Special Issue Introduction: Animism and its discontents: Soul-based explanations in early modern natural philosophy and medicine

The aim of this special issue is to explore varieties of animism in western European natural philosophy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The issue focuses on “natural-philosophical animism,” by which we mean the position that the soul, along with its various faculties and powers, is integral to the functioning of nature as a whole, or to the functioning of some natural entities. The term “animism” was coined in the second half of the eighteenth century, first in French and then migrating to English, and it emerged in connection with the work of the Halle professor of medicine Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–1734). It came to be used as a general term for a variety of positions that challenged the mechanist and materialist accounts of nature that proliferated during the early modern period. Soon enough, “animism” became a catchall for doctrines that lost out to modern science. This opposition between animist and material, or animist and mechanical, has profoundly marked the history of sciences: one of the achievements of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment was, the usual story goes, to remove the soul and its forces from scientific investigation. However, when we reconsider the history of animism from the Renaissance on, we find complex overlays of the animate and materialist (or, later, animate and mechanical) in the same figure.