The search for a new foundation of the order of things, that characterizes the period between Descartes and Kant, is closely related to three questions: What is an animal? What is a human? What is a machine? The various answers that have been given to the questions occur in a field of dynamic interactions between theories of knowledge and of matter, experiments, observations, moral, theological and scientific claims, analogies, metaphors, imitations, and specific objects or artifacts. The main objective of this book is to retrace these interactions within different disciplinary, methodological and conceptual perspectives that reach from soul-body debates to models of organic molecules, fibre bodies and self-regulating clocks.

Contributors are Tobias Cheung, Charles T. Wolfe, Ann Thomson, Hanns-Peter Neumann and Yvonne Wübben.

Originally published as Volume XV, Nos. 1-2 (2010) of Brill's journal Early Science and Medicine.