ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of G. W. Leibniz's statements vis-a-vis those of his contemporaries, that the available accounts of the absence of biology in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century are neither entirely accurate nor entirely adequate. Leibniz was following the lead of observational science as well as satisfying metaphysical needs, a fact which shows the error of supposing philosophical mechanism to be generally incompatible with a recognition of the category of the living. The absence of a discipline-sustaining concept of life in Leibniz is not due to any logical conflict between continuity and organism. Rather, the separation of a physical level of analysis and a metaphysical level of analysis — clashed with his biological tentative based on an awareness of distinctive structural and reproductive features of living things, an awareness which reflected the existence of a field of study which was neither medicine nor natural history.
