Leibniz on organic bodies and living beings

In this talk I will show why it is, strictly speaking, incorrect to speak of 'living bodies' in Leibniz's philosophy. For Leibniz, in the period of the controversy with G. E. Stahl, organic structure is precisely the feature of natural bodies that makes it possible to given an exhaustive account of them without any recourse to the concept of 'life'. Life, in turn, is invoked only to describe the activity of immaterial monads. Life is, thus, a feature of beings, not bodies. In this respect, the emerging science of biology, as Leibniz understands it, does not take a special interest in life as something that characterises a special subdomain of nature deserving of its own special science. Rather, for Leibniz, the study of the organic structure of bodies is at the heart of his conception of the science of nature in general.