This paper aims to spotlight some important, but neglected, aspects of early modern interactions between matter theories and the life sciences. It will trace the ways in which atomistic or corpuscular modes of reasoning were adopted to explain the origin of life. To that end this paper will examine three seventeenth-century natural philosophers:…[Read more]

Sixteenth-century natural philosophers and physicians crafted novel ideas on bodies and their internal powers. Their theories often went far beyond the framework of the traditional Aristotelian perspective, influencing the broader philosophical scene of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although the principal actors in Renaissance…[Read more]

A pregnant woman encounters a wolf in the woods. She is so scared that her strong emotion of fear imprints the wolf’s morphological traces on the fetus in her womb. Another pregnant woman craves strawberries or cherries so intensely that she leaves certain marks or impressions of these fruits on the fetus. The belief that the power of maternal e…[Read more]

In this paper I will address the question of the origin of the soul and the intellect in human and animal generation, as it appeared in medical debates of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. How did this issue affect the traditional boundary firmly established between human beings and animals? How was the passage of Aristotle’s “…[Read more]

In his “Generation of Animals” 2.3, Aristotle suggested that the nature of the heat contained in the seed along with the pneuma corresponds by analogy to the “element of the stars,” which is the celestial substance, aether. A cosmological dimension is thus introduced in the middle of an embryological discourse. The aim of the present article is…[Read more]