I've seen notices for two very interesting books. I hope to be able to post interviews with each author in the near future.
Justin E H Smith, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Science of Life (Princeton UP, 2011). Link. Excerpts:
Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. In Divine Machines, Justin Smith offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. He shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines.
Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, Divine Machines takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here Smith reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. He casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, Smith provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.
Mary Beth Mader, Sleights of Reason: Norm, Bisexuality, Development (SUNY Press, 2011). Link. Excerpts:
A brilliant and original reimagining of sexuality, Sleights of Reason examines how concepts lend themselves to power/knowledge formations. Many contemporary French philosophers make incidental use of the notion of a ruse. Its names are legion: “duplicity,” “concealment,” “forgetting,” and “subterfuge,” among others. Mary Beth Mader employs Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the concept to describe three specifically conceptual ruses, or sleights, that make up part of the conceptual support for the concept of sex. These are the sleights associated with the concepts of norm, bisexuality, and development. Mader argues that concepts can trick us, and shows how they can effect conceptual sleights, or what she calls sleights of reason. She concludes by offering a robust synthesis of insights from Foucault and Deleuze to extend those into a proposal for a conceptual next step for imagining the structures of sexuality as eros.
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