The World Soul in Early Modern Philosophy

Abstract

The world soul was often a target of attack in early modern natural philosophy, on grounds of impiety and explanatory vacuity. But it also played an important role in debates about two of the most important questions in natural philosophy: How does nature depend on God, and what explains nature’s organization? As an answer to those questions, it lived on through the early modern period, sustained especially by philosophers who argued that individuals in nature cannot be understood in isolation from the whole. In this chapter it is argued that in this guise, it served as an alternative model of explanation in a context that increasingly emphasized explanation in terms of laws of nature, and that this reflects the fact that these two models represent two fundamentally competing approaches to natural philosophical explanation.