More than five decades have passed since the publication of two milestones in the history of science, i.e. Jacques Roger's Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle (1963) and Walter Pagel's Harvey's Biological Ideas (1966), yet one cannot say that early modern life sciences have received the same attention as physical sciences since. This collection of papers (originating from a workshop held at the Philosophy Department of Princeton University) aims at shedding new light on the relationship between early modern philosophy and life sciences. The book, focusing on philosophical issues rather than on experimental practice, is divided into four thematically arranged sections (the nature of living beings, the structure of living beings, the generation of living beings, the order of living beings) and covers a time span ranging from the second half of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Renaissance Aristotelianism is discussed in two papers, notably Peter Distelzweig's on Girolamo Fabrici's work on muscles and Andreas Blank's on Juan Gallego de la Serna's ideas of generation. Peter Distelzweig highlights the role played by Aristotle's zoological works and by the pseudo-Aristotelian Quaestiones mechanicae (first Latin trans. 1517) in shaping Fabrici's ‘teleomechanics’ of muscle. Blank's paper expounds the rejection by Juan Gallego de la Serna (physician to Philip III and to Philip IV) of the animation of seed – a view held by the influential Wittenberg physician Daniel Sennert. Aristotelian philosophy crops up in Anne-Lise Rey's paper on Glisson too. Rey maintains that the Thomistic theory of knowledge and anatomical investigations (rather than Jean Baptiste van Helmont's archeus) were the sources of Francis Glisson's view of the organs’ activity.

Several papers address problems concerning mechanical philosophy and life sciences. Descartes's ideal of explaining all natural phenomena, including generation and the animal economy, in terms of matter and motion faced opposition from many and diverse quarters. Generation was a key subject in testing the explanatory power of mechanical philosophy, and a tension between mechanism and teleology was to be found in a number of early modern works on the life sciences. Such a tension was somehow resolved by Kant, as we learn from Thomas Teufel's paper on Kant's teleology as contained in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Generation is the subject of Karen Detlefsen's paper on Nicolas Malebranche, stressing that the theory of pre-existence combined mechanism and teleology. A mechanical philosopher, Malebranche rejected Descartes's theory of epigenesis as he believed that mechanism could not account for the existence of living beings. Karen Detlefsen elucidates Leibniz's version of pre-existence, showing that it is a doctrine about generation as well as about death. As Ohad Nachtomy points out (‘Infinity and life: the role of infinity in Leibniz's theory of living beings’), for Leibniz a living being is infinite both in being ever active and in its structure. As Leibniz wrote in the Monadology (1720), ‘each organized body of a living being is a kind of divine machine or natural machine’. Leibniz's living machines display the mark of an infinite Creator; they did not begin and cannot be destroyed. Some degree of life is preserved in a natural machine.

Lea Schweitz moves from Leibniz's criticism of the Cartesian view of living bodies as simple artificial machines, maintaining that Leibniz held a ‘sacramental view of nature’ (a key principle of Lutheran theology), namely that the finite is capable of the infinite. For Leibniz, humans are natural machines, i.e. complex machines, containing an infinite number of organic parts, and human life is both a natural machine (as distinct from an artificial one) and a divine mirror. François Duchesneau's chapter focuses on the Leibniz–Stahl controversy, taking into account Friedrich Hoffmann's De natura morborum (1699), holding a view of organism that Leibniz approved, namely that organic bodies differ from inanimate ones by a higher degree of structural composition. Leibniz made use of Hoffman's medical dissertation in his attack on Stahl's assumption, notably that the living body is the instrument of the soul, which generates and regulates corporeal structures and motions. Leibniz rejected Stahl's opposition between organism and mechanism, claiming that the former is a ‘machina hydraulico-pneumatico-pyria’ receiving impetus from chemical reactions – which in fact Stahl wanted to separate from physiology. Unfortunately, Duchesneau's exposition takes little account of recent studies in the history of chemistry, which have underscored the importance of chemistry in early modern physiology. Catherine Abou-Nemeh's paper explores the Réaumur crayfish regeneration experiment and its impact on Nicolas Hartsoeker, who ruled out the strict mechanical view of nature he had adopted in his early career to introduce an intelligent spiritual agent operating in living bodies. Abou-Nemeh points out that Hartsoeker's anti-Cartesian stance was stimulated by his contacts with the Cambridge Platonists, notably with Ralph Cudworth – though the latter's Plastic Nature was different from Hartsoeker's spiritual principle, since it was God's unconscious instrument acting in nature. The Cambridge Platonist appears again in Raphaële Andrault's chapter investigating Ralph Cudworth's and Nehemiah Grew's refutation of materialism and their use of life as a polemical tool. The role of theological motives in entomology is the topic of Brian Ogilvie's informative paper, focusing on the study of metamorphosis as central to insects’ classification.

Charles Wolfe deals with the materialists’ side in a fascinating paper devoted to Diderot's entry ‘Spinosiste’ for the Encyclopédie. For Diderot, modern Spinozists are those who maintain that ‘matter is sensitive; they demonstrate this by the development of the egg’. Diderot established a link between Spinozism and epigenesis in Le rêve de D'Alembert (written 1769, published 1830) too, where he claimed that ‘it is with this egg that we can overturn all schools of theology’. Wolfe contends that Diderot's interest in epigenesis was by no means restricted to its biological meaning; he pursued a metaphysical project, i.e. a vital materialism of active, self-transforming matter.

The volume under review provides a valuable survey of key concepts in the history of early modern life sciences. It merits the attention of anyone interested in the philosophical aspects of early modern science.