The souls of seeds

Pauline Phemister (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom), in the paper Souls of Seeds, argues that Leibniz’s pre-established harmonious unfolding of individuals’ essences is rightly granted a pivotal role in his metaphysics. Most commonly understood in terms of the unfolding of monadic sequences of perceptions and appetitions, the closely related theories of organic-body preformation and the unfolding into visibility of plants and animals from their seeds have until recently largely been ignored. The author questions why, despite the thoroughgoing mechanical preformation of organic bodies, Leibniz insisted that the preformed seeds of animals and other living things must contain souls, entelechies or substantial forms. The issue is raised through contrast with Malebranche’s doctrine of preformation that makes no such claim.