The Search for the Soul of Plants (review of Fabrizio Baldassarri and Andreas Blank, eds., Vegetative Powers. The Roots of Life in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Natural Philosophy, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives, volume 234, Cham: Springer, 2021)
Sabin Dumitru COROIAN
This volume is constructed around the activity of several research projects and contains the talks held at different international conferences. For this reason, the volume coordinated by Bladassarri and Blank proposes a rather eclectic approach, built on various perspectives on how the concepts of vegetative soul and vegetative powers were developed in the medieval and early modern thought. Despite the ongoing debate around the meaning of the Aristotelian concept of the vegetative soul, there is a common agreement that is a set of capacities (powers) that enable the living body to specify its nature. The principle of individuation in Aristotelian terms is given by the actualization (by the action of the formal cause) of something existing in potential (the material cause). Vegetative soul regulates processes such as generation, nutrition, growth, contributing thus to the uniqueness of each living body. Intersecting different areas of investigation, the study of the vegetative soul represented an important subject of study for medieval and early modern natural philosophers following (and sometimes trying to refute) Aristotle, for theologians interested in the materiality vs. immateriality of the soul, or for alchemists preoccupied with agents triggering transmutative processes in nature.