Between Laws and Norms. Genesis of the Concept of Organism in Leibniz and in the Early Modern Western Philosophy

The word “organism” represents an original keyword of the early-modern philosophical world. As it was first developed by Leibniz, it seems to blend together two different conceptual paradigms: the Cartesian model of the “machines” and the Aristotelian legacy of the “individual natures”. According to the first, nature represents itself the prototype of any good mechanical functioning, but at the same time its inner development is explained by the occurrence of a normative dimension that rules the world of primitive forces in the dynamics. For such reasons, the “organism” lexicon is affected by an internal stress that is extremely interesting to analyze for it seems to posit a normative turn acting from the within of a mechanically conceived notion of life.