Back to the Roots. 'Functions' and 'Teleology' in the Philosophy of Leibniz

Although the great subject of life is not foreign to classical Greek thought (as attested by Aristotle’s reflections on the “organic functionality” of the “parts” of animals in the entire corpus of his so-called “biological” writings), it owes its specificity to the early modern application of the concept of “machine” to nature. The step from the nature-machine to the machine of nature is not as short as it might at first seem; mechanism, teleology and generically “functional” approaches were perceived to be interrelated in the protomodern age, and not only from an epistemological point of view. Rediscovering the close “polarity” in the passing from a horizon of nature seen as “machine” to the idea that certain machines are distinct from others by being “alive” can perhaps help us to better understand how concrete the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” was in the dawn of the scientific age.