The Vegetative Soul demonstrates that one significant resource for the postmodern critique of subjectivity can be found in German Idealism and Romanticism, specifically in the philosophy of nature. Miller demonstrates that the perception of German Idealism and Romanticism as the culmination of the philosophy of the subject overlooks the nineteenth-century critique of subjectivity with reference to the natural world. This book's contribution is its articulation of a plant-like subjectivity. The vision of the human being as plant combats the now familiar conception of the modern subject as atomistic, autonomous, and characterized primarily by its separability and freedom from nature. Reading Kant, Goethe, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Nietzsche, Miller juxtaposes two strands of nineteenth-century German thought, comparing the more familiar "animal" understanding of individuation and subjectivity to an alternative "plantlike" one that emphasizes interdependence, vulnerability, and metamorphosis. While providing the necessary historical context, the book also addresses a question that has been very important for recent feminist theory, especially French feminism, namely, the question of the possible configuration of a feminine subject. The idea of the "vegetative" subject takes the traditional alignment of the feminine with nature and the earth and subverts and transforms it into a positive possibility. Although the roots of this alternative conception of subjectivity can be found in Kant's third Critique and its legacy in nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie, the work of Luce Irigaray brings it to fruition.

The volume analyzes the natural philosophical accounts and debates concerning the vegetative powers, namely nutrition, growth, and reproduction. While principally focusing on the early modern approaches to the lower functions of the soul, readers will discover the roots of these approaches back to the Ancient times, as the volume highlights the role of three strands that help shape the study of life in the Medieval and early modern natural philosophies. From late antiquity to the early modern period, the vegetative soul and its cognate concepts have played a substantial role in specifying life, living functions, and living bodies, sometimes blurring the line between living and non-living nature, and, at other moments, resulting in a strong restriction of life to a mechanical system of operations and powers. Unearthing the history of the vegetative soul as a shrub of interconnected concepts, the 24 contributions of the volume fill a crucial gap in scholarship, ultimately outlining the importance of vegetal processes of incessant proliferation, generation, and organic growth as the roots of life in natural philosophical interpretations.

Rethinks the soul in plant-like terms rather than animal, drawing from nineteenth-century philosophy of nature.

This volume is a detailed study of the concept of the nutritive capacity of the soul and its actual manifestation in living bodies (plants, animals, humans) in Aristotle and Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s innovative analysis of the nutritive faculty has laid the intellectual foundation for the increasing appreciation of nutrition as a prerequisite for the maintenance of life and health that can be observed in the history of Greek thought. According to Aristotle, apart from nutrition, the nutritive part of the soul is also responsible for or interacts with many other bodily functions or mechanisms, such as digestion, growth, reproduction, sleep, and the innate heat. After Aristotle, these concepts were used and further developed by a great number of Peripatetic philosophers, commentators on Aristotle and Arabic thinkers until early modern times. This volume is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth survey of the development of this rather philosophical concept from Aristotle to early modern thinkers. It is of key interest to scholars working on classical, medieval and early modern psycho-physiological accounts of living things, historians and philosophers of science, biologists with interests in the history of science, and, generally, students of the history of philosophy and science.

In Animal Rationality: Later Medieval Theories 1250-1350, Anselm Oelze offers the first comprehensive and systematic exploration of theories of animal rationality in the later Middle Ages. Traditionally, it was held that medieval thinkers ascribed rationality to humans while denying it to nonhuman animals. As Oelze shows, this narrative fails to capture the depth and diversity of the medieval debate. Although many thinkers, from Albert the Great to John Buridan, did indeed hold that nonhuman animals lack rational faculties, some granted them the ability to engage in certain rational processes such as judging, reasoning, or employing prudence. There is thus a whole spectrum of positions to be discovered, many of which show interesting parallels with contemporary theories of animal rationality.

What are humans? What makes us who we are? Many think that we are just complicated machines, or animals that are different from machines only by being conscious. In Are We Bodies or Souls? Richard Swinburne comes to the defence of the soul and presents new philosophical arguments that are supported by modern neuroscience. When scientific advances enable neuroscientists to transplant a part of brain into a new body, he reasons, no matter how much we can find out about their brain activity or conscious experiences we will never know whether the resulting person is the same as before or somebody entirely new. Swinburne thus argues that we are immaterial souls sustained in existence by our brains. Sensations, thoughts, and intentions are conscious events in our souls that cause events in our brains. While scientists might discover some of the laws of nature that determine conscious events and brain events, each person's soul is an individual thing and this is what ultimately makes us who we are.

In our daily lives, we are surrounded by all sorts of things – such as trees, cars, persons, or madeleines – and perception allows us access to them. But what does ‘to perceive’ actually mean? What is it that we perceive? How do we perceive? Do we perceive the same way animals do? Does reason play a role in perception? Such questions occur naturally today. But was it the same in the past, centuries ago? The collected volume tackles this issue by turning to the Latin philosophy of the 13th and 14th centuries. Did medieval thinkers raise the same, or similar, questions as we do with respect to perception? What answers did they provide? What arguments did they make for raising the questions they did, and for the answers they gave to them? The philosophers taken into consideration are, among others, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, William of Auvergne, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, John Pecham, Richard Rufus, Peter Olivi, Robert Kilwardby, John Buridan, and Jean of Jandun. Contributors are Elena Băltuță, Daniel De Haan, Martin Klein, Andrew LaZella, Lukáš Lička, Mattia Mantovani, André Martin, Dominik Perler, Paolo Rubini, José Filipe Silva, Juhana Toivanen, and Rega Wood.