The artificial and the natural : an evolving polarity / edited by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman.

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2007], ©2007.

vi, 331 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Physis and technē in Greek medicine -- The three pleasures of mimesis according to Aristotle's Poetics -- Art and nature in ancient mechanics -- Art, nature, alchemy, and demons -- Forms of art in Jesuit Aristotelianism (with a coda on Descartes) -- The artificial and the natural -- Renaissance histories of art and nature -- Leibniz's theatre of nature and art and the idea of a universal picture atlas -- Spinoza on the natural and the artificial -- Eighteenth-century wetware -- Overtaking nature? the changing scope of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century -- Reconfiguring nature through syntheses -- Concluding comments.