Abstract

In this article, I investigate Johann Christoph Sturm’s (1635–1703) mechanist account of plant life. The problem of life is one of the touchstones of any early modern mechanist philosophy. Plant life, in turn, constitutes the most rudimentary form of life. Sturm’s account is functionalist: plants perform the life-function: nutrition, growth, self-preservation, and generation. Sturm makes clear that what his Aristotelian predecessors called the ‘vegetative soul’ must be reduced to (1) the possession of an organic body (i.e., a higher-order structure of matter and its modifications) and (2) the extrinsic kinetic heat of the sun. In contrast to mechanists like Descartes, Sturm accepts teleology. He deals with the origin and transfer of motion on occasionalist grounds. For Sturm, all processes associated with the life of plants can be accounted for mechanically—all but the ultimate origin of the first plant’s seed, for which Sturm relies on the theory of pre-existence.