The Mechanical Life of Plants in 17th-Century Natural Philosophy

In early modern time, vegetal bodies fell under the investigations of natural philosophers, who used plants as tools to investigate nature and, even, to propose an alternative interpretation of nature and overturn the Aristotelian ontology. René Descartes’ mechanical philosophy of nature embodies one of these cases, as he considers plants nothing but living machines deprived of soul and constituted of particles of matter. Within this framework, vegetal bodies are such as clocks or automata, i.e., self-maintaining machines. In this talk, I will inspect Descartes’ interpretation of plants: the mechanical description of their internal structure and functioning in terms of particles and motion, the physiological explanation of their virtues and therapeutic uses, and their geometrical representation. In this case, I will also briefly span from what I consider Descartes’ sources, such as Isaac Beeckman, and followers, such as Henricus Regius and Florent Schuyl. I will then compare Descartes’ study of plants with Pierre Gassendi’s atomistic interpretation of vegetal bodies and Thomas Hobbes’ mechanization of vegetation. I will finally show how much these interpretations affected a mechanical study of plants in the second half of the seventeenth century, and especially in Nehemiah Grew, John Ray, and Marcello Malpighi.