Nominal Species and Generation in the New Essays

VARGAS, EVELYN

G. W. Leibniz selon les Nouveaux Essais sur l?entendement humain

Vrin

Lugar: Paris; Año: 2006; p. 153 - 163

 An analysis of Leibniz?s conception of natural species in the Nouveaux Essais is relevant to more than just the philosophy of language. Contemporary debates among historians of philosophy attest to an increasing interest in the history of science, particularly the development of the physical sciences during the Scientific Revolution, in order to achieve a better understanding of modern philosophical positions. Now although anatomy and physiology are disciplinary domains that pertain to a long tradition of vocabulary, textbooks, practices and institutions that reaches back to ancient times, and although recent historiography of science regards them as having no relevant role in the Scientific Revolution, these disciplines actually underwent a radical transformation in modern times. The changes in natural philosophy, for example, had a great effect in physiology since the former provided the theoretical framework for the latter. In the history of modern science natural philosophy is commonly distinguished from natural history; while the one searched for the causes of natural phenomena, the other focused on description, giving primacy to observation over theoretical constructions. This opposition was generally accepted by 18th century England practitioners of the life sciences and, as we shall see, the epistemological primacy of natural history can be sustained on Lockean grounds but it is foreign to Leibniz. My purpose in this paper is to show that Leibniz?s conception of living species is a mediating position which relates taxonomy to the search for causes by making classification dependent upon the study of the process of generation in plants and animals.