This volume brings together a group of essays that explore early modern theories of composite substances and their relevance to early modern views on the nature of plants and animals (both human and non-human). The metaphysics of composite substances was a unifying topic at the heart of quite diverse issues in early modern ontologies of living beings. For instance, it was applied in explanations of both the complexity and the unity of a living being, in conceptions of the structure of plant and animal seeds, in considerations concerning the nature and mutability of biological species, in exploring the physiological function of imagination in biological reproduction, in characterising the beings and processes responsible for diseases, and in understanding the relation between living beings and divine causation. While pre-modern in inspiration, the metaphysics of composite substances played an intriguing and still not well-enough understood role in the formation of modern philosophy.
Thus, the present volume focuses on thinkers who are paradigmatic as transitional figures-figures who serve to understand the complex process by means of which non-mechanistic medieval conceptions of the structure of living beings were superseded in the second half of the seventeenth century by mechanistic conceptions of the structure of living beings.