Justin E. H. Smith

Review of Divine Machines in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Published: April 17, 2012

Justin E. H. Smith, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, Princeton University Press, 2011, 392pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780691141787.

Reviewed by Jeffrey K. McDonough, Harvard University

It is widely recognized that Leibniz's philosophical thought is deeply influenced by the mathematics, physics and philosophical theology of his era. Justin E. H. Smith's Divine Machines argues that many of Leibniz's most central philosophical doctrines are similarly bound up with the life sciences of his time, where the "life sciences" are understood very broadly to include fields as diverse as alchemy, medicine, taxonomy, and paleontology. Smith's groundbreaking exploration represents an important contribution to our understanding of both Leibniz's philosophy and the study of life in the early modern era. It is to be recommended to historians, philosophers, and historians of philosophy alike. Below I highlight four central topics in Smith's book, raising some reservations along the way.

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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. 

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].

Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light

Franklin Perkins
Cambridge University Press, 2004

(Originally published in Philosophy in Review.)

It would be no exaggeration to say that increased contact with the world beyond Europe’s borders, picking up rapid speed after 1492, was the single most important factor in Europe’s transition into modernity.  By the 17th century, European thinkers were consumed by questions about the inhabitants of the rest of the world, and by the way in which their customs, technologies and beliefs compared with their own. 

This possibility of comparison with independently emerging, radically different cultures is responsible for many of the genuinely new developments in early modern philosophy.  Yet most scholars remain content to treat this period’s philosophy as though it emerged in a vacuum.  When non-European cultures play an indispensable theoretical role --such as that of the American savage in social-contract theory-- they are duly acknowledged.  But the curiosity that European thinkers had about the attainments of other cultures in science, mathematics, and technology goes largely unacknowledged.  One does not have to be all that enthusiastic about multiculturalism to find this neglect unfortunate.  For to consider Europe in relation to the rest of the world in the 17th century, whether one is interested in philosophy or in the spice trade, is not necessarily to engage in cross-cultural comparative study.  Such consideration is also a fundamental part of understanding early modern Europe itself.   

As Franklin Perkins notes in his fine new book, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light, the lack of acknowledgement among scholars has something to do with the self-presentation of at least some early modern thinkers themselves.  Descartes, for example, does not dwell on the Persians or the Chinese (though he does mention them more often than the index to the English edition of his writings would lead us to believe).  The world outside Europe, Descartes may have thought, could only provide complicating and messy evidence against the universality of his claims, and, more damagingly, against the a priori method of producing claims about what sort of entity a human being is.  This, as Perkins notes, is why far-away cannibals were, if a potential embarrassment to Descartes, celebrated by skeptics such as Montaigne. 

Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher

Sarah Hutton
Cambridge University Press, 2004
271 pp. ISBN 0 521 83547 x

(Originally published in Philosophy in Review.)

Henry More no doubt was looking to make a compliment when he told his pupil Anne Conway, ‘you write like a man’.  A compliment it was, at least to the extent that it was no easy thing for a woman to penetrate into the intellectual elite of the 17th century, to absorb all its concerns and master its style, and finally to contribute lastingly to its legacy.  Sarah Hutton’s excellent new study of Conway’s life and thought does a fine job of showing how she managed to do just this, both by lucidly explaining what Conway’s theoretical contributions were, as well as how these were forged in the course of her intriguing life.

Conway could of course not receive a proper education, barred as she was from university study.  Her half-brother John Finch had been a student of the great Cambridge Platonist Henry More, and it was through this connection that Conway had the good fortune to begin a correspondence with More that would in time make her an unofficial member of the Cambridge circle.  Conway shares with More a distaste for the Cartesian disjunction between ensouledness and materiality.  Her preferred alternative is a vitalistic monism, according to which the entire material world is coursing with a vital principle, and indeed according to which materiality is not something radically different from spirituality, but rather is simply a mode of substances that are at bottom incorporeal.  For her, matter is congealed or sluggish spirit; it constitutes a state of substance in the same way that ice amounts to a state of water.  Substances can move up and down along the continuum of degrees of spirituality, and rarefaction is more than just a chemical analogy for moral improvement.  To become better is literally to move from a more sluggish and bodily state to a rarer or more spiritual one. 

Leibniz and the Natural World

Activity, Passivity and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz’s Philosophy

Pauline Phemister

The New Synthese Historical Library, vol. 58
Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. ISBN: 1-4020-3400-8
293 pages

(Originally published in The Leibniz Review)

Matter as the principle that both limits and particularizes an otherwise merely homogeneous abstraction is a conception very familiar in many different schools of ancient thought.  Leibniz was well aware of this.  He himself mentions the Patristic authors in this connection in his On What is Independent of Sense and Matter: “I am inclined,” he writes, “to think that all finite immaterial substances (even genii or angels according to the opinion of the old Church Fathers) are joined to organs and accompany matter” (GP VI 507 / AG 192 / L 552 / PP 80).  Thus for the Church Father Origen, God made corporeal nature in order to facilitate the permutations of qualities in things, and it is necessary for corporeal nature to endure only “as long as souls who need a corporeal garment last” (214).    

    Nobody would think to argue that Origen denied the existence of a ‘real’ bodily world.  Instead, readers see his account of body for what it is: an account of body.  Mutatis mutandis, one might expect that readers of Leibniz would similarly appreciate his account of the bodily world for what it is: a fascinating and complex alternative to physical atomism that takes force as its most basic notion, and seeks, not without difficulty, to harmonize the world of forces, motions and impacts with the world of perceiving and striving subjects, indeed to show that these are one and the same world.  Yet this pan-European syncretist has all too often been cast in the role of a German Idealist avant la lettre, a role in which much of his talent goes unnoticed.  Over the past few decades, a number of Anglophone scholars have been working to correct this miscasting.  Pauline Phemister’s excellent new book is an important contribution to this ongoing project.