This article draws attention to several different practices of observation, manipulation, and experimentation with the surface of natural things. Beginning from the observation that the surfaces of natural things invited observation, manipulation, measurement, and re-configuration, with the promise to unveil the knowledge of depths, this article explores how practical knowledge about the surface of things and bodies led to new conceptions of nature and matter as composed of layers, corpuscles, and artificially reproducible solid parts in early modern Europe. This article (...) explores issues of knowledge production, and studies the ways in which material knowledge-making practices contributed to the habits of observing and experimenting with the surface of nature. By discussing three groups of cases in which nature was known by its surface and practice was mixed with theoretical appraisals of matter—surgeons, butchers, and food-cutters; gardeners and agronomists; and physicians—this article argues that “cognitive models” focusing on the description as well as the manipulation of natural surfaces informed both artisanal practices and natural philosophy, bridging the “high” and the “low” in the age of the “scientific revolution.”. (shrink)

This paper elucidates the philosophical origins of the conception of plants as machines and analyses the contemporary technical and ethical consequences of that thinking. First, we explain the historical relationship between the explicit animal machine thesis of Descartes and the implicit plant machine thesis of today. Our hypothesis is that, although it is rarely discussed, the plant machine thesis remains influential. We define the philosophical criteria for both a moderate and radical interpretation of the thesis. Then, assessing the compatibility of (...) current botanical knowledge with both interpretations, we find that neither withstands scrutiny. We trace how biological and agricultural sciences have historically relied upon thinking of plants as machines and how they continue to do so today through rhetoric centred on breeding, biotechnology, and production. We discuss some of the most important legal and ethical consequences of obscuring the vitality of plants. Finally, we explore less reductive and destructive ways of thinking about, and using, plants. (shrink)

In René Descartes' works there are four major references to living bodies as objects of his natural philosophy. The first is contained in the Fifth part of the Discours de la Méthode, published in June 1637, where Descartes provides a mechanical explanation of the heartbeat and other living functions of the body. The second is in a bio-medical note collected in the Excerpta anatomica dated November 1637, where he discusses nutrition and growth. The third is the famous claim on the (...) absence of a section on living bodies in the Principia philosophiae, published in 1644. The fourth is in La Description du corps humain, Descartes' late physiology likely dated 1647-1648. In this article, by exploring these passages and contextualizing his physiological observations of animals and plants, I reassemble Descartes' science of life: his dismissal of soul, his mechanical framework, his interpretation of bodily self-maintenance and growth, his understanding of living bodies as integrated and organic systems, and the role of a power such as the immutatio and forces such as the impetus. (shrink)