to go with him to St. Germain, he told me that he had just done a surgical operation on himself, against gout, by way of precaution.  I asked him what it was.  He said that his brother had learned in Germany that when one begins to be seized by gout, or to detect it, one must make incisions or scarifications at every new moon, as close to the true time of the new moon as possible, on the pad of the toe above where one begins to feel or to detect the affliction.  His brother began to have two cases; some time ago he made use of [the operation]; the affliction has not returned.  He has already felt there on occasion gout pains much more violent still than those his brother described.  He made use of the same remedy, and the affliction has not returned since.  There is nothing more reasonable than this.  For it is the lowest and the final part of the body, where the heaviest and most viscous and tartarous humours accumulate little by little, and finally harden, or at least swell up that part.  This is why one must give them air [vent]; this serves to move the blood from there, and to give them air [de l’air].  After the incision a ventouse must be applied.  The style of ventouses used by the Germans, with their little points, is much more comfortable; as for me, I remember hearing the same thing in Germany as a certain remedy against gout, even when it has just been detected.

Note on Gout and 'the Vapors'

LH III 5, 56. To see the original manuscript, please go here.

25 janvier, 1676

Estant venu <un matin> chez Mons. l'Abbé de Gravel, pour aller avec luy à S. Germain, il me dit qu'il venoit de faire une operation de chirurgie sur luy même, contre la goutte, par precaution.  Je luy demanda ce que c'estoit.  Il me dit que son frere avoit appris en Allemagne, que lorsqu'on commence d'estre attaqué de la goutte, ou qu'on l'apprehende, il faut toutes les nouvelles lunes, le plus près du veritable temps de la nouvelle [lune], qu'on peut[,] faire des incisions ou scarifications sur le pouce du pied ou on commence a ressentir ou apprehender le mal, au dessus.  Son frere commenca a en avoir deux acces icy, il y a quelques temps; il s'en servit; le mal ne revient plus.  Luy y a deja ressenti quelques fois des douleurs de goutte bien plus violents encor que son frere la dessus.  il s'est servi de [c]e même remede, et le mal n'est plus revenu depuis.  Il n'y a rien de si raisonnable.  Car c'est la plus basse, et la derniere partie du corps, ou les humeurs les plus grossiers et les plus gluants ou Tartareux se rendent peu à peu, et enfin s'en durcissent; ou enflent au moins la partie.  C'est pourquoy il faut leur donner vent; cela sert à y remuer le sang, et à luy donner de l'air.  Il faut apres l'incision appliquer la ventouse.  La mode <des ventouses> des Allemands, avec les petites pointes qu'ils donnent, est bien plus commode; pour moy[,] je me souviens d'avoir entendu la même chose en Allemagne, comme un remede asseuré contre la goutte, quand elle seroit même confirmée. 

De Methodo botanica

Epistola G. G. Leibnitii ad A. C. Gackenholtzium, Medicinae Doctorem

(Transcribed from Dutens 1768 II ii, 169-74.  For my translation of this text, please go here.)

23 April. 1701.

I. De optima ratione plantas digerendi.  II. De optima dividendi methodo generatim.  III. De dividendi methodo recentiorum Botanicorum.  IV. De usu plantarum.  V. De diversa plantas dividendi methodo.  VI. De methodo Joachimi Jungii.  VII. De plantarum comparationibus non ex floribus tantum instituendis.  VIII. IX. X. De diversis plantas discriminandi capitibus.  XI. De re medica in melius provehenda, atque Ramazzini & Hoffmanni in eam meritis. 

I. Litteras tuas, doctrinae experientiaeque non vulgaris & adfectus erga me proni testes, recte accepi.  Volui autem e vestigio respondere, tum ut gratias tibi agerem, tum ut in in nonnullis mentem meam uberius explicarem.  Pulchre tu quidem & ex rerum argumentis mihi adstipularis, dum unis floribus in digerendis plantis nos non debere adstringi, radicum a me nominatarum exemplo, ostendis, quae magnae sunt varietatis capaces: possentque iis, quas memoras, differentiis addi ipsi radicum quarundam succi; quo in genere memorabile est, quod aiunt, camphorae genus haberi ex radice arboris cinamomi.  Equidem non improbo Virorum in re Botanica egregiorum ingeniosam diligentiam, qui commodiorem, quam hactenus, plantas digerendi rationem ex floribus invenere; interim considerari volui, ex uno divisionis fundamento rem non absolvi, nec doctrinae Botanicae recessus hac una methodo satis explicari. 

