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.
Full Product Details
Author: Lucas John Mix
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Imprint: Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Edition: Softcover Reprint of the Original 1st 2018 ed.
Dimensions:
Width: 14.80cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.454kg
ISBN: 9783030071394
ISBN 10: 3030071391
Pages: 273
Publication Date: 25 January 2019
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
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)
“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)
Author Information
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.
