Hiro Hirai, Ph.D. (1999) in history of science, University of Lille 3, is a Marie Curie Fellow at Radboud University Nijmegen. He has published widely in early modern natural philosophy, medicine and chemistry, including Le concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance (2005). He is Vice Editor of Early Science and Medicine.

"[T]he author’s attention to rare sources and varied views of the past contributes to a wider understanding of early modern scientific culture that abandons oversimplifications about revolutions carried out by a few great geniuses." - Pietro Daniel Omodeo, in: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 913-915"Hirai […] scrutinizes a relatively unexplored field of research, i.e. the impact of humanistic culture on the evolution of natural philosophy, focusing in particular on sixteenth and seventeenth-century exponents of so-called ‘learned medicine’. […] Hiro Hirai’s work stands out for stimulating new insights and is of great interest for future research." - Leen Spruit, Università degli Studi «La Sapienza», Roma, in: Bruniana & Campanelliana, Vol.2 (2012), pp. 655-656

• Acknowledgement by Way of a “History”Introduction 1. Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy2. Matter, Life and the Soul3. The Newly Recovered Texts and Their Interpretations4. Philosophy in the Manner of Medical HumanistsChapter One. Nicolò Leoniceno between the Arabo-Latin Tradition and the Renaissance of the Greek Commentators1. Introduction2. Galen: The Vegetative Soul and Innate Heat3. Aristotle and Pietro d’Abano: Celestial Heat, the Intellect and Soul’s Vehicle4. Alexander of Aphrodisias and Simplicius: The Seed’s Inner Nature5. Averroes and Themistius: Ideas, Intellects and Souls6. ConclusionChapter Two. Jean Fernel and His Christian Platonic Interpretation of Galen1. Introduction2. The Divine Forces of Forms3. God the Creator and Fetal Formation4. The Divine and Celestial Nature of the Soul5. The Notion of Faculty6. Formative Force and Divine Craftsman in the Seed7. The Spiritus and Its Innate Heat8. The Physiological Functions and Their Occult Causes9. Fernel’s Source10. ConclusionChapter Three. Jacob Schegk on the Plastic Faculty and the Origin of Souls1.Introduction2. The Plastic Faculty as the Instrument of God3. The Plastic Faculty as the Second Actuality4. Is the Plastic Faculty Corporeal or Incorporeal?5. The Divine Vehicle of the Plastic Faculty6. The Separability of the Divine Vehicle7.Is the Plastic Faculty a Part of the Soul?8.Conclusion Chapter Four. Cornelius Gemma and His Neoplatonic Reading of Hippocrates1. Introduction2. Fernel and the Hippocratic Notion of “Something Divine”3. Cardano and His Hippocratism4. Gemma and His Neoplatonic Hippocratism5. Petrus Severinus and the Parisian Connections? Chapter Five. Fortunio Liceti against Marsilio Ficino on the World-Soul and the Origin of Life1. Introduction2. Liceti’s De Spontaneo Viventium Ortu (1618)3. The World-Soul in the “Junior Platonists”4. The Ideas in the “Major Platonists”5. Ficino and the Earth’s Soul6. Cicero’s De Natura Deorum as Ficino’s Source?Chapter Six. Daniel Sennert on Living Atoms, Hylomorphism and Spontaneous Generation1. Introduction2. The Origin of Souls in Normal Generation3. The Eduction of Forms4. Schegk and the Plastic Force5. The Nature of the Seed and Its Spiritus6. Spontaneous Generation in Sennert7. The Atoms of Living Beings and Their Souls8. ConclusionConclusion1. Natural Philosophy and Medical Humanism2. Toward a Quest for the Seminal Principle: Sennert and beyondAppendix1. Jacopo Zabarella, Liber de calore coelesti, in De rebus naturalibus (Frankfurt, 1607), 11.2. Giovanni Argenterio, De somno et vigilia libri duo (Florence, 1556; Venice, 1592), 2.6.3. Dominico Bertacchi, De spiritibus libri quatuor (Venice, 1584), 1.8.4. Fortunio Liceti, De spontaneo viventium ortu (Vicenza, 1618), 3.13. BibliographyIndex