La philosophie médicale de Descartes

Vincent Aucante. xxi + 472 pp. illus., figs., tables, app., bibl., index. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006. € 31.

(Originally published in Isis.)

It would be difficult to imagine a more thorough treatment of Descartes’s medical philosophy than the one Vincent Aucante has undertaken, and we may be certain this study will remain authoritative for some time to come.  It is to be hoped that an English translation will be published soon, as this book is of tremendous interest not only to specialists in the history of medicine, but to anyone interested in understanding Descartes in terms of what he himself sought to understand.  Medicine was important to Descartes: Aucante places at 20% the quantity of pages in the oeuvre dedicated to it, and Descartes himself writes in a 1645 letter that “the preservation of health has always been the principle aim of my studies” (AT IV 329).  In view of Descartes’s own stated priorities, the received view of the 19th-century neorationalists who saw Descartes’s medical thought as a failure, and as best left out of editions, urgently needs to be revised.  Aucante’s book makes this case powerfully. 

This study surpasses Annie Bitbol-Hespériès’s Le principe de vie chez Descartes of 1990 in depth and breadth, though the subject here is not, to be precise, life.  Life, for Descartes, is sustained by the ‘feu sans lumière’ (AT VI 46, 7-8) of the beating heart, and thus by a sort of ferment.  To this extent animals, lacking the souls Aristotle had thought all living things have in common, are perfectly alive.  Descartes’s ‘biology’ is thus entirely contained within his physics, while the ultimate horizon of his medicine is metaphysical, to the extent that medicine is concerned specifically with ensouled bodies, that is, human bodies, with their health and well-being, and with the psychophysical causes of disorders.  In Jean-Luc Marion’s terms in his short preface (these in turn borrowed from Husserl), medicine is concerned not so much with the body [le corps, der Körper] as with the flesh [la chair, das Leib, or, in Descartes’s own telling phrase, mon corps].

Spontaneous Generation and the Problem of Species Reproduction before and after Descartes

In this article I shall focus on some of the important conceptual problems posed by the purported phenomenon of spontaneous generation, showing how these problems are connected with the theoretical question of the origins and ontology of biological species, above all with the problem of their boundaries.  I will argue that the important conceptual distinction in the history of generation theory was never that between sexually and spontaneously generated animals, but rather that between animals generated through the cyclical reproduction of form, on the one hand, and through what Descartes would call ‘minor causes’ on the other.  For a hylomorphist such as Aristotle, all reproduction is formal, whether sexual or ‘spontaneous’; for a mechanist such as Descartes, all reproduction, including sexual reproduction, is mechanical.

Biological Knowledge, Cosmological Context, and the Question of Non-Western Science

(Presented to the James Bay Research Group, McGill University, Spring, 2007)

There is a cluster of questions, of interest to philosophers and anthropologists alike, concerning the relationship of literal to metaphorical discourse, the uniqueness of scientific rationality among ways of conceptualizing the world, and the tension between absolutism and relativism.  Philosophers tend to assume that these problems can be worked out without stepping back from the culture that itself generated them. It seems to me however that if philosophers wish either to critique or to defend and promote scientific rationality, they are going to have to dare to look closely at the sort of practices with which it supposedly contrasts.

One way of stepping back from one’s own culture and getting a broader view is that of the historian.  Historians of ancient philosophy and science --unlike, for the most part, historians of the early modern period-- have in general been more ready to acknowledge that the past is, as is said, a foreign country, and consequently have been ready to look at the origins of Western thought in context, with an eye to just how much what has been called ‘the Greek miracle’ in fact overlapped with other, pre-Greek, supposedly merely mythological systems of thought in other eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures.  For G. E. R. Lloyd, to the extent that there was a ‘Greek miracle’ at all, this was a matter of a growing concern to distinguish between the different criteria for truth in different registers of speech, with an ultimate preference for the most literal register.  Thus Aristotle criticizes earlier philosophers, most often Empedocles, for saying things that may be, as he puts it, “acceptable for the purposes of poetry,” but not strictly speaking true.   One important component of the modern scientific revolution was already in place in ancient Greece, then: the distinction between literal and metaphorical claims, and the valorization of the former at the expense of the latter.  The former have the final say, whereas the latter are at best of use in certain local, circumscribed contexts.

Biologische Arten und das Problem der Ursprünge des Menschen in der frühneuzeitlichen Naturphilosophie

Die Embryologie und die Ontologie erscheinen uns heute als sehr entfernte Verwandte. Jedoch kann die ontologische Frage, was ein Tier ist, wie sie am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts gestellt wurde, nur im Kontext der frühneuzeitlichen Metaphysik der Fortpflanzung verstanden werden. Mit anderen Worten, was es bedeutet von einer bestimmten Art sterblicher, körperlicher Substanzen (d.h., ein Automat für die Cartesianer) zu sein, hat in fundamentaler Weise damit zu tun, wie diese sterbliche, körperliche Substanz entsteht. So war insbesondere die geschlechtliche Fortpflanzung kein kontingentes Detail in der Historie eines Tieres, sondern in der Tat dasjenige, was es zu einem Tier machte und dasjenige, was es diesem Tier ermöglichte seine spezifische Position in der Ordnung der Natur einzunehmen. Es wurde angenommen, dass ein Tier zu sein, bedeutet, einer bestimmten Art anzugehören, was wiederum bedeutet, von Eltern derselben Arten abzustammen. Dies unterscheidet Tiere von anderen natürlichen Arten wie z.B. den Elementen und, wie wir sehen werden, Pflanzen. Obwohl das traditionelle Verständnis davon, wie genau die Abstammung von Vorfahren von statten geht im 17. Jahrhundert in einer tiefen Krise steckte, blieb es dennoch für die Naturphilosophen ein Kernanliegen, die ontologische Differenz zwischen Tieren und anderen natürlichen Arten sowie zwischen Menschen und Tieren zu erklären, ungeachtet dessen, ob sie Mechanisten, Vitalisten oder Synkretisten waren. Das Buch, das ich zur Zeit schreibe, ist eine Studie der Art und Weise, auf die neue Entwicklungen in der Embryologie diese Erklärungen beeinflussten.

The Organ of Taste (1686-9)

(LH III 5, 219. To view original Latin text, please click on "continue reading" below. To see the original manuscript, please go here.)

I believe that the organ of taste does more for the salubriousness and usefulness of food than is commonly perceived.  I observe withal that there is a great difference when I consume anything after another, provided that there is no pause. Yet nevertheless for the stomach there is less difference.  Wherefore in the Acts of the English,  a traveling Physician, I know not who,  returning if I am not mistaken from Jamaica, observes that there was a great difference whether water or vinous spirit  was drunk first, or both were drunk mixed together. I clearly observe in myself, indeed, that if I follow the consumption of something sweet such as milk by something acid, or vice versa, indeed if I should so much as bring it to my mouth, a certain unpleasant and almost harmful perturbation follows; if nevertheless I should interpose something in between, such as something that is salty and greasy, I sense nothing unpleasant or uncomfortable.  And yet in the stomach clearly everything is mixed together.  Accordingly the organ of taste decides to make use of what things are fitting for us and equally for it, and in this way it is offended by things that are less suitable in combination, and propagates this displeasure by a certain hidden ratio to the stomach itself, and to the intestines and to the entire constitution of our bodies. In this way it is evident that through the offices of the nerves and of the glands, we are maintained by the pleasing and vigorous things brought up to the mouth, indeed by odors taken in through the nostrils and by swallowing.

PHIL 339A: Special Topics in Aesthetics

Winter, 2007

PHIL 339A
Special Topics in Aesthetics:
PHILOSOPHY OF FILM
W 18:00-20:15, H 625
(plus viewing sessions immediately following the class)

Course Description:

This course will serve as a general introduction to the history and to the core questions of philosophical aesthetics, with especial attention to the way these questions come up in relation to one particular art form: film.  We will also consider the problems of philosophical aesthetics that pertain uniquely to this art form.  We will do this both by reading and discussing theoretical texts on film, as well as by watching lots of movies.    We will be considering film both with respect to the ontology of the artwork as well as to the phenomenology of the viewing experience.  What we will not be doing in this course is philosophy through film.  That is, we will not be using films to inspire us to ask philosophical questions not related to film, such as, ‘How do I know I don’t, like, live in the Matrix?’ or ‘Did Sophie make the right choice?’ Such questions might come up in passing, but it will be our foremost purpose to approach aesthetics as an autonomous philosophical domain. 

On the Origins of the Nations of Transylvania

(For the original Latin text, please click "continue reading")

[Originally published in G. W. Leibniz, Viri illvstratis Godefridi Gvil. Leibnitii epistolae ad diversos, theologici, ivridici, medici, philosophici, mathematici, historici et philologici argvmenti, e MSC. avetoris, evm annotationibvs svis primvm divvlgavit Christian. Kortholtvs (Lipsiae: svmtv B. C. Breitkoptii, 1734), 5-9.  Republished in an altered form in Gothofredi Guilelmii Leibnitii Opera Omnia. Ed. Louis Dutens. (Geneva, 1768), Tom. IV, Pars II, 206-80.  Translated here from Dutens.] 

14 September, 1697

I am very indebted to you not only for sending me as a gift your very clear notes on Beier’s Compendium of Theology, but also for communicating to me the Origins of the Nations of Transylvania, written by the Lord Valentinus Francus à Frankenstein, evidently an eminent man, which could liberate them [the nations of Transylvania] from their error, whereby they contrive distant origins, either from Charlemagne or indeed from the earlier times of the Dacian Saxons. Certainly, Charlemagne does not appear to have penetrated that far.  Authors relate that certain Saxons were transplanted from there into the regions beyond the Rhine, which Ludovicus Pius brought back, not to mention the very distant colonies, since the Saxons in Charlemagne’s infantry were not sent to fight against the Huns. Indeed the Goths, Gepids, Longobards, and other Germanic peoples settled in Pannonia, not to mention that it seems plausible that before the ancient Dacians --also known as Gets (if we are to believe Strabo and others)-- there was a Gothic or Germanic people there.  But whatever was German in that place, it may be supposed, was long since eradicated by the migrations of peoples, and the author’s demonstration must be affirmed, that the Germans who were residing there as guests were won over with privileges that were given by the Kings of Hungary --who were by now Christians-- and the cities were overfilled by the influx of merchants, workers, and certain military men, as in Prussia and Livonia, nevertheless with this difference, that they entered into those regions by force, whereas they were in truth invited to come to Hungary. 

It would be a good thing if certain charters could be obtained, by which the granting by King Andrei to the Saxon nation of the privilege of immunity could be more comprehensively illustrated than is done in Toppeltinus’s Origins of Transylvania (which I have available to me), p. 16 sq.  In this connection I am pleased that Lord Francus has corrected an error, and with great discrimination substituted ‘called’ for ‘given’. Indeed, the one expression declares them to be new guests; the other represents them as a sort of aboriginal people.  And it is a matter of the honor of the Saxons themselves, that they should not be believed to have been given their freedom in the manner of slaves, but that they be called by the promise of the preservation of the liberty that is instilled in them at birth.  It would have been worthwhile to know whether the monogram was suspended or imparted by the original privilege of the King, and by what means the witnesses to the charter, as is customary, agreed with it [?].  Now Toppeltinus neglects these things which, if we are to be able to obtain the works of [this] lucid man, should add a great deal to his favor. 

Indeed, the charter of King Andrei calls them not ‘Saxons’, but ‘Teutons’, and the well-known Hermannus, from whom we get ‘Hermannstadt’ [i.e., the German name for Sibiu],  is said to have been from Nuremberg, and it is well known besides that very often Germans are all indiscriminately called ‘Saxons’ by the Italians, the French, and other outsiders, after the appellation ‘Franks’ begins to be attributed to the French [Gallis], and the ensign of the rue, adopted no doubt belatedly by the inhabitants of Hermannstadt, appears to confirm the popular appellation and opinion.  Meanwhile I do not wish to deny that the Germans of Transylvania should be specifically referred back to the Saxons, especially if the dialect is known from which it will be more accurately determined whether it is cognate with the dialect of Westphalia or of Lower Saxony.  Thus I should like to have some examples of how the words are pronounced by the common people, as well as an index of provincial vocabularies, which, even if they are German, will nevertheless not be known by all Germans.  In this way indeed we will be better able to judge as concerns the origins and the dialect. 

But I should like to know rather more about the other inhabitants of Transylvania.  The Lord Author distinguishes the Szekers from the Hungarians, but Toppeltinus said that they have the same origins as other Hungarians.  This is something that will best be defined by language, whether indeed they be truly Hungarian, having mixed a great deal with foreigners, or whether they are Sarmatian, or Slavonic (which group I now take, in the same vein, as arising in the broadest sense with the Slavonic language), or whether indeed they come from another Scythian people.  Of the Wallachians, or Vlachs, everyone agrees that their language has much in common with Latin.  I have always suspected that there could remain in certain corners of Dacia some vestiges of the Cumanian language.  Now in the 13th century the Hungarian King received the Cumanians, and gave them a residence, even if afterwards, when the Tartar war erupted, the majority of them were annihiltaed.  Cumania moreover seems to have extended from the Hungarian dominions to the Black Sea. 

While the Lord Author says that in Wallachia and Moldavia the Ruthenian language is mixed with Latin, and in Bulgaria and in Mysia it is mixed with the Illyrian language, I should like to know what is meant by “Illyrian.”  This language is itself vulgarly called “Slavonic,” but I think another language than this is had in mind, as it has not previously been sufficiently distinguished from Ruthenian, while both are of the Slavonic genus. 

It is also most worthwhile to study the Gypsies in the same manner, who reside in some parts of Dacia.  The celebrated Wagenseil, in the recent appendix of the Nuremberg memorabilia, ingeniously and convincingly derived the Gypsies from Jews who had been expelled from all over Germany, and traced their language back to Hebrew.  But the author says that everywhere they make use of the same language, though through the use of dialects this language appears to be able to be divided into several more distinct ways of speaking.  Toppeltinus would have them observing the religion of the Greeks, and conducting a certain ceremony of baptism; clearly, there is nothing here that is suggestive of Judaism. 

Finally, it appears remarkable to me that, as Toppeltinus relates, the Transylvanian Saxons call themselves, at least, the Detschen, while however calling other Germans Mueser.  They themselves hold that Detschen comes from “Dacian,” while Mueser comes from the French “Monsieur.” But it may be that Detschen is nothing other than Deutschen.  What about Mueser, though?  I believe it is very far removed from the French Monsieur.  Now since Toppeltinus says: We understand the German language poorly; we are however scarcely distinguished from them, and adds that many French, Italian, Spanish, English, Turkish, and Tartar words have been noted in their speech, it would be most desirable to have a little dictionary of the language of the common people of German Transylvania, and to request that other examples as well be added, which would be genuine, rather than made to fit our own way of speaking. 

Since in the privilege of King Andrei mention is made of the Vlachs and of the Bissenians, and it is clear who the Vlachs are, the question arises as to what nation the Bissenians belong, whose forest was conferred by the King to the Teutons.   

Divine Machines: Rationale and Contents

Biology, though it did not yet exist as a discreet domain of scientific inquiry,  was at the very heart of many of the most important debates in 17th-century philosophy.  Nowhere does the importance of biology for this period come through more clearly than in the work of G. W. Leibniz.

Leibniz’s frequent claims to the effect that all of nature is to be conceived after the model of animals, it will be argued in this book, are not intended as loose or poetic comparisons.  Leibniz means what he says. In the the Monadology of 1714, for example, a text intended as a summary of his basic philosophical principles for a wide audience, Leibniz writes:

"Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes.  But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquids is also some such garden or pond… Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe" (§§ 67-69).

Leibniz not only means what he says here, but indeed he is compelled to hold that everything in the world is made up out of biological entities as a direct consequence of some of his most central philosophical principles, principles that do not make sense unless claims of this sort are taken seriously. 

What we find when we look closely at Leibniz’s natural-scientific writings, particularly the unpublished natural-scientific writings of the forthcoming Series VIII of the Akademie Edition, is that the interpretation of Leibniz as in large part a natural philosopher focused upon the living world --an interpretation common among many of his followers in 18th-century French natural science-- is in large part correct.  Leibniz’s fundamental ontology did in fact consist exclusively in living creatures; his fundamental physics was a physics of organic bodies endowed with living force; his deep theological convictions about the immortality of substances were corroborated and --I will argue-- in part shaped by the empirical life sciences of his day.  For Leibniz, every body is an organic body, no substance is without its own organic body, and no organically embodied substance is ever generated entirely de novo. In other words, the world consists in infinitely many eternally existing biological entities.  There is nothing else.  There is nothing, that is, that falls entirely outside of the domain of biology.  This is to say that, for Leibniz, everything is organically embodied. 

But what exactly is organically embodied?  The answer is that there are infinitely many immaterial monads, all of which are constantly accompanied by some organic body or other.  Yet insofar as the bodies result from the monads themselves, as Leibniz often asserts, he would appear to believe that it is only the immaterial substances, and not their bodies, that belong to the fundamental ontology of the world.  “There is nothing in the world but simple substances,” he writes, “and in them perception and appetite.”  Of course, he writes this in the Monadology, the very same text whose fish-pond image enchanted 18th-century naturalists, and as with the fish-pond image, we can find numerous other more recently published, and even not-yet published texts to corroborate it.  This interpretive problem --the existence of two sets of texts, and sometimes two sets of passages within the same text, coming from the same author that seem to commit him to two different and conflicting fundamental ontologies-- is known as the ‘corporeal substance problem’, and has produced by now a great deal of not only secondary, but even some tertiary literature. 

Divine Machines: Chapter Outlines

CHAPTER 1. THE ARISTOTELIAN LEGACY: ANIMALS AS FORM-MATTER COMPOUNDS; REPRODUCTION AS TRANSMISSION OF FORM

It will be a central argument of this book that, overall, the place occupied by biology in Leibniz’s philosophy is closer to the one it enjoys in Aristotle than in Descartes: it is a field of application par excellence of general philosophical principles, rather than an obstacle to the viability of these principles.  In this and the following chapter, we will focus on the contrast between Aristotle and Descartes, and then move on to position Leibniz in relation to them.

In this chapter, we will gain a thorough understanding of Aristotle’s approach to both general and developmental physiology, and will then move on to his account of sexual reproduction.  We will conclude with an account of the central Aristotelian doctrine according to which ‘like begets like,’ that is, of his generation-based theory of species membership.  Throughout, we will be concerned to position Aristotle’s account of animal motion, development, and generation in a way that will highlight its sharp differences with Descartes’s later account, in order ultimately to show the brilliant manner in which Leibniz will synthesize elements from both of these systems of biology.   

In the first section, on organic structure and function in Aristotle, we will consider Aristotle’s account of the ontological priority of functions over the bodily organs through which these functions are executed, taking as our example his analysis of vision and the eye.  This analysis will provide us with a first instance of the general principle that also underlies Aristotle’s account of sexual generation: that of the priority of form over matter.  In Aristotle’s theory of reproduction, the father imposes both a formal and final cause, through the vehicle of the semen, upon the material of the mother’s uterus. This brings about what Jim Lennox has called “formal replication,” in which the father ensures his own eternity in kind, as Aristotle puts it, if not in number. While the product of generation is not an exact copy of the father, it is the closest thing possible to this, and the extent to which it falls short of this mark is traceable in large part to the degrading influence of the mother.  The menstrual blood possesses in potentia all of the possible qualities of a human being that may be actualized once the blood is acted upon by the semen; but still the menses are not pure seed, “for it lacks one thing only, the source of the soul” (GA II 3 737a). This soul source is at the same time the source of (to speak anachronistically) the blueprint or program that determines how the fetus will develop.  The semen determines the end toward which the fetus will develop, since, in Aristotle’s view, in natural beings such as animals the formal and final causes are one and the same.  For Aristotle, a woman is a degradation of man,  “a male deformed.”  A female is generated when the movements introduced by the male’s semen prove to be weak, and are consequently overcome by the movements of the menstrual blood.  Monstrosities occur, finally, when the movements of both of these are very weak and lack even the efficacy to render the menstrual blood into a distinct particular human, leaving it instead at the level of development common to all animals in general (GA IV 3). If no degradation were to occur, the male would reproduce itself perfectly.  This can never happen, since particular primary substances are not eternal. The particular mechanism by which perfect self-reproduction is hindered is the mutual interaction of the movements of the semen and the menstrual blood at conception.  Thus there is no need to explain where defective fetuses come from.  They are merely privations of form, which manifest themselves as recapitulations, not of earlier evolutionary stages, as some modern theories would later hold, but of a more general category --animal-- to which particular members of any animal species belong.

Aristotle’s account of species membership, then, is intimately linked with his account of sexual generation: to be a member of a certain biological kind is just to have one’s form originally transmitted by one’s male progenitor, ‘for like begets like’. As we will see, this is a very convenient principle to uphold within the context of a hylomorphic metaphysics, but its truth, and even its comprehensibility, become severely problematic with the rise of mechanistic biology.

The Human Body is a Sort of Machine (1680-82)

LH III 1, 2. For the original Latin text, please go here.  To view the original manuscript, please go here.)

THE DESCRIPTION OF A MACHINE IS BEST APPROACHED THROUGH ITS FINAL CAUSE.

The human body, like the body of any animal, is a sort of machine.  Any machine moreover is best defined in terms of its final cause, so that in the description of the parts it is therefore apparent in what way  each of them is coordinated with the others for the intended use. Thus one who is to describe a given clock will say that it is a Machine made to display equal divisions of time, and therefore the function of a clock-hand lies in its uniform motion for some period of time; and, further, he will say that for this motion a motive force is required, which arises from weight or from elastrum;  further, he will say that an impediment is required in order that the force should not be exercised suddenly (which may arise equally in the wheels as in the obstacle that moves back and forth); to such an extent, finally, he will say that a rule of uniformity is required, which is obtained in the first place from the elastic coil, or from the oscillations of some body, either heavy or elastic, or even from a certain period we have described elsewhere. 

THE AIM OF NATURE IN THE ANIMALS IT PRODUCES CAN BE CONSIDERED TO BE THAT OF CONSERVING, AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, AND WITH RESPECT TO ITS PARTICULAR SPECIES, A MACHINE OF PERPETUAL MOTION IN THE UNIVERSE

Though it be difficult moreover to determine the ends of things and the purpose of nature before the event, after something has been carried through to the end it is possible to determine what nature wished to do from what it did do.  Wherefore if we wish to bring together into one whole everything that nature aimed at insofar as is permitted to the admirable artifice of Animals, and to establish a sufficiently simple concept, which contains all the rest by means of consequences, we should say: the Bodies of Animals are Machines of perpetual motion, or, to put it more clearly, they are machines comparable to a certain fixed and singular species of perpetual organic motion that is always maintained in the world.  Thus for as long as there are spiders there will be weaving machines, for as long as there are bees there will be honey-producing machines, and for as long as there are squirrels there will be dancing machines.   Thus the aim of nature when it produces an animal is a perpetual-motion machine, as against the aim of the mechanists, who are seeking after perpetual motion by a useless labor, in order to obtain something like an animal that it is not necessary to feed.  On the other hand, this our definition of the animal may appear to resemble an enigma.  Indeed, if it be asked, what is a machine of perpetual motion?, not everyone will at once guess that the Animal is what is had in mind.  It is nevertheless not for this reason to be rejected; often indeed this very thing happens in these definitions --which are not nominal but real or causal-- whenever they are, evidently, sought from causes not immediately forthcoming.  It is thus apparent in what way, moreover, from this singular notion the entire composition of the animal follows straightaway (it is on the other hand granted that plants conserve their species while nevertheless lacking any notable motion, and machines do not have a species).

Corpus hominis et uniuscujusque animalis Machina est quædam (1680-82)

(For my English translation of this text, please go here. To see the original manuscript, please go here.)

LH III, 1, 2, 1-2; 1 folded folio page, 4 columns.  Previously published in a critical edition in Pasini 1996, and in Mahrenholz 1987 (text only, plus German translation. Date:1680-83 (watermark conclusively dated by Potsdam catalog to 1680; some terminology suggests a later date of composition). Published in a critical edition, with translation, by me, in the Leibniz Review (2007).

1. MACHINAE DESCRIPTIO COMMODISSIMÈ À FINALI CAUSA INCHOATUR.

Corpus hominis, quemadmodum et uniuscujusque animalis, Machina est quædam.  Machina autem omnis à finali causa optime definitur, ut in explicatione partium deinde appareat quomodo ad usum destinatum singulæ coordinentur.  Ita horologium quoddam descripturus dicet Machinam esse ad aequales temporis divisiones significandas factam, itaque opus esse indicis cujusdam aequabili motu <aliquandiutino, et ad hunc requiri porro> tum vim motricem qualis est à pondere vel elastro; tum moram ne vis subitò decurrat (quod rotis pariter et obstaculo reciprocante consequi licet;) tam denique regulam æquabilitatis, quæ imprimis à choclea elastri, aut ab oscillationibus cujusdam corporis sive gravis sive elastici, aut <etiam à> periodo quadam alibi à nobis explicata obtinetur. 

2. SCOPUS NATURAE IN PRODUCENDIS ANIMALIBUS VIDETUR, MACHINA MOTUS PERPETUI CERTA SUI SPECIE IN UNIVERSO QUOAD LICET CONSERVANDI.

Quanquam autem de finibus rerum consilioque naturae ante eventum judicare difficile sit; post rem peractam tamen de iis quae facere voluit, judicari potest ex illis quae fecit. Quare si totum hoc, quod admirabili Animalium artificio quantum licuit, consecuta est, in unam summam redigere velimus, notionemque satis simplicem constituere, caeteras omnes consequentiis complexam, dicemus: Corpora Animalium esse Machinas perpetui motus, sive ut clariùs dicam ad certam quandam ac singularem motus perpetui organici speciem semper in orbi conservandam comparatas.  <Ita quamdiu erunt araneae erunt machinae textrices quamdiu apes mellificatrices, quamdiu sciuri, saltatrices.  Scopus ergo naturae cum producit animal est machina motus perpetui quemadmodum contra scopus mechanicorum motum perpetuum irrito labore quaerentium est habere quoddam quasi animal quod alere necesse non sit.>  <Haec autem nostra> definitio animalis licet aenigmati similis videatur <si enim quaeratur quae sit Machina motus perpetui non statim qui vis divinabit intelligi Animal; non ideò tamen repudianda est, idem enim> saepe in illis contingit <definitionibus>, quae non sunt nominales sed reales sive causales, quoties nimirum à causis non statim ob viis [one word?] petuntur; quomodo autem ex hac una notione protinus compositio animalis universa derivetur <(nam plantae quidem licet speciem suam conservent motu tamen notabili carent machinaeque speciem non habent) hoc quidem> ita patebit